The apparent lack of quality control MLB has over one of the most important parts of the sport is embarrassing

Hello and welcome back to FanPost Friday. This tweet stopped me in my tracks yesterday because it put the league-wide offensive struggles into an easy to understand, stark reality for me (and probably for many Mariners fans who recognize these names).

As discussed on this week’s LL podcast, the “good” news is that it’s not just the Mariners who are struggling to hit this season. The entire league is struggling. Jesse Winker has not actually turned into late-career Chone Figgins overnight. There are bigger, systemic issues at play here, and here are just a couple that we can confirm:

• Humidors are being used league-wide to store the game balls
• Something changed with how the cores of at least some of the baseballs are constructed
• Baseballs take a long time and a lot of labor to manufacture, and given ongoing supply chain issues, “fixing” the baseball isn’t going to happen overnight

If you haven’t, go read this excellent piece from ESPN to get more of the specifics, which also features my new favorite quote from Andrew McCutchen (“The ball ain’t the same as it used to be. I used to be 165 pounds soaking wet here flicking balls out.”) This chart in particular kinda blew my mind.

ESPN/Savant

So, yeah. It’s a problem. Will MLB fix it? Can they? Should they? Here’s your prompt:

If you were in charge of MLB, how would you fix the baseball to prevent a historically low offensive season across baseball?

Go ahead and write a whole FanPost if you’re inspired, or just pop into the comments with some ideas. Give us your plan, how you’d roll it out, and how quickly.

That’s it! Have a great weekend and let’s hope the Mariners can turn things around during this home stand and get back to being fun to watch again.