The Windup Newsletter ⚾ | This is The Athletic’s MLB newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Windup directly in your inbox.The baseballs have seemingly changed yet again, and the home runs are flying. Plus: Benches cleared in Boston, Andy McCullough returns to the mailbag and Chris Paddack’s agent has the opportunity to do something very funny. I’m Levi Weaver — welcome to The Windup!Drag Rates: Is MLB changing the balls again?Last week, I saw a tweet by our Eno Sarris suggesting that lower drag in June was causing a huge uptick in home runs.Today, Sarris and Evan Drellich posted their findings. It’s not great!Let’s start with this visual, courtesy of Baseball Savant:So, what are we looking at?In layman’s terms, the higher up on that chart we go, the more drag — aka, how much the air slows down a ball in flight — on batted baseballs. The lower the point, the less drag — which means batted balls go further.Back in 2019, players were ahead of reporting on this, telling anyone who would listen that baseballs were flying further than usual.
The numbers bore that out: 6,776 home runs were hit that year, breaking the previous record of 6,105 in 2017, and jumping by nearly 1,200 from 2018.
