Rob Manfred signs a baseball in 2015.
Some preteens; some Pokémon. Otherwise, no person or product is in a more continual state of flux as Major League Baseball’s ever-evolving baseball.
The league’s lack of apparent disclosure about changes to its equipment is where curiosity evolves into controversy. For example: in 2022, a team of legal scholars published a study1 that argued MLB’s relative absence of communication about its changing baseball—while also expanding its online gambling business—was analogous to a company committing securities fraud on the stock market. “Just like with securities fraud, misinformation distorted market prices in ways harming gamblers,” wrote the researchers about a midseason home run spike that altered the statistical environment the game was played—and bets were made. “By implication, gamblers assessed the odds of games based on market prices without accounting for the destabilizing effects of duplicitous conduct.”
What MLB says or doesn’t say about its baseball, as well as its willingness to prove its true, makes a difference.
Each ball phenomenon and what MLB did or did not say since Rob Manfred became league commissioner in 2015 could be its own series.5 Instead, we’ll start with 2026’s June home run spike, a phenomenon powered by a decline in drag—a physics term measuring force against the baseball’s movement—that rivals the league’s most homer-happy years on record. MLB responded to media inquiries about the dinger binge with a statement that defended its ball’s performance but conceded issues with its production, in a collection of confusing, if not, outright contradictory claims.
We’ll be going through all of them, but for now, we’ll focus on one. Buckle in, and don’t lose your grip.
Spinning yarn
This June, The Athletic found that fly balls traveled eight feet further than the previous month. Just like 2015, the year of the study comparing MLB’s gambling market to securities fraud, the drag declined and the home run rate jumped midseason.
By acknowledging some changes, MLB at least appeared to take a different tact. According to a league official, Rawlings notified MLB of “excess oil from the yarn inside the baseball”, which the league claimed affected about 50% of its baseball supply. The official said the inner yarn’s oil stained the ball’s white leather cover with a “yellow discoloration,” but also, that Rawlings —which MLB owns a partial stake in—resolved the issue with its yarn supplier. Also, the official said that after testing the tainted balls, the league believed the issue was strictly “aesthetic.”
Nice to know. But the question in view was about how its ball played, not how it looked. Taken at face value, the league’s answer, which you can read here, was a complete non sequitur.
If the defect affected more than the mere cosmetic issues MLB claimed, the official suggested that league compliance staff could intercept bad balls before they could reach the field. “MLB's gameday compliance monitors—” referring to the league’s designated staff stationed at every stadium to maintain the integrity of league equipment and rules “—remove any baseballs that show cosmetic imperfections after the pregame mudding process.”
So we decided to ask an MLB compliance staffer who was intimately familiar with the process MLB outlined and publicized as a firewall to the balls reaching the field.
The staffer directly disputed the company line.
“It is nearly impossible for us to reject any baseball with the yellow cosmetic issue,” the compliance staffer told eyeblack. “Because once it is mudded,” referring to the literal mud added to every game ball to improve pitcher grip—”the yellow becomes mostly invisible to the naked eye.”
The staffer4 then reviewed a handful of pictures eyeblack obtained of Rawlings game-baseballs—before and after they reach the field—to illustrate why they’re powerless to stop the production error from reaching the players.