New York Yankees 2023 Season Preview
We’ve known for a long time that there have been, ahem, inconsistencies with the baseballs used in the Major Leagues. There was the jumpy, super-juiced ball of 2019, in which the Seattle Mariners’ 1997 record of 264 homers was topped by FOUR teams, including the Yankees, who finished second with 306.
Then there was the dead ball season of 2022, in which we saw the lowest batting average (.243) since 1968 and the lowest slugging percentage (.395) since 2014. Mysteriously, the dead ball didn’t stop Aaron Judge from setting a new American League record for home runs, busting Roger Maris’s record of 61 in ‘61 with 62 round-trippers. The Yankees also hit 254 homers as a team, 11 more than the Braves and 35 more than the third-place Brewers.
An Insider investigation authored by Bradford William Davis prominently featured astrophysicist Dr. Meredith Wills, who has been studying baseballs for the last several seasons, and the two uncovered some interesting findings. Armed with existing data that suggested that there was a change to the baseball around mid-May that led to more offense and more home runs, it was clear that at least two different baseballs were used during the season.
However, the research of Wills and the Insider crew found a third baseball, nicknamed “Goldilocks”. A disproportionate amount of these balls were used in the playoffs and also in Yankees games.