How MLB’s “deadened” new baseball will affect the Mets
For Mets fans, 2021 is supposed to represent the season of more: more payroll to spend, more fans in the stands, more wins, and hopefully, more tailgates and BBQs with friends and family, as conditions allow for easing of COVID-19 restrictions.
But one thing we might not see more of this season are home runs. In an effort to normalize the playing conditions that have led to power spikes in recent years, Major League Baseball is “deadening” the baseball, as explained by The Athletic who obtained a memo detailing the changes:
The MLB memo includes a footnote that says an independent lab found that fly balls that went over 375 feet lost one to two feet of batted ball distance with the new ball. That sounds like no big deal, but every 3.3 feet of distance increases the likelihood of a home run by ten percent. An analyst familiar with the physics and math of this situation said the relationship was linear enough to estimate that this change will reduce home run rates by around five percent.
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What does this mean for the Mets?
Thanks to some great research by Max Bay from Baseball Prospectus and Dodgers Digest, we at least have an idea of how much a deadened ball would have impacted the players on the current roster and their home run totals over the past two seasons.
While it’s logical to believe that everyone would suffer relatively the same from a different baseball, it turns out some teams and players will be impacted more than others.
Why? Not everyone makes the same type of contact, and therefore, you can’t expect the same impact to every player, as Bay explains below:
Each batted ball event has certain qualities that make it more or less likely to result in a hit, most notably, those qualities are exit velocity (the speed of the ball of the bat), launch angle (the angle the ball projects into the air) and spray angle (left, center, right field, etc.). Those same batted ball qualities can be used to compute home run probability (xHR). If the construction of the ball changes from season to season, the same exit velocity, launch angle and spray angle will have different home run probabilities in different years.
Based on Bay’s model, we can see the estimated impact of the deadened ball for each major league team, and the players currently on the Mets’ roster would have lost ~8.5% of their big flies if the new ball had been used over the previous two seasons, which is slightly below league average.
The Mets are one of five teams who already store their balls in humidifiers, which should help to neutralize some of the year-to-year inconsistencies that lead to sudden power surges. The Athletic reports five more teams will do so in 2021.
If we look at individual players who could be impacted by the deadened ball, we find the Mets are also in pretty good shape.
Pete Alonso is a good example of a power hitter who would have lost some home runs because he hit so many, but the way he strikes the ball — as characterized by his exit velocity, launch angle, and pull direction — seems to indicate that he is less likely to lose home runs from the deadened ball than someone like Amed Rosario, who, ironically, is the player Bay estimates would have been the most impacted on a percentage basis.
While it seems like there’s always something to worry about if you are a Mets fan, the deadened baseball doesn’t appear to be one of them.
Great stuff thanks.