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M.L.B. Hired Scientists to Explain Why Home Runs Have Surged. They Couldn’t.

The pitchers were right, sort of. Something in the aerodynamic properties of baseballs is making them fly through the air and over walls with greater ease, but a team of scientists hired by Major League Baseball could not determine exactly what it is.

The ball itself is not juiced, as many pitchers have claimed. The red seams are not lower, as some also insisted. And the launch angle of the balls off bats, another posited theory, does not account for the staggering number of home runs hit between 2015 and 2017.

It turns out it is all about drag coefficient.