Lifelong Dodgers fan here. Have been following this scandal closely as Trevor Bauer is one of the big faces of it. He publicly denounced use of “sticky stuff” in 2017 and 2018 and tweeted about how much more rpm his pitches would get when he experimented with it. When nothing came of this his spin rate increased dramatically and he won the Cy Young award in 2020.
This is his first year on the Dodgers and we have been watching pretty much every game. Bauer’s last four outings he has been much less dominant than earlier in the season. This comes after some of his game balls confiscated for analysis by MLB.
We finally checked the stats today and sure enough his rpm’s are down again the last few starts.
So the threat of enforcement does seem to be having an impact, at least in the short term.
I’m glad the league is cracking down because after the Astros sign stealing scandal (of which the Dodgers were arguably one of the biggest victims) the last thing I want is for our team to now be the face of a new cheating scandal
> He publicly denounced use of “sticky stuff” in 2017 and 2018 and tweeted about how much more rpm his pitches would get when he experimented with it. When nothing came of this his spin rate increased dramatically and he won the Cy Young award in 2020.
I kind of feel for the guy. He tried to do the right thing and shine a spotlight on this issue. No one cared, no one did anything. So now he's got a 9-figure 3-year deal instead.
In his shoes, I'd spend a lot of effort collecting evidence that his coaches and managers are fully aware of what he's doing.
> So the threat of enforcement does seem to be having an impact, at least in the short term.
This is how the US solved the hijacking problem in the 1970s; threat to do occasional random searches of passengers. Apparently airport security reported finding abandoned firearms outside in the bushes whenever they put up the “passengers may be searched” signs.
Yeah pitchers in general seem to have lost command of the ball, based on the Indians games I've been watching lately. Shane Bieber (AL 2020 Cy Young winner) gave up an uncharacteristically high number of hits today. I've seen pitchers on both teams throw balls several feet above the strike zone. Austin Hedges got hit in the head while at bat the other day.
I assume we'll see a big drop in performance for the time being and a gradual increase in performance as pitchers relearn muscle memory for throwing balls without sticky stuff.
A friend of mine who works data science for one of the MLB teams was talking to me about this.
Apparently enforcement is quietly coming down the pipeline. They're not doing enforcement out of nowhere because everyone knows that everyone is doing it, and it'd lead to the league enforcing against all teams simultaneously, which ultimately would be bad for the league itself to have at the very least none of it's star pitchers for some time period.
Enforcement is coming though apparently and you'll be able to see it in the stats pretty clearly in hindsight.
I don't agree with all MLB's descions, but at least in this case they're quietly optimizing for better games as best as they can given their massive bureaucracy which is what you want out of them.
> it'd lead to the league enforcing against all teams simultaneously, which ultimately would be bad for the league itself to have at the very least none of it's star pitchers for some time period
I don't get this idea. Is it better to watch the best players cheating than watch great-but-not-best players in general?
I wouldn't be surprised if the MLB secretly notified the teams that they have x days to stop it because enforcement will commence thereafter. That way the MLB still looks clean but they get rid of the problem. MLB is very concerned about their image.
> They're not doing enforcement out of nowhere because everyone knows that everyone is doing it, and it'd lead to the league enforcing against all teams simultaneously, which ultimately would be bad for the league itself to have at the very least none of it's star pitchers for some time period.
Why? All you have to do is apply the rules at the end of a season, so that it applies to everyone equally. You can mention they are going to be enforced beforehand. If it applies at the start of a new season, it is fair for everyone. Nobody got an unfair advantage. And if you inform those involved beforehand, everyone can prepare in whatever way is necessary. Soccer rules get updated like this all the time. For example, it would not surprise me if rules are going to be updated after Eriksen's accident (with regards to continuing playing the match), but such would not apply during the European Championship. You wouldn't do same with say VAR either.
Aw, I thought this was going to be about football pitches...
John Beck did a fair amount of "pitch doctoring" at Cambridge United. He would play an exclusively long ball game, hoofing it to a set of 7ft tall strikers. To help with this, he demanded that the grass be grown long in the corners to hold up the ball and basically ploughed the rest of the pitch to kill any attempt at a passing game. He was nicknamed "Dracula" for sucking the life out of the game :)
> The corners of the pitch developed their own eco-systems and it was all too common to see a player go to take a corner only to be mauled by a cougar.
When Curzon Ashton (a wonderful low-league team from Greater Manchester) managed to get through to the second round of the FA Cup, drawing AFC Wimbledon, the manager decreed that the pitch lines at the home ground be narrowed to the minimum permissible width, in order to hamper Wimbledon's more refined style of play down the wings.
It's incredible how much he stumbled over that question when it was so obviously coming. He eventually gave a politician non-answer but he looks like a deer in the headlights at first lol.
I actually find the childish antics of Baseball--trick plays, fights, intentionally hitting players with pitching, sign stealing, sticky balls--to be a charming part of the game.
This is good parable about how corruption becomes systemic. When integrity, and acting in good faith, becomes a weakness, it forces everyone to cheat or get cut. And on a larger scale, it gives integrity a bad name, a foolish position adopted only by suckers and losers who aren't willing to do whatever it takes to win. And so we descend even further into the cynical, amoral corner of the Nash equilibrium which is objectively worse for everyone.
The league should give a mild suspension to everyone doing this now, with harsher suspensions in the future, and the introduction of consistent, rigorous testing. They need to make it easy to do the right thing.
(Interestingly, a similar problem exists in the ping pong world. Players apply grippy, volatile chemicals to their paddles to increase grip on the ball. It got so bad that tournaments started doing gas analysis and sequestering paddles until match start to curb the practice. Imagine if the MLB did this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTCbpWmPzTY&t=0s)
I like your framing, because this dynamic occurs in so many places. Pretty much everyone was doping in cycling during the Lance Armstrong era - if you weren't, it's highly unlikely you would have been remotely competitive. Similarly, there were tons of mortgage brokers in the mid 00s who could see that everything would end badly - but if you were an exec at a mortgage company and weren't willing to give a loan to anyone who could fog a mirror, you'd greatly underperform your competition in the short term, and you'd be canned long before the end game became apparent.
It’s seems straightforward to have random testing of the balls throughout a game. All the umpire needs to do is ask the catcher to hand it over. If they’re suspecting this is happening and they’re not doing it, it’s intentional.
Does the public find the defense heavy game more enjoyable? I’d imagine more hits and homers would liven things up.
To play devils advocate, the batter also wants to know the pitcher has control of the ball. It has always been an unspoken rule that pitchers did this in colder weather, because the ball is harder to grip in cold weather. A batter would prefer to know the pitcher won’t unintentionally hit them with a 96 mph fastball.
I will completely agree this has gone too far. There are a lot of unspoken rules in baseball which to me is a feature not a bug. This has gone too far, but there are more layers than just “this is against the rules”
All the drama about striving to be better, and fairplay and cheating, is all just to entertain.
So this scandal is about as important to real world morals as the disappointing last seasons of Game of Thrones.
Scandals and drama, up to a point, increase engagement. (But that has to be managed carefully.)
Btw, I'm not saying that anyone in the industry has to consciously think like that. It's just what the competition with other forms of entertainment rewards.
The Cheetah doesn't have to understand how it runs fast, it just has to run fast. The entrepreneur doesn't necessarily have to understand the customer, we just need enough people trying so that some of them deliver what people are willing to pay for---even if those trying have the wrong idea about what they are doing works.
But why in this case it’s worse? Just allow sticky stuff to be used, compensate with ball design. Everyone will use it, no need to test and worry, no cheating scandals.
Reminds me of current insane F1 regulations while there exists simple way to solve most problems widely used in other series: rules that specify size of air inlets, which naturally limits power of the engine.
Yes. This is also why pricing in externalities is so important in capitalist economies: otherwise honest players in the market can't compete and only the worst companies survive.
Cricket is much murkier than baseball in this regard. Some amount of "ball tampering" is allowed in cricket, whereas, AFAIK none is in baseball.
In cricket you can polish the ball against clothing and use sweat or saliva (with some caveats against sweetened saliva). Moreover, replacing the ball is a big event in cricket.
But yeah there have been a couple of ball tampering scandals recently in cricket. One involving pants zippers and another involving sugar in pockets IIRC.
They overcorrected with the changes to the ball. Not only do the balls fly a shorter distance, but they raised the seams as well, leading to more movement and break.
Use of sticky substances absolutely is a big deal and the league is right to crack down, but it also gives them cover for their missteps with changing the ball. By raising the profile of the foreign substance abuses, it gives them ammunition when negotiating with the very powerful MLBPA.
After the mlb announced they were going to start checking for and taking action again foreign substances a couple of weeks ago, spin rates were down across several of the leagues big pitchers.
The worst decision MLB ever made was refusing to take back Houston's world series trophy and place in the record books. They signaled to the world that cheating is OK.
Not surprisingly, Gerritt Cole at the center of this seems to have started down this path immediately after joining the Astros.
Records and stats broadly are huge parts of the core of the game's history. They made a far worse decision to both intentionally allow the steroid era and then take no action to eg protect/reclaim the records of Hank Aaron and Roger Maris.
If you won't protect Hank Aaron's home run record, which was a staggering sports accomplishment, you're sure not going to take back a mere World Series trophy. After signaling they were ok with destroying such a large part of the game's history and what the fans enjoy, a Houston was inevitable. Houston ruined one year particularly, if they had contained it properly. Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, the steroid era overall and leaving that fraud in the record books, destroyed the game's history across more than half a century of competition. The long lineage in MLB is critical, being able to look back, measure the history, track the numbers, make a big deal of the feats, it's central to the game. Now a lot of it is garbage. How do you fix Bonds being the home run king? Juice the ball and let someone hit 80 home runs? Juice the ball and hope someone hits 800 for a career? It becomes a joke and they trapped themselves in it.
Apparently the only way that umpires would check was if an opposing coach complained. Opposing coaches never complained because they knew their own players were doing it, too. The league stepping in insures there won’t be any fear of that sort of retaliation.
It would be super easy for the NYPD to give me tickets for jaywalking too, but they don’t.
The reason this was not enforced is because nobody cared and most people involved didn’t really consider it cheating, not because enforcement is difficult.
If you're not cheating in baseball, you aren't trying. It's such a boring game, made worse by sabermetrics, that this kind of meta game is the only remaining interest. Tweak the balls. Tweak the bats. Sign-stealing. Tweak batting approaches. Fiddle with the mound. Chase ever better steroids.
Without that arms race, it'd be horrifically dull.
As someone in Europe whose knowledge of baseball is from US movies: are there technical barriers to test for a coating substance?
I believe that the ball does not belong to the team that pitches it, right? It is given to them by the referee (?). So what's the problem to check if there is any substance on it after the game (the part where one team has control of the ball) and if there is anything, well they are disqualified.
Or is it that nobody is interested in changing the status quo?
It's odd that the league doesn't have a rule where one coach can require the ump to do an 'equipment check' for whatever on any player. After the ball is caught by the catcher, the Ump can be required to check the ball. If it's sticky, the pitcher is out and the batter walks. Then they figure out what to do with the cheater.
And the coach can do this twice a game or something like that.
This is a rule. Coaches are allowed to call for a check whenever they want. There's a few (in)famous instances of it and the player is immediately thrown out of the game.
Opposing coaches just don't bother because their guys are cheating too.
Baseball is thick with unwritten/unspoken rules that define the respect and integrity of the game. Coaches don’t like to do things that put “the integrity of the game” at risk. Very similar to golf in that regard.
> Brand-new major league baseballs are so slick that umpire attendants are tasked with rubbing them before games with special mud from a secret spot along a tributary of the Delaware River. Pitchers also have access to a bag of rosin, made from fir-tree sap, that lies behind the mound.
Fun fact about the secret river mud, and also interesting that certain substances are specifically allowed.
Everyone seems to say it's been going on forever. Why such a big issue now all of a sudden? Is this something that has only come to light due to ultra-high-def cameras and super-slow-mo that can actually measure spin rate and other minute details that was impossible to observe previously?
Baseball used to be the most popular sport in America. Now it's third. I don't think soccer will ever actually catch it, but that's mostly because MLS is run by the same sort of stubborn people as MLB.
Nobody ever really remembers teams with great pitching. They don't really give them names. There's no "Murderer's Row" of pitching in MLB history. There's a reason for that.
A home run is something everyone instantly understands. New to the game, old to the game, whatever, it gets people excited. So does hitting and base running. People want to see people hit the ball and score runs in baseball. A walk-off homerun to end a big game is remembered forever by everyone who watched it.
Pitching, by contrast, is usually only fully appreciated in retrospect. You don't throw a no-hitter until the last out is counted. Same for a perfect game. A perfect game in the second inning is just a second inning. A home run in the second inning is something that gets everyone out of their seats. The final strikeout of a big game is remembered by fans of the winning team. but it's a footnote for everyone else.
So for entertainment's sake, if you're going to either have great pitching or great hitting, you damned well should be focused as an executive to make sure that the hitting is as good as it can get, because the people who care the most about your sport at this point are boomers, stat nerds, and bookies.
My 86 year old grandmother who passed 3 years ago? She LOVED to watch baseball with my grandfather. Likewise, my other grandfather would watch whenever he could except for when a John Wayne movie was on. My parents couldn't care less, and in my social group of about 40 boys, only two watched the sport on a regular basis.
It is letting pitchers throw pitches that are on the edge of what they can control. Also, when pitchers throw balls the same way they have for years, changing the way balls move in ways the pitchers haven't been able to account for. The result is that the number of batters hit by pitches has gone up, and some of them have gotten seriously hurt (orbital bone fractures, broken noses, etc).
[+] [-] jacobkg|4 years ago|reply
This is his first year on the Dodgers and we have been watching pretty much every game. Bauer’s last four outings he has been much less dominant than earlier in the season. This comes after some of his game balls confiscated for analysis by MLB.
We finally checked the stats today and sure enough his rpm’s are down again the last few starts.
So the threat of enforcement does seem to be having an impact, at least in the short term.
I’m glad the league is cracking down because after the Astros sign stealing scandal (of which the Dodgers were arguably one of the biggest victims) the last thing I want is for our team to now be the face of a new cheating scandal
[+] [-] mabbo|4 years ago|reply
I kind of feel for the guy. He tried to do the right thing and shine a spotlight on this issue. No one cared, no one did anything. So now he's got a 9-figure 3-year deal instead.
In his shoes, I'd spend a lot of effort collecting evidence that his coaches and managers are fully aware of what he's doing.
[+] [-] ashtonkem|4 years ago|reply
This is how the US solved the hijacking problem in the 1970s; threat to do occasional random searches of passengers. Apparently airport security reported finding abandoned firearms outside in the bushes whenever they put up the “passengers may be searched” signs.
[+] [-] CoryAlexMartin|4 years ago|reply
I assume we'll see a big drop in performance for the time being and a gradual increase in performance as pitchers relearn muscle memory for throwing balls without sticky stuff.
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monocasa|4 years ago|reply
Apparently enforcement is quietly coming down the pipeline. They're not doing enforcement out of nowhere because everyone knows that everyone is doing it, and it'd lead to the league enforcing against all teams simultaneously, which ultimately would be bad for the league itself to have at the very least none of it's star pitchers for some time period.
Enforcement is coming though apparently and you'll be able to see it in the stats pretty clearly in hindsight.
I don't agree with all MLB's descions, but at least in this case they're quietly optimizing for better games as best as they can given their massive bureaucracy which is what you want out of them.
[+] [-] viraptor|4 years ago|reply
I don't get this idea. Is it better to watch the best players cheating than watch great-but-not-best players in general?
[+] [-] TwoBit|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fnoord|4 years ago|reply
Why? All you have to do is apply the rules at the end of a season, so that it applies to everyone equally. You can mention they are going to be enforced beforehand. If it applies at the start of a new season, it is fair for everyone. Nobody got an unfair advantage. And if you inform those involved beforehand, everyone can prepare in whatever way is necessary. Soccer rules get updated like this all the time. For example, it would not surprise me if rules are going to be updated after Eriksen's accident (with regards to continuing playing the match), but such would not apply during the European Championship. You wouldn't do same with say VAR either.
[+] [-] duncanawoods|4 years ago|reply
John Beck did a fair amount of "pitch doctoring" at Cambridge United. He would play an exclusively long ball game, hoofing it to a set of 7ft tall strikers. To help with this, he demanded that the grass be grown long in the corners to hold up the ball and basically ploughed the rest of the pitch to kill any attempt at a passing game. He was nicknamed "Dracula" for sucking the life out of the game :)
[+] [-] physicsguy|4 years ago|reply
> The corners of the pitch developed their own eco-systems and it was all too common to see a player go to take a corner only to be mauled by a cougar.
[+] [-] bencollier49|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stefan_|4 years ago|reply
"I don't quite know how to answer that, to be honest...If MLB wants to legislate some more stuff, that's a conversation that we can have"
https://twitter.com/snyyankees/status/1402379195007778821
[+] [-] caddemon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] worker767424|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javajosh|4 years ago|reply
The league should give a mild suspension to everyone doing this now, with harsher suspensions in the future, and the introduction of consistent, rigorous testing. They need to make it easy to do the right thing.
(Interestingly, a similar problem exists in the ping pong world. Players apply grippy, volatile chemicals to their paddles to increase grip on the ball. It got so bad that tournaments started doing gas analysis and sequestering paddles until match start to curb the practice. Imagine if the MLB did this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTCbpWmPzTY&t=0s)
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aidenn0|4 years ago|reply
There was a point where a large fraction of players were on amphetamine.
Gaylord Perry semi-openly used Vaseline on the ball, to the point where he offered to do a commercial for Vaseline. He's now in the Hall of Fame.
McGwire missed the HoF by a mile due to the steroids scandal, but Bonds is likely to miss it by a slim margin.
Ty Cobb was famous for shady base running tactics, so this isn't new
[+] [-] koolba|4 years ago|reply
Does the public find the defense heavy game more enjoyable? I’d imagine more hits and homers would liven things up.
[+] [-] dgfitz|4 years ago|reply
I will completely agree this has gone too far. There are a lot of unspoken rules in baseball which to me is a feature not a bug. This has gone too far, but there are more layers than just “this is against the rules”
[+] [-] eru|4 years ago|reply
All the drama about striving to be better, and fairplay and cheating, is all just to entertain.
So this scandal is about as important to real world morals as the disappointing last seasons of Game of Thrones.
Scandals and drama, up to a point, increase engagement. (But that has to be managed carefully.)
Btw, I'm not saying that anyone in the industry has to consciously think like that. It's just what the competition with other forms of entertainment rewards.
The Cheetah doesn't have to understand how it runs fast, it just has to run fast. The entrepreneur doesn't necessarily have to understand the customer, we just need enough people trying so that some of them deliver what people are willing to pay for---even if those trying have the wrong idea about what they are doing works.
[+] [-] vl|4 years ago|reply
But why in this case it’s worse? Just allow sticky stuff to be used, compensate with ball design. Everyone will use it, no need to test and worry, no cheating scandals.
Reminds me of current insane F1 regulations while there exists simple way to solve most problems widely used in other series: rules that specify size of air inlets, which naturally limits power of the engine.
[+] [-] nicoburns|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Taniwha|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Australian_ball-tampering...
[+] [-] kosievdmerwe|4 years ago|reply
In cricket you can polish the ball against clothing and use sweat or saliva (with some caveats against sweetened saliva). Moreover, replacing the ball is a big event in cricket.
But yeah there have been a couple of ball tampering scandals recently in cricket. One involving pants zippers and another involving sugar in pockets IIRC.
[+] [-] makomk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gundmc|4 years ago|reply
Use of sticky substances absolutely is a big deal and the league is right to crack down, but it also gives them cover for their missteps with changing the ball. By raising the profile of the foreign substance abuses, it gives them ammunition when negotiating with the very powerful MLBPA.
[+] [-] deelowe|4 years ago|reply
It’s not the ball.
[+] [-] tw04|4 years ago|reply
Not surprisingly, Gerritt Cole at the center of this seems to have started down this path immediately after joining the Astros.
[+] [-] TwoBit|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adventured|4 years ago|reply
If you won't protect Hank Aaron's home run record, which was a staggering sports accomplishment, you're sure not going to take back a mere World Series trophy. After signaling they were ok with destroying such a large part of the game's history and what the fans enjoy, a Houston was inevitable. Houston ruined one year particularly, if they had contained it properly. Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, the steroid era overall and leaving that fraud in the record books, destroyed the game's history across more than half a century of competition. The long lineage in MLB is critical, being able to look back, measure the history, track the numbers, make a big deal of the feats, it's central to the game. Now a lot of it is garbage. How do you fix Bonds being the home run king? Juice the ball and let someone hit 80 home runs? Juice the ball and hope someone hits 800 for a career? It becomes a joke and they trapped themselves in it.
[+] [-] woofcat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oivey|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] umanwizard|4 years ago|reply
The reason this was not enforced is because nobody cared and most people involved didn’t really consider it cheating, not because enforcement is difficult.
[+] [-] thrower123|4 years ago|reply
Without that arms race, it'd be horrifically dull.
[+] [-] BrandoElFollito|4 years ago|reply
I believe that the ball does not belong to the team that pitches it, right? It is given to them by the referee (?). So what's the problem to check if there is any substance on it after the game (the part where one team has control of the ball) and if there is anything, well they are disqualified.
Or is it that nobody is interested in changing the status quo?
[+] [-] rossmohax|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jollybean|4 years ago|reply
And the coach can do this twice a game or something like that.
[+] [-] csa|4 years ago|reply
The next inning, the opposing coach reciprocates and asks for a check, also probably finding something.
Both coaches are incentivized not to check so that their pitcher is not checked.
[+] [-] llbeansandrice|4 years ago|reply
Opposing coaches just don't bother because their guys are cheating too.
[+] [-] soared|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoshTko|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnicholas|4 years ago|reply
Fun fact about the secret river mud, and also interesting that certain substances are specifically allowed.
[+] [-] listenallyall|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MisterBastahrd|4 years ago|reply
Baseball used to be the most popular sport in America. Now it's third. I don't think soccer will ever actually catch it, but that's mostly because MLS is run by the same sort of stubborn people as MLB.
Nobody ever really remembers teams with great pitching. They don't really give them names. There's no "Murderer's Row" of pitching in MLB history. There's a reason for that.
A home run is something everyone instantly understands. New to the game, old to the game, whatever, it gets people excited. So does hitting and base running. People want to see people hit the ball and score runs in baseball. A walk-off homerun to end a big game is remembered forever by everyone who watched it.
Pitching, by contrast, is usually only fully appreciated in retrospect. You don't throw a no-hitter until the last out is counted. Same for a perfect game. A perfect game in the second inning is just a second inning. A home run in the second inning is something that gets everyone out of their seats. The final strikeout of a big game is remembered by fans of the winning team. but it's a footnote for everyone else.
So for entertainment's sake, if you're going to either have great pitching or great hitting, you damned well should be focused as an executive to make sure that the hitting is as good as it can get, because the people who care the most about your sport at this point are boomers, stat nerds, and bookies.
My 86 year old grandmother who passed 3 years ago? She LOVED to watch baseball with my grandfather. Likewise, my other grandfather would watch whenever he could except for when a John Wayne movie was on. My parents couldn't care less, and in my social group of about 40 boys, only two watched the sport on a regular basis.
[+] [-] chupchap|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colordrops|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rvba|4 years ago|reply
Checking gloves, gear, even by a doctor and banning cheaters is the way.
But article states that this type of cheat is in the history of the sport.
[+] [-] paulv|4 years ago|reply