Gerrit Cole, the New York Yankees' ace and owner of the biggest contract for a pitcher in baseball history, paused for an extremely awkward five seconds Tuesday and didn't answer a yes-or-no question about whether he had ever used a foreign substance. And in the process, amid his Elaine Benes dance around the truth, he told on the entire sport.
By not denying that he had dabbled in Spider Tack, the viscous grip agent that has become the substance du jour for those looking to improve the spin they create on pitches, Cole validated the concerns that have increasingly dominated conversations around the sport in recent months. For years, the use of foreign substances has been not so much a "dirty little secret," as St. Louis Cardinals manager Mike Shildt called it, as an open one.
Now, Major League Baseball -- which has been aware of the use of foreign substances but has sparingly enforced its own rule banning them -- is finally acting with a plan to crack down on their use. After gathering evidence over the first two months of the season, MLB will arm umpires with information on the likeliest users, then ask them to add another responsibility to their jobs: goo cop.
MLB almost certainly will levy suspensions, adding more faces to the foreign-substance conversation. After Cole's response to a simple yes-or-no question of whether he had ever used Spider Tack while pitching -- "Um ... I don't ... I don't know ... I don't know if, uh ... I don't -- I don't quite know how to answer that, to be honest," he said -- his is, for the moment, front and center. Cole is an easy target because of his success and salary, yes, but his precipitous spin-rate growth -- his average four-seam fastball spin jumped from 2,164 rpm to 2,379 to 2,530 over the 2017-19 seasons -- put him on the league's radar long before the cat got his tongue.
Here's the reality: MLB has treated foreign substances like Bunny Colvin treated drugs in "The Wire." And now, like with Hamsterdam, the cops are primed to descend and break up what for so long the establishment enabled. There are naturally plenty of questions about foreign substances, both basic and complex, for fans casual and rabid, and they deserve answers. Here are 20.
Just how big a deal is that?
Presumably, everyone can agree that if a rule is codified but not being enforced, it warrants an explanation. The league has offered no such explanation to this point. That feels kind of like a big deal.
Further, there is a very good argument to be made that the decline of offense in baseball -- which has reached a point of alarm -- stems at least in part from the use of foreign substances. That, too, feels kind of like a big deal.
When there are pitchers who acknowledge on the condition of anonymity -- out of fear that the league will discipline them for admitting use of foreign substances -- that the quality of their pitches is going to decrease if they renounce sticky stuff ... yup. That sets off the big-deal radar.
Whether this is tantamount to baseball's other recent cheating scandals -- the steroid era and technology-driven sign stealing -- is up for debate.
How does this all work?
A number of factors contribute to spin, but the most important when it comes to sticky stuff is friction. Glue-like foreign substances create outsized amounts compared to bare skin touching a baseball's leather cover. Generally speaking, the tackier the substance, the more friction is created, and the more friction there is, the more a ball spins.
With four-seam fastballs and breaking balls, spin is particularly important. For being the straightest pitch thrown, four-seamers can be incredibly deceiving -- especially at high rates of spin. The faster a four-seamer spins, the less it drops. Thus, a four-seamer with elite spin looks to hitters like it's rising. It's actually just falling less, but the emergence of the high four-seamer as a weapon is inextricably linked to a better understanding of spin. The explanation for breaking balls is straightforward: The more a slider, curveball and cutter spin, the more they're capable of moving.
While pitchers may be able to slightly improve their spin rates -- especially with a jump in velocity -- thousands upon thousands of hours have been spent searching for and dreaming of a natural solution that has remained elusive. It's why sticky stuff stuck.
"It works," one veteran pitcher who uses Spider Tack said, "and I don't want to give back those rpms."
So this rule prohibiting foreign substances. How explicit is it?
Pretty explicit! While baseball's founders could not have foreseen a scenario in which pitchers used increasingly sticky substances to leverage a growing knowledge of how to pitch effectively, the game's keepers do have the ability to amend their rules. They didn't add anything denoting particular substances that are illegal, but just look at some of the elements included in Rule 6.02(c) and try to argue that the shepherds didn't understand that doctoring a ball could open the door to some sort of crisis.
(1) While in the 18-foot circle surrounding the pitcher's plate, touch the ball after touching his mouth or lips, or touch his mouth or lips while he is in contact with the pitcher's plate. The pitcher must clearly wipe the fingers of his pitching hand dry before touching the ball or the pitcher's plate.
(2) expectorate on the ball, either hand or his glove;
(3) rub the ball on his glove, person or clothing;
(4) apply a foreign substance of any kind to the ball;
(7) Have on his person, or in his possession, any foreign substance.
Yikes. Almost every pitcher, even those who don't use sticky stuff, touches their mouth at some point during an outing. Gripping a baseball can be tricky, and sometimes the powdered rosin that is legal and supplied to players does not suffice. The rules, though, say no licking, no spitting and, technically, no rubbing the ball on, well, anything aside from two bare, dry hands.
Foreign substances, while not defined, are unambiguously outlawed in both application to ball and possession.
Well, what exactly is a foreign substance?
An item used to make a baseball move in an unnatural way. Balls to which foreign substances have been applied are colloquially called spitballs, even though spit is one of the myriad foreign substances pitchers have used since the banning of the spitter in 1920 and the retirement of the last pitcher whose use of it was grandfathered in, Burleigh Grimes, in 1934.
What are the types of foreign substances pitchers use?
Whatever the imagination can dream. Among the items used throughout baseball history:
Vaseline, K-Y Jelly and other slippery products made famous by Gaylord Perry, who threw more than 5,000 innings before he was suspended for use of a foreign substance. He still made the Hall of Fame even though he spent more than 20 years throwing a spitter.
Abrasives that scuff balls. Joe Niekro, the veteran knuckleballer, got caught on the mound with an emery board and sandpaper, because one foreign object clearly wasn't enough.
Belt buckles, shin guards and other hard items that can nick balls and defy the laws of physics that long have governed the game, even if they're not entirely understood.
Saliva. It's called a spitter for a reason.
Grip enhancements. What started with the use of pine tar quickly morphed into a desire to fully optimize the array of available sticky products. Pine tar is a byproduct of burning pine wood at high temperatures and is legal for hitters trying to grip their bats. Pitchers willing to push the foreign-substance boundaries long preferred it as their tack of choice. About a decade ago, the mixture of Bullfrog sunscreen and rosin garnered a devoted following. From there, it was an arms race that evolved to Cramer Firm Grip, Pelican Grip Dip stick and Spider Tack. With some resorting to homemade concoctions that include everything from a melted-down Manny Mota Grip Stick to Coca-Cola, modern baseball players can moonlight as quite the odd couple: a lab rat and chemist. They will make their own sticky stuff and then test it themselves to see if it's any good.
Why do pitchers use foreign substances?
Because, like the pitcher said earlier, they work.
Thanks. That's very helpful.
Well, it's true. But fine. Here's the real story.
It started in 2008, when a Danish company called TrackMan began utilizing its radar-based measurement system on baseball. Two years later, it started tracking MLB games. Among its measurements: spin rate, or the revolutions per minute a ball is spinning when it leaves the hand of a pitcher.
The smartest teams quickly understood what this meant: an objective measure of how a pitch was moving through the air. Spin was about to change baseball, and early adopters like the Houston Astros derived enormous benefits. By 2013, the teams that weren't intimidated by new concepts understood simple truths, like the difference between a 2,200 rpm and 2,400 rpm fastball is massive.
Two years later, spin went mainstream with the launch of Statcast, the now-ubiquitous system that measures just about everything one could want to know from a baseball game. Pitchers educated in spin, like Trevor Bauer -- much more on him later -- for years already had been trying to learn how to goose more spin while also using high-speed cameras to understand what different grips, pressures and general experimentation did to a pitch's movement characteristics. These were the early days of lab-created pitches.
In his quest, Bauer recognized that sticky stuff had a demonstrable effect on spin. Others soon were converts, and they learned the sad part about spin for all but outliers: It's very difficult to be elite by natural means. Either you have spin or you don't. It's not quite like eye color, but it's a close relation.
In hindsight, of course that knowledge -- and the increasingly universal emphasis on spin rate, which was everywhere from MLB.com to free-agent conversations -- should've alerted the league that foreign substances were about to become a real problem. Hindsight is easy, yes, but even back in May 2018, long after he'd started studying spin, Bauer tweeted about a player's spin rate jumping "a couple hundred rpm overnight." He didn't name names, but the implication was obvious: He was talking about his college teammate Gerrit Cole.
What is the result of this foreign substance usage?
Let's look at average spin rate, according to Statcast.
Four-seam fastball
2015 -- 2,238
2021 -- 2,317
Four-seam fastballs have jumped by an average of 79 rpm and climbed in every year but one. That also could be attributed to a rise in velocity over that time.
The bigger tells are with the other pitches that benefit from more spin (slider, curveball, cutter) and the ones that theoretically don't (sinker, changeup, splitter).
Slider
2015 -- 2,106
2021 -- 2,459
Curveball
2015 -- 2,303
2021 -- 2,555
Cutter
2015 -- 2,206
2021 -- 2,416
The average slider jumped more than 350 rpm, the curveball more than 250 and the cutter more than 200. This is not velocity-induced. Pitchers are clearly spinning the ball more now, and the only explanation is sticky stuff. Two pitchers who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the extra tack gives them the faith to throw their sliders at max effort with the intention of generating the most spin -- something they weren't comfortable doing without foreign substances.
Two-seam fastball
2015 -- 2,115
2021 -- 2,158
Changeup
2015 -- 1,722
2021 -- 1,785
Splitter
2015 -- 1,482
2021 -- 1,488
Two-seamers, changeups and splitters are pitches that do not benefit from extra spin because they're intended to stay low in the strike zone and induce ground balls. It's no surprise that pitchers don't actively seek more spin.
The consequence: The leaguewide batting average is currently .237, 17 points lower than in 2015 and the lowest since 1968, after which the mound was lowered from 15 inches to its current 10 because pitchers were seen as too dominant. At least in 1968 there were 6,567 more hits than strikeouts. This year, the hit-to-strikeout ratio is 13,862 to 15,886.
Sticky stuff isn't the only reason hitting is so difficult in 2021. But it's a big one.
How do pitchers get away with it?
They've learned to be crafty. But if you're even slightly educated on the subject, you can spot it in every game.
Watch a pitcher between pitches. Where does his hand go? Does it touch the brim of his cap? If so, there's probably a foreign substance on it. What about dabbing his middle and index fingers inside of his glove? That, too. The spots vary -- the palm, near the webbing -- but it's a go-to hiding place -- "hiding place" -- for plenty.
The truly sneaky pitchers put their gunk in places you wouldn't consider. If there's a pitcher who seems to tuck in his shirt a little too often, the foreign substance could reside in his waistband. Some use their jerseys, others the hip area of their pants.
The real answer to this question, truthfully, is that they get away with it because they're allowed to get away with it.
OK, OK. Guys use sticky stuff. Fine. I'm convinced. How many pitchers are we actually talking about?
Estimates vary. On the low end, at least half of pitchers in baseball use at least the low-fi sticky stuff -- pine tar or a sunscreen-and-rosin concoction. The most frequent estimate, among the dozens to whom ESPN has talked in recent months about sticky stuff, is 80%. Others think it's as high as 90%.
Certainly the number using Firm Grip or Pelican or Spider Tack or homebrew or any of the other high-end items isn't that high. But it's not that low, either. And sources around the game believe the number of those who graduated to the premium stuff has increased significantly this season, even as MLB started its evidence-gathering process in April.
Can you name names?
Cole's tacit admission is a big one and confirms the speculation that surrounded his rise in spin. Though even before he tried to dance around the subject Tuesday, there was another public allegation beyond Bauer's that actually named him.
In March 2020, the Los Angeles Angels fired a longtime clubhouse attendant, Brian "Bubba" Harkins, after MLB accused him of supplying his homemade grip enhancer to pitchers. The firing came a month after Chris Young, now the Texas Rangers' general manager and then MLB's vice president of on-field operations, distributed a memo to teams saying team personnel could not assist players in procuring or using foreign substances.
Harkins sued the Angels for defamation, and in his complaint he named more than a dozen players he told MLB had asked him for his blend of pine tar and rosin, including Cole. The lawsuit included a text message allegedly from him that read: "Hey Bubba, it's Gerrit Cole. I was wondering if you could help me out with this sticky situation [winky face emoji]. We don't see you until May, but we have some road games in April that are in cold weather places. The stuff I had last year seizes up when it gets cold ..."
The lawsuit was dismissed. Cole never denied Harkins' allegations.
Beyond Cole, what's a good example of what goo can do?
As Bauer was campaigning publicly for some consistency regarding foreign substances -- either legalize them or enforce the rule, he would say -- he spoke about the experiments he conducted at Driveline Baseball with foreign substances and how if ever he used them, he could be the best pitcher in the world.
Well, in September 2019, something happened: His fastball spin rate, which had hovered at levels consistent with his velocity for almost five years, spiked significantly. It continued into 2020, when his curveball leapt nearly 400 rpm, his four-seamer almost 350, his cutter more than 250 and his slider 200-plus.
Bauer won the National League Cy Young Award.
While he never has publicly admitted using foreign substances, Bauer's own acknowledgment that the only way for a player to magnify his spin so drastically is through foreign substances means either he found the holy grail or he embodied an if-you-can't-beat-'em-join-'em ethos.
Also worth noting: After spending the first two months of the 2021 season carrying the highest four-seam spin rate in baseball and the best slider spin among starters, Bauer's spin numbers dipped noticeably in his last start Sunday -- just days after the league on Thursday informed owners that it soon would pursue discipline against those using foreign substances.
He was not the only one, according to research from ESPN Stats & Information's Mike Bonzagni. Bauer's dip of 223 rpm on his fastball compared to his previous season average was the highest in baseball. Right there with him: Cole, who went from an average of 2,561 to 2,436 -- the lowest average he has had in a game in three years.
This seems like a mess. How did it get so out of hand?
Four ways:
1. Pitchers fell in love with the good stuff. And why wouldn't they? It works and MLB showed no signs of enforcing its rules.
2. Managers -- who have the ability to ask an umpire to check an opponent for foreign-substance use -- didn't call out blatant cases. Why? Because their guys were using them, too, and they didn't want to start a public war that would force MLB to impose suspensions. Self-interest bred silence.
3. Hitters went along with the notion that sticky stuff gave pitchers better control and that its use was more for safety than performance. Never mind that hit by pitches rose every year from 2015 to 2020. The narrative took root.
4. MLB did not enforce its rules. The closest it came was the memo from Young, which outlined Rule 3.01, a more cursory version of 6.02(c), which Young referenced as well.
"Under our practice," the memo said, "umpires are instructed to enforce the rules when they personally observe a potential violation or are informed of a potential violation by the opposing team. We do not intend to change that practice in the 2020 season."
In the 2020 season, 734 players pitched in the major leagues. None was suspended for using a foreign substance.
Do players want it banned?
Hitters sure do. Their approach to sticky stuff changed this season. The awful offense, the incredible movement they see on pitches, the sense that a growing number of pitchers have graduated from sunscreen and rosin to the hard stuff -- every-day players are mad. It resembles the same sort of anger that burbled beneath the surface until pitchers started to push for performance-enhancing-drug regulations. Not only had the game become imbalanced, their own livelihoods were being threatened.
Pitchers are split. Plenty want MLB to simply legalize everything. Others worry it has gotten out of control and want someone at the league to regulate within reason -- say, a dispensation for sunscreen and rosin but a suspension for Spider Tack. And then there's the minority that doesn't use anything and has mixed feelings. Some say live and let live. Others say: Get rid of the cheaters. Now.
Did you say cheaters?
Even if everyone is doing it, even if the league isn't disciplining, that doesn't invalidate the fact that there is a rule to promote fair competition and large quantities of Major League Baseball players are breaking it. Until Rules 3.01 and 6.02(c) no longer exist or are rewritten, what's going on right now in baseball is cheating.
Which ... isn't particularly new or special. The history of pitchers cheating is long and storied. Gaylord Perry, Don Sutton and Whitey Ford, all noted ball defilers, are in the Hall. Baseball lionizes and romanticizes its scalawags. It laughs at Craig Kimbrel's cap, which annually features a large, discolored circle on the brim.
Perhaps no one put it better than Eddie Harris, the old junkballer in "Major League," who, after a soliloquy about the various foreign substances on his body and his willingness to load a ball with snot, told hard-throwing rookie Ricky Vaughn: "I haven't got an arm like you, kid. I have to put anything on it I can find. Someday, you will, too."
Why has MLB suddenly found religion?
That's not clear yet. Since issuing the crackdown edict last week, commissioner Rob Manfred hasn't talked about foreign substances -- about when exactly he knew, about why he did nothing, about what prompted him to do something, about the effect on the game they've had, about whether he believes this is going to have a significant enough consequence to be worth the headache that's bound to germinate from enforcement.
Did baseball really not learn from the sign-stealing scandal?
In terms of knowing that something was happening, not meeting it head-on with significant investigative capital and discipline, and watching it mushroom into something bigger than it needed to be? Sounds kind of familiar.
Remember, before the Houston Astros were banging on trash cans, the Boston Red Sox were using an Apple Watch to relay sign sequences. And as the Astros were banging on trash cans, complaints about them cheating had been filtering into the league. It took a story detailing the scheme to mobilize the league, and even then, the players who benefited from it were granted immunity and didn't miss a day of play or a dollar of pay.
For years, MLB has been told by individuals that there is widespread use of foreign substances, and that such use is skewing the game. The league missed its opportunity for early enforcement. Soon enough it'll be clear whether the discipline follows the same track.
How is MLB going to clean this up?
With ... umpires. Who already have an incredibly contentious relationship with players. Who will be learning on the fly to hunt for foreign substances. Who are going to be armed with information from MLB that will be old or incomplete.
Honestly, if you're a pitcher and you know the cops have your hideout, are you going to keep going there? Of course not. There will be pitchers who continue fiddling with goo, who believe the reward of cheating outweighs the risk of getting caught, and their ability to do so will depend as much on their creativity and subterfuge as anything -- particularly with Statcast there to serve as a baseball precog.
This has turned into a bad look in quick fashion. If the rollout of enforcement -- which is expected to include random checks in between innings and specifically target pitchers who, through the collection of game balls and data, are believed to be using -- doesn't go well, it leaves MLB open for even more criticism.
The league is operating under the better-late-than-never principle, a reasonable but risky proposition. The league could have afforded itself the benefit of the doubt had it, say, looked at the play in which a Brett Cecil pitch affixed itself to Yadier Molina's chest protector and considered it an obvious foreign-substance situation.
Instead, the league said it found no violation. And Cecil said, "If I could explain it, I would, but I can't." And Molina, asked if he had sticky stuff on his equipment, called it a "dumb question."
When you treat your customers like they're idiots and four years later return with a completely different tack, that benefit of the doubt is gone, and rightfully so.
What penalties can MLB actually hand out?
If the league really is intent on changing the culture, there will not be just one or two players suspended. It already suspended four minor league players for foreign-substance violations. The sticky stuff is plenty prevalent in the minor leagues as well, and it's easy to understand why: When you're making between $10,000 and $15,000 for an entire season of work, spending $15.99 on a 2.5-ounce puck of competition-grade Spider Tack offers some kind of ROI.
The issue, of course, is how much teeth the suspensions have. In 2014, when Yankees starter Michael Pineda received a 10-game ban for sloppily shmearing pine tar on his neck, he was still paid. MLB recognizes that a 10-game suspension for starters, if a team plays its rotation properly, amounts to one game. And if it's one start and the player is paid throughout his time away -- something for which the union will fight -- what will be the public's reaction to that in the wake of an Astros decision that has left reams of fans disillusioned and critical of Manfred's ability to step up in a moment where leadership is paramount.
All of this is Joe West's fault, isn't it?
Give it to the longest-tenured umpire in baseball history: When he confiscated the hat of Cardinals reliever Giovanny Gallegos on May 27 because he found a foreign substance, he managed to inject himself into the middle of one of the biggest baseball stories in some time. It was the Joe Westest of Joe West maneuvers.
To call him the catalyst of this all wouldn't be entirely accurate, but West certainly opened the blinds to shine some sunlight on what was happening in the sport. Even though he allowed Gallegos to simply switch his cap and continue playing, West's decision to make it even a little thing emboldened others.
A spirited Twitter discussion between Minnesota Twins third baseman Josh Donaldson and former big league pitcher Dallas Braden wound up with Donaldson saying he had an "entire catalog of video of these guys cheating it's coming out," and, well, that would be quite the thing.
What's realistically going to change?
A potpourri of thoughts to close.
1. Is it going to be like steroids, where the threat of discipline didn't rid the sport entirely of the issue but scared the vast majority of players straight? Certainly that's the hope for the league. And if that's the case ...
2. There very well may be a surge in offense. Fastballs with less spin are easier to hit. Breaking balls with less funk are easier to hit. If even 10% of the pitchers using foreign substances stop, that changes the calculus. If that vast majority comes through, the comparisons to the summer of '68 will be long gone.
3. There could be a recalibration of who and what constitute elite. If unnatural spin goes away, suddenly pitchers who come by it naturally are in the best position to succeed.
4. But, seriously, is 10 games -- especially if it's paid -- really a deterrent? And if not, what's gonna change may well be nothing.
It's not easy navigating this morass, but baseball -- the league and the players -- must do so knowing that inaction caused this to mushroom. This is a problem that takes both sides to solve. And if somehow they can coalesce around something that's right for the sport -- if they actually pull this off -- then it'll be worthy of a dance. Even one by Elaine Benes.