Major League Baseball used two balls again this year, and evidence points to a third

According to Wills’ data, MLB deployed this third baseball alongside the dead ball in 2022, with production starting as early as January – six months before Manfred promised a one-ball season. This new third ball’s weight centers somewhere between the juiced ball the league phased out last season and the newly announced dead ball: It is on average about one-and-a-half grams lighter than the juiced and one gram heavier than the dead. According to the league’s own research, a heavier ball tends to have more pop off the bat, meaning the third ball would likely travel farther than a dead ball hit with equal force.

While we accumulated 204 baseballs from 22 big league parks in 2022 – more than Wills has obtained in any of her previous studies – MLB also made sure it wasn’t easy. One player told Insider that one of Manfred’s top lieutenants warned a players’ union official not to let players send any balls to Wills for “third-party testing” and warned that the league could fire any non-union team employees who helped her research. Nonetheless, we amassed baseballs from sources around the league, and supplemented our sample by purchasing balls caught by fans and from licensed vendors at ballparks.

(It is worth noting that all the balls we obtained fell within the legal specifications in MLB’s rulebook. But as league-commissioned physicist Alan Nathan once said, “The specs on Major League baseballs, they almost don’t deserve to be called specs…They’re so loose that the range of performance from the top end to the bottom end is so different.”)

But perhaps even more interesting than the apparent existence of the third ball itself is where we tended to find it. Though the overwhelming majority of baseballs we obtained were dead, 36 of them fit the bill for what Wills dubbed the “Goldilocks ball” (not too heavy, not too light — but just right). Of those, most were found in one of three situations:

• Postseason games, including the World Series;

• The All-Star Game and Home Run Derby;

• Regular season games that used balls with special commemorative stamps (i.e. Texas Rangers 50th anniversary ball) on the outer leather.