I’ve been going on all year about the ball all year, about how it wasn’t flying as well as it did in previous years. At the Japan Series, former pitcher Hiromi Makihara was surprised to find that someone outside the loop would know that there was a problem. I told him it was simple arithmetic, when home runs drop by 35 Percent, it’s no secret. He was rightly impressed.

Having heard from a member of one club’s analytics staff that the yarn used to stitch the covers on the balls was fraying on hard contact, I assumed the issue was yarn from a new supplier that was not up to spec. But Makihara revealed at the Japan Series that the problem was related to a change in the manufacturing process after Mizuno moved its production of NPB balls in the summer of 2023 from China to Taiwan, which a senior NPB official confirmed.