Juiced Balls?

[Playing Catch]

This has been brought up oodles of times throughout the season. I suspect there is actual data out there that could be trusted, but I'm not savvy enough to find such stuff. It looks, from my 2 or 3 minutes of googling, that they've demonstrated that the drag coefficient of the ball is off across the baseball landscape. Perhaps that is that, and there isn't anything left to say about it.

But I would like to posit that pitchers and hitters, with their access to incredible training tools, have learned to seek and destroy each other using the narrowed zone (and perhaps "fairly" adjudicated top/bottom of the zone).

Pitchers aren't pitching to contact, but they are being taught to win in the zone using stuff/tunnelling, where there is more whiff top/bottom and using speed/deception, rather than beating the hitter on the edges of the zone. 

What I'm wondering about is that based purely on my watching baseball on TV, it looks like a lot of players that used to go the Dan Uggla route with their careers (or perhaps Andrew Fischer --- I'm not suggesting launch-angle is "over," or unimportant), have instead embraced the idea of maximizing their swing, trying to find the barrel.

In the quest for ever higher EVs (and posting them to their social media), I suspect hitters have gone back to line-drive approaches that result in more balls on the ground, but [perhaps?] more consistent EVs, spraying balls pole-to-pole and higher EVs/contact rates when getting beat in the zone.

With the anti-shift rules, the (effectively) smaller zone, and bouncier balls, and instant AI-enhanced video feedback, Pitchers have chased velocity, needing to beat hitters in-zone, and hitters have needed to counter, seeking EV where they can get it, on pitcher's pitches, but with smaller parks (Biloxi's park is too small. There. I said it), where they don't have to pull the ball to do damage.