Baseball’s rule against the use of foreign substances has been buried for decades under a gentlemen’s agreement between managers, who almost uniformly refused to ask umpires to screen opposing pitchers because they knew their own pitchers would not be screened. .
But with Major League Baseball poised to order umpires to enforce the foreign substance rules starting Monday, at least three teams intend to sideline that old agreement, according to sources. If the managers of those teams receive information that seems suspicious (a video capturing an opposing pitcher perhaps using foreign substances or data on an unusual increase in the speed of the spin) they will ask the umpires to check the opposing pitchers.
If only a handful of teams start requesting foreign substance controls, the gentlemen’s agreement could become obsolete, with most or all teams willing to monitor opposing pitchers.
A senior talent screener explained his organization’s perspective the other day, while asking not to be identified.
“We’ve been telling our pitchers that if they’ve been using it, they should stop,” said the evaluator. “We seek to level the playing field. The whole sport seeks to level the playing field. We have an expectation that our guys will abide by the rule. If we have an indication that there is someone pitching for the other team who might be doing something to get a competitive advantage, yes, we want our manager to challenge him. “
Employees of two other organizations echoed similar sentiments: that as long as there is a sports-wide devotion to a level playing field and the removal of foreign substances, they will expect opponents to abide by the rule as well.
The use of foreign substances has been widespread and essentially in the open air for many pitchers across the baseball landscape. When pitchers rubbed the bright spot on the forearm of their gloved hands, almost everyone in the sport (umpires, managers, coaches, players) knew that they were probably accessing some mixture of sunscreen, rosin, and pine tar, which is against long-standing rules.
But almost all managers have looked the other way instead of asking umpires to check, mainly to protect their own pitchers. There have been rare exceptions. In a game between the Yankees and the Red Sox in 2014, on a cold early-season night at Fenway Park, Michael Pineda He struggled to control and control the ball in the first inning, and complained about this to his teammates after the first half of the inning. When he returned to the mound for the bottom of the second, he had a drop of pine tar on his neck that had been applied by a fellow veteran, a lump of foreign substance so large that it immediately caught the attention of the cameras of a television audience. national.
As buzz in the stadium grew, Red Sox manager John Farrell came out of the Boston dugout to ask for Pineda to be checked, but as Farrell explained years later, he really had no desire to do this, but He felt he had no other choice given Pineda’s heinous way of doing it. Joe Girardi, the Yankees manager at the time, acquitted Farrell and told reporters that he understood Farrell was in a difficult position. The referees expelled Pineda, who was subsequently suspended 10 games.
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