Ok, I’ll bite.
What is rosin?
I like rosin. It looks cool, it looks old school, every time there was a rosin bag on the mound growing up I used it on principle. I went from a 12-year-old throwing 70 mph to a 16-year-old Jamie Moyer making college coaches complain to showcases about allowing skinny ground ball pitchers to waste their time. I had high socks and a good changeup. I needed that rosin bag.
Did I know what it was, though? Of course not. Like most teenagers, I had no idea what was in that bag, but I knew it looked cool, and I knew it made me feel good. Made my hands feel capable of things.
In the wake of Max Scherzer getting suspended two starts for allowing his cannibalism habit to show up on the field letting the rosin get too clumpy, we have two things to say.
I want Phil Cuzzi on every Astros game from here to eternity.
I need to figure out what rosin is.
To the second end, there’s a little thing out there called The Internet™, and it says rosin is a kind of tree resin, mostly taken from pines and other conifers. What’s a tree resin? It sounds like they’re substances plants ooze out to help themselves heal. Wounded plants need to keep bugs out, and we won’t give them band-aids, and resin’s thick and—importantly—sticky. Bugs get in there and DIE. (Sorry, old habit.)
The stickiness is what makes rosin useful in baseball. And in other things. Violining, photocopying, Irish dancing, gymnasticking, drag racing, bull riding, oil painting, dog grooming, fly tying, circuiting, and even cooking potatoes. More than that, too! Rosin is sticky, and it’s everywhere, and here’s where we may have learned something useful:
I am way over my head on this and this is entirely speculation, but if rosin comes from such a wide variety of sources but is still technically rosin, and if MLB pitchers first saw spin rates drop when sticky stuff was banned but then slowly raised them again once they figured out how to use rosin, and if the stuff Max Scherzer was using wouldn’t come off umpires hands for more than an hour afterwards, just from a little touch with the guy…
How do we know Max Scherzer hasn’t discovered a new species of pine with especially sticky scabs?
Commissioner Manfred, I await your call.
