PULLMAN, Wash. — In cardboard boxes and plastic bins.

On shelving units and tabletops.

Even suspended in midair, as if by magic.

In the sprawling Sports Science Laboratory at Washington State University, baseballs are everywhere. In flight, too, when they’re fired out of air cannons at up to 90 mph.

“We have balls coming from all over the place,’’ Lloyd Smith told USA TODAY Sports, and he plucked one off a table in the lab where he was sitting last week.

Smith is a 55-year-old professor of Mechanical and Materials Engineering who oversees the baseball madness inside the lab he started in 2003. For almost two years, he has been working for Major League Baseball to figure out if and why “juiced baseballs” have triggered a surge in home runs.

The mystery appears to be over.

“The smoking gun may very well have been found,’’ said Alan Nathan, chairman of a committee of scientists that includes Smith and was formed by MLB in August 2017. “As I told Lloyd, ‘You’re going to be a big hero for doing this.’ ”

Smith said modified baseballs could be ready for the 2021 season, but MLB spokesman Pat Courtney said the league has yet to commit.

“We are still in the process of gathering information and have not planned any production changes at this time,’’ Courtney told USA TODAY Sports via email.

Within a matter of weeks, according to Smith and Nathan, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred could be ready to present the research findings and explain what has caused the baseballs to drive up the home run totals — not to mention fuel conspiracy theorists who have accused the league of juicing up the balls.

Manfred may talk of the coefficient of restitution, standard deviation, flow visualization and other scientific concepts when publicly addressing the scientific findings. But for now, mum’s the word.

“As the commissioner has said, the committee is continuing their research,’’ Courtney said. “We do not plan to comment until that work is completed.”

Smith and Nathan declined to discuss specifics about the findings.

“I would like you not to say that we’ve solved the problem,’’ Smith told USA TODAY Sports. “We’ll say that once Major League Baseball is satisfied with our results and willing to make a public statement.

“We’ve notified MLB of our progress and their answer has been, 'That’s great, but we can’t get this wrong.’ So we need to test more balls. So far we are at about 80 dozen balls that we’re testing over different areas of the game to see if we’re right, how right we are and if everything adds up.’’

The home runs certainly have added up.

MLB is on pace for 6,712 home runs, which would be 1,100 more than a year ago, and an increase of more than 600 over the record 6,105 hit in 2017.

Justin Verlander, the eight-time All-Star pitcher with the Houston Astros, has loudly and profanely accused MLB of using a “juiced’’ baseball. The theory: MLB doctored the baseballs to increase the number of home runs in hopes of boosting TV viewership and attendance. (TV ratings and attendance actually has dipped.)

Meanwhile, Manfred has repeatedly denied the allegations.

The scientific committee led by Nathan and funded by MLB issued a report in May 2018. One conclusion: since the start of the 2015 season, the baseballs used by MLB showed a decrease in “drag’’ — which means less air resistance for the ball, which then carries farther.

The scientists concluded that the baseballs, which have been manufactured by Rawlings since 1977, were not intentionally “juiced." But the puzzle included a missing piece: The scientists had no explanation for why the baseballs had decreased drag.

“I found the result very unsatisfying,’’ said Smith, the Washington State professor. “It’s, ‘OK, the drag has changed.’ But that’s it?’’

Yep, that was it.

So the conspiracy talk has continued and, inside the sports science lab at Washington State’s campus, so has the research resumed.

Inside the lab

The smell of fresh popcorn and the thud of baseballs slamming against wooden bats greeted a visitor last week at the Sports Science Laboratory. Fiddle with the thermometers at your own risk.

To ensure uniformity, major league baseballs used for testing are stored in rooms set at 72 degrees Fahrenheit and 50% relative humidity.

“Plus or minus 2 percent,’’ Smith noted.

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The lab covers approximately 10,000 square foot in an old brick building. Over the years, Smith and his team — about two dozen people comprised of engineers, technicians and Washington State students — have been best known for certifying bats for the likes of USA Baseball, USA Softball and the NCAA.

That is likely to change.

Concerned about the rising numbers of home runs, MLB reached out to Nathan in July 2017. Nathan worked with MLB to assemble a 10-man committee of scientists and he made sure to include his friend from Washington State.

Smith and Nathan had discussed the physics and engineering of baseball – primarily, the bats and the balls. for almost two decades. Suddenly they were part of a team of scientists examining mountains of data and Smith’s lab went into overdrive.

About 1,000 baseballs have been tested. Some were measured and weighed, others split and gutted and hundreds fired out of air cannons, speeding through light gates and profiled by lasers.

It was the first time the aerodynamics of a baseball had been tested for a study, according to Smith, who was intent on finding properties of the baseballs that correlated with a decrease in drag.

The equipment designed to test the aerodynamics of a baseball stretches 100 feet and features three light gates, lasers and a ball-return system. It was developed at Washington State at a cost of about $100,000, according to Smith.

“This is the only place in the world where we can measure a ball’s lift and drag outside of play conditions,’’ he said.

But Smith also has sought the help of others, traveling to Utah, New Jersey and even Holland to meet scientists.

“I call this project my bad girlfriend,’’ he said. “Week after week, she would get my hopes up. And every time she would break my heart.’’

It seems the heartache could have been avoided.

Resistance to technology

Inside his lab, Smith picked up a baseball split it down the middle and eyed the the contents. Little about the major league baseball has changed over the past century.

It still features a rubber or cork center, wrapped in wool yarn, with two strips of cowhide stitched together. Smith said he saw the manufacturing process when he traveled to the plant in Costa Rica, where Rawlings makes the balls.

“This is an interesting little tidbit,’’ Smith said. “The highest-trained employee at a ball factory is the sewer, and a sewer is trained for three months before they’re allowed to stitch one ball that goes on the production line.’’

It is part of the charm of MLB’s baseballs — and potentially part of the problem, too.

Art Chou, an executive at Rawlings from 2004 to 2014, said the baseball would benefit from new technology and pointed to the evolution of the golf ball.

Like the baseball, the golf ball once was made exclusively of organic properties, including threads of rubber and elastic wrapped around the core. But by the 1960s, rubber gave way to urethane skins and synthetic resin cores, according to multiple accounts of the golf ball's evolution.

Thanks to advances in synthetic materials, Chou said, the today's golf balls perform far better and more consistently than their organic predecessors.

“There’s no reason you couldn’t do that with a baseball,’’ said Chou, who also worked for golf equipment maker Titleist. “I think there’s a lot of lessons to be learned by looking at golf ball manufacturing.

“The way technology has been applied to golf ball manufacturing has resulted in better performance and better consistency. But you had to be willing to accept changes in the traditional way the ball is made.’’

Therein lies the rub.

Kathy Stephens, director of quality assurance for Rawlings, said she has talked to MLB officials about the possibility of adding synthetic materials to the baseball in an attempt to make the ball perform more consistently.

“Yes, there are things that could be done, I believe,’’ Stephens said. “We’ve mentioned it, but the tradition of baseball is such that they don’t want change.’’

That would come as no surprise to Smith.

“Oh, yeah, they’re locked into history,’’ he said. “There are features of the major league ball that are characteristic of the way rubbers were produced probably 100 years ago that today are just ridiculous. But they do it the same way so they can say the ball is made the same way.’’

Yet that has done little to quiet the conspiracy theorists, especially after MLB partnered with an equity firm and in June 2018 bought Rawlings for $395 million.

MLB invests in baseball production

After MLB purchased a stake in Rawlings, Manfred suggested technological improvements in the manufacturing process may have inadvertently shifted the centering of baseball’s “pill’’ – the core of a ball. That, Manfred said, might be responsible for the spike in home runs.

Verlander, the All-Star pitcher, fumed.

"It's a (expletive) joke,’’ he told reporters earlier this month. “Major League Baseball's turning this game into a joke. They own Rawlings, and you've got Manfred up here saying it might be the way they center the pill. They own the (expletive) company.

“If any other $40 billion company bought out a $400 million company and the product changed dramatically, it's not a guess as to what happened. We all know what happened. Manfred the first time he came in, what'd he say? He said we want more offense. All of a sudden he comes in, the balls are juiced? It's not coincidence. We're not idiots."

And so MLB’s scientists figure to face skepticism even when Smith’s latest findings are released to the public.

“Some people are skeptical of things like this because MLB is paying for it and therefore they’re (allegedly) getting whatever answer they want,’’ Nathan, chair of the scientific committee, said. “That’s not true.

“We are all academics, we’re all used to doing research and publishing our research. … We’re straight shooters.’’

Added Smith, “When I was invited (to participate), I asked MLB pointedly, I said, ‘Look, you might not like some of the things we find and I need to know what are my boundaries. What can I not do?' And their answer was, ‘Nothing. Whatever you need, you tell us and we’ll make that happen.’ They did.”

The next major leaguer to visit Smith’s lab will be the first. And it turns out Smith spends about as much time at ballparks as players do in science labs.

“I try to pay attention to the World Series,’’ Smith said sheepishly. “My passion is the science and the experimentation. That’s what excites me.

“If this was an easy answer, we would’ve had this a year ago. But it’s a hard answer and that likely means we’ve got a noisy signal. And interpreting noisy data is tricky.’’

Although he divulges no details about his most recent research findings, Smith acknowledged his “bad girlfriend’’ — as he refers to the project — is treating him far more kindly these days.