Austin Slater said MLB threatened to fire people if they were found to be providing baseballs for testing, though the league denied the allegation.
Denis Poroy/Getty Imagesoutfielder Austin Slater says that Major League Baseball actively discouraged him from sending baseballs for testing to see if the league was still using balls of different weights. The warning included a reminder that MLB could fire anyone who was found giving out baseballs to nonaffiliated organizations, Slater said.that MLB had secretly been using two different baseballs during the 2021 season without notifying players.
Slater, the Giants’ team union rep, got involved in the controversy this season after he read Insider's 2021 report. He wanted to help collect baseballs for Dr. Meredith Wills, an astrophysicist and the researcher behind the initial discovery of the different baseballs in 2021, but was told by the league to back off through text messages sent to a players' union official, he told Insider.
MLB specifically mentioned that it did not want baseballs going to Wills and said it would fire anyone involved in retrieving balls for Slater to send to a third-party researcher, according to Slater. What the league suggested as an alternative in texts sent through a union official was to run tests on baseballs through labs at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Washington State University, which the league has worked with in the past.
MLB denied the outfielder's claim that anyone’s job was threatened, though it did not dispute anything else Slater said, according to Insider. Regardless, Slater said he was scared off over concern for the job security of stadium workers if they were somehow linked to his collection of baseballs. He also decided against the league’s offer to run tests at MLB-affiliated labs.
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