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On Monday, months of speculation concerning Aaron Judge’s future finally came to an end after the Yankees slugger agreed to remain in The Bronx in exchange for a massive nine-year contract worth $360 million. The franchise had attempted to secure the talents of the outfielder with an eight-year, $225 million offer at the start of the 2022 season, but he opted to keep his options open ahead of free agency.
That turned out to be a pretty good call, as Judge essentially raised his market value by more than $100 million over the course of a stellar year where he surpassed Roger Maris and set the single-season American League home run record by clocking 62 dingers when everything was said and done.
There are plenty of baseball fans out there who would argue Judge deserves to be viewed as the “real” single-season home run champion when you consider Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa (the only players who’ve hit more dingers over the course of 162 games) had their achievements tarnished by their use of performance-enhancing drugs.
However, an investigation into the baseballs that were used over the course of the 2022 MLB season has thrown an interesting wrench into that claim.
On Tuesday, Insider published an in-depth article examining one of the more intriguing storylines to emerge during a year where a number of players bemoaned the introduction of the so-called “dead balls” that were linked to a drop in offensive production.
That shift stemmed from the MLB’s decision to level the playing field during a 2021 season where it experimented with two types of baseballs before supposedly rolling out a new universal standard for 2022. However, Insider was able to obtain more than 200 baseballs used during the most recent campaign and had them examined by a team of experts who claim there were actually three distinct variations in rotation.
Those differences were primarily manifested in the weight of the baseballs that were studied. The lightest (classified as “Dead Balls”) comprised the majority of the 204 balls at the center of the investigation, but there were also a handful of the “Juiced Balls” on the heavier side of the spectrum as well as a few dozen that earned the “Goldilocks” label by falling in a sweet spot in the middle.
That last category is especially compelling when you take a look at where the “batter-friendly” Goldilocks balls were sourced from. In addition to being deployed in a number of postseason showdowns, a disproportionate number of balls in that category came from Yankees games played in the final two months of Judge’s record-setting season.
But what’s wilder, imo, is *where* we found Goldilocks. Last year we had no discernable pattern. Within our sample this year, most Goldilocks balls show up in the 2022 postseason or regular season Yankees games. Almost every other baseball in every other location was dead. pic.twitter.com/l0Df0M65S0
— Bradford William Davis (parody) (@BWDBWDBWD) December 6, 2022
Insider qualified its findings by noting the study was hampered by the MLB’s unwillingness to provide baseballs for testing, which resulted in a relatively small sample size that made it difficult for the outlet to come to any definitive or wide-ranging conclusions concerning leaguewide trends (a representative for the league also disputed the findings, describing them as “wholly inaccurate and just plain wrong”).
However, that’s still the kind of chart that makes it hard to resist the urge to throw on a tinfoil hat.