During the World Series, Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci wrote a story in which various members of the Dodgers and Astros agreed that the baseballs used during the World Series were slicker than those used during the regular season. The pitchers, and report, suggested that the balls made it particularly hard to throw a slider, leading to slider pitchers having particular problems, leading to a lot of home runs on balls which spin but didn’t break as expected.
Major League Baseball denied that at the time, saying that the only difference in the baseballs was the little gold “World Series” embossing. The photo at the top of Verducci’s article makes such a denial dubious, but by the time October rolled around, we became pretty accustomed to Major League Baseball issuing dubious denials about the composition of baseballs.
Yu Darvish is a guy who relies a lot on a slider and he, quite famously, struggled mightily during the World Series. He was one of the pitchers who noticed a difference in the balls. Yesterday, when he made his first appearance at Cubs’ camp, the president of his new team seemed to acknowledge that the balls could’ve played a factor. Here’s Theo Epstein talking about Darvish’s World Series struggles:
“The difficulty with the baseballs” sticks out. Is the comment a matter of Epstein merely nodding at his new employee’s explanation as a means of having his back, or does Epstein put stock in the slick balls theory too?
If the latter, I wonder how many other people inside the game believe the pitchers who issued complaints about the baseballs and how many believe MLB’s denials about it. And I wonder what MLB thinks of that.
Maybe they’ll just deny that Epstein even said that, knowing full well that most of the baseball media will just print their denial without criticism. Worth a try, right?