Major League Baseball facilitated the use of two different kind of baseballs over the last two seasons without players’ knowledge, according to a report from Business Insider.

“According to a new study by Meredith Wills, a Society for American Baseball Research award-winning astrophysicist,” the article by Bradford William Davis states, “the league used two distinct types of baseballs — one lighter and deader than the other — during the 2021 season.”

The lighter one–the recent “updated” ball that had a looser and lighter core that caused balls to allegedly travel less far–and the heavier ball–the one with a heavier center that aided in the home run bursts of recent years–were both in circulation as early as the 2020 season and regularly in the 2021 season, the study from the report found.

MLB chalks up the mixed use of balls to production line issues due to the COVID-19 pandemic–a pretty easy excuse to drum up given the fervor in the country about issues with the supply chain. Essentially, the report says, MLB argued that because production slowed down due to the pandemic, it needed to use its backlog of balls from 2019 and 2020–the older ball–to keep up with the amount of games MLB was playing again in 2021.

But the report found Rawlings, the company that makes the baseballs, said their Costa Rica plant began alternating “between making balls with heavier and lighter centers since late 2019, when it started production for the 2020 season.” MLB, it should be noted, bought Rawlings in 2018. So MLB’s plan to have balls with lighter cores that it announced in 2021 went into production in 2019, and some of those balls made their way into pitchers’ hands for the 2020 season. Again, players didn’t know this.

Wills studied balls used in games as early as 2018, the report said. She was able to identify when the balls were made based on the batch codes inside the ball, which are “seven stamped letters that indicate the production week, a receipt that allows an exceptionally curious person to know the date the ball was manufactured.”

Doing this, she found that “just under half” of the balls from 2018 to 2021 had a lighter center–one between 124 and 125 grams–and the remaining–the heavier ball–had a center of around 127 grams. Before 2018, Wills’ and Davis’ reports say that balls “from the previous 20 seasons” all had centers around 127 grams. Within all of this, the report says, the baseball stayed within its need weight between 5 and 5.5 ounces.

So once MLB bought Rawlings, they started messing with the ball, and on top of that, they didn’t tell players that there were multiple types of balls in circulation. The article points out that right after MLB bought Rawlings, four teams set franchise records in home runs in the homer-happy season of 2019. (It’s largely understood that the 2019 season was played with a different ball that players were used to, despite its weight and core not differing widely from previous years.)

This is also the same season Pete Alonso said it was pretty evident that baseball was messing with baseballs in order to tamper with the upcoming free agent class of pitchers, which included the likes of Gerrit Cole, Zack Wheeler, Hyun-jin Ryu, Dallas Keuchel and Madison Bumgarner. He argued that baseball changes the balls based on upcoming free agent classes.

It’s also when Justin Verlander was quite vocal about how evident it was that MLB was messing with baseballs, as the report points out.

MLB says “it had ‘directed’ Rawlings not to ship any of the new baseballs ‘for regular season or postseason game use in 2020,'” according to the report, but the new baseballs still found their way into the 2020 season.

Then, for the 2021 season, both balls were used. Players still didn’t know.

Davis provided an example from Joey Votto‘s power trip in August, where he smacked home runs in seven straight games–some which were against the Mets–where the ball may have been a factor.

Remember the eighth game, where it looked like Votto almost hit another home run? Davis pointed out that this hit “had a 92% shot at clearing the fence” in Citi Field based on exit velocity and launch angle. It was a single.

A previous home run in Votto’s streak “had a .082 xBA and 8% home-run probability,” but it flew out of Great American Ballpark.

Now, while ballpark dimensions sometimes play a role, the expected statistics take those dimensions into play. It’s entirely possible two different balls could’ve been used during those Votto at-bats.

A lighter-centered ball–which MLB says was in circulation in 2021–might not have flown out of GAB (assuming a ball with a heavier-centered core was used in that at-bat), while a ball with a heavier-centered core could’ve caused Votto’s to fly out of Citi Field had it been used (assuming a ball with a lighter-centered core was used in that at-bat). Davis tracked the numbers from Votto’s at-bats after Reds teammate Sean Doolittle used them as references for when he was surprised that a Votto ball went out versus when one hadn’t.

Wills went on to even suggest that MLB is “more or less incentivized” to send certain baseballs–“whichever flies more”–to a primetime series like the Mets and Phillies.

Conversely, a “National League pitcher imagined a good-faith explanation: MLB experimenting with the ball in an earnest search to find the best mix of run-scoring and action on the field to ‘make the game better,'” the reports says.

If MLB were doing that, they still didn’t let the players know they were being experimented on.

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All of this comes as MLB locks out its players after not agreeing to a new collective bargaining agreement.

In his opening press conference with the Mets, Max Scherzer said the players’ No. 1 top issue was competitiveness among teams. You’d have to imagine transparency and making sure everyone is using the same baseballs is high on the players’ list of concerns, too.

Davis quoted Andrew Miller, a lead player representative, as saying, “There’s a fair amount of distrust between players in the league on certain topics, and this is one of them.”

Players and owners are at a time where trust needs to grow closer, but it’s pretty clear that it’s only growing further apart.