Free-agent first baseman Anthony Rizzo claimed during a podcast appearance this week that he could tell the difference in the baseballs used by MLB last season.
"I would take the balls this year and feel on them and be like, 'Man, this seems harder,'" Rizzo said on Compound Podcast, hosted by his former Chicago Cubs teammate Ian Happ, per NJ.com's Brendan Kuty. "And then you take some of them and you're like, 'Feel how soft this is compared to what they were.' It's crazy."
Happ, for his part, agreed with Rizzo. He added: "They started flying in the middle of the year and you're like, what's going on?"
Rizzo and Happ's comments come in the wake of Bradford William Davis' Business Insider report concerning Major League Baseball's usage of two different baseballs during the 2021 season. MLB claimed there was no wrongdoing at play, and that both sets of baseballs met the required specifications. The switch was blamed on a manufacturing delay at Rawlings caused by staffing shortages that stem from the COVID-19 pandemic. (The league, it should be noted, owns Rawlings.)
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Our Michael Axisa recently analyzed the situation, finding that more home runs were hit on a rate basis as the season progressed. That within itself isn't necessarily surprising -- offense tends to improve as temperatures rise -- but the other aspects of this story led Axisa to wonder if commissioner Rob Manfred will resign, the way Japanese baseball commissioner Ryozo Kato did in 2013. (Axisa predicted he won't.)
Manfred and MLB have experienced some controversy or another about the composition of the baseballs dating back years now. The league even commissioned its own investigation into the matter in 2019, concluding that the ball wasn't intentionally changed, and crediting the league's home-run barrage to hitter behavior.
Rizzo, who most recently suited up with the New York Yankees following a midseason trade, is currently a free agent. He'll remain unemployed until the end of the owner-imposed lockout, the league's first work stoppage since 1994-95. That isn't expected to happen until the owners and the MLB Players Association ratify a new Collective Bargaining Agreement.
