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Tyler Glasnow & Sticky Stuff

AUTHOR
DATE
June 16, 2021

More drama in baseball between the players and the league?! I’m SHOCKED!

For the very brief spark notes if you live under a rock:

Pitchers always used foreign substance to help grip the baseball, but as you can imagine, it’s going too far and now they are using spider tack to add an obnoxious amount of spin rate to their pitches. This is causing less offense then ever before and the pitchers having too much of an advantage.

So the league decided to implement a new rule mid-season where you get checked during the game and basically can’t use any substances. Now all of a sudden, the pitchers are throwing with nothing, changing grips, changing how tight they hold the ball, and it’s possibly leading to injury?

That’s what Tyler Glasnow is saying. He recently was put on the 10-day IL with a partial UCL tear and flexor strain and they are going to try to rehab through it. Shane Bieber recently hit the IL as well.

From the surface I thought he was being ridiculous. You’re seriously complaining that you can’t cheat? Shut up and pitch. It definitely is a bit more complex than that though.

Alright, let’s hear from Glasnow

I’ll be honest, I think he has a great point. To say every substance is so damn game-changing is a little absurd to me. At the same time, it’s baseball… If you give tiny wiggle room for pitchers to cheat, teams will take advantage of that situation. So it’s better to wipe everything clean instead of keeping the door cracked open just a bit.

We are in an era of high velocity and a wild amount of command being lost so I don’t see a problem with sunscreen and rosin. It’s better than pitches flying towards the head of hitters.

Here’s my issue. I can’t stand how much the league and the players despise one another. It’s a big FUCK YOU match every single time there is a problem. Both parties are so focused on “Who won the negotiation?!’ When it should be “What’s best for our sport? What is best for the future of the game?” It’s never going to be perfect between a player’s union and the league, that’s obvious. It can clearly be better than whatever the hell is going on with this sport.

Anyway, something needs to be done about the offensive part of this game. It’s easy to ONLY blame launch angle and the approach to the plate, but when you see the RPM these pitches are coming in with, it’s basically impossible to hit. It’s not ironic since MLB announced the new sticky stuff policy, batting averages around the league have jumped back up.

Maybe the right move was to just ban spider tack for this season and then reassess in the off-season? Is that too difficult to separate from other substances in-game? Possibly. I’ll have to see what the injuries look like moving forward over the next couple of weeks and months. If there is a monster spike of pitchers hitting the IL then this only resurfaces and intensifies more. If the same amount of injuries happen as any other year, then maybe there wasn’t as much validity to what Glasnow was saying. (Or pitchers are still using substances)

I truly do see both sides of this argument. That’s why I kind of need to see how this recent stretch plays out so I can study the cause and effect, if you will.

Oh by the way, can’t wait for the next collective bargaining agreement, am I right?!

And I’ll end it with this clip of Trevor Bauer just to put it into perspective on what some of these pitchers are using…