Is altitude all that it ‘seams’?

As long as MLB’s official baseballs are hand-stitched, they won’t be 100% identical.

This presents a problem for the meticulous data collection in this game. We can’t expect all pitch data to be 100% accurate if the baseball itself is inconsistent.

It’s safe to reason that no two baseballs will be identical — which might be a good thing, if differences can help combat the drastic effects of baseball at elevation.

Barton Smith is a mechanical and aerospace engineering professor at Utah State University, and is know in baseball circles as the “seam tamer” as mentioned on his Twitter account. Smith’s research on baseball flight has served as a backbone for discussions on seam-shifted wake and…