#ICYMI - Breaking Down Baseball Barriers, with Meredith Wills and Justine Siegal

In case you missed this episode on the Playing with Science channel…. Hosts Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice investigate “HomerGate” alongside baseball data scientist and astrophysicist Meredith Wills, and, get details on what it takes to be a groundbreaker in sports from Justine Siegal, founder of Baseball for All and the first female coach in the MLB. Photo Courtesy of Justine Siegal.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Gary O'Reilly?

  I'm Gary O'Reilly.

• 0:02Chuck Nice?

  And I'm Chuck Nice.

• 0:03Gary O'Reilly?

  And this is Playing with Science.

• 0:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Today, we revisit the big baseball mystery that took place between 2015 and 2017, when there was an outbreak of homers, but nobody knew why.

• 0:18Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and so you know, Major League Baseball commissioned an independent investigation led by Professor Alan Nathan, who personally told us, right here on PWS in 2018, they'd look, and they found, pretty much, that there was no smoking gun and that they would continue to look.

• 0:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, and astrophysicist Dr. Meredith Wills was having none of it and tore, literally tore into the balls and found what looked a lot like a firearm with smoke coming out of the barrel. Well, how about that?

• 0:49Chuck Nice?

  Yes, and also taking us inside baseball's universe will be Major League Baseball's coach, Justine Segal, who might just know a thing or two about where we stand on the cusp of the new baseball season.

• 1:02Gary O'Reilly?

  But first, let's speak to our super sleuth, Dr. Meredith Wills. We did speak to Professor Alan Nathan, who led the Major League Baseball investigation last year, and he said something was happening, but they weren't able to discover it. You did, but before we get to that point, and we will, don't worry, we will, what led an astrophysicist to baseball?

• 1:31Speaker 02

  I love this question. Let's see. I was born on opening day. I was three weeks old when I went to my first baseball game. I don't remember how old I was when I learned to keep score. I have been an official scorer in some capacity since I was about 14 and have actually been a professional official scorer. I didn't become an astrophysicist till I went to college. So the question is more the other way around.

• 1:57Chuck Nice?

  Wow, what led such a baseball fan into astrophysics?

• 2:03Speaker 02

  My grandfather worked for NASA and so it seemed like the thing to do, I guess.

• 2:08Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 2:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Family tradition.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  You know, I, I, yeah, so, so I, I, I came, uh, my dad's side is baseball, my mom's side was scientists and.

• 2:16Chuck Nice?

  And you're bringing them all together.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  At, at the, at the time, it was a lot easier to, to get a job in astrophysics and enjoy baseball than the other way around. It kind of still is. I mean, it's very hard to just do astrophysics research on the side for fun. Uh, as opposed to, if you get, you know, paid by NASA to do astrophysics, you still could do baseball research. But I've found a way to do baseball research and get paid for it. So.

• 2:43Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, let's, let's, let's deal with this.

• 2:45Chuck Nice?

  Very nice.

• 2:45Gary O'Reilly?

  What made you think you could solve Homer Gate? I'm calling it Homer Gate from now on.

• 2:50Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay. I like it. Don't. Oh, not that Homer.

• 2:53Gary O'Reilly?

  No, not that Homer.

• 2:55Chuck Nice?

  So Homer Gate.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Well, uh, I guess some of this comes from, I have a, a history of, for entirely different reasons. I've gotten very good at tearing apart baseballs and it turns out that there is actually precedent. Uh, going back, oh, at least to the twenties, uh, for changing the ball, changing the way that it travels. Uh, the big, the, the best example of that is actually something Ben Lindbergh wrote up. Uh, where they, uh, if you've heard of the dead ball era and the live ball era.

• 3:32Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Uh, the reason that you got the transition was because it was, uh, World War One and we ran out of American wool. So we had to start importing wool from Australia to make the yarn for inside the baseballs. That turned out to be stringier, or excuse me, springier and suddenly you get, it becomes much easier to hit home runs. You get Babe Ruth. Um, so

• 3:56Chuck Nice?

  Look at that.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  The idea of construction of the ball, making it travel differently. There is precedent. I thought, great, maybe I'll find something, you know? That was sort of where it started.

• 4:06Chuck Nice?

  That's, first of all, brilliant of you to look to the past and see where the precedent is, uh, or see where the precedent is for the past. And then maybe use that as a clue to look into the future because, uh, you know, you deconstructed a ball, which, first of all, uh, kudos to you for that. Because the first inclination would be to cut a ball open and take a look at the cross-section of the ball. That's the first inclination. I don't care who you are. You think, okay, let's see what's going on with this ball. Boom, let's cut it in half. Let's look at a cross-section. We'll break down the component parts and we'll see, you know, we'll take our measurements and we'll see.

• 4:51Chuck Nice?

  You, no. You were like, let's unravel the ball completely. Yeah. That, by the way, that alone, you just deserve like many, many kudos for that. I'm, you know what I mean? Cause I mean, that just shows right there that you're thinking outside of the box. With that in mind, I gotta know, how long does it take to take apart a baseball? Cause you didn't, you didn't do it. You act, you literally took it apart. You de-seamed it and then unraveled it. How long does that take?

• 5:22Speaker 02

  Um, on a, if you're on a roll, it takes, oh, I don't know, maybe a one to two hours. Uh, the problem is that taking the laces apart really cuts your hands up. So you can't really do more than a couple a day because you just, you're, the laces are tight. And even then you have to get like, I've taken enough apart where I'm pretty good at detaching the seams themselves so that they don't fray. But you, you're literally taking a pin, sticking them under the seams and pulling them up. And if you don't do it exactly right, the seams fray and then it takes a lot longer. Plus you then lose the laces and, as you mentioned, say the laces, right?

• 6:06Speaker 02

  Uh, you lose the laces, which, you know, ultimately became

• 6:12Speaker 02

  My most important data point, so it's really a good thing that I'd already gotten good at taking them apart because it meant my laces were largely intact.

• 6:20Gary O'Reilly?

  So where do you go to source, because you need to source balls of a certain period. It's no you saying, "Well, I'll look at the balls that are current, I'll look at the balls or whenever, you know, there's a couple in the backyard, I'll deal with those." You have to go to a certain place. Was that access easy?

• 6:33Speaker 02

  Uh, yes and no. Uh, by the way, it turns out that, uh, here, visual aids.

• 6:39Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  It turns out that, uh, every baseball that is pre-2015 has, um, let me see if I can get that close enough to the camera. It has Bud Selig's signature on it. So by definition, if it's got Bud Selig's signature, it is pre-2015 because the commissioners changed in the offseason of 2014, 2015.

• 7:03Chuck Nice?

  It's kind of like money and the treasurer, uh, the US treasurer. When the treasurer changes, the signature on your money changes.

• 7:10Gary O'Reilly?

  So you, we are dealing with a super sleuth, a little single, simple indicator like that.

• 7:15Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 7:16Gary O'Reilly?

  I mean, okay, so you, you data.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  Afterwards, it's harder, actually.

• 7:20Gary O'Reilly?

  All right.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  Because the transition happened during 2015, so you want to make sure you don't get 2015 balls, which do save Manfred. And so for those, I actually did go to people specifically, you know, uh, 2016, 2017, uh, a lot of parties that actually I have to keep anonymous for various reasons. Um, and since then, it's been a little bit easier to get my hands on, uh, baseballs. I prefer to have ones that have actually been game used to some extent, you know, either used in batting practice, or foul balls, or whatever, um, because you get a more random sample.

• 8:03Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Uh, you know, as opposed to like, if you get a box of baseballs, as I've discovered, you take them apart and they all have the same ID number on the inside. So it could be that the difference might be related to that exact person at that exact time, not that it is something that's systematic.

• 8:22Chuck Nice?

  Okay. That makes sense. That makes sense.

• 8:24Gary O'Reilly?

  So what did you find?

• 8:25Speaker 02

  eBay, I guess, is the way you end up going. And then you ask the person, "When did you catch these baseballs?" And there happened to be some people where they'll say, "Oh yeah, I got them in, you know, August and September of last year. Great, okay, I'll take them."

• 8:40Speaker 02

  That's the way to do it.

• 8:42Gary O'Reilly?

  I mean, we talked about the Major League investigation, the independently commissioned investigation, or whichever one you want to call it. They didn't find, but you did, but what did you find that was specific? And how does that correlate to the physics, to the homerun increase? Because that homerun increase tailed off in the 2018 season. So we are looking at a specific time band here. So what did you find? What was it that you went aha, smoking gun?

• 9:17Speaker 02

  Well, this does start with the homerun committee's findings. And it's basically that they found the only thing that was clearly different was the ball. And in particular, they found that the drag on the baseball, the aerodynamic drag, was less on the balls in 2016 and 2017 than before 2015. And hence, it's got to be the ball. That much they knew. You know, it couldn't be coaching, it couldn't be weather, it couldn't be, you know, launch angle, it had to be the ball.

• 9:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 9:57Speaker 02

  What I found, and in the way that science always worked, always works, I almost didn't even measure this. It was the last measurement I did, and it was a last minute aha, was I ended up looking at the thickness of the red laces. So like the actual, you know, how.

• 10:15Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  And it turns out that for the newer baseballs, the laces themselves are actually thicker by nine percent. And that's a big enough difference where it is a statistically significant difference.

• 10:29Gary O'Reilly?

  So what does thicker laces mean? I mean, apart from the fact they're thicker.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Well, it's interesting because a lot of people, when they hear thicker laces, they think higher seams.

• 10:38Chuck Nice?

  Right, they think seam higher.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  Which is not the case.

• 10:40Chuck Nice?

  Right, and of course, if you had higher seams, I mean, we do a lot.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  It would be less, it would be more drag.

• 10:46Chuck Nice?

  It'd be more drag and you'd get more movement and so, you know, you'd have an increased Magnus effect, as we've discussed on this show here many times. But, so, it's really interesting that you found this thicker, these thicker seams, these thicker laces.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 11:03Chuck Nice?

  Thicker laces, thicker laces, not thicker seams, I'm sorry. The seam is the space in between. The thicker laces, what did that do to the ball? Does a thicker lace mean a tighter seam? What exactly does it do?

• 11:15Speaker 02

  What ends up happening is, I mean, I guess, first of all, to make sure that the seams are related to the size of the leather cover.

• 11:23Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  So if you think about it, it's that it's the amount of leather that's getting squeezed under the laces. That's what gives you the height of the seams.

• 11:30Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  It's leather, it's not the laces. Um, as far as getting that difference, it turns out that, um, the laces, because the laces are cotton, um, we've all had this happen. You know, you spill coffee on your shirt, you go into the bathroom and you go and scrub it out, you get a divot in your shirt.

• 11:52Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's like a little, it's a, yeah, right, yeah.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Right, so what, what that demonstrates basically is that wet cotton, if you deform it and let it air dry, it stays deformed. So in the process of making the baseballs, the cotton laces get wet, they're put under tension from the, you know, the stitches themselves, they're then actually put under additional pressure to make the ball more spherical, and then they let them air dry. Well, thinner laces are going to stretch more than thicker laces. And what you end up with is that seam is the weak point, so you literally get almost a deformity along the seam.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  And so it bulges at the seams for the thinner laces. For the thicker ones, you get a little bulging, not so much. And I actually did a follow-up study where I looked at another sample, and I found that every single pre-2015 baseball I looked at was bulging at the seams, all of them.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  And in some cases by significant amount, actually.

• 13:03Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 13:03Gary O'Reilly?

  So, if I go back to the World Series in 2017, so the Astros and the Dodgers, both sets of pitches, both ballpens were saying, "Balls are juiced." I won't do the accent. Balls are juiced. I'll say it in British. Sounds far more ridiculous, right?

• 13:19Speaker 02

  You know what? I know with various Brits that I know that was a lot better than what I usually hear, just so you know.

• 13:27Gary O'Reilly?

  You've just patted me on the head, haven't you?

• 13:30Speaker 02

  It was a compliment.

• 13:31Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, thank you. All right, thank you. I'll take it as such. But they were both saying, "These balls are different." They found that they were slicker.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, the slicker thing I don't understand, but yeah.

• 13:42Gary O'Reilly?

  But they said there's something different. Because if you give, if you blindfold a pitcher, a major league pitcher, and just say, "Ball," because they did an experiment, and I think it was the Dodgers, or he said, "Hey," it's one or the other, the Astros or the Dodgers, six balls, and he said, postseason, regular season, and he got them all right. The difference, the three of each. And they will know. They just, because that's the tool they use day in and day out. They have an intimate knowledge of what ones were.

• 14:13Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  The interesting thing is, okay, what we have here, this is a pre-2015 ball, this is a post-2015 ball. I actually used these balls, and this is just like I randomly picked them out of my, out of the samples that I have. I gave a presentation last summer where I brought these, and, you know, everybody who I talked to afterwards, I had them feel the balls. People who had never picked up a baseball in their life could tell the difference.

• 14:42Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. They told me correctly which ones had the thicker seams. That's how obvious it is. So it doesn't just take pitchers. All it really takes is having any kind of tactile ability.

• 14:55Chuck Nice?

  And so it's a haptic experience. If you touch it, you can feel the difference. So now, this is what I want to know, because you are, you're an official scorer, and you've been, you know, which means you're a purist fan.

• 15:12Chuck Nice?

  Rawlings says that, hey man, we just do what we do. Like, you know what I mean? Like, we've, we changed nothing. Is, is that really the case? I mean, because it seems to me that something's gotta be different. So, you know, but, but I understand why they, why they would resist in saying that anything's different because anything you change in baseball, baseball is such a game of statistics and such a game of tradition. You are going to anger fans because fans who are keeping a close eye on things, they want to know what those variables are because they're going to factor that into their recordings. So, what, do you think that it's more like them towing their own party line?

• 15:56Chuck Nice?

  Or is it, or, or, or is there something that they're, they're, they could be truly ignorant of?

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Uh, I would say yes and no.

• 16:03Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  Um, I would say that, first of all, I would be very surprised if anybody intentionally went out and got laces that are 9% thicker. It was very likely just a contract negotiation. This was the, um, this was the bid that came in the best. And it, you know, however many levels down, and it just didn't occur to anybody, I mean, to, to, either to check or to take seriously that the laces were that much thicker. In, in addition to the pitchers, what you have to realize is all of these balls are laced by hand. So there's a couple hundred people down in Costa Rica who are making baseballs every day, every week, you know, and, and they produce like 200 baseballs a day, or excuse

• 16:49Speaker 02

  me, a week each.

• 16:50Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  And, um, I guarantee they had to have known there was a difference in lace thickness.

• 16:56Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  Um, that being said, I would be very surprised if Rawlings anticipated that this was somehow going to change how the, the ball traveled and essentially how the game evolved. It may also explain to some extent that 2018 change because they could have had, and I need to look at some more 2018 balls to take a look, but they may have just had supply turnover. And the next batch, they're still thicker as far as I can tell, but they may not be as thicker as the 2016, 2017 set.

• 17:36Chuck Nice?

  Interesting, interesting.

• 17:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Can I go back just to the physics of it a little bit more? And I know we're crunched for time. Smaller balls, tighter laces.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  Not necessarily smaller, more spherical.

• 17:48Gary O'Reilly?

  More spherical. Does that affect the deformation of shape once they're hit? Do they then return to their spherical, true spherical shape sooner? And is that going to be the reason maybe? Like I know because I'm a physicist, they fly further?

• 18:04Speaker 02

  That's something that I considered and I have a feeling that if it is an effect, I don't think it's the predominant effect, partly because when the MLB Home Run Committee did their research, they put all these balls through a wind tunnel even once they hadn't been impacted, and they still found a difference even without impact. So if impact is having an effect, it's an additional effect, but the effect exists regardless of whether the ball is hit.

• 18:35Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 18:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Thank you.

• 18:36Chuck Nice?

  That's great. You really did get into this, man. You really, you really, yeah, you got into this. This is great. All right, we've got to take a break, right?

• 18:44Gary O'Reilly?

  We're going to take a break. Are we going to have the doctor remain?

• 18:47Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 18:47Gary O'Reilly?

  We are. Fabulous. Because I have a head full of more questions. Right. More from Dr. Meredith Wills when we come back. The mystery solver of the big, I sound like I'm Scooby Doo here. It's like a Scooby Doo mystery. I'm not belittling your work, doctor. Just, this mystery has plagued people's minds and no one's really produced a smoking gun until now.

• 19:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 19:10Gary O'Reilly?

  And I think we have exactly the right person and there's more evidence, I believe, to back this up. Stay tuned. We're going to get really into this.

• 19:43Gary O'Reilly?

  Welcome back to Planet Science. This is our little baseball mystery. That isn't so little, it's rather large, big. And the code breaker. Yes. The person that broke the enigma code. We have the chief detective, the chief inspector. Yeah, we have a super sleuth, Dr. Meredith Wills. An astrophysicist, second. But a baseball devotee, first. And we've got into laces being thicker, the consequences thereof. But there's other evidence to back up that the laces are. Not just you saying it and then just saying, "Well, that's it now. I've said it, that's enough." Rich Hill, pitcher, major league variety of.

• 20:28Gary O'Reilly?

  What did he say about the balls when he was pitching them?

• 20:34Speaker 02

  Well, he's, um, he's actually been, I guess, until some of this stuff came out, very, very vocal about the fact that the ball was different. And he postulated that the seams were higher specifically. He even brought up that the laces were thicker. And went to MLB and said, "Please, will you check to see if the ball is different? Because the ball really feels different." MLB came back and, like Rawlings said, "The ball hasn't changed." I mean, even to the MLB Home Run Committee, Rawlings said, "The ball hadn't changed." So, um, you know, it's more, I guess Rich Hill was right, is what it comes down to. It just required that somebody go in and check for real.

• 21:19Gary O'Reilly?

  But there was actual medical evidence with something called pitcher blister?

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, pitcher, Rich Hill, Aaron Sanchez is another one, Marcus Stroman this last year, where Aaron Sanchez with the Blue Jays was actually the really big one because he had like the lowest ERA in baseball, he's a great young pitcher, and he lost about a half a season to blisters that got so bad that I believe he tore a tendon in his finger in the end and was out for the rest of the season. It was pretty bad. If you want to see some pretty disgusting pictures, you can look up some stuff online and it is just disturbing how bad things, because they kept trying to cut things away in hopes that it

• 22:07Speaker 02

  would somehow, but I mean, the way to look at it, seeing as I have demo, is when you have a, not a pitcher, but for a four seam fastball, see if I can get that right, four seam fastball, you hold the, your finger up against the laces with that, and so if you're letting go, depending on how you do the release, effectively, and this is something that Bear's looking into with equipment that I don't have, I have a feeling it's almost more of like a sandpaper effect than if the laces are thinner, and so, you know, it's

• 22:48Speaker 02

  not that people won't get, won't get blisters at all, but, and again, back to Ben Lindbergh, did a great article where he looked and the, I don't want to, I want to say it's like a factor of five or a factor of eight, there was this massive spike in 2016 of pitcher blisters just going up, and it's just interesting that there's a correlation between the laces being thicker, the pitcher blisters going up, and the home run surge. It's funny. It would be very strange to think that they're completely unrelated.

• 23:22Gary O'Reilly?

  I have to follow your train of thought here. But I go back to a show we did a couple of years ago with the great Ron Darling, pitcher with the Mets.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 23:31Gary O'Reilly?

  And he had a similar thing on one of his fingers and he showed us a scar.

• 23:34Chuck Nice?

  Oh, God, yes, it's still there.

• 23:36Gary O'Reilly?

  And he called it a vampire ball.

• 23:37Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 23:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Because he couldn't help it, it would rip.

• 23:40Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 23:40Gary O'Reilly?

  On the seams and get blood on the ball. And that's hence the term vampire ball.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  Oh, wow, yeah. And you're because one of the rules is you're not actually allowed to wear any kind of bandage or anything. So when you get a blister, you end up on the disabled list.

• 23:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh.

• 23:55Speaker 02

  So it's actually a very big deal, even for a minor blister.

• 24:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  Um, you know, you see guys pulled and a lot of times you can tell because suddenly someone's looking at their hand and the guy goes. And sometimes it's a natural blister, sometimes it's that there's one that seems to be coming on, but they it's a starter, they want him to make his next start and so they're going to be cautious about it. But, uh, but yeah, because when you lose, you'll lose a guy to the 10-day disabled list easily.

• 24:24Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, so we've had, we've cast you in the role of super detective, right? Let's turn this way, the other, let's turn this the other way. Baseball, Chuck continually tells me, needs to be better, more, give me more, let me have more homers, let me have more this, let me have more that.

• 24:42Chuck Nice?

  I'm only giving the people what they want, man.

• 24:44Gary O'Reilly?

  No, you want, you being selfish is what you want. All right, laces seem to have had a positive effect. Yes, any pitcher will disagree.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  I was going to say, it depends on what you consider positive. Positive on home runs, negative on pitchers.

• 24:59Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 24:59Gary O'Reilly?

  So, um, meh, pitchers, home runs, yes. How shallow am I? Is there anything else that could be done? Because baseball looks like it could do the little bit of an uplift. And have Major League Baseball and Rawlings inadvertently stumbled upon something that could be a positive?

• 25:20Speaker 02

  I, you know what? I, I.

• 25:25Speaker 02

  Home runs are interesting to people who are not rabid baseball fans.

• 25:32Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 25:32Gary O'Reilly?

  I would look at myself.

• 25:33Chuck Nice?

  You're absolutely right.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  So, um, this is to bastardize a Bull Durham quote. Um, it's about strikeouts, but it's the same idea. Home runs are boring. Besides that, they're fascists. Throw more ground balls. It's more democratic.

• 25:50Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  You know, the home run, there's, there's nothing involved. There's, there's no defense involved. It's just the pitcher and the hitter and the fielders could go home.

• 25:58Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. However, I mean.

• 26:01Gary O'Reilly?

  But it's a visual.

• 26:02Chuck Nice?

  But you gotta remember though, like, let's look at a no hitter. That's the same thing. I mean, everybody else can kinda go.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  But no hitters happen so rarely.

• 26:10Chuck Nice?

  That's true.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  And now we've got multiple home runs every single game.

• 26:14Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 26:14Gary O'Reilly?

  Yay.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  Hank Aaron, Hank Aaron, you know, who, who for, for years and years and years was the home run king.

• 26:23Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  Um, said the most exciting play in baseball is a triple.

• 26:29Chuck Nice?

  Well, yeah, cause how often does that happen?

• 26:32Speaker 02

  Right, and it's hard too.

• 26:34Chuck Nice?

  Right, it's very difficult. Yeah.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  When Bartolo Colon can hit a home run, anybody can hit a home run.

• 26:40Chuck Nice?

  So now, what do you think about this? Cause here's my, here's my thoughts on it. I think that people love home runs until there's a really great pitching duel. When there's a really great pitching duel, everybody changes the way they feel about the game. But as soon as somebody hits a home run, or as soon as there's a score, forget the home run. All right, just say you have an inning where, you know, just through a series of moves, you know, you do a sacrifice and boom, and now you bring a guy home and now you leave the inning and you scored a score. Once that happens, I think people are just like, now I just wanna see scoring. I just wanna see home runs. It's like, I think that, that that's kinda the way, for some reason,

• 27:22Chuck Nice?

  that that's how baseball has become in the minds of the average fan. Somebody like you who's a purist, I think you're looking at every aspect of the game, but I kinda feel like, you know, if you're just a regular person, you either wanna see like this incredible pitching display, or you wanna see dingers, you know? Or just a lot of hitting, cause you know, baseball, I think you're right. What is boring is home runs. What's not boring is hits. Lots of like, you know what I mean? You wanna see a lot of offense. You wanna see hits. You don't necessarily wanna see home runs.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  There is, I have two words for you, and this is relevant, this just happened the last few days, two words. Nolan Aronato, third baseman for the Rockies, who is, happens to also be very, very good offensively, but the man is a defensive genius at third base. If you've ever watched him play third base, he makes the kind of outs where you go, did you just see that? That seemed impossible. I think those kind of plays also tend to get appreciated even by people who are not purists. So, really, or the running catches, where they make these insane dives, you know, going

• 28:38Speaker 02

  into foul territory, did he just do that? So, really impressive defense, I think, also gets people. Where it runs into problems, and ironically, this is something that, you know, people who work in the sabermetrics or analytics, is when the game is boring, because the outs are just being made easily. Now, in a way, that's actually a better-played game, you know, so something like a shift, the reason they do a shift is because the statistics for getting those outs goes up.

• 29:14Gary O'Reilly?

  Right, yeah.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  On the other hand, it does actually, like you say, kind of make it boring. But then the people win, then the team wins, and, you know, actually, I believe the best way for a team to increase their revenue is to go on a winning streak. So, you know, boring baseball that wins might actually work out in the end, you know, so who knows?

• 29:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Am I getting the feeling that, as a purist, the ball is sacred, and no playing, no tampering, no messing with the laces, let's keep it as it is?

• 29:52Gary O'Reilly?

  And then we respect the talent of the third baseman. We respect someone like Keith Hernandez on first base for doing the incredible thing they did and maybe even changing the game, the way opponents played. And getting into and appreciating it more, rather than me as a newbie to the game and being super impressed by someone being able to hit the ball several hundred yards. But looking and learning to look at the intricacy, the detail, the beauty. I'm not a mathematician, but what I can imagine is the beauty is in the numbers, not in the home run.

• 30:29Speaker 02

  The beauty is in the numbers, the beauty is also in the athleticism.

• 30:33Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 30:33Speaker 02

  You know, that's, that's, maybe that's the way to look at it. Fielding requires athleticism in a way that pitching and hitting does not.

• 30:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Cool.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  And we all appreciate, regardless of the sport, it's basketball, it's football, it's soccer, it's, you know, truly wonderful athletic plays.

• 30:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  Are always a joy to watch.

• 30:56Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and the acrobatics in baseball is in fielding. It's, that's where you see the acrobatics in baseball, in no place else. Hey, let me ask you this, back to your study, because it just dawned on me. So you find these, okay, first of all, the response to your findings was a little, was almost laughable, it's like, oh yeah, we didn't think of that. That was it, that was, I mean, seriously, that was not, that's all they had to say. I mean, like, you know, I don't, I don't get that, how do you, how does somebody find something so significant and then the response is, oh yeah, you know, well, we didn't, we didn't really look at it like that. You know, so what I'd like to-

• 31:32Speaker 02

  Everybody, like you said, everybody either cuts the ball in half-

• 31:35Chuck Nice?

  Cuts the ball open.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  Or the other, the other way to do it is if they decide to take the cover off, they take a razor and slice through the laces.

• 31:41Chuck Nice?

  Slice the strings, that's right, never the deconstruction. So now, are they willing to, or does this have to happen? I mean, your, your findings are really detailed. You know, I looked at the way you overlapped all the little boxes where you show everything from the deconstruction of the ball and the twine inside and the core and everything, and then you show the laces and it's like so demonstrably different, you know, between the two balls. Are they going to try to replicate what you did, or is that necessary?

• 32:14Speaker 02

  I would say validation is always a good idea. Um, my understanding last time I spoke to Dr. Alan Nathan was they were taking a different tack on uh what might have changed the aerodynamics of the ball. Uh, in their case, they think that it may be that the core is off center a little.

• 32:36Chuck Nice?

  Well, he told us about that.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  They also think it might be that the leather is smoother.

• 32:41Chuck Nice?

  He told us about that too.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  And those seem to be the two that they're fixing, that they're, they're really focusing on as opposed to that the ball might be rounder. Um, that seems to be uh is being discounted for whatever reason.

• 32:55Gary O'Reilly?

  What have Major League Baseball said to you, if anything?

• 33:00Speaker 02

  Uh, I had one discussion with uh Dr. Nathan about a week and a half after my study came out. Uh, we discussed the nature of what thread was basically. Um, not much about the findings themselves. They asked for my data, which I did give them because it is science and of course your data should be transparent.

• 33:23Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  And I haven't heard a thing since.

• 33:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Did Major League Baseball's head office have a direct reply? I know you said you spoke to Dr. Alan Nathan and he was commissioned by them.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  I did spoke, I, I emailed the, the day before the article came out.

• 33:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:39Speaker 02

  I did email Major League Baseball for a comment. Um, I mentioned to them that I had already received a comment from Dr. Nathan and they said, great, that counts as our comment.

• 33:49Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  And that was it.

• 33:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, alright.

• 33:52Speaker 02

  So, so they, they have been contacted about this and I did tell them what my results were. Um, so they were, they are aware of them.

• 34:01Chuck Nice?

  So is there any place else to go with this from your end? Is there anything else that you think you can look further into this? Cause I would love to see you actually just come up with like definitive conclusions and just be like, eat this! No, I'm joking.

• 34:15Gary O'Reilly?

  Cause we keep coming, we keep bringing you back up.

• 34:18Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll keep bringing you back in.

• 34:19Gary O'Reilly?

  We keep bringing you back up.

• 34:20Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  There, there is, there's, there's two things. First of all, I, I will admit I'm curious. To see more for the pitcher blister issue than for the home runs.

• 34:33Chuck Nice?

  Uh huh.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  Um, don't forget, this happened in 2016 and 2017.

• 34:38Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  But none of the results came out till 2018.

• 34:41Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  So any home run drop off, it's coincidental. However, in 2019, they know that these results exist. So I want to get my hands on some 2019 balls and look at the lace thickness to see if in fact there may have been a change back to thinner laces.

• 35:04Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  Um, and I mean, and if that's the case, I, it seems to me that it would have been done, uh, you know, with some sort of forethought to it as opposed to just the, you know, here we're going for the best, uh, the best bid for our contract.

• 35:24Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 35:24Speaker 02

  Um, another one that I'm a little curious about and, uh, I have a couple of former major league pitchers who brought it up. I, I'm not sure it shows up well on these, but I have to wonder if the laces themselves, or excuse me, the seams themselves may not be slightly wider. Um, and that, that actually, it, it has to do specifically with the way, um, this was a pitcher who was telling me about, um, throwing a curve ball and, um, and his hands are about the same size as mine. So this is a newer one and apparently when he throw, used to throw a curve ball,

• 36:06Speaker 02

  his fingers wouldn't touch the laces at all on either side. And with the newer balls, he says that his fingers are touching the laces, which makes the release slightly different because he's getting a little friction that he didn't used to. Um, so that would be.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  Again, I don't, I don't think that there's a, that there is, like I said, any kind of, you know, pre-planning. There's, there's, there's no good reason why thicker laces would be anticipated to cause more home runs. There would be no reason why wider seams would be anticipated to do anything either. But, um, you know, it is easy enough to go in and measure that sort of thing. I just haven't had a chance.

• 36:50Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  So.

• 36:52Chuck Nice?

  Doctor.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  And a wider seam would also give you effectively a larger area against which to get that blister.

• 37:00Gary O'Reilly?

  And you can incorporate the physics.

• 37:02Chuck Nice?

  Love it.

• 37:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Doctor Meredith Wills, the power of an inquiring mind.

• 37:07Chuck Nice?

  Yes, we love it.

• 37:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh, no wonder you're an astrophysicist. That mind is being applied to a number of different things and long may be applied to baseball because I think baseball might well be a better place for it. Thank you.

• 37:20Speaker 02

  Baseball needs astrophysicists.

• 37:22Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Actually, the world needs astrophysicists.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  This is true.

• 37:26Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, the whole world needs astrophysicists. Problem solvers.

• 37:29Gary O'Reilly?

  Doctor, a pleasure.

• 37:31Chuck Nice?

  Hey Doc, thanks so much.

• 37:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, your time's been fabulous and thank you for opening the minds of not just Shaun, of Shaun, yes.

• 37:38Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 37:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Chuck and I, Shaun's brother.

• 37:39Chuck Nice?

  I'll be Shaun for you.

• 37:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh darling.

• 37:41Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 37:41Gary O'Reilly?

  And our listeners in particular. Thank you once again. Um, we're going to take a break.

• 37:45Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 37:46Gary O'Reilly?

  We are. Um, Doctor Meredith Wills, really just, as I said, the power of an inquiring mind. When we come back, the first female Major League Baseball coach, yes, Justin Siegal will be our guest. Uh, from one fabulous part of baseball to another. Uh, stick around, we'll be back very, very shortly.

• 38:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Welcome back to Playing with Science and now our pleasure to speak to a groundbreaking coach, Justine Segal, the first woman to coach professionally in Major League Baseball. We are so honoured. Justine, welcome to the show.

• 38:43Speaker 03

  Yes, thank you for having me.

• 38:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Ah, the pleasure is ours.

• 38:47Chuck Nice?

  It's really a pleasure.

• 38:48Gary O'Reilly?

  Growing up, you were drawn to baseball rather than softball. What was the reason for that?

• 38:56Speaker 03

  I played baseball with my brother and all of my friends and that was the sport that made sense to me. I was a big Cleveland Indians fan, so I wanted to, you know, play the same sport that my heroes were playing and I just kept playing and when I was told I should quit because I was a girl, I was 13, and I just decided I would keep playing forever.

• 39:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Who told you to quit?

• 39:21Speaker 03

  My new coach. He said I didn't belong there, but I didn't quit, so he had to keep playing me anyway.

• 39:29Gary O'Reilly?

  Who lasted longer, you or the coach?

• 39:31Speaker 03

  Pardon me?

• 39:33Gary O'Reilly?

  Who lasted longer at that team, you or the coach?

• 39:36Speaker 03

  Well, I would say in the world of baseball, I lasted longer.

• 39:41Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 39:42Gary O'Reilly?

  There you go. Note to self for the coach, do not ever do that to a young lady.

• 39:48Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 39:48Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, wow.

• 39:49Chuck Nice?

  I'm interested to know whether or not you feel kind of the gaze of the public and all of the, you know, there seems to be a great deal of, I don't know, I don't know what you would call it, pressure, would you call it pressure? Kind of like, you know, it's tough to be the first anything and, you know, of course, that makes you a great role model and it means that you're groundbreaking, but personally, does it put any pressure on you when people tend, because I'm sure for you, you're like, I love baseball, I'm just doing what I do, I'm just doing what I love. So how do you handle that?

• 40:30Speaker 03

  Sure, um, this year I'm not with the team, but in the past, you know, you always, you always know that people are waiting for you to make a mistake, or at least it feels like that. Um, but I've had a lot of support in recent years. Um, I've had fans look at me like I have three heads because they're not comprehending why I'm in uniform. But I've also had, you know, fans, you know, with their own signs cheering me on. So, uh, the players have been great. Um, you know, you're really just part of a team. It is different. Um, I'm a woman. I'm proud to be a woman. I don't pretend I could, you know, just be one of the guys. I'm a woman who coaches baseball, but the guys, you know, they couldn't be better. And, you know, if I can make them a better player, that's all they care about.

• 41:15Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 41:16Gary O'Reilly?

  My kind of coach, Chuck.

• 41:17Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 41:18Gary O'Reilly?

  To make the players better. That's it. You've got, yeah, you've got in any sport. That's where, that's what I want to hear. That's where I want to go. But Justine, to, to be a woman in such, I won't even say such a male dominated environment. It is totally male dominated. How did you go about leveling the playing field or make, turning it to your advantage as a coach?

• 41:46Speaker 03

  Well, I started, um, learning to coach when I was 16. That's when I decided to make it my goal. And I would have to say I just didn't give up. So every time I was told I couldn't do it, I would just find another way or another program that would accept me. Uh, I got a PhD in sports psychology, um, figuring I could use education as a tool that I have that other coaches don't have. And, and that has served me very well.

• 42:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's gotta be. So, so how much of that, and can you give us maybe an example of how you bring in the sports psychology? You know, we've had several sports psychologists on this show, and it seems to be an extremely important part of, uh, player performance. So how, how do you bring that into your coaching?

• 42:37Speaker 03

  Sure, um, so I have not, I've been coaching and using it to be the best coach I can. So when you understand how people learn or understand um the best way to communicate uh to reach the players, then then you're a better coach.

• 42:54Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 42:55Speaker 03

  So um I would say that the sports psychology and all the information I know, it helps me translate knowledge for players.

• 43:01Chuck Nice?

  Excellent.

• 43:02Speaker 03

  Whether they're confused on what's going on or whether or not um I can help them and they don't even know I'm helping them.

• 43:09Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:09Speaker 03

  Because of the language I'm using or where I'm throwing the ball during batting practice, you know, it kinda, it it's all encompassing. If I was just doing mental performance for a team, then I would work on concentration and visualization and and those type of things. But in my case, it's it's all who I am and it's how I coach players.

• 43:30Chuck Nice?

  Wow. Wow, that's uh, you know, we speak to a lot of coaches and what you just said there is really cool. And the way that you're using it is extremely impressive that it's about making you a better communicator. And and so that's, I mean, like, the easier it is for me to understand you, the easier it is for me to carry out your instructions, uh, the the better off I'm going to be. That's fantastic.

• 43:54Speaker 03

  Yes, and then you can, you know, throw in different things like constraints on practices, you know, different, once you know that there's different ways to learn, you can also shape your practices so you can reach more people in a shorter period of time. You can really hit their sweet spots.

• 44:09Gary O'Reilly?

  It's interesting. We we interviewed Ned Colletti, the former GM at the Dodgers, and we discussed uh development of foveal vision and and concentration and and visualizing, as you've just described. And he was saying how he wanted his coaches to be more like educators.

• 44:26Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 44:27Gary O'Reilly?

  And you you have preempted that by going directly into that environment. And I have to credit you for seeing something ahead of the curve. Back in my sort of sporting environment, there was a saying that said, the better the players you played with, the better player you became. Did you, through your experience, because you've worked with a number of major league teams, find that the experience of working with pros just drove your coaching skills upwards very quickly?

• 45:02Speaker 03

  Well, I've worked mostly with minor league players, independent players, and some major leaguers or former major leaguers. And for me, your question is player to player, but as a coach, when you've coached with someone that's been coaching for 50 years, I mean, you can't help but elevate and try to soak in everything they know. And I think when I worked for Team Israel during the World Baseball Classic qualifier, they determined there was like 130 years of experience on that coaching staff. Oh. You know, so you can't, all you want to do is keep your eyes and ears open and learn and do whatever you can to be better.

• 45:39Gary O'Reilly?

  So, Justine, before we let you go, we need to speak about what you're doing now, which is Director of Sports Partnerships at the Centre for the Study of Sport in Society, which is an amazing title at North Eastern University. Plus, you have the Baseball for All Foundation that you are the founder and director of, which is promoting gender equality throughout baseball. So, please, allow us an insight into both of those roles that you have.

• 46:08Speaker 03

  Sure. I actually moved on from Sport and Society, but it's an amazing organisation that provides opportunities to address social justice issues through sports, whether that's poverty, whether that's sexual assault, all of those topics can be addressed through sport. But I've moved on and I'm, I work now full-time running Baseball for All, which is a non-profit that I founded, to provide opportunities for girls to play, coach and lead in baseball. Like I was sharing my story, I was told I should quit baseball. Amazingly, here in 2019, girls are still being told they should play, not play baseball, but play softball.

• 46:52Speaker 03

  So, we're telling them they can do whatever they want, not live in a box and believe in themselves.

• 46:58Gary O'Reilly?

  Wow. Congratulations. Yeah, great stuff. And fly that flag as high as you can. And I'm stunned that in 2019, we're still hearing that song sung.

• 47:11Speaker 03

  It's getting better and our national girls tournament is growing by about 100 girls every year. We'll have about 400 girls from around the country playing baseball. We run events around the country. We do clinics, tournaments, do talks to schools and so on. So we're really growing and, you know, I just happen to think baseball is the greatest game and that everyone should have a chance to play.

• 47:34Chuck Nice?

  That's fantastic and I hope that your vision actually comes to fruition because it'd be wonderful to see everybody get a chance to play and just thanks for everything that you're doing.

• 47:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, if any of our listeners wish to reach out, is there a website? Is there something they can explore to learn more?

• 47:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. Go to baseballforall.com and you'll see all you need to see all these beautiful girls playing baseball and you can reach me through the website as well.

• 48:03Gary O'Reilly?

  Baseballforall.com, simple as that. Justine, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for sharing your story and thank you for turning a deaf ear to what I would say was a disgraceful piece of coaching and congratulations on being a groundbreaker in baseball as far as women coaching is concerned and carry on the good causes.

• 48:31Speaker 03

  Thank you so much.

• 48:32Gary O'Reilly?

  You're welcome. Chuck, two amazing women in the world of baseball.

• 48:38Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 48:39Gary O'Reilly?

  That are leading. We have Dr. Meredith Wills who wouldn't take no for an answer. There's no smoking gun. It's not the baseball. And she said, well, I've got another theory. How about this one? And then Justine there, the first women to, woman rather, to coach professionally in Major League Baseball and who hasn't stopped there and rested on her own laurels but is prepared to give and promote the opportunity for other young women to come through and follow in her footsteps. I think it's amazing.

• 49:14Chuck Nice?

  I do too. We have to do more shows where we celebrate and herald women and their accomplishments in sports. I think it's awesome.

• 49:21Gary O'Reilly?

  I agree. And on that note, we will say farewell and we will go off and research just that. So I have always been Gary O'Reilly.

• 49:30Chuck Nice?

  And I have sometimes been Chuck Nice.

• 49:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Parent of the year, apparently.

• 49:36Gary O'Reilly?

  This has been Playing with Science and we look forward to your company very, very soon.