OT: Sports Illustrated on MLB's sticky-ball issue
Title is clickbaity (sorry) and does not say it all. This is a long and (IMO) interesting article on how Major League Baseball pitchers are doctoring baseballs:
https://www.si.com/mlb/2021/06/04/sticky-stuff-is-the-new-steroids-daily-cover
They have been doctoring balls for 125 years.
I'd recommend reading the article. It's long, but it gets at the idea that the "doctoring" has ramped up to the point that it is (along with shifts, etc.) a big contributor to the imbalance between pitchers and hitters.
Not like this they haven't. The advent of measuring spin rate has lead teams to perfect it. It used to be people doctored balls strictly to get them to move different. It was more an art form than scientific. Now there is a tangible goal--increase your spin rate. The article talks about some teams hiring scientists to perfect the practice.
Baseball is going to need to do something because the game has become really boring due to all the lack of contact.
Watched a few tigers games the last couple weeks and they’ve been hitting the stuffing out of the balls. They won 10-7 against the Brewers last week with 7 combined home runs!
Last night on MLB one of the guys suggested MLB provide an approved “sticky substance” so all teams were equal. I think it was Plesak (sp?) - an ex pitcher.
I used to have that problem too. Not anymore...
Actually I think this stuff was recommended on the board here years ago. A huge thanks to whoever that was.
There's nothing worse than foul balls.
"MLB To Probe Sticky Balls"
Come on, hitherto unknown paper, I dare you to use that headline...
Almost as good as “Griese pumps once and unloads deep down the middle.”
Hate when that happens...
The MLB can check my sticky balls
....and mine.
In general, batting averages have long been on a decline. Sticky balls may well be a part of this but batters increasingly swinging for the fences, even with a two-strike count, is surely a factor here. Otherwise, my unresearched wonderings wonder if the talent pool, at least among Americans, is increasingly choosing other sports.
Yep, that's been the trend for 3 decades, but paired with new trends in pitching over the last 5 years, and the game haS begun breaking records for offensive futility.
Another factor is that umpires are now calling the high strike. This has been a dramatic change in the last 7-8 years. For as long as I can remember the strike zone was supposed to be knees up to the letters, but in fact anything more than a few inches above the waist was called a ball. Now they are calling up to the top of the zone a strike. With the pitchers scuffing the ball and throwing high heat up in the zone, the hitters can't square it up.
I mean, it's so obvious when you see discoloration on the cap of the pitcher in HD or and the glove.
Every since the balls started to be replaced after any contact with the ground (20 years ago?), the pitchers have been getting more and more bold with this shit.
They should be suspended for a year for doctoring baseballs with foreign substances and any games they appeared in should be forfeit.
This and the bullshit way professional hitters approach PAs these days make the game unwatchable.
This video has a great recap of the current state of what's going on right now, but the TL:DR is:
- Teams have invested in chemists to create new substances to doctor the ball
- People noticed that when pitchers went to the Astros, they suddenly magically gained spin and velocity (especially Verlander)
- Notorious jerk/troll Trevor Bauer becomes a whistleblower and records videos of the effects of doctoring the ball on YouTube
- MLB shrugs
- Bauer tweets he's going to cheat in a game and does it visibly.
- MLB shrugs.
- Astros pitcher, and visible cheater, Gerritt Cole signs monster contact with Yankees
- Bauer decides if MLB is not going to enforce the rules, he's going to cheat for full season.
- Bauer's spin and velocity explode overnight and he wins Cy Young. Signs monster contact with Dodgers.
- Entire Dodgers pitching staff suddenly increases their velocity and spin rates overnightb with Bauer
- MLB realizes it's not a good look to have dudes cheating in the open and have so little offense. Decides to start collecting balls/gloves/caps from suspected cheaters.
- Managers flip their shit because MLB is likely planning a crackdown after tacitly allowing this cheating for so long.
- And that's where we stand now
Thank you for the summary and that video. I had no idea about any of this. I’m glad to see Trevor Bauer call out cheating and when nothing was done about it, joined the party and apparently, take it another level.
This somewhat reminds me of college athletes being paid. You can take the higher morale ground and not do it, but then you won’t be as good as those doing it.
This isn't anything new with MLB
They did this exact same thing with steroid use in the game
Except with steroids, it increased the popularity of the game and the TV ratings as home runs went bonkers. Here, it's reducing the action people are willing to pay or tune in for. That might be a decent motivation for MLB to actually do something... if they weren't hapless morons.
Baseball is just awful at this point. I was better at baseball than any other sport growing up and still found it so boring and lame to play. Just too much sitting around and standing.
Outside of the top/bottom of the 9th in a World Series final game, I can’t bring myself to watch it on tv. The actual baseballs watching part of the experience at the parks has gotten worse as well.
That all being said, I do hope they find a way to inject life into the sport and bring back offense. Restricting how far players can move when shifting, lowering the mound further, banning ball doctoring, dropping the pitch count to 10 seconds, and more would be nice way to inject offense without truly changing the game in a way that totally revamps it like adding a 3 point line did for the NBA/NCAA.
Will Manfred/owners actually do anything though, probably not. It feels that the MLB is a league that wants to become more irrelevant.
Not allowing defensive players to shift seems like the last place I would start. Offenses have ways to counter this strategy. Reward players who can put the ball where they ain’t and people won’t shift on you so much.
Ball doctoring is where I would start with regards to leveling the playing field.
Limiting time players have to get in batters box and time pitchers have to throw would significantly improve watchability.
Requiring 2 infield defenders on each side of 2nd base would be an easy rule change and would definitely improve things. Watching teams line up everyone on the right side of the infield against left-handed hitters is just dumb.
Yeah, hitters can control where they hit a bit. But this isn't slow-pitch softball. Righties are going to hit to he left side and lefties to the right side. Not many guys can spray the ball at will.
Can they bunt?
Interesting. The topic prompted me to check this season's batting average leaders, and, lo and behold, Nick Castellanos tops the majors at .367.
The Tigers could sure use a guy like that in their lineup.
Agreed! Too bad he didn't sign a comparable extension to the deal he got from Cincy.
Sometimes, like Scherzer, you can offer more and a player decides to go elsewhere.
It sucks.
Castellanos HATED hitting in Comerica. He was never going to re-sign with the Tigers. He probably lost more HR to the deep dimensions in LF than any other hitter.
I prefer Schwetty Balls, especially over the holidays. Mmmm. Good times.
This seems like a fairly major problem for MLB. I'm not a pro baseball watcher and we all know the common complaints about baseball that prevents casual viewership: too few hits, too few runs, too boring, etc etc. If all your pitchers are doctoring balls and that's driving batting averages even further down, that's a direct hit on MLB's bottom line. The MLB offices should be freaking out about this
Focusing on how the game is presented seems important, as well. When there's 45 seconds between each pitch and pitch counts are way up and strikeouts have almost doubled in the last few decades... there's an awful lot of waiting for anything to happen other than one guy throwing a ball to another guy.
This substance stuff isn't going to help. They compare it to the steroid race, and I see that. Either you 'roid or you don't make it to the majors - that was the message for a long time. This is even easier. You don't have to transform yourself into Big-Head Barry or risk doing something that might give you cancer or cause serious defects if you manage to get your wife pregnant. You just wash your hands of it. I'd be surprised if it wasn't already part of high-school ball.
Still, if it made the game more watchable, and specifically, since it's safe, unlike steroids, I could see it becoming part of the game. Test it, find the best substance (sounds like Bauer's done a lot of that work himself), package up a few of the top candidates and make them available to teams.
Unfortunately, it doesn't make the game more watchable. It reduces contact and increases pitch counts. You're left considering tweaks that threaten the most perfect numbers in all of sport - 60'-6" and 90'. Because spongier balls and lower mounds aren't going to make much difference when you're faced with 15% more rotation on the fastest pitches. And changing those fundamental numbers makes it a different sport.
It's a real dilemma. Like boxing, baseball is facing an existential crisis. I'd start with pitch clocks and penalties for leaving the batter's box, telling the networks to stop jumping around with close-ups of everything between pitches (I do not need to count the number of times the manager can propel a fist-sized wad of bubble gum around every tooth - seemingly hundreds of times an inning). If that doesn't work, maybe something more fundamental like making bats bigger (dangerous, because you're also talking about much bigger sweet spots and higher exit velocities - cage helmets for pitchers). I don't know, just spit-balling here. I'm not sure the game can be saved at this point.
Baseball's existential issue is related to the fact it has no time constraint, unlike virtually every other sport. Some sports with this problem have adapted--consider tennis (tiebreaker) and volleyball (running scoring). You can't take all day AND reduce the amount of action.
This is really a continuum of Schweddy Balls of the 1990s. Not surprised!
I blame Pete Schweddy.
I love playing baseball. I hate watching baseball. I hate sticky balls unless they are my sticky balls. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. Sometimes it rains.
UPDATE:
All Major League Baseball pitchers will be checked repeatedly and randomly for foreign substances by umpires under the plan being swiftly advanced -- and perhaps implemented within the next 10 days to two weeks.
One of my favorite scenes from Major League:
Vaughn: “What’s that shit on your chest?”
Harris: “Crisco. Bardol. Vagisil. Any one of them will give you another two to three inches drop on your curveball. Of course, if the umps are watching me close, I just put a little jalapeño inside my nose and get it running, and if I need to load the ball up a little, just wipe my nose.”
Vaughn: “You put snot on the ball?”
Harris: “I haven’t got an arm like yours. I’ve gotta put anything on it I can find. And someday you will, too.”
Jomboy, as always, has a great take on this.
https://youtu.be/1bqOOyMjCCM
Baseball hasn't had a real commissioner in over 3 decades, and the rot from a lack of leadership has resulted in so many issues that I don't see any way to save the sport from irrelevance without decisive and drastic action. The sport needs a complete overhaul with the goal of promoting an aesthetically pleasing version of baseball in line with how the game was played when it was actually popular.
"Well the sport makes more money than ever" so did boxing right up until the sport died in America. Like boxing, baseball has been making record money leveraging the wallets of older fans. But take a look at boxing now, it's a meme sport that requires youtubers to draw a decent house. At one point baseball was bigger than the NFL, and now the top stars of the MLB could walk down main street in any town in America with nobody knowing them from Adam.
Eventually, the boomers and X'ers who grew up when people cared about baseball will not be able to contribute to the bottom line, and then it'll be too late to fix anything.