Matt Harvey had a nice start last night. Six innings. Five K’s. Three walks. One earned run. His Orioles beat the Yankees.
I was texting with a reader about it, and the reader reminded me that he’s been asking me for years to look into whether players who stop dipping experience downturns in their performance. Specifically, he reminded me of Josh Hamilton’s 2012 attempt to stop dipping, which was accompanied by a slump from which he never returned to his former level of performance.
Early in his career, Harvey often had a recognizable wad of chewing tobacco in his lip. Looking through pictures now, I’m not seeing it anymore. I’m finding some with something in his lip from as recently as 2017, but in a similarly-timed photo, he’s blowing a bubble, implying it might be bubblegum and not dip. I’m not looking through every photo I can find, so it’s possible I’m missing some, and it’s similarly possible I’m missing an article about this (though I’ve been looking and I’m not finding anything), but this doesn’t cast doubt on the reader’s theory that beginning with the 2016 season, when New York banned smokeless tobacco at ballparks, Harvey stopped dipping during starts and his performance suffered as a result.
2016 wasn’t a bad year for Harvey. It wasn’t a great year—his ERA was up to 4.86 from 2.71 in ’15, his FIP rose to 3.47 from 3.05, and he missed half the season with shoulder surgery for thoracic outlet syndrome—but it wasn’t terrible. In 2017, things got really bad for him performance-wise: His ERA jumped to 6.70 and his FIP climbed to 6.37. Again, though, there was an injury explanation: He was sidelined for more than two months with a stress fracture on his scapula. Before that, there was the incident when he allegedly missed a game because he was hungover. He ended up on the Reds in May of 2018, and managed a fine season across his time there and with the Mets—155 innings, 4.94 ERA, 4.57 FIP—but in 2019 and 2020 his performance, his health, and the pandemic limited him to a combined 71 innings.
It’s hard to pinpoint the decline, and it’s hard to know what was injury and what was other issues. It’s hard to even know with certainty (or I’m missing a clear place where I can learn with certainty) whether Harvey quit dipping, and it’s hard to know when he quit, if he did. I suppose the best way to address this would be to look through every Getty Image of him and track, start-by-start, whether he can be seen to be dipping, not dipping, or if it’s inconclusive, and then go from there. But that sounds time-consuming, and I’m not sure I’ll find the time. The fact Major League Baseball banned dipping but grandfathered in everyone already in the league while certain cities banned it themselves makes it hard to have clear lines of when players were and weren’t dipping (it’s also tough because dip can be disguised as bubble gum, and because dip can sometimes be rather effectively hidden—intentionally or unintentionally—depending upon the contours of a player’s face). So, if a study were to be conducted on Matt Harvey, that’d be where to start. Overall, one would be better off finding accounts of players actively talking about having quit dipping, figuring out when they did it, and studying the performance trends of those specific players, but that too would be time consuming, small-sample-size-yielding, and incomplete.
Overall, I don’t think I know enough about tobacco to know whether quitting dipping could worsen someone’s performance, but I’d certainly imagine that changing the chemistry of one’s own blood and brain would have some sort of impact on one’s ability to perform on a baseball field. I’d be curious too to know if players starting dipping see an improvement or a worsening in their own performance, and whether there’s some regression to one’s true ability as one gets used to the changed chemistry. But again, I’m probably not the one to do that study well.
