Art of pitching to return

Please, pitchers, can you stop with all the complaints?

Sure, the timing isn’t the greatest for baseball’s crackdown on illegal foreign substances, but when was the perfect time?

The warnings were given in March. The evidence was collected in April and May. The number of pitchers blatantly cheating was staggering, with every team in baseball guilty of having someone on their staff using foreign substances to increase their spin rates.

It starts Monday with umpires checking starting pitchers at least twice a game and relievers once, making sure they are not using anything on their hands except for the rosin bag.

Pitchers are outraged the crackdown starts in the middle of the season, but they’re the ones who ignored the warnings, laughed at the threats, leaving MLB no choice but to institute the crackdown after watching the cheaters suffocate the life out of the game.

In the two months pitchers flaunted the foreign no- substance rule, hitters batted .236 with a .312 on- base percentage, .395 slugging percentage and a .707 OPS. Since June 3 when MLB told owners the crackdown was coming: .247, .316 on- base percentage, .416 slugging percentage, .732 OPS.

Home runs are up. Strikeouts are down. Spin rates are way down.

And the art of pitching is about to go way up. In their last starts, the spin rates for Dodgers starter Trevor Bauer and Yankees starter Gerrit Cole were down but they still dominated without the use of Spider Tack and every other type of goop on their fingers while the game still had plenty of action.

It may be quite refreshing watching pitchers actually pitch instead of loading up with illegal substances and throwing the ball past everybody.

“I think it goes back to the pitcher is actually learning how to pitch and actually locating pitches,” Red Sox slugger J. D. Martinez says. “Now, you can ( still) throw as hard as you can, but you actually have to control it.”

Amen.