Is a juiced ball causing MLB's large home run spike? [View all]

[KamaAina]

https://www.yahoo.com/sports/news/10-degrees--is-a-juiced-ball-causing-mlb-s-large-home-run-spike-025820397-mlb.html

At the risk of sounding like someone who believes in chemtrails and listens to Infowars religiously, I have a confession to make: More and more I’m convinced that juiced balls are causing a home run spike throughout baseball.

Nolan Arenado and Trevor Story are 1-2 in the NL home run race. (AP Photo)I am far from the only one. It’s hitters and pitchers and coaches and executives and even rational, cogent analysts who cannot find a reasonable explanation for the spike in home runs dating back to last August. The HR/FB rate – the percentage of fly balls that end up over the fence – spiked over the season’s final two months, and it has continued this April.

With 11.8 percent of fly balls leaving the yard in the season’s first month, it marked the highest April rate since the league started tracking the data in 2002. The number mirrored those of August (12.2 percent) and September (12.3 percent), which Hardball Times analyst Jon Roegele noticed after not even a month. Roegele studied it and came to an impasse.

“I couldn't find anything to describe that amount of HR/offensive change, as far as weather, strike zone, where pitchers were pitching, etc.,” he wrote in an email this week. “I suspected that they changed something with the balls after the All-Star break last year as nothing else in the data could explain it.”

When the email landed, I thought I heard black helicopters whirling above. On the eve of the season, Ben Lindbergh and Rob Arthur at Five Thirty-Eight investigated the HR/FB spike and all the causes that leap to the mind’s forefront. They even sent balls from 2014 and 2015 to a lab for testing to see any differences. None showed. They might as well have been the same.