KENT, Ohio -- A new season of Major League Baseball is beginning, which means home runs will start flying out of ballparks across the country.
Will there be more of them? Are the baseballs to blame? It’s a question that’s been whispered, then talked about and now studied.
Kent State grad student and long time baseball fan, Nathan Beals, has been noticing the increase in home runs for a few years.
“The depth of power hitters has greatly increased versus the past," Beals says. "I think it’s great, I think it’s exciting. When you look at the numbers analytically, you can see there’s a pretty drastic jump in home runs hit.”
The thing about being a grad student in chemistry is when you’re curious about the composition of something, you have the means to figure it out.
"At the end of the day, this is made of some chemicals and we deal with chemicals so it doesn’t matter whether it’s a baseball or a toothbrush, it doesn’t matter," says Dr. Soumitra Basu, chair of Kent State’s department of chemistry. "The bottom line is it’s all chemistry.”
They got started when Beals' childhood friend, now a producer at ESPN’s Sport Science, Tim Dix, reached out to see if they would join USC on the experiment.
“They found that there is a difference in the density of the core of the baseball,” Basu says.
Kent State’s team found the main difference in the baseballs to be the polymer core, which was .5 grams lighter in the newer balls. That’s about the weight of a paper clip.
"We just tried to narrow it down to exactly what’s going on at a molecular scale," Beals adds.
Their findings, mixed with USC’s study and other research led to an article at fivethirtyeight.com by Dix and Rob Arthur saying that all these subtle changes have had an effect.
“All of these things together showed roughly an 8 foot difference in maybe a fly ball hit,” Beals says.
When Major League Baseball was asked for a comment on the studies, they sent the following:
In late February, Commissioner Rob Manfred said the following at a press conference, and this statement continues to reflect where we currently stand: “The baseballs are a really important topic. We have actually had a postseason-long project, involving independent experts, ongoing. That project is not quite complete. At the conclusion of that project, we will have both information available as to the results of the process, and some recommendations as to what we’re going to do going forward.”
As far as Beals is concerned, he’s ready to take his area of expertise to a new project.
“I always think it’s really great looking at how chemistry can be applied to the world around us.”