[WhawhaWhat]

Study: MLB's balls are not juiced but aerodynamically different

It wasn’t a juiced ball. It was a drag show.

A group of scientists tasked with finding the reason home runs flew at a record rate in Major League Baseball last season believe the ball’s aerodynamic properties – and particularly the drag on its surface – are the culprit and not changes to the core that would cause extra bounciness, according to a report the league released Thursday.

In the midst of a season in which players hit a record 6,105 home runs and emboldened juiced-ball theorists, MLB commissioned 10 scientists to study the source of the spike. Using a combination of Statcast data and laboratory testing, the group found that balls in 2016 and 2017 had lower drag coefficients than their predecessors.

What they didn’t find was why.

“It was something of an unsatisfying result,” said Dr. Alan Nathan, a physicist who has studied the game for decades and chaired the group that wrote the 84-page research paper. “We had a set of baseballs that had a much higher than average drag. We had a set of baseballs that had a much lower average drag. We asked ourselves: ‘What’s the difference between these baseballs?’ ”

Nathan’s conclusion: “We cannot find a single property that we can actually measure other than the drag itself that would account for it. … We do admit that we do not understand this.”