FiveThirtyEight takes a look inside the balls used in major league baseball using X-rays to see what has been pysically changed in recent times. The physical changes are probably the main cause of the upswing in home runs noticed. Multiple independent investigations have shown differences in the characteristics of the balls and the way they perform.
MLB and its commissioner, Rob Manfred, have repeatedly denied rumors that the ball has been altered in any way — or "juiced" — to generate more homers. But a large and growing body of research shows that, beginning in the middle of the 2015 season, the MLB baseball began to fly further. And new research commissioned by "ESPN Sport Science," a show that breaks down the science of sports, suggests that MLB baseballs used after the 2015 All-Star Game were subtly but consistently different than older baseballs. The research, performed by the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California and Kent State University's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, reveals changes in the density and chemical composition of the baseball's core — and provides our first glimpse inside the newer baseballs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 27 2018, @10:13PM
With a superball. Zzzzzing
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 27 2018, @10:17PM (1 child)
I'm saying all the things that I know you'll like
Making good conversation
I gotta handle you just right
You know what I mean
I took you to an exposition game
Then to the all-star weekend
There's nothing left to talk about
Unless it's the World Series
Let's get pysical, pysical
I wanna get pysical, let's get into pysical
Let me hear your body talk, your body talk
Let me hear your body talk
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday May 28 2018, @05:35PM
Given your spelling, let's wget pysical, it sounds better.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Monday May 28 2018, @01:12AM (2 children)
I grew up in San Diego. In little league we took 2-3 field trips a year to see the Padres play. As I got older I went for other reasons (Beach Boys after the game for the win).
They lost. Always. I can't remember a single Padres game I attended where they won. A few years back they wanted a new stadium, somehow they got to the World Series. They lost, but got the money to build their new stadium. Then went back to losing seasons.
This explains why. "They" made anti-Padres baseballs. It's the only explanation.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28 2018, @02:10PM (1 child)
Don't get me started on the Chargers... which should be renamed "Retreaters"
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday May 28 2018, @02:22PM
Hey now, you know nothing of football-induced depression until you've been to a Cleveland Browns game. It's entirely possible that they'll break the record this year for longest losing streak in NFL history, set in the 1940's.
Of course, the Browns-Chargers game always helped answer the fascinating philosophical question of what happens when a thoroughly resistible force meets a completely moveable object.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28 2018, @02:03AM (1 child)
juiced players? bad
juiced balls? good
juice the juicers who juice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28 2018, @01:06PM
The ball doesn't get health issues later on. Also, it's not as if one team in a given game got juicy balls, and the other didn't.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Monday May 28 2018, @06:46AM
or maybe the balls are manufactured in China and they slipped in some melamine or that plastic that wasn't supposed to be used for medical implants
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28 2018, @07:32AM (3 children)
There's in fact a recent paper (nature communications, therefore free to read: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04177-w), [nature.com] where the authors study the movement of spheres with different moments of inertia in a fluid.
It turns out that you can control the "weirdness" of the trajectory by changing the moment of inertia (i.e. the difference between ball filled with sand vs mostly empty ball with a chunk of iron in the middle), and they actually mention that ball sports can be made more interesting if you take this research into account. Quote from conclusions:
"Other avenues of application could lie in sports ballistics, where zig-zag and spiral trajectories add to the unpredictability of the game. While this has historically been achieved by introducing surface heterogeneities and/or spin to the ball42, rotational inertia could be used as an additional lever to trigger such path-instabilities, thereby lending richer diversity to various ball sports."
(the 42 refers to a review entitled "sports ballistics", https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-fluid-010313-141255). [annualreviews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 28 2018, @07:46AM (1 child)
sorry for the links... I thought the brackets would be split from them automagically...
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Monday May 28 2018, @07:59AM
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04177-w [nature.com]
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-fluid-010313-141255 [annualreviews.org]
Parentheses are valid URL characters. Wikipedia uses them pretty often. [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday May 28 2018, @01:26PM
This seems a riff off bullet vs tissue dynamics research with the addition of buoyancy and much slower speeds. Nothing in the refs to indicate that, but it is kinda a cousin of that research.