Well, it’s happening. Baseballs thrown by Trevor Bauer are evidently going to be tested by Major League Baseball for illegal substances (illegal within the context of the game—I don’t think Bauer was putting fentanyl on the ol’ horsehide sphere, though the reality television part of my brain hopes he was).
It’s a strange situation, made up of a lot of strange little details. Let’s go through them:
Trevor Bauer warned MLB about this.
Back in 2018, Bauer made a lot of noise about how Astros pitchers were seeing their spin rates rise inexplicably. Bauer, who’s on the forefront of a lot of sciency pitching stuff, claimed (with few objecting) that the only way he’d found to increase spin rate like the Astros did was to use something like pine tar on the baseball—a sticky substance that increases grip.
Come 2020, Bauer’s spin rate mysteriously rose. And in at least his first start of 2021, it didn’t drop.
Trevor Bauer’s balls aren’t the only ones caught up in this, right?
It’s a big story because it’s Bauer, the reigning Cy Young winner hated by many and viewed with curiosity by others (I fall into the curiosity camp—there are hateable things and not-hateable things and it’s hard to sum them all together with him). But it does seem at least possible, and possibly likely, that other pitchers’ baseballs have been taken away for similar studies, as MLB informed teams prior to the beginning of the season that it was going to crack down on this.
Did Trevor Bauer bet on MLB not actually cracking down?
If Bauer’s still putting things on baseballs (and if he ever was), it’s striking that he wasn’t scared off by the MLB memo. Was he itching for a fight? Did he think they were all talk? Either would be believable.
Why was there a leak?
Bauer’s alleging that someone in MLB leaked that his balls were being investigated. The fact there hasn’t been any formal announcement or named source makes it pretty clear that there was, in fact, a leak, but it doesn’t make clear why. Is it because of someone (or an entire office) wanting to push back against Bauer, who’s been critical of MLB leadership? Is it because this is more exciting than it would be for some no-name, or tracks better with the story than it would for some press darling? My personal guess—and this is a complete guess—is that someone within Major League Baseball thought it would be a good story and independently passed it along to press with whom they have a relationship, but I don’t know. The leak piece of this is smoky.
What does Major League Baseball want?
This is the weirdest thing of all of this, and I guess it’s responsible for all the other weirdness. The conventional wisdom is that pine tar usage is rather widespread among pitchers, and while it makes life easier for pitchers, there are also ways in which it makes life easier for hitters—namely, by helping pitchers not drill hitters on days when it’s hard to grip the ball. Maybe it’s this ambiguity that’s made Major League Baseball so reticent to do any enforcing of the foreign-substance rule. Whatever the case (I’d bet on the powers that be just being too incompetent and oblivious to make a decision about an issue they were only half-aware existed), we may find out soon. If the crackdown has teeth, we’ll have our answer. If it doesn’t, we won’t. Regardless, it’s probably a good idea for someone to start tracking year-over-year and outing-over-outing spin rate change amongst every pitcher in the league, because we may be about to learn a lot on that front real fast.
