New Titleist baseballs found
with Minute Maid core
"Nothing is wrong with today's baseballs", "They may be
more lively, but they aren't juiced", "They are the same ones
we used last year", and "The players are just bigger and stronger."
All of this has been said from sources of Major League Baseball and it's
all a load of crap.. Let's start with the first couple of quotes. To say
there is nothing wrong with the balls is untrue, but to say they are "lively
but not juiced" is borderline retarded. When people say the balls are
juiced, they don't literally mean the
re is juice in the ball idiots.
"Juiced" is an expression for the balls being much more lively
which causes them to jump off the bats as if being shot out of a gun. It's
true, and it's not hard to see. In fact, there have been a number of coaches
in the majors that know it's true. These guys that have been hitting fungos
to the infielders and outfielders for decades and several have said they
can feel a difference in the way the ball comes off the bat. They say it
just seems to jump a little more than it used to. Unless gravity has changed
since the strike, we feel safe saying the baseballs have.
This brings in the blatant lie that baseballs are the same as they used
to be. When the strike hit in 1994, major league baseball said they would
look into some changes to try to get the fans back. Is it just irony that
the homerun totals have exploded since the 1995 season or did all of these
players use that year to gain 15 pounds of muscle and suddenly become power
hitters? I think not. MLB (a.k.a. Morons leading baseball) claim the balls
are the same as they were last year. Well, duh. Of course they are the same
as last year, and the year before that. But what about the balls used in
say 1991? Conveniently, ML
B reported that they can't find any of
these baseballs to compare test results with. Can't find any baseballs?
Do you know how many players, coaches, fans, umpires, executives, etc. have
a game ball in their homes? I'm sure several of them would be willing to
part with it for a couple of days so MLB could run some tests on it. Heck,
I've got one from 1995 that I'd let them use. And if you were wondering,
there is a difference between it and the baseball I got in batting practice
this summer. The skin on the new balls is rock hard, and the seams are almost
non-existent making gripping the ball nearly impossible. The balls are slick
and would surely be hard to control. I decided to do a little bounce test
of my own with my 1995 ball and the 2000 ball. I found a nice hard, even
surface and dropped the balls from shoulder height. Not surprising to me,
the 2000 ball bounced higher all 5 times I dropped it. Not a great deal
higher, but about an inch higher than the old ball. I won't do the math
to figure out what the difference would be converted to about 350 feet,
but it is plenty of difference for me. Peter Gammons reported that today's
baseballs travel anywhere from 15 to 30 feet farther than those of earlier
years, but said that's not much of a difference and there are a lot of other
factors that are causing the homeruns. Umm, Peter I think 30 feet is quite
a bit of distance. You only have to hit a ball 300 feet to homer in any
stadium down the lines then. Here's a test for you. Count the number of
homeruns you see land in the first 3-5 rows of the stands this week. That's
how many fewer homeruns there would be if the only thing MLB did was change
the baseball. MLB has admitted the baseballs are at the limit of the "lively
scale" so just fix them and get them back to normal.
As for today's bigger, stronger players, I'm not convinced. There are
obviously some players that are bigger than players in the past. That's
obvious to see. However, another thing that is obvious is that players like
Rich Aurilia are 
NOT bigger and stronger than past players. Aurilia (who
is listed at right about 6'1, 180 pounds) hit 22 homeruns last year. A little
"Did you know" trivia here: Did you know that slugger Dwight Evans
hit over 22 homers only 6 times in 18 full seasons in the majors? Also,
another Boston player who played with the inviting Green Monster, Jim Rice,
hit over 25 homers only 6 times in 14 full seasons. Now you tell me honestly
that Rich Aurilia is bigger and stronger than Evans and Rice and we'll quit
this argument right now. OK, we'll keep going then. Pitchers are flying
balls out of the yard and even the all-powerful Doug Glanville hit 11 homeruns
last season. Glanville (6'2, 170 soaking wet) is a clear example that you
don't have to be a power hitter to hit homeruns. The way the game is played
has changed, but not all of the players are bigger and stronger. That's
simply not true. So don't try to come up with all these excuses for why
homerun totals are up because we don't want to hear them. It was a nice
idea to get people back in the seats, but you got your stupid homerun record
from McGwire so just get some real baseballs that don't have dimples in
them with "Titleist" stamped across them.
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