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By Tangotiger , 12:26 PM

The following is an exchange between a reader and Bill James, where the reader quotes a report in the Boston Globe to that effect, and Bill James describes a true story where a ball-sniffing dog would separate the two kinds of balls. The seam-thing is the first I heard of it, but, given different standards and different manufacturing plants, I wouldn’t be surprised.

I also remember one year Felipe Alou suggesting that the balls were different (might have been 1997 or 1998), that the balls were “slicker” (meaning harder for the pitcher to grip, either because of the material, or the seams).

Bill, per the Boston Globe, minor league baseballs have more pronounced seams than major league balls (which is why Dice-K uses the MLB variety in his rehab games). Is there really a difference? If so, wouldn’t every team and every pitcher be better served by using the real thing, rather adding adjustment to s different ball to all the other pressures and changes pitchers face when they reach the majors…

Asked by: greggb Answered: 5/22/2012

The balls are different, but I didn’t know they would let you use major league balls in minor league games. I would presume there would be an economic barrier to the wide usage of major league balls in minor league games—if not an outright prohibition on it. Major league balls are more expensive.



This is a true story; the Red Sox minor league equipment co-ordinator used to have a dog that had been trained to tell the difference between a minor league ball and a major league ball. We would sort the balls into “buckets”—major league balls in one bucket, minor league balls in the other. Major league teams have dozens and dozens of buckets of balls around for batting practice and such like. Anyway, if there was one major league ball in a bucket of minor league balls, that dog would smell it, and he would remove all the balls from the bucket until he found the major league ball, put it in the major league bucket, then he would put the minor league balls back in the minor league bucket. True story.

Alan posted a letter from (.doc file) the testing facility that says:

The Major League balls are manufactured in Costa Rica and have a compressed cork sphere per the specifications. The Minor League balls are manufactured in China and have a cork center as specified in â€œ1996 Minor League Baseball Proposalâ€?. This cork center is the likely source for the decrease in performance, which results in a comparable Minor League ball hit of 391.8 ft under the same conditions as the Major League balls [at 400 feet].

It should be noted that an 8 to 9 foot drop in batted ball distance would lead to a 25% drop in the number of home runs. It’s all well-and-fine to say that there might be an eight foot difference in home runs due to the difference in ball configuration, and to you and me, that sounds like a small number, but the reality is that it has a tremendous impact.

There’s also this quote, that talks about how a ball could meet specifications, but would have a drastic impact:

This means that theoretically, two baseballs could meet the specifications but one ball could be hit 49.1 feet further than the other could be hit. This 49.1 feet is the combination of the increased distance of 8.7 feet for the ball being on the light side with respect to weight (i.e. 5.00 oz. as opposed to 5.25 oz.) and an additional 40.4 feet for the COR being biased to the high side (i.e. 0.578 versus 0.514). However, it should be noted that the balls investigated in this study did not exhibit this potential 49.1-ft difference. Thus, the tested baseballs indicate that the 1999 and 2000 baseballs fall within a tight range of batted-ball performance and that the 1999 and 2000 baseballs are for all practical purposes the same with respect to batted ball performance. The 49.1-ft value is purely academicâ€”it was not seen in the balls tested.

Basically, the plants do a great job of producing balls within a tight range, but the specs allow for a huge margin of error.