Jim Albert notes that the increase in home runs are coming from the bottom of the pack:
Usually we associate high home run hitting with the leaders (Bonds, McGwire, Sosa, etc). But this graph indicates that the 2017 home run surge is due to the increase in home run hitting among the non-sluggers — the players who generally don’t hit many home runs. Everyone is hitting home runs in this current baseball season. This suggests that the reason for the home run surge is not more big sluggers, but rather some change that is impacting the home run hitting for many players.
This might go along with the notion that the ball is traveling farther. Great sluggers already hit the ball far enough to get out of the park, but the hitters on the edge are getting the boost.
Phil Birnbaum looks at MGL’s data on the balls he purchased for a study, and find that their is a lot of variations in balls from the same day:
Add those up, and you get that one ball, used the same day as another, was twenty-five feet livelier.
If 7.1 feet (what MGL observed between seasons) is worth, say, 30 percent more home runs, then the 25 foot difference means the “43” ball is worth DOUBLE the home runs of the “41” ball. And that’s for two balls that look identical, feel identical, and were used in MLB game play on exactly the same day.
Teams might want to teach pitchers how to recognize a livelier ball and toss them out.
from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2tGxdUn
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