Let\u2019s recap, in broad strokes: the lower the drag coefficient, the further the ball travels through the air, essentially. That has an impact on a lot of stuff in a baseball game, but especially the rate of fly balls that become homers:<\/p>\n
To be clear, while this is only a few data points, the r-squared between these two data elements is over 50 percent, i.e., over half the variation in league-average HR\/FB alone is explained just by the mean drag coefficient for the year. The chart is also incredibly blatant (one goes up, the other goes down), with the main thing ruining being, in part, 2025 \u2014 where the ball\u2019s coefficient of restitution changed in addition to its drag coefficient. This muddied the water, because essentially it was a draggier-than-ever ball that was nonetheless \u201cspringier\u201d than ever before. How can we tell? Leaguewide exit velocity essentially didn\u2019t budge year-to-year from 2015-2024, decreasing four times year-over-year while increasing five times, until having a big jump from 2024 to 2025. (Also, note: there was a big fall from 2016 to 2017, and then it went back to where it was in 2018. Unclear whether 2026 will go back to 2024-and-before levels.)<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no real way to know what MLB is planning\u2026 or inadvertently going to engender for 2026. Like many of you, this \u201cquestion\u201d came to mind watching Ronald Acu\u00f1a Jr. hit a ball 112+ mph at a 22 degree launch angle and have it bounce in front of the fence in a Spring Training park. The ball traveled short of 400 feet; even last year, with the added drag, the most similarly-hit ball was a no-doubter homer with an extra nine feet of distance, and all balls in the Statcast era with the same EV+LA combo were also homers (though one was a topspin dart with an estimated distance of only about 383 feet). Austin Riley later had a similar pop-up into the outfield that blooped in, seemingly fooling the center fielder in the process in terms of how much it didn\u2019t carry.<\/p>\n
Now, it was soggy yesterday, and the wind was blowing to right field, so one set of a couple of weird ball-in-play things does not a portent of even more drag make. Still, it\u2019s something to wonder about. I wish we didn\u2019t have to, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Let\u2019s recap, in broad strokes: the lower the drag coefficient, the further the ball travels through the air,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":588460,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2394],"tags":[191,46,73299,4166,5,192,4],"class_list":{"0":"post-588459","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-atlanta-braves","8":"tag-atlanta","9":"tag-atlanta-braves","10":"tag-atlanta-braves-discussion","11":"tag-atlantabraves","12":"tag-baseball","13":"tag-braves","14":"tag-mlb"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116120597736268630","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=588459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588459\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/588460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=588459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=588459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=588459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}