It's May 20, and there already have been six no-hitters in Major League Baseball, two shy of the record for an entire season, set in 1884.
The sixth was thrown by New York Yankees right-hander Corey Kluber in Arlington, Texas, on Wednesday night. Kluber's outing marked the 11th time a pitcher had completed at least seven no-hit innings in 2021, a new record through the end of May since the league expanded in 1961. It was the fourth no-hitter in a span of 15 days.
No-hitters are fun, even as they become a bit diluted, but hitting has never been more difficult. And the league is hellbent on correcting that.
The experiments taking place at the lower levels have received most of the attention. But just as important is what's going on in the majors, where the league is starting to crack down on pitchers' use of foreign substances like never before.
What follows is an explainer of how we got here, why it's so important and what might be done next.
How common is the use of foreign substances by pitchers?
It's almost as old as the game itself. For decades, pitchers have been venturing outside of the traditional rosin bag to get a better grip on the baseball. They've used Bullfrog sunscreen, pine-tar rags, rubbing alcohol, cotton candy, sugarless gum, pre-tape spray or, if they really wanted "stick," products such as Pelican Grip Dip or Mota Stick. They'd put it on the bill of their caps, on the strings of their gloves, on the side of their pant leg, on the inside of their belt buckle. And if they wanted to take it to another level, they'd blend several of those items, sometimes add soda, and heat up the mixture in a microwave or with a Bunsen burner or on a pan.
"It was just accepted," a recently retired pitcher said. "I didn't talk to one hitter who even cared about it."
A longtime pitching coach who also pitched in the 1990s estimated that 90% of a pitching staff probably is using some form of foreign substance that would violate the rules as written. That rule, 6.02(c), states that a pitcher may not "apply a foreign substance of any kind to the ball."
Why the crackdown now?
Just follow the numbers.
Eleven of the 27 lowest leaguewide batting averages since 1920 have happened just over these past 11 years, and the 2021 season remains on pace to be the lowest ever. Strikeout rates have navigated a similar path. The sport set a record for strikeout percentage each of the past five years and is on pace to set another one in 2021.
Bucking those trends is a crucial element to the league's goal of improving the entertainment value of its product and opening the sport back up to a wider audience. The time between balls in play continues to increase, which makes games increasingly boring to the casual fan. A big reason for that, some believe, is an uptick in spin rate, which makes pitches more difficult to hit and can be increased by maximizing a pitcher's grip on the baseball. The average spin rate -- measured by revolutions per minute -- has risen every year since Statcast began tracking it in 2015.
Curbing the use of foreign substances won't solve everything, but the league hopes it will help hitters and thus create more action. And it believes that in recent years the issue has spiraled out of control, with pitchers using chemically advanced, at times undetectable blends that take stickiness to a new level -- the type that can leave a pitcher's fingertips engraved on a baseball and nearly rip some leather off of it upon release. The league also believes teams are finding ways to facilitate that, perhaps by hiring their own chemists to manufacture blends.
The league has heard from position players who complain about the difficulty of hitting in this climate and believe that pitchers' abuse of foreign substances only tips the scales further in their favor. Some pitchers, meanwhile, have noted an impossible choice of either falling behind or breaking the rules to keep up, not unlike the dilemma hitters faced with steroids in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Los Angeles Dodgers right-hander Trevor Bauer, who has been very outspoken on this topic over the past three years, previously stated that foreign substances offer a greater advantage than steroids.
Is there any pushback on curbing this?
Aside from the process with which MLB will potentially seek out punishment -- we'll get to that in a minute -- the answer is yes, and it is rooted in safety. Batters are being hit by pitches at historic levels. There were 1,984 hit by pitches in 2019, surpassing a record that stood since 1920. The shortened 2020 season was on pace for 2,222. At the start of this week, the 2021 season was on pace for 2,247.
Pitchers are throwing harder than ever, oftentimes with wavering command, and many of them have stated that gripping a baseball with nothing but rosin is exceedingly difficult. A cue ball is often cited as a comparison to gripping a major league baseball, which is not good. Every new baseball is rubbed with a very specific mud -- more on that later, too -- but when that mud dries, they become dusty, chalky and even more difficult to get a handle on.
"If you can imagine grabbing a cue ball with baby powder on it -- that's what it feels like," a longtime, recently retired catcher said.
Added a veteran reliever: "There's no more panicked feeling than when you're on the mound and about to throw a baseball and you can't get the right grip on it."
The complaints picked up in 2019, when MLB utilized a baseball that was said to be noticeably firmer and with shallower seams. But throughout the game's history, pitchers have utilized pine tar and sunscreen to obtain a better grip, and hitters have generally been good with it because it helped keep them from getting hit. And the need to grip the baseball is even more important now with so many pitchers throwing max effort.
The counterargument: The use of foreign substances is more prevalent than ever, and yet batters are getting hit at an unprecedented rate. Maybe the biggest culprit isn't grip. Maybe it's pitchers being taught to throw up in the strike zone more frequently and location not being emphasized enough in development.
What exactly are the new rules and procedures?
Michael Hill, recently appointed by MLB as a senior vice president of on-field operations, sent a memo to front-office members on March 23 outlining new protocols to police the use of foreign substances. It included two team employees stationed at each game in part to monitor the issue, utilizing Statcast and Hawk-Eye data to spot trends in the spin rates of pitchers suspected of using, and, most importantly, analyzing balls taken out of play at a third-party laboratory.
The memo said MLB would "prioritize baseballs that contain potential evidence of a foreign substance, but also will randomly select balls to ensure full coverage." The memo added that umpire enforcement would continue as usual and that "players are subject to discipline" for violating the rules.
Thirteen months earlier, Chris Young, who basically held Hill's job before becoming general manager of the Texas Rangers, issued a memo banning team personnel -- mostly clubbies and bullpen catchers -- from facilitating the use of foreign substances. A bullpen catcher's bag was "like a grocery store for sticky stuff," a longtime catcher said, but the memo worked well enough for most of those bags to contain only rosin and sunblock in 2020, sources said. Pitchers still used foreign substances, but they didn't want to put lower-paid employees at risk of losing their jobs like longtime Los Angeles Angels trainer Brian Harkins famously did.
What have we seen so far/what's the latest?
MLB has collected hundreds of baseballs from basically every game this season and remains in information-gathering mode. If there has been punishment related to this issue, it hasn't been made public. Regardless, MLB doesn't feel comfortable using these new methods -- particularly examining baseballs that could be touched by several players before they are collected and studied in a lab -- to issue punishment. It is still mostly relying on managers to alert umpires of opponents skirting the rules, a method that has never really worked because managers know their own pitchers are doing the same and thus won't be proactive.
The new, slightly deadened baseball, which generally has more life off the bat but doesn't carry as far, hasn't made much of a difference with regards to grip. One veteran pitcher noted that the leather on that new ball is "a little grainier," as opposed to a 2019 baseball that was found to be exceedingly firm. The league has heard opinions all over the spectrum about the new baseball -- some say it's better, some say it's worse, some say it's the same. But the difference, pitchers said, is not enough to curb the use of foreign substances.
Pitchers have expressed concern about the idea of punishing someone for a baseball that was investigated in a laboratory when it might be impossible to prove that the pitcher himself contributed the substance that was on it. Bauer spoke out against that earlier this season with a 23-minute YouTube video in which he said, in part:
"If I throw a pitch and it gets thrown out and tested, and then has a foreign substance on it, how do they know that it came from me and not from the catcher's glove or the third baseman's glove or on a foul ball? What if it happened to hit the handle of a bat where a hitter has pine tar, or whatever other substance he wants -- which is completely legal so long as it doesn't get too far up the bat? How are they going to tell that that was me and fault me for using a foreign substance when it could've come from any host of other places that are legal?"
It's a valid concern that MLB has yet to figure out how to navigate. For now, it's focused on the more exotic blends and the most egregious users.
What's MLB's endgame?
The next step, once the league has enough of a sample size from the baseballs that have been collected, is to figure out what to do with the information. Ultimately the goal is to do away with a pregame practice that has been taking place for more than a century.
Dating back to the 1940s, MLB clubhouse attendants have been rubbing up new baseballs with a specific mud found on the banks of the Delaware River that removes the sheen of new baseballs and helps pitchers to get a better grip. MLB would like to eventually develop a uniform substance that gives the ball even more tack, which, theoretically, would allow it to deploy a more aggressive crackdown of foreign substances.
MLB previously experimented with Rawlings on a pre-tacked baseball, akin to what is used in the professional leagues of Japan and South Korea, but they didn't get rave reviews in spring trainings of prior years. The league appears to have scrapped those plans. The current task, of policing a practice that hardly ever had oversight, seems even more difficult.