Photo Credit: Los Angeles Times
According to a new article by Joel Sherman, Major League Baseball will be heavily enforcing their rules about doctoring baseballs for pitchers. This could affect many great pitchers that may be using illegal substances, including Dodgers newest off-season acquisition, Trevor Bauer.
Within the article, Sherman breaks down the brief history of pitchers using illegal substances to find an edge within the game. While their is a written rule about doctoring the baseball, Sherman explains the mutual understanding of pitchers and hitters on illegal substances “But for years a gentlemen’s agreement existed not to challenge a pitcher, namely because so many were doing it that to challenge an opponent was to risk having your pitchers challenged as well.” However, now Major League Baseball is taking matters into their own hands by using their Statcast system to monitor an increase in velocity, spin, and movement.
This brings many pitchers into question on the sticky situation including the Dodgers own Trevor Bauer, who openly admitted that he used a form of illegal substance in a tweet.
I was using foreign substance to increase the spin rate illegally https://t.co/pnzgUR1NjV
— Trevor Bauer (トレバー・バウアー) (@BauerOutage) April 9, 2020
There is also evidence to further prove that he was using during the 2020 season, as baseballsavant tracks the spin rate by pitchers per season. Bauer had a dramatic increase in spin rate with all of his pitches compared to 2019, his fastball saw a 364 RPM increase, his curveball saw a 377 RPM increase, his slider a 215 RPM increase, his cutter a 268 RPM increase, and his sinker a 442 RPM increase. So this clearly backups someone’s case that Bauer used a foreign substance to gain an edge against hitters. However, Bauer has also been open about using substances to gain an edge and his been wondering himself where MLB’s stance is with enforcing this rule because it is such a gray area rule.
The news of MLB trying to crack down on this rule of banned substances has caused many people throughout the baseball industry to react. One of these people, Bauer’s agent Rachel Luba, questioned the policies herself and brought up the question of existing pitchers that have consistently used substances. While her own client does come into mind, the issue is bigger than just Bauer, with a large unknown amount of pitchers doing the same thing Bauer is doing, MLB could cause more damage to the game rather than saving it.
“Statcast data will compare spin rate to career norms”
So if you’ve been using it your whole career, you’ll be grandfathered in?
— Rachel Luba (@AgentRachelLuba) March 24, 2021
Major League Baseball seems to be going at great lengths to put a stop to the use of foreign substances with compliance officers, taking samples of balls, and lab research as mentioned in the tweet above by Jeff Passan. So where does that put Trevor Bauer in all of this? Well, so far he hasn’t responded to any of this on twitter even though he’s been known to voice his stance on things through the app. His performances will more than likely be under the microscope more than ever now with this news and the bigger question not only for Bauer will be, can these pitchers adapt?
Jacob Cisneros is a writer for Dodgers-LowDown. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram @_JacobCisneros.