One has to wonder if former NPB commissioner Ryozo Kato cracked a smile when he opened his newspaper Friday morning and saw that there are more questions surrounding the official NPB ball, knowing that this time, he's far away from the fray.
Granted, Kato hardly seems like a man who would derive pleasure from the misfortune of others, but there had to be some small sliver of him that relished the fact that this is someone else's problem.
NPB on Thursday released findings that tests they'd performed at six stadiums on March 29, the second day of the regular season, revealed that balls were livelier than the maximum limit allows. The maximum coefficient of restitution (COR) allowed by NPB is 0.4234. Sports Nippon reported the average from last month's tests to be 0.426 and noted similar tests in April of 2013 yielded a COR of 0.416 on average.