The Windup Newsletter ⚾ | This is The Athletic’s MLB newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Windup directly in your inbox.We have an update on the league’s confusing lack of consistency with the baseballs. Plus: Cristopher Sánchez hits a bump in the road, Jasson Domínguez might have a new nemesis and our Power Rankings try to find 30 microcosms. I’m Levi Weaver — welcome to The Windup!Drag Rate: MLB exec set ‘target’ home run rate?Last week, I told you baseballs were flying out of the park at near-2019 rates, and the drag on the balls had dropped dramatically from May to June.Yesterday, Bradford William Davis over at Eyeblack published an article that provides some interesting details on the league’s years-long ball-tinkering. Using open records, Davis was able to obtain some emails from MLB EVP of baseball operations Morgan Sword. In one, Sword says, “ … so that we can manage to a target leaguewide home run rate.”As Davis notes, this might have just been a poor choice of words in an email that wasn’t intended for public consumption. But when your league’s research lab is a publicly funded university, well … as I tell my kids: Everything on the internet is public and permanent.The story makes it clear that Sword is, at least, very aware of the issue.It’s worth a click-through to see the charts, which lay out the difference in the balls used in 2020 and 2021. We also get a pretty clear sense that commissioner Rob Manfred wasn’t entirely forthcoming about the matter back then:“Like almost everything else in the world, production of ’21 baseballs was disrupted by COVID, okay?” Manfred told (Davis) during a 2022 All-Star Game news conference. “When we got ready to start the ’21 season, we found ourselves in a situation where we did not have enough 2020 baseballs to play a whole year.”Manfred’s explanation was wrong. While the pandemic was undeniably inconvenient to global supply chains, Rawlings continued to make baseballs. Both of them. The “old” balls weren’t old inventory like Manfred claimed, but new products assembled and used in 2020 and 2021.Well. We’ll keep you posted as more details emerge.Middle Relief: Which players match their team’s vibe?In today’s Power Rankings, we tried to pick one player from each team whose personal vibe matches the team’s fortune. Here’s an excerpt featuring our Nos. 4, 5 and uh, Also-5 team — the Rays, Yankees and Cubs, respectively.Tampa Bay Rays (4)