MLB had a committee made up of professors conduct a study on the league’s baseballs used in 2019 and they determined that uptick in home runs this past season was not due to juiced balls as detailed by Jeff Passan of ESPN.
Instead, “carry contributed to 60% of the home run increase and launch conditions to 40%,” Passan said. “Seam height accounts for about 35% of a ball’s carry, according to the report, and the committee developed a new technique that tied seam height to drag coefficient.”
So, in essence, they determined that player’s swings and the seams on the balls contributed the most to the uptick in home runs.
The study also insisted that there was no evidence found that MLB and/or Rawlings purposely changed the ball in order to increase homers.
It also made a series of recommendations to the league to improve this in the future such as making sure the baseballs of all 30 teams are kept in more similar conditions, instead of varying where they are stored.
