Southpaw 39: A Sticky Situation
Major League Baseball has been enveloped by a scandal involving a substance known as "Spider Tack."
Dear readers,
We’ve reached the last week in June, which means that any day now, the Supreme Court will hand down its decision in National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston, in which the Court will decide whether the NCAA’s limit on certain non-cash benefits for athletes violates federal antitrust law. As we wrote in our preview of the case in March, the Court’s decision could have major implication for the future of the NCAA and its “amateurism” model, which, at least in the eye of the law, gives it the right to profit from the labor of its athletes without compensating them for their efforts.
During oral arguments in March, the Court’s conservative and liberal justices alike seemed skeptical of the NCAA’s arguments, but we’re waiting to see whether that skepticism will translate into their decisions. Knowing our luck, the Court will probably release its opinion on Monday, and we’ll have to sit idly through multiple cycles of punditry before delivering our take. C’est la vie. In the meantime, you can brush up on the facts of the case by reading our preview, which includes an extended reading list of the best coverage of the case from around the web.
This week, we’re tackling a slightly less lofty situation: Major League Baseball’s decision to crack down on “pitch doctoring”. As always, please send your feedback, comments, and questions, and share widely with your friends and neighbors!
-Calder & Ian
Five Takes—from plausible to crackpot and everywhere in between—on the “sticky stuff” scandal roiling baseball
On Tuesday, Major League Baseball announced plans to buttress the league’s enforcement of Rules 3.01 and 6.02(c), informally known as the “sticky stuff ban,” which prohibit pitchers from applying foreign substances to baseballs to improve their grip, alter the ball’s aerodynamics, or otherwise guck up its pristine leather surface. According to the league’s new enforcement regime, pitchers will be subject to frequent in-game checks from umpires, and any player found to be in violation of the rule will be ejected from the game and will face a 10-game suspension (with pay).
To be clear, the “stick stuff ban” has been on the books for decades, but the league has largely turned a blind eye toward pitchers who rely on a little something extra—most commonly a slurry of rosin and sunscreen—to make the balls a bit grippier. Over the past couple of years, pitchers’ arsenal of goops has expanded to include a wider array of sticky stuff—including an industrial-strength gripping agent called Spider Tack—which, apparently, crosses MLB’s (previously nonexistent) ethical line.
Fans, players, and coaches received MLB’s announcement with a mix of anger and incredulity—Why suddenly enforce a decades-old rule? Why in the middle of a season?—but we’d like to highlight five takes on MLB’s new enforcement regime that go beyond the well-rehearsed discourse surrounding cheating in baseball to capture something important about the broader political dynamics at play. We don’t necessarily endorse all these takes in their entirety, but we think they’re all worth chewing on.
Take #1: The sticky stuff ban is a distraction tactic.
As a number of Twitter pundits pointed out, MLB is currently fending off numerous other scandals, all of which are potentially more damaging than the sticky stuff controversy. Here’s an insightful Twitter thread highlighting six of them:
As if to underscore this interpretation, we were reminded this week that most Major League teams do not pay their minor league players enough to survive:
Unsurprisingly, this story didn’t get nearly as much traction as the stick stuff controversy—and that might be exactly the point. MLB can carry on with its really nasty and treacherous labor practices so long as fans and pundits are busy arguing about relatively stupid stuff like Spider Tack—which sounds pretty cynical and conniving until you realize … that it really works.
Take #2: The sticky stuff ban is corporate misdirection.
This take is really just a sub-take of Take #1, but MLB might be using the new enforcement regime to distract from a much more immediate scandal: the fact that MLB itself routinely doctors balls.
It’s well documented that MLB, which owns the company that manufactures the baseballs, changes the composition of the balls from year to year to suit its needs. (For one possible read of this, see Take #4.) With this in mind, it seems entirely plausible that the league would gin up a scandal that puts players in the hot seat while quietly maintaining its own monopoly on ball doctoring.
Take #3 The sticky stuff ban in a money-making scheme.
You might be tired of hearing this from us, but when it comes to analyzing weird and confounding decisions by professional sports leagues, one factor matters more than any other: money. Of course, a crude materialist interpretation of MLB’s decision might be a bit reductive, but in this case, it isn’t too much of a stretch: sticky stuff leads to more strikeouts; more strikeouts leads to less offense; less offense leads to more boring games; more boring games mean fewer ticket sales to line MLB’s coffers. Ergo, less sticky stuff means more money for the league. Voila.
Take #4: The sticky stuff ban is…wage manipulation!
This take, courtesy of New York Mets slugger Pete Alonso, is almost too radical and diabolical for Southpaw . . . but not quite. When asked for his thoughts on MLB’s decision, Alonso had this to say: “The biggest concern is MLB manipulates the baseballs year in and year out depending on the free agency class . . . Oh, no, that's a fact. Yes, guys have talked about it. It's not a coincidence. It definitely is something that they did."
Pete’s take runs afoul of Take #3, but it shares its underlying logic: MLB appears to juice balls when the free-agent class is predominantly pitchers (as it did during the 2019 season) and deadens them when the free agency class is predominantly hitters (as it has done this year), thereby artificially depressing the wages of the upcoming free-agent class. It’s unclear how Pete’s take maps onto the sticky stuff ban—Pete said, “Maybe if the league didn’t change the baseball, pitchers wouldn’t need to use as much sticky stuff”—but we’re here for it, one way or another.
Take #5: The sticky stuff ban is class war.
Well, not exactly, but there is a pretty good case to be made that there is an element of good old-fashioned management-worker animosity involved in the new enforcement rules. As Defector’s David Roth wrote this week, MLB does seem to gleefully participate in the age-old tradition of devising newly annoying and invasive ways to police workers’ behaviors in their workplaces: “There is, running under and through all this, the league office’s cynical and self-interested fixation on finding ways to make the players look grasping and unsympathetic, an ancient and reflexive obsession that Commissioner Rob Manfred has seized upon whenever and wherever he can as the sport’s owners prepare for a lockout after the league’s collective bargaining agreement expires this winter.” He’s not wrong.
What we think
Fair competition is important, and based on how pitchers have dramatically improved their “spin rate” to be much more effective than they used to be, there’s clearly something going on that’s more nefarious than rubbing a baseball with a little sunscreen. The broader issue is that Major League Baseball and its commissioner, Rob Manfred, seem to have essentially no understanding of why fans enjoy the game. Manfred himself is constantly grousing about all of baseball’s problems and doing things like gutting the minor leagues in order to clear a slightly higher profit margin for the people in charge. In light of all of that, it’s hard to believe that he cares much at all about “fair competition.” The reason that theories like Alonso’s seem plausible is this is what we’ve come to expect from the people who run the sport.
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