Major League Baseball

After all the hype, sticky substance enforcement feels like 'business as usual'

Updated Jun. 22, 2021 7:21 a.m. ET

By Pedro Moura
FOX Sports MLB Writer

SAN DIEGO — In 2015, the year pitchers’ spin rates became public through Statcast, Zack Greinke cruised through the best season of his likely Hall of Fame career.

The new data said the spin on both his fastball and slider ranked in the 89th percentile among his peers. He logged a 1.66 ERA. He went 19-3. Was the spin the reason? Greinke thought not. It probably wasn’t any different than in years past.

The introduction of spin-rate data, measured in revolutions per minute, did to deception the same thing it did to so many elements of baseball this century: It quantified and confirmed what ballplayers and their coaches had been seeing for far longer. Some fastballs had always seemed to rise; the data explained why and prompted pitchers to chase more spin and teams to chase pitchers who had spin.

"Ideally you’d like to have a lot, but I don’t think you can adjust it," Greinke said of spin rate six years ago. "It just kinda is what it is. But maybe they’ll figure out a way in the future. Or maybe they have, and I just don’t know about it. It’ll be interesting to see if we ever figure out how to help pitchers using it. I don’t know if we will. But maybe."

Greinke was right, kind of. Teams now know much more about spin rate than they did then, and the available evidence demonstrates that, as he indicated, pitchers cannot adjust their four-seam fastball spin rate without throwing harder or applying a grippy substance to the baseball. (Breaking-ball spin is more complicated.)

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Researchers at Driveline Baseball, a pioneering pitching laboratory, showed that a pitcher’s spin-velocity ratio is generally fixed. They called the resulting ratio Bauer Units, after right-hander Trevor Bauer, who contributed much of the experimentation.

In the six years since the data was first released, pitchers, coaches and organizations have slowly, surely bent the rules to figure out how to fiddle with that ratio. Many of them have succeeded, with Spider Tack, Pelican Grip Dip and more.

All of that effort crested Monday, as Major League Baseball began enforcing its rulebook as written. Foreign substances have always been against the rules. Now, pitchers are no longer tacitly permitted to use any sticky stuff to increase their spin rate. Umpires are checking starters twice per game and relievers once.

This has been the hinted-at plan for weeks and the official plan for one week. Pitchers had time to prepare, and it seems they did. As Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said before his team’s Monday game at Petco Park, "Our guys are ready for it."

There is proof of preparation in the data: A few pitchers have seen their spin rates drop more than 200 RPM. League-wide, spin rates on four-seam fastballs are down about 65 RPM since the first reports on June 5 of impending enforcement. It’s a change but not so significant a change that the sport is suddenly going to be far different. As spin rates decreased, batting average, on-base percentage and slugging percentage have all increased, each by between 10 and 20 points.

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Nothing about that data implies that a crisis has been resolved. There’s also little evidence that a crisis has been created by the sudden enforcement of the rules, despite pitchers’ full-throated warnings. More than anything, this seems to have been much ado about relatively little.

Rays right-hander Tyler Glasnow argued that he tore his elbow in part because he held the baseball differently to account for missing grip.

After a 250-minute game last week, Red Sox right-hander Garrett Richards said that slowed pace of play would be the ultimate product of the changes. "We're gonna follow the rules," he said, "but this is what you're going to get."

Bauer made a show of demonstrating that sweat and rosin, mixed together just right, could create a sticky substance on a pitcher’s hand. He questioned if pitchers would be suspended for concoctions as mild as that.

Based on what we saw Monday, it seems clear that they will not. Padres reliever Craig Stammen passed an inspection despite what appeared to be rosin visible on his cap.

Seventy-five pitchers were checked Monday across eight games. No foreign substances were found on any of their persons. By day’s end, it was already almost routine. The plate umpire captured the pitcher’s attention as he walked off the mound, then directed him to the crew chief, who examined his glove. Another umpire inspected his cap. As the Dodgers’ Julio Urías returned to the dugout following the fourth inning at Petco, plate umpire Jordan Baker almost forgot to initiate the check.

Many pitchers laughed about it. Some even volunteered to lift up their belt buckles, as some umpires also looked there. According to the MLB memo, umpires are also to examine pitchers’ fingertips and, on occasion, catchers. That did not happen everywhere.

It’s possible that umpires merely opted for simplicity on the first day. Oakland Athletics manager Bob Melvin said the checks went better than he expected. "It didn’t feel like a situation like [pitchers] were being frisked or something like that," he told reporters. "I think the umpires made it pretty seamless today."

Padres right-hander Yu Darvish, who started and won Monday, called it "business as usual."

It looked like it.

Pedro Moura is the national baseball writer for FOX Sports. He most recently covered the Dodgers for three seasons for The Athletic. Previously, he spent five years covering the Angels and Dodgers for the Orange County Register and Los Angeles Times. More previously, he covered his alma mater, USC, for ESPNLosAngeles.com. The son of Brazilian immigrants, he grew up in the Southern California suburbs. Follow him on Twitter @pedromoura.