The baseballs are different, again, but that's not Atlanta's problem on offense

Major League Baseball continues to change one of the most fundamental parts of the sport without telling anyone

One of the recurring discussion points over the last few seasons have been the differences in the baseballs.

After a 2023 season in which several teams reached new heights of power production and the Atlanta Braves tied the single-season home run record with 307 longballs, many turned to one of the most fundamental aspects of the sport to explain the dropoff in power performance for the 2024 edition of the team.

But let’s back up first.

Back in 2021, astrophysicist and SABR member Meredith Willis dissected game-used baseballs from 15 different MLB parks and found that the league changed the manufacturing process, using a lighter center and a different winding process that suppressed the distance of the ball’s flight. The league then mixed and matched those balls throughout the 2021 season, citing “production delays” with the transition to the new baseballs.

MLB supposedly fixed the manufacturing bottleneck and fully transitioned to the new baseball for 2022 and 2023, although independent analysis found three distinct sets, all with different flight characteristics, from in-game samples throughout the season.

It’s widely assumed that the newer, lighter balls were fully in place for 2024 and are a small contributor (along with injuries) to Atlanta’s struggles to recreate 2023’s power production.

On Monday morning, Eno Sarris of The Athletic posted some research on Twitter/X establishing yet another change made to the baseballs for this season, one that could explain some underperformance for this year’s offense.

Let’s talk about it.

Why does this matter?

Here’s the thing about a baseball: It’s the most fundamental part of the sport and even minute changes can have far-reaching impacts.

There are weight specifications for the ball and MLB never violated those rather loose guidelines, but the variability is becoming a bit of a problem. According to Willis’ work, specific sets of games received different baseballs—“jewel” events, such as the All-Star Game, postseason games, and matchups of specific teams that featured a commemorative stamp on the leather — that were of a different performance level than most of the league.

Frankly, it’s absurd for MLB to allow different sets of baseballs to float around the game, never mind there being actual discernible patterns as to where the balls went.

It’s also an issue that the players were never notified. In the original story from 2022, the introductory anecdote is attributed to reliever Sean Doolittle, who observed several instances of batted balls not having the same distance that he expected based on ten years of experience in MLB.

As I’ve come to understand this most recent change to the balls, both player observation and internal team-specific models have shown larger-than-normal errors in their results, as one of the most significant variables—the flight characteristics of the ball—has changed without warning.

It must be incredibly frustrating for a modern front office, one that has developed advanced models to predict likely outcomes based on the batted ball characteristics of its roster, to have such a fundamental concept as the baseball change without notice.

How is this year’s ball different?

According to Sarris, the league’s own ball flight data, obtained via Statcast, indicates that the drag on the outer surface of the ball has increased this season to its highest point in the Statcast era. This increased atmospheric drag lowers the distance of batted balls hit in the air, therefore negatively affecting power production.

From 2015 through last season, barrelled fly balls have typically averaged 104.7 mph and 385 feet when hit at 26°.

This season? 377 feet, even given a slightly higher average exit velocity of 104.9 mph over the prior Statcast-era sample.

While it’s common for baseballs to fly slightly farther in the heat of the summer, Sarris accounted for that. This data was pulled for each season and for just the months of March, April, and May, so a timeframe that should present similar (but not identical) weather conditions.

One would think that eight feet of reduced ball flight wouldn’t cause a significant change in the batted ball performance, but it clearly has. So far in 2025, the league has seen the single largest underperformance in slugging percentage of barrelled baseballs in the Statcast era.

For that original 2015-2024 time period, the league averaged 16 points of batting average under expected and 68 points of slugging under expected.

In 2025? 68 points of underperformance in batting average and 254 points of slugging.

The only two seasons in this sample where a barrel has had a batting average of less than .700 are each of the last two, with barrelled balls producing a .684 average in 2024 and a .664 in 2025. Slugging is similar, with the previous floor being a 2.402 mark in 2023 before dropping to a 2.267 in 2024 and a 2.189 in 2025.

How has this impacted the Braves?

Bucking expectations, though, this has not always had a larger negative impact on the power-prolific Braves offense than the rest of the league.

Here’s the team’s batting average and slugging on barrelled balls in the first three months of 2023, 2024, and 2025:

2023: .645 average, 2.036 slug
2024: .738 average, 2.429 slug
2025: .672 average, 2.206 slug

In fact, the Braves have MORE homers on barrelled balls in 2025 during this early-season period than each of the previous two seasons, including their record-setting 2023 campaign:

2023: 43 homers
2024: 40 homers
2025: 57 homers

It’s worth pointing out that this higher homer total in the first part of this season was mostly done without Ronald Acuña Jr., who returned to the lineup on May 23rd against San Diego and accounts for just three of the team’s 2025 homers in the sample.

You can’t blame the baseballs this time

While it’s unavoidable that the higher-drag baseballs are changing the outcome of batted balls in actual ways, it’s hard to properly assign blame for that versus the other offensive approach changes simultaneously implemented by the Atlanta coaching staff.

We’ve already documented how players are neither swinging as hard nor as much overall, with most players seeing decreased offensive performance from it. While the different baseballs have undoubtedly had a negative impact, it’s hard to argue that anything more than a small percentage of the offensive struggles are because of the different baseballs.

Atlanta’s hitting .247/.319/.373 with runners in scoring position this year, through the end of May. While that’s not as good as last season (.269/.330/.418), it’s still better from a batting average and on-base perspective than the outstanding 2023 lineup did (.223/.308/.382).

As always, it comes back to one simple thing that the Atlanta Braves offense needs to do in 2025: Be better. There’s no magic fix here, nor is there a convenient scapegoat.

As I like to do, we go back to Vaughn Grissom and his delivery of the advice he received from former third base coach Ron Washington after losing the shortstop job to Orlando Arcia in 2023: