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Major League Baseball's recent crackdown on foreign substances used by pitchers to enhance their grip on the baseball has been met with mixed reviews from league officials, players and fans.
Spider Tack was the most controversial substance pitchers had been using. It is a substance created by a man named Mike Caruso, The Athletic reported, a retired strongman who originally intended its use for aiding with lifting 220-353-pound Atlas Stones in strongman events.
Pitchers had been using everything from Spider Tack to pine tar to a simple mix of sunscreen and rosin. Under the new regulations, everything is now banned except rosin, though pitchers must, somehow, take care not to mix it with sunscreen.
The penalty is an immediate ejection from the game and a 10-game suspension. Umpires will now conduct random checks on every pitcher to enter a game, and should they find any banned substance, the player will be immediately disciplined.
The new policy, while probably well-intentioned by the league in effort to even the playing field, has drawn the ire of pitchers for completely changing the rules in the middle of the season, rather than waiting for the conclusion of World Series to give players time to adjust.
Tampa Bay Rays starting pitcher Tyler Glasnow, for example, believes the crackdown directly led to a recent injury he suffered June 14 in his start against the Chicago White Sox. The right-hander completed just four innings and yielded two runs on three hits while striking out six before exiting with "right elbow inflammation," ESPN reported.
Team officials and fans alike shudder at the mere mention of any potential injury pertaining to the elbow of a pitcher, as season-ending Tommy John surgery, the procedure performed to repair the ulnar collateral ligament, is usually the next step.
Indeed, ESPN's Jeff Passan and the Tampa Bay Times' Marc Topkin reported the next day that Glasnow had suffered a partial tear of his UCL as well as a flexor strain. He will try to rehabilitate the injury and avoid surgery.
"I one hundred percent believe that contributed to me getting hurt," Glasnow said. "Without a doubt."
Glasnow added, in an over four-minute long answer, that after his first start without using sunscreen and rosin, he had felt sore "in places I didn't even know I had muscles in" the next morning, and how he wished MLB would have implanted this change in the offseason rather than forcing it on the players with weeks' notice.
It took only days for the new policy to take center stage as the sport's biggest controversy. Washington Nationals ace Max Scherzer was checked three times during his June 22 start, the third of which was requested by Phillies manager Joe Girardi and ended with the Philadelphia manager's ejection after he came onto the field between innings and shouted in the direction of Washington's dugout.
Later the same evening, Oakland Athletics reliever Sergio Romo appeared to mock the random check by pulling his pants almost all the way down in front of the umpire when only his belt buckle needed to be inspected.
"My view is the first two days have gone very well," Commissioner Rob Manfred told The Athletic June 23.
The first player to, supposedly, be caught with a banned substance was Seattle Mariners reliever Hector Santiago in his June 26 appearance. "Supposedly" being the operative word in this instance due to the fact that another aspect of this process is the league's refusal to check the glove itself after the confiscation, according to ESPN's Jesse Rogers. MLB appears to be leaving the judge, jury and executioner duties up to the umpires on the field.
Santiago is appealing his suspension, and as Passan tweeted June 29, it will be fascinating to see how MLB handles a non-clear-cut case.
There is still much unknown about the new policy, such as how a potential unintended mix of sunscreen and rosin will be handled, if that was the case with Santiago, and how MLB will be able to differentiate between blatant infractions and unintended mixtures. One thing is sure, in the interest of preventing more players from getting hurt or being wrongly disciplined, it would behoove MLB to release more clarification on its new regulations, and soon.