There is no evidence from scientists that the ball is harder...the drag of the baseball is less - Robert Manfred, Major League Baseball Commisioner
Plenty of people have already written articles about this theory. CBS, CNN, The New York Times, and BleacherReport are all over the first page of Google for the keyword: "are major league baseballs juiced". FiveThirtyEight even went as far as to X-ray multiple major league baseballs. This is obviously a problem we all as fans want answers to, I just think some of the articles didn't dig deep enough in the data (Fivethirtyeight went about as deep as you can physically get).
Need to find data on:
- percentage of fly balls
- balls hit with "hard" or "solid" contact
- Swing path?
- Percentage of called strikes vs swinging strikes?
- Swinging strikes/at bat
- extra-base hits vs singles/other outcomes (compare last 3 years with the peak years of steroid era)
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.datasciencedojo.com/p/b0585cb3-7400-42eb-9e63-9e042a48387e/