Pitchers trying to improve their grip by applying something sticky to the baseball is a tradition as old as hot dogs, the national anthem and the seventh-inning stretch.
Doing this isn’t, in the strictest sense of the word, “legal” according to the rulebook, but there’s long been an unspoken agreement among teams to mostly let it slide. Everybody does it, the thinking goes, and as long as the violation isn’t egregious, it benefits everyone to allow a little malfeasance.
Now the commissioner’s office has decided that this method of self-regulation is insufficient. The league sent a memo last week to all clubs saying that it intends to crack down on the use of foreign substances on the ball this season. In addition to collecting balls and having them examined by a third-party laboratory, MLB will also analyze data to check for statistical anomalies that suggest the ball has been tampered with.
This increased emphasis on ball-doctoring is MLB’s way of reining in a practice that had grown from a quirky relic of the game’s past into a sophisticated enterprise designed to give pitchers an unfair advantage.
Teams have historically been reluctant to challenge opposing pitchers for going to the mound with a bit of pine tar on their arm or sunscreen under the brim of their cap, since their players were doing the same thing. Anyway, hitters mostly approved of pitchers having something to help their grip to avoid the likelihood of a 95 mph fastball accidentally landing in their rib cage, especially in cold weather.