Mets hitting coach Eric Chavez recently told Newsday’s Tim Healey that his hitters suspect baseballs curiously become less muffled during nationally televised games, like the recent Mets-Phillies matchup last year . Sunday night on ESPN. Healey writes:

And then, in late April, two days before the Phillies played on ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball,” several hitters gave Eric Chavez a heads-up : Watch how baseballs travel during the week’s biggest televised game. at the national level. They had heard that the balls in those games were somehow different.

“I thought for a second, ‘You guys are kind of right about that,’” Eric Chavez said .

Then what happened?

“The ball was traveling further, balls that weren’t hit as hard. And I said, wait a minute, that shouldn’t have happened,” Chavez said. “The ball just traveled better. That was the vision test, but then we lined it up with what the tests were telling us.”

It’s worth noting that we heard similar whispers last year regarding featured games or series. In fact, the ball-tracking data from this game doesn’t particularly support the perceptions of Mets hitters.

Run scoring and related offensive results are down in 2022, and there’s every reason to suspect that the properties of the baseball itself have a lot to do with it. MLB has a recent history of putting widely varying baseballs into play at those properties from year to year and even within the same season, and 2022 appears to be no exception.

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