Given an inch, they took a mile
Pitchers went too far; MLB reacted
As always with cheating baseball players, things have become very complicated. See if you can follow along.
This happened Tuesday: Tampa Bay Rays star pitcher Tyler Glasnow — name ring a bell? — sort of admitted to cheating, hinted that he doesn’t cheat as badly as others, urged Major League Baseball to allow pitchers to cheat at least a little and argued that MLB should have given more time for cheating pitchers to adjust — and he said all of it just three weeks after implying the Toronto Blue Jays cheated against him by stealing signs.
Lots to unpack there. Let’s start with this: Glasnow actually made some excellent points and likely opened some minds, including this one, in regard to MLB’s pending crackdown on pitchers using foreign substances on baseballs.
MLB announced Tuesday that beginning June 21, any pitcher caught using or possessing foreign substances will be suspended for 10 games. Starters will be checked multiple times per game, relievers at least once.
This had been rumored for weeks, causing pitchers to preemptively adjust. Glasnow claims he went “cold turkey,” eschewing substances, in his past two starts. He said that forced him to change the grips on his pitches, which he believes contributed to an elbow injury that has put his season in jeopardy.
I hadn’t thought of the health component. Maybe this is too much of a kneejerk reaction on baseball’s part.
Couldn’t the powers-thatbe decide on a universal substance that helps with grip but doesn’t give pitchers a ridiculous advantage? How about improving the quality of the baseballs so that no substance is needed for grip?
And shouldn’t MLB have spent more time preparing for this as opposed to launching a midseason substance raid?
So yes, MLB is culpable here. But let’s not forget the real culprits — the ones Glasnow mostly left out: the fanatical cheaters who use substances not for grip but for radically increased spin rate.
Unless I missed it, Glasnow forgot to mention those guys, though he made it clear he isn’t one of them in that he only used the balldoctoring equivalents of weed — sunscreen and rosin.
Other guys use the hardcore stuff. Might one of them be Glasnow’s former Pirates teammate Gerrit Cole?
I don’t want to go all Salem Witch Trials here, but it did seem curious that Cole went from a decent strikeout pitcher with the Pirates to some combination of Nolan Ryan and Roger Clemens in Houston. He literally became one of the most dominant strikeout pitchers of all time overnight. His whiff rate skyrocketed by nearly 60 percent from his last year in Pittsburgh to his second in Houston.
If MLB is panicking because nobody hits anymore, and that prompted the crackdown, and that is causing the likes of Glasnow to adjust on the fly and perhaps injure themselves, then Glasnow’s colleagues are at least partly to blame.
We can all follow that line of logic, yes?
All of this is happening, as a Yahoo Sports article phrased it, “after years of [pitchers] pushing the rulebook too far, leaping from the accepted use of pine tar to more complex and impactful products like Spider Tack, stuff that crosses the line from control aid to performance-enhancer.”
Spider Tack — which Cole has essentially admitted to using — is a powerfully sticky substance that pitchers use to increase the spin rate on their pitches. More spin makes it harder to hit (this is becoming simpler by the minute).
And wasn’t it interesting that the mere threat of a raid caused a reduction in spin rate, a reduction in strikeouts and a rise in batting average over the past few weeks?
Star pitcher Trevor Bauer appeared on HBO’s “Real Sports” two years ago and graphically demonstrated how illegally increasing spin rate can radically transform a pitcher’s performance, yet the response in some circles remains some version of, “What’s the problem? Pitchers have been doctoring the ball forever.”
We could go on forever, too, but I’m going to leave this game in the capable hands of longtime major league reliever Jerry Blevins, who recently retired after a stellar career in which he went 30-13 with a 3.54 earned run average and 508 strikeouts in 495 innings.
On Tuesday, Blevin tweeted: “Pitchers used sunscreen & rosin every day (myself included) for control of the baseball. Other pitchers used foreign substances to enhance the spin rate. The old, ‘give an inch, take a mile.’ It went too far. This is why we can’t have nice things.”
So if you’re Tyler Glasnow, or the next guy who’s injured because he had to alter his approach, don’t forget to cast blame at the guys who deserve it most.
The guys who took it too far.