All these homers are from MLB juicing the ball. Well, maybe.

Listen, we know it’s tough to catch up on everything happening in the baseball world each morning. There are all kinds of stories, rumors, game coverage, and Vines of dudes getting hit in the beans every day. Trying to find all of it while on your way to work or sitting at your desk just isn’t easy. It’s OK, though. We’re going to do the heavy lifting for you each morning and find the things you need to see from within the SB Nation baseball network, as well as from elsewhere. Please hold your applause until the end, or at least until after you subscribe to the newsletter.

MLB has juiced baseballs before. The steroid era sure seems like it was the era of steroids, but it’s still probably improperly named, since there were plenty of other aspects at play that caused offense to rise: smaller ballparks, multiple expansions in the decade that (temporarily) diluted the talent pool in MLB, and juiced baseballs as proven by studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and written about by Jay Jaffe.

Now, we might be back to an era where the ball is livelier, and it’s because of a change in the design. That’s what Ben Lindbergh and a guy who blocked me on Twitter after I told him to log off are saying, anyway. A change to the seams has reduced air resistance on baseballs, and between that and the sudden desire of so many players to hit fly balls, we’ve got ourselves a whole bunch of dingers we didn’t have even just a few years ago.

There are some issues here, though. The pair even admit that this is a central question “we can’t quite figure out,” and also that some of this could just be inconsistency in the batches of balls themselves — the fact they haven’t been able to test any balls from this year limits the scope, too. And if there was a change, was it intentional, or just one of those things that happens when the manufacturing process changes?

It’s a discussion that’s far from over. There’s likely some underlying change — or, as with the steroid era changes — that’s causing all these dingers. A changed baseball could very well be part of it, but we’ll need more testing and more research to know for sure: Especially when UMASS Lowell has already done their own testing again and concluded something different than this pair did.

Regardless, it’s worth reading and thinking about the findings within that Ringer piece. Even if my advice to log off was unwisely ignored.