Pitchers and Sticky Substances and my Thoughts about them
- Andrew Curran
- Feb 25, 2022
- 2 min read
As many baseball and sports fans know, baseball has been going through a sticky substance issue. As many of these fans also know it involves the sticky substance spider tack. These sticky substances help pitchers control the ball as well as increasing spin rate. Now some of you may be wondering what increased spin rate has to do with anything. Well increased spin rate allows the pitches to move/break better, harder, or sharper as well as making it harder to hit a baseball. Having increased spin rate on a pitch also makes it more deceptive as it makes it look harder/faster than it really is. As many fans saw this past season, Commissioner Rob Manfred implemented a rule mid-season for pitchers to stop using these substances as they would be checked after each inning (which makes no sense), and if caught they were thrown out of the game, suspended 10 games and fined. My first thought to this is to check the pitcher before they start warming up if you are so concerned of the unfair advantage the pitcher has on hitters. Now I do like thought the fact that you have a set punishment for this unlike your domestic, sexual assault and child abuser policy where Rob Manfred can choose how long it is.
Now my thoughts on this whole situation. I both do and do not like it. The part that I don’t like is knowing that pitchers already have the advantage in the game of baseball, and now they want to enhance that advantage even more. I also do not agree with how the rule was implemented mid-season, and we saw some pitchers get injured right away after the fact. Now I am not saying they prevent injuries, but in this sense, it seemed as if it could make an argument for some players. Another thing that I did not like is how long this took to come into effect as I feel it has been an ongoing issue for years, not just the past few. Now the things that I do like about this is that we see hitters get to use all kinds of things to have a better grip on the bat for hitting, so I do feel it is fair for pitchers to have something else besides rosin as the main source. I feel that they should allow pitchers to be able to like their fingers or blow into a fist and not have to wipe it off. This is done to get moisture on them because having dry hands becomes very hard to pitch with and majority of people will agree they have no clue where the ball is going. I also feel pitchers should also get one other substance to officially use besides rosin, but this is done through very thorough research into something that is very similar to a rosin bag. Overall, the whole situation is still in a gray area because there are so many ways to cheat with sticky substances in baseball, so I feel there has not been enough done to make a fair argument here, so until then, people should watch where they end up making this argument until they are aware of the many ways players “cheat with sticky substances.”
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