Dead ball? Juiced ball? The debate unfortunately rages on
The biggest story this year in Major League Baseball wasn't a player, a manager, a general manager, an incredible play or a historic game. It was a five-ounce-heavy, nine-inch-round orb that birthed conspiracy theories, broke records, spurred incessant conversation and happened to be part of all 732,472 pitches thrown in the 2019 regular season.cheap nfl nike jersey
The ball -- the rocket ball, the juiced ball, the super ball, whatever you want to call it -- changed the game's calculus this season. Home runs left the park at never-before-seen rates, to the point that teams across the game tweaked their internal algorithms to account for it in future projections and specifically game-planned around it for this season. Nobody was quite sure why this year's ball was so different from balls of previous years. Nobody could say for certain how it happened. Nobody definitely knew whom to blame. Everyone simply agreed: The ball was behaving differently than it had in years past.
Which makes this October that much more curious -- and might have had a demonstrable effect on the Houston Astros' 4-1 victory over the New York Yankees in Game 3 of the American League Championship Series on Tuesday. The postseason ball is dead. It's not just the colder weather or superior pitching, either. Baseball Prospectus' Rob Arthur studied the drag coeffiecient, which helps determine how far balls fly, and said it is significantly greater, with a "one-in-a-million chance" the balls are the same as used in the regular season.
St. Louis Cardinals manager Mike Shildt said his team's analytics department believes the balls are traveling 4½ feet less than they did during the regular season. Officials from two other teams, who requested anonymity to not run afoul of the commissioner's office, concurred that whatever batch of balls has been used during October is not performing the way the ones in the regular-season did.nike nfl jerseys cheap china
And that leaves us here, in the fifth inning of Game 3, Didi Gregorius at the plate, two on, two out and the Astros clinging to a 2-0 lead. Gerrit Cole, the Astros' starter, unspooled a middle-in 99 mph fastball to Gregorius. He turned on it and drove it 101.4 mph toward Yankee Stadium's short porch in right field. Astros outfielder Josh Reddick backpedaled, tracking the ball at its 41-degree launch angle, going back, back some more, back some more yet. And then, as if some force field commanded the ball to stop, it fell into Reddick's glove with his back against the fence.
This brought about varied reactions. A quick oral history of those 6.3 seconds Gregorius' ball hung in the air:
Cole: "The emotions kind of followed the fly ball, right? So it was kind of like low ... "
Reddick: "Panic. Immediate panic. Anything that goes up in the air in here as we all know has a good chance of getting out of here."
AJ Hinch, Astros manager: "I think every fly ball in 2019 is a homer. In season, regular season, postseason. I don't care. It's kind of been conditioned that way."
