‘Almost everyone is using something’: Getting a grip on how MLB pitchers are cheating

Your favorite pitcher is probably cheating.

A large majority of big league pitchers right now are using some sort of extra-grip substance to impart more spin — and therefore more movement — on the ball. That’s the consensus of nearly 20 major league hitters, pitchers and pitching coaches who spoke to The Athletic in the last month. The median answer was more than three-quarters of the league, but five respondents thought the portion was much closer to 100 percent.

“Almost everyone is using something,” said a coach with experience in several major league organizations.

“My guess on total MLB players using some sort of grip enhancement … 99.9 percent,” said another coach who has worked with multiple major leaguers.

Those who are loading up with a “grip enhancement” on the mound are violating Official Baseball Rule 6.02, which states that the pitcher may not “apply a foreign substance of any kind to the ball” or “have on his person, or in his possession, any foreign substance” or “attach anything to his hand, any finger, or either wrist.”

But, rather than try to eradicate such a widespread practice, it might make more sense for Major League Baseball to legalize it.

Because of ongoing innovation in the grip substance marketplace, the difficulty of enforcement, the perils of selective enforcement and the flaws in alternative solutions, the simplest way out of this current situation may be to find some sort of substance that satisfies the pitcher’s needs and hopefully ends the race to develop better grip.

The advantages of using grip substances are unmistakable.

“It’s better than steroids,” said one player development executive about the benefits, which have been demonstrated by major league pitchers in real time before. Trevor Bauer, after making some comments about how a pitcher could add spin rate and throwing some shade at Astros pitchers, ended up doing what can only be described as a public experiment when it appears he added spin rate to his fastball for one inning in 2018, when he was with Cleveland.

“For eight years I’ve been trying to figure out how to increase the spin on my fastball because I’d identified it way back then as such a massive advantage,” Bauer himself wrote in a piece for The Players’ Tribune. “I knew that if I could learn to increase it through training and technique, it would be huge. But eight years later, I haven’t found any other way except using foreign substances.”

It wasn’t for a lack of experimentation.

“I’ve tested all sorts of different stuff in the lab up at Driveline,” Bauer told Jordan Bastian in 2018. “I sat down with a chemical engineer to understand it. At 70 mph, when we were doing the tests, spin rates jumped between 300-400 rpm while using various different sticky substances. The effect is slightly less pronounced at higher velocities — more game-like velocities — but still between 200-300 rpm increase. So, that’s a lot of the research we’ve done. We’ve done it with multiple test subjects. … And those are the results we found.”

Some of those experiments at Driveline Baseball, the data-driven center for pitching research outside Seattle, made their way into “The MVP Machine,” a 2019 book by Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik. One test left current Giants coordinator of pitching analysis Matt Daniels with baseball on his fingers and, of course, increased spin rates on his fastball. In a possibly related matter, Bauer now has the highest spin rate of any four-seam fastball in baseball.

An independent pitching development lab was kind enough to do some applied research for the purposes of this article, asking a pitcher to throw multiple times without any grip, then with pine tar on his fingers, and finally with Pelican Grip on his fingers.

The results were remarkable. Going from nothing on the ball to applying Pelican Grip added more than 300 rpm to this pitcher’s fastball and more than three inches of extra movement. That’s enough to move from 39th on the fastball spin leaderboard (Sam Selman with 2476 rpm) to first (Bauer, with 2776 rpm). See how much each substance changed the spin and movement on the same pitcher’s fastball:

These resulting changes in movement would improve this pitcher’s stuff in an apparent way. A pitcher who added this much spin to a league average fastball would expect his swinging strike rate to go up from the 10.4 percent (league average) to 11.1 percent, research on “stuff” metrics has found. That would be like going from Michael Pineda’s fastball to Trevor Bauer’s fastball, given their respective whiff rates from the last two years combined. Real improvement, more strikeouts, all from a little tacky stuff on the fingers.

It’s because of results like this that pitchers are largely turning to grip substances on the mound. The league’s average spin rate has risen steadily from 2238 rpm in 2015, when we first started tracking the stat, to 2306 in 2020. Part of that might be due to teams selecting pitchers with higher spin rate, but it also could be that more pitchers are turning to a grip substance as they see the improvement in colleagues who have used these substances before.

The practice has become so commonplace that pitchers, in past seasons, have “loaded up” in front of multiple reporters, and casually talked about the practice when off the record. Reporters have also observed infielders and catchers putting pine tar on their gloves and equipment in order to improve their grip, maybe, but also (admittedly) to add some goop to the ball for the pitcher as it’s thrown around the infield.

Perhaps because of the ubiquity, and the form that enforcement takes, very few pitchers have gotten in trouble for violating a rule that very many are disregarding every time they take the mound. In practice, a manager must ask the umpire to check the pitcher on the mound — and it could be that managers aren’t willing to go there if they know their own staff would be made vulnerable by the action.

When Brendan Donnelly was caught using pine tar on his glove in 2005, he brought with him the ill will of being a replacement player who had crossed picket lines to play during the 1994 strike. And, because Nationals manager Frank Robinson, who’d been told by a former teammate of Donnelly’s that the pitcher used pine tar, checked the pitcher, the very next night Angels manager Mike Scioscia sent the umpire to the mound to check on reliever Gary Majewski, who didn’t have pine tar anywhere the umpire examined.

Right there, you have the flaws in the way the rule is enforced shown front and center. Making the manager the enforcer means that it can be used tactically once the reward outweighs the risk.

So, maybe baseball could change the process. A pitcher in South Korea said that the umpires basically “check you up and down” before your start. Something automatic and daily like this would make enforcement less tactical and selective and more of a routine.

“If you know where to look, it’s all obvious,” said one coach. “Watching the playoffs today, there are clearly three guys touching the same spots.”

But would that catch all of the rule breakers?

Check the bill of the cap, check the glove, check the belt, check the back of the neck and under that long pitcher mane. Then suspend those infringing on the rules, and get this out of the game. Except it’s probably not that easy. Try it for yourself, if you like. Find where the six or seven pitchers in each game, on average, are getting their grip substance from. Yes, there are the obvious few, but are all of them obvious?

Here’s another clue that it’s not so easy to eliminate the use of grip substances by pitchers: Baseball itself announced an intention to crack down on the practice in 2020, but the results of that effort are not obvious to the public. In an internal memo obtained by Lindbergh before the season, MLB senior vice president Chris Young points out that umpires may decide on their own without the prodding of a manager and adds that the clubs themselves have some responsibility to quell the cheating.

“It is the responsibility of each Club to ensure that its staff and its players understand the rules set forth in this memorandum,” Young wrote. “Clubs may be subject to sanctions by the Commissioner for failing to adequately educate their staff and players on the applicable rules.”

And … not one pitcher was cited this year. One clubhouse manager was fired for selling grip substances to visiting pitchers, and that’s seemingly all that happened.

MLB declined to comment for this article, but The Athletic has confirmed with multiple sources that the league has spoken to teams about the issue and is working toward finding an alternative — whether it be a new ball or an approved sticky substance — because enforcement is so difficult.

Technology is part of the reason that specific pitchers, even those with big increases in spin rate, have been able to evade punishment. Pitchers have found some substances that aren’t so easy to detect.

“Pitchers make concoctions and then use the Rhapsodo, and it makes it spin like crazy,” said one coach, pointing to the fact that ubiquitous pitch-tracking technology makes it easy for pitchers to conduct their own experiments and discover (often clear!) grip substances that change their metrics.

“Some teams ‘cook’ their own mixtures,” said another coach. “I’ve heard about some guys putting Pepsi on a stove top and heating it until it had to be cut off. When slightly heated this can be mixed with other mixtures and you create some unbelievable stick.”

With the immediate feedback provided by today’s pitch-tracking technology and the eagerness to get noticed by spin-hungry front offices, the groundwork is laid for an arms race. And not all of the substances pitchers are working with are as visible as a pine tar patch on a pitcher’s neck. Clearer options that have been tested or considered include CBD oil, lubricants, Tyrus Clear Sticky Grip, shaving cream, Sprite instead of Pepsi, and the tried-and-true rosin-plus-sunscreen trick.

(Rosin bag and pine tar stick: Hannah Foslien / Getty Images)

That last one has been around a while, and seems impossible to catch. Should pitchers be suspended for having too much sunscreen on their arms? If not, there’s already a huge hole in the plan to enforce the rules more stringently.

Pitchers often see the use of sticky substances as a collective response to a dry, dusty ball with increasingly tighter seams that are harder to grip.

“I would say a vast majority use something, but it’s because balls are so slippery after they rub them up,” said one pitcher.

You might even find some hitters who say it’s no big deal because they’d rather the pitcher had a good grip on the ball. Not all of them, though.

“This topic really bugs me when pitchers say it’s only for grip,” said one major league hitter with a different perspective. “Lots of position players use substances for grip too, so we get it. But guys are gaining insane amounts of spin and ride from using insanely sticky substances. Guys are already throwing harder than ever; we don’t need their sliders to have unconventional break.”

The idea that the substance is only there to improve command (and thus protect hitters) is also hard to square with the fact that batters hit by pitches are at an all-time high. It seems implausible that the problem would be that much worse than what is already the worst hit-by-pitch rate of all time with less pine tar, especially when other pitching trends seem to explain the plunking situation better than any pine tar addition or subtraction would.

“This has absolutely changed the way we have to approach hitting,” said one major league hitter that was adamant that something should be done about the situation and didn’t think the grip substances were saving him from any plunkings. “We have to deal with more ride. We have to deal with more break.”

But, if the ball is the reason pitchers are using pine tar, the ball can also be a way out. In South Korea, where they check every pitcher before each appearance, they also have a different ball that’s easier to grip.

“The balls in Korea are treated with something and they use powder rosin, not rock rosin, so it actually dries off in your hand and allows you to grip the ball,” said one pitcher with experience in the KBO.

Rawlings and the league are working on a tacky ball, and it was tested in the Atlantic League last year, but one complaint from a hitter seems ominous for a league that has struggled with ball changes over the last five years.

“The big difference for me was that they felt a little bit softer than the other ball,” former Reds catcher Ramon Cabrera told Newsday last year. “… I really liked it. But when we’re hitting, the balls don’t jump like the regular ones. So, we hit a couple line drives and a couple balls really hard, and the balls didn’t go anywhere.”

Does baseball want to risk taking the carry out of the ball at a time when strikeout rate also has risen to an all-time high? The reward would be that strikeouts and home runs both go down, and perhaps more balls are put in play — but the risk is that only the home run rate comes down, and viewers are rewarded with a game that is reduced to strikeouts and strikeouts alone.

Maybe that’s why baseball is reportedly considering developing and distributing an MLB-approved sticky substance, which Lindbergh reported and The Athletic has confirmed.

“Allow it,” Bauer said in 2018. “I don’t see that there’s a way to enforce it, because you can’t go check a pitcher every single inning, every single pitch, and that’s currently how it is.”

“You can get thrown out of a game and suspended for it if an umpire comes out and checks and finds out,” he continued. “But it doesn’t happen. So, pick a substance that’s sticky, that gives you all the performance benefits, and just put it on the back of the mound. That way, if you want to use it you can and everybody knows it’s being used. And, if you want to use other substances and skirt the rule, whatever. Have a certain amount of outlawed substances — Vaseline or whatever. But, if you want to use sticky stuff, it’s right there on the mound. Put your fingers on it and throw.”

(Pine tar and Tuf-Skin: Leon Halip / Getty Images)

With a couple options on the table, the least likely seems to be an all-out enforcement blitz. But some sort of action is on the table since baseball — as it has acknowledged — thinks this is a problem worth solving. With strikeout rate (and spin) at an all-time high, wiping out grip substances that give pitchers an unfair advantage might be a way to achieve more balls in play by enforcing a rule already on the books.

“Pressure is on in the league,” one coach said. “Front offices value spin and velo. If everyone around you is getting favoritism from the front office and having higher success rates because they are using sticky stuff, then you’ll most likely start to learn how to use it.”

“Something should happen,” said one hitter, before adding something disturbing for a league that was just racked by a sign-stealing cheating scandal. “Can the league do something? Absolutely. Is a little bit of cheating OK?”

Pitchers look around and see teams picking up high-spin pitchers. “You don’t have to give them a name,” reliever Ryan Buchter said once of the pitchers the Dodgers brought into camp. “You just bring in the numbers from the TrackMan, give them 10 guys and they’ll pick off of their stats. They don’t care what they look like or anything.”

These pitchers see more than three-quarters of the league using this tacky substance, and they know it doesn’t have ramifications for their bodies the way steroids did, as those performance-enhancing drugs have been shown to cause long-term issues with heart and psychiatric health. Can you blame them for joining in?

It might behoove the league to try and enforce this, but it’s also apparent that the practice is so widespread, and the grip substance research so advanced, that enforcement will be difficult, if not impossible. The league has a choice between offering options — like an approved tacky substance, or a new ball — that address the problem, or doubling down on previously unsuccessful efforts to catch the pitchers in the act.

Either way, there’s a fascinating process that starts almost every time the pitcher gets the ball back from the catcher. That series of seemingly innocuous ticks may have a calculated goal designed to impart a sticky advantage. And the way out is as difficult to track as the high-spin breaking ball that ends up sizzling its way to the plate.

(Illustration: Wes McCabe / The Athletic / Getty Images)