MLB Still Tinkering With Getting Baseballs Right

It has been on ongoing story for a few years now. The balls are juiced. The balls have been deadened. The balls are too slippery. The league changes which balls are being used midway through a season without telling the players. Enough that not more than a few weeks can pass without the ball itself being a major story in Major League Baseball.

In April of this season, Mets starter Chris Bassitt was vocal about his frustration with the balls, suggesting that they were dangerous to throw because they were slipping out of pitchers’ hands and putting batters at risk. Just a few days ago, Angels pitcher Michael Lorenzen said the same after an errant pitch of his hit Justin Upton in the head.

“I don’t know what Major League Baseball is playing with these baseballs, but that fully slipped out of my hand. It’s just crazy man,” he told reporters. “As a kid you think Major League Baseball is the greatest thing ever, and you get here and you realize, what are they doing? All of a sudden they’re going to change the baseballs.

“I know [Kevin] Gausman had an issue in Toronto. So it’s a league wide thing. These baseballs are slick. They did get someone hurt. So that’s on Major League Baseball for sure. I don’t know what’s going on. These baseballs are straight out of the package.”

These ongoing complaints and frustrations from the players can make for a skeptical light cast on MLB’s latest ball-related decision by everyone else.

On Wednesday, the league issued a memo to all teams about how the balls are to be muddied, ESPN’s Jesse Rogers reported. In short, all thirty teams are expected to use the same technique to help ensure consistency.

In the past, clubhouse attendants could muddy balls — a practice intended to help improve pitchers’ grip — days before they would be used in a game. Now, they have been instructed to muddy them only on game day. As Rogers reported, this decision was weeks in the making, so it is not necessarily a direct response to Lorenzen’s frustrations. Per the league, the decision was based on observing different clubhouse practices and noting that there was enough inconsistency to warrant a rules change.

And not only are there new guidelines for when and how to muddy the balls, but also for how the balls should be stored until they are used in a game.

These are the full stipulations for how balls are to be stored after they are muddied, from Rogers’ report:

• All baseballs to be used in a specific game must be mudded within 3 hours of all other baseballs being used in that game.
• Once the muddying process is completed, all balls should be placed back in the Rawlings boxes with dividers, and the boxes should then be placed in the humidor. In the past, balls were allowed to go directly into the humidor.
• When taken out of the humidor for that day’s game, only eight dozen balls at a time should be placed in a ball bag. In the past, there was no limit to how many balls could be in the bag but players felt the ones at the bottom felt too ‘chalky.’ Additionally, the inside of the ball bags will be required to be cleaned thoroughly by wiping with a damp cloth and then with a dry cloth to make sure there is no excess residue, dust or moisture.
• Each team will be provided a poster showing the acceptable range of appearance for a mudded baseball. (Dark/Light)
• All game balls must be stored in humidors for a minimum of 14 days before being taken through the muddying process.

These new expectations will go into effect with Wednesday’s games. The changes might help create a greater sense of consistency with the balls around the league, but it will take time to see whether pitchers are more satisfied with the results. When the Bassitts and Lorenzens of the league are speaking up out of concern that they are going to injure opposing players, it should spark a strong reaction from the league in order to keep batters safe. It’s not clear if these new rules regarding how balls are muddied will have an impact.

In the big picture, this might feel to fans like another chapter in MLB’s ball-related saga. For what it’s worth, Major League Baseball is not the first professional sports league to have PR issues as it relates to its balls; we are just a few years removed from the absurdity of “Deflategate” in the NFL. But it would be for the benefit of baseball if this kind of news stopped being front and center, or at least not one of the top headlines.