“I’d like to think I speak for 99 percent of us … If I have to keep invoking terminology like ‘drag,’ ‘pill’ and ‘tackiness’ while covering baseball, I might turn to a more compelling topic like stick-figure art.”

— Ken Davidoff, New York Post, July 9, 2019

SAN DIEGO — Ladies and gentlemen, Major League Baseball has called our bluff. Shall we organize a field trip to the nearest stick-figure art exhibit?

The talk about baseballs — be they juiced, dejuiced or manipulated in any fashion, whatsoever — is here to stay. Major League Baseball held a news conference Wednesday, here at the winter meetings, to discuss its findings of the independent study it commissioned to figure out why balls left the yard at a record rate in 2019. The findings, recommendations and resolutions depressed those of us who enjoy this topic about as much as we appreciate a lengthy chat on the history of orthodontics.

The 6,776 homers this past season, which shattered the previous mark of 6,105 established in 2017 and set off a slew of complaints from players to team employees to fans, resulted from less drag on the baseballs and players’ increased focus on launch angles, as per the report of four professors with doctorates ranging from mathematics to physics to engineering.

“Approximately 60% of the home run increase is due to an increase in carry and 40% to a change in launch conditions,” the authors wrote, citing laboratory work and study of Statcast data. About 35 percent of that increase in carry, studies determined, resulted from raised seams on the balls.

While agreeing with the assertion that the postseason balls carried more drag, thereby resulting in fewer homers, the authors offered no explanation behind that, and they concluded, “No evidence was found that changes in baseball performance were due to anything intentional on the part of Rawlings or MLB and were likely due to manufacturing variability.”

In that case (and at this point, I don’t even care whether MLB juiced the balls or not), let’s fix that manufacturing variability, right? Kill this headache right where it hurts, in that 60 percent. Even if it means giving up on the romantic notion of hand-stitched baseballs, each as unique as a snowflake, and manufacturing the balls synthetically for more consistency and less noise.

Alas, that won’t be happening any time soon.

“I think one of the things we’re going to have to do as we continue this journey of discovery is accept the fact that the baseball is going to vary and the performance of the baseball is going to vary, and we’re going to do everything we can to control it, but that that is kind of fundamental to the equipment choice we’ve made,” said Morgan Sword, MLB’s senior vice president of league economics and operations.

“Journey of discovery” proved an apt description of how MLB sees this baseball issue. The authors proposed four suggestions: 1) Better tracking of balls’ manufacturing and shipping dates; 2) The installation of atmospheric tracking systems at field level for all 30 ballparks; 3) A codifying of the current procedures used to monitor balls’ drag; 4) An expansion of monitoring baseballs’ other properties, in particular their coefficient of restitution, or their bounciness. However, they all fall under the “more research” category rather than concrete change.

“I think the variability in the baseball is a product of the fact that it is a man-made product with natural materials,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said. “I think that’s part of the charm of the game, and the reason that I’m prepared to live with that variability is both teams play with the same baseball.”

That just means both teams can complain, taking away time and energy from more important and interesting matters.

The authors, who traveled here from all over the country on MLB’s dime, appeared absolutely delighted to be involved in this study and discussion. More than happy to conduct further studies.

Yet no delight comes from a serious quality-control issue. The charm of a man-made product with natural materials gets mitigated by the scrutiny produced by Statcast and scrutinized by social media.

So get ready for more science talk and conspiracy theories along with your home run studies in 2020, baseball fans. It is, to use the parlance of the moment, a real drag.