[dfwgator]

Company Claims '98 Baseballs Were Juiced

Apparently so were the players.

[TommyDale]

I've wondered why they didn't do this testing long ago. I can remember when baseballs didn't float in water.

[labette]

for later

[Pukin Dog]

Expected and understandable, considering that Baseball was becoming an afterthought prior to the home run derby injection into the sport.

[The_Victor]

The Center for Quantitative Imaging at Penn State, it took images of 1998 baseballs.

Imaging? Why not just buy a representative sample of 1998 balls and saw them in half?

[em2vn]

Does it make any difference if the balls were juiced! Baseball is entertainment and nothing more. It was wise to give the paying fans what they wanted, more excitment and suspense.

[randog]

A company that uses computer imaging claims baseballs had a larger rubberized core and a synthetic rubber ring in 1998...

Nowhere in the article does it mention how much larger the balls are. Microns? Millimeters? Inches? The balls could very well be within spec, as I suspect, and someone is out for some free advertising.

[Right Wing Assault]

I know these guys were just doing imaging, but I wonder what 9 years on the shelf does to the bounciness of a ball? Also, a ball stored 9 years in an attic where temps hit 150 degrees might be a lot different than one stored at room temp.

[wagglebee]

This is a little suspect if you ask me. There is no doubt in my mind that there is a huge steroid problem in MLB, but I fail to see how the balls could be altered in such a way.

Rawlings is not going to "secretly" manufacture a bunch of balls that will perform better and even if they did, how would they ensure that guys like McGwire and Bonds would be hitting them. If you pay attention to a baseball game, you will notice that the "playing time" of an individual ball is very short; so, if these balls were made, there should be a bunch of them out there that could be cut open and examined.

[TomGuy]

McCain will be demanding Senate hearings on why baseballs have rubber rings.

[DCPatriot]

"No changes have been made to the core of the ball through the entire time they have manufactured it."

Not addressing the synthetic ring around the core....

[Poodlebrain]

Suppose there was a 10% increase in the number of home runs hit, and the increase was pretty evenly distributed among all players. The simple solutions are that player performance changed significantly in one season or the physical characteristics of the equipment changed significantly to account for the increase in home runs. While player doping may have been widespread in 1998, it is doubtful that the distribution of the increase in home runs would be so uniform across all batters, and shouldn't the pitchers have shown some sort of improvement from doping to counteract the hitters? A juiced baseball is so much more likely the cause as it is the one constant used in all games by all players, and it is the easiest change to accomplish.

The commercial Randy Johnson made "Chicks dig the long ball" merely pointed out what everyone in baseball knew, home runs sell tickets. The owners who were willing to ignore the rampant cheating in the game would surely not be above tweaking the equipment to increase their revenue.