Commissoner Rob Manfred discussed progress on developing a properly tacky baseball. A pristine ball might cause another problem, however:

“Like everything in baseball, when you inch towards a solution, you figure out another problem,” Manfred said. “The baseball, if we get there with the Dow people, would be a pearl, right? A pure white baseball. I think if you take hitters and pitchers out front here and ask ’em what they think of a pure white baseball, you’re going to find out that it’s a pretty controversial topic. So not only do we have the science that we’re continuing to work on but we’re going to have to get over that sort of policy issue of: Is a pure white baseball a good thing?”

ESPN.com

I don’t know what batter objections would be to the ball, but a very clean ball might be much tougher for pitchers to secretly scuff.

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