Mike's Mets - Cracking Down on Sticky Stuff, Hefner's Positive Impact

 

By Mike Steffanos

Last year before the start of spring training, there was talk that MLB would be cracking down on the use of substances by pitchers to enhance their grip on the baseball and increase the amount of spin on their pitches. This, in turn, is one of the contributors to ever-increasing strikeout numbers in baseball. The topic took a back seat to worries about surviving a baseball season during a pandemic, but it's back now this spring as the country slowly moves towards a post-COVID world.

There was always some understanding among people who closely followed the game that the amount of spin pitchers could put on a baseball was important. It affects the movement of a pitch, whether it's a breaking ball or a fastball. Moreover, high-spin could affect the lateness and sharpness of the break. A pitch with a relatively late, sharp break is more difficult to hit than a pitch with a lot of break that takes place more gradually and predictably.

Sometimes when you read about all of the spin rate emphasis, it sounds like this is something new in baseball. It's not. What's relatively new is the sophisticated equipment available to track the spin pitchers are imparting on the ball. This allows more sophisticated analysis and coaching for pitchers to achieve maximum results. That, of course, is all perfectly legal.

Of course, the knowledge that getting more spin on pitches is important tempts pitchers to use substances to better grip the ball. In Joel Sherman's piece in the New York Post linked above, Sherman notes that MLB plans to use some of the fancy technology to catch pitchers who are artificially increasing their spin rate. The consequences could have a huge impact on modern pitching:

MLB's Statcast system allows the tracking of every pitch — its velocity, spin, and movement. MLB intended to use the data to compare with both career norms and in game to see if, say, a slider suddenly had more revolutions with runners on second and third in the sixth inning than with no one on in the first.

This could have seismic impact. There are those who believe that some organizations have worked to develop substances to help entire staffs improve their stuff and that removal could lead to significant decline in performance.

It's no secret that the use of illegal substances has become pretty widespread in the game of baseball. The current thinking is that most of the pitchers in MLB are using something at least some of the time. No one wants to challenge other team's pitchers because they know that their own are doing some version of the same thing.

Now I don't believe that any MLB crackdown on illegal sticky stuff will lead to a dramatic decrease in strikeouts and more balls in play, but it will probably help. I'm curious, though, how they're planning to do this with Statcast. I don't think it would be wise to penalize a pitcher based just on that data. I would expect that a funky Statcast result would be used as justification to search a pitcher to find if he's using something illegal. I would expect that only if they find something would a pitcher be penalized. This will bear some watching as the regular season begins.

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