HOUSTON – For an idea of just how desperate times are these days, Adolis Garcia, purveyor of one of baseball’s mightiest swings, led off the sixth inning Thursday with a bunt single, a career-first.
Not a bad bunt, either, though you can’t discount the shock factor.
Even though the Rangers had been on a hitting tear in their four-game winning streak, which the Astros snapped with a 5-1 win before 34,593 at Minute Maid Park, they’ve been in a tough slog all season. Maybe you’ve noticed. Never has the Mendoza line looked so unapproachable.
Maybe you’ve also noticed this is somewhat of a universal affliction.
Welcome to the Dead Ball Era, 21st century edition.
Babe Ruth saved the sport the last time around, but MLB officials seem hellbent on sending it back to the dark ages, or at least 1968, the Year of the Pitcher.
This is more than just short spring training or general ineptitude, if you were wondering.
Could it be dead baseballs?
“Don’t get me started,” Mitch Garver said.
Get him started, someone else said.
“I think there’s something going on with the baseballs,” Garver said.
Actually, there’s not much mystery about it. In his infinite wisdom, Rob Manfred, the commissioner, decided too many baseballs were flying out of parks over the last couple of seasons. As a result, they tinkered with the formula. Also installed humidors in parks across baseball.
The result is a “wet” baseball that both the eye test and science say doesn’t carry nearly as well.
Through the first month of the season, MLB hitters were batting a combined .233 with an OPS of .629, the lowest since 1981. Alan Nathan, a University of Illinois physicist who has worked with MLB on baseballs, studied this year’s batch and concluded that it experiences more drag than baseballs from last year, 2019 or 2018. Not only is it less bouncy, he told the Washington Post recently, it’s less aerodynamic.
Meredith Wills, who has a PhD in astrophysics and is a student of MLB baseball, summed it up nicely in the same story for the Post:
“One of the best ways to break something is to try to fix something that wasn’t broken to begin with.”
Exactly.
The dead ball apparently affects some hitters more than others. As Rob Orr wrote recently in Baseball Prospectus, Marcus Semien’s drought this season is a perfect example. Semien, who set an MLB record for second basemen with 45 homers last season, is off to the longest homer drought to start a season of his career. Historically, he’s produced a high launch angle, anywhere from 25 to 40 degrees. Homers once hit on a path that high, and with a exit velocity of 95 mph or so, now tend to die on warning tracks.
Without mentioning Semien specifically, Chris Woodward suggested before the Rangers’ game Thursday that, instead of driving balls at 25 or 30 degrees, think maybe 15 or 20. Especially at Globe Life Field.
“Because it’s playing bigger,” he said of his home park. “And if the balls aren’t going anywhere, it’s playing even bigger.”
Semien -- who went into Thursday’s game slashing .173/.235/.223, and that after three Wednesday – produced a double Thursday. But he’s got a long ways to go, as do most of his teammates.
Woodward isn’t sure he wants to buy into the dead ball theory, mostly because he doesn’t want anyone using it as an excuse.
But the balls aren’t affecting just the hitters. They’re messing with pitchers, too. On his rehab work down at Round Rock, while recovering from a right forearm flexor strain, Garver he said he once reached into a ballbag and found four different types of surfaces on balls.
“There are pitchers across the league that are quoted as saying they have used different baseballs on a nightly basis, or even on any basis,” Garver said. “They’re never consistent. They don’t feel the same. They’re not the same. The way they’re rubbed is not the same.
“I’m actually amazed at the way pitchers can go out there and come into a game on a cold night, grab a baseball and do what they do with it. It’s really quite amazing.”
Nearly as amazing as Glenn Otto nearly going toe-to-toe with the Astros’ Framber Valdez for six innings Thursday. He gave up just two runs while throwing 96 pitches at Minute Maid, where he once pitched while a student at Rice. But Valdez was too much for the Rangers, a recurring theme this season. The Dead Ball Era is alive and well.
