‘Anyone can hit a home run if they try,” said the great Ty Cobb at the end of the deadball era as Babe Ruth rose to fame in the 1920s. Cobb was unimpressed by Ruth, the Sultan of Swat. “It’s a brute way to approach the game.”

In 2019, Major League Baseball (MLB) seemed to prove Cobb’s point as big leaguers whacked a record 6,776 home runs—671 more than any year in major-league history.

In previous years, there had been much scuttlebutt about the ball seeming livelier. But 2019 took the cake. That year, the MLB-standard ball was introduced in AAA baseball—and at the minor-league level, home runs soared at a major rate. Not since 2011 had there been more than 4,000 home runs in AAA. But in 2019 there were 5,749, up from 3,652 in 2018.

Consequently, minor changes were made in the manufacturing of the ball—giving rise to a new set of suspicions and theories.

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