Fascinating article linked by andyb. I suggest all follow the link, and read it through.
Among other things, the article's historical discussion of the dead ball - live ball transition suggests that bkox's comment about MLB "using" changes in offense in response to crises is too simplistic, and suffers from assigning motivations after-the-fact to changes that may have been (or in some cases, were) driven by completely different motivations.
It is, of course, possible that the change we've seen is deliberate, based on calculated modifications to the ball. But I have my doubts. In general, people tend to impute deliberate motives to all kinds of changes, although we know that a lot of things that change in our lives are, in fact, just due to random, or unrelated events. People imagine patterns and causal relationships where these do not exist - we appear to be hard-wired to "see" these things.
So is there something deliberate here? Some "meddling," to use bkox's word? Maybe, but not proven, IMHO. I tend to avoid subscribing to such explanations, in the absence of solid evidence; generally, if random variations or unintentional changes can explain some phenomenon, I find that more likely than attributing that phenomenon to some nefarious plot.
The evidence says the ball has changed in several ways, and those changes, coupled with players' response to those changes, can explain the increase in HR. The evidence says nothing about why the ball has changed - whether that's a result of random manufacturing changes made by a producer, or of random changes in materials (as happened in 1919), or of some calculated, intentional plot by MLB (or something else entirely).
If one chooses to believe that the change is intentional, as opposed to random, that's fine; but it's a "belief," not something supported by evidence at this point. People believe things because they want to.
