Quote Originally Posted by engie View Post
Exactly. It's common sense really, and it doesn't take math and engineering degrees to understand it.

If a ball is travelling 60-80% as far as it once did, that means it's travelling 60-80% as fast as it once did. If it's leaving the bat at the same speed as purported, then it's deceleration has been greatly decreased, basically making it appear to "speed up" compared to the balls of today. Which stands to reason that this part should be somewhat directly proportional to overall offensive output. Nevermind that it's going to decrease movement on pitches and increase velocity somewhat, which I'll take as a wash for now until we see otherwise.

The bottom line is that a 10-15% increase in offensive output around baseball compared to this year is an asinine number to throw out there based on all the information and data we have at our disposal at this point.
On the other side of this debate, engie, a return of "60-80%" of the "distance lost" does not necessarily correlate to a similar increase in offensive production. For instance, if the "20 extra feet it adds to a batted ball" is 20' on the end of a 350' hit, that's just a 7% increase in distance. I apologize in advance if I'm misunderstanding you, but it perhaps bears emphasizing the % increase expected is only of the, "% lost from the switch to BBCOR" not to be applied to, "overall offensive numbers".

If all they are telling us us that the new balls give us 15-20 more feet on a batted ball, it is just speculation on what % impact that will truly have on overall offensive output. The best we can probably do is look at numbers from the pre-BBCOR days, and guess that the offensive production might be close to what is was then. Still a guess, but an educated guess.

So, how much has offensive production gone down since the switch? Are there any other significant contributing factors, such as adjustment to pitching mounds, quality of players, particularly pitchers electing to play college ball, etc?