New sticky baseball pro#

During the steroid era in the 1990s and early 2000s, hitters used performance-enhancing drugs to build massive, Popeye-like forearms and biceps. Six sluggers since 1970 have been busted for using a 'corked' bat - drilling a hole in the end of the bat and filling the barrel with cork, making a large bat lighter and thus easier to swing. In 1980, Seattle Mariners pitcher Rick Honeycutt forgot he'd taped a thumbtack to his finger and accidentally gashed his face. Mid-20th-century greats like Gaylord Perry, Whitey Ford, and Joe Niekro were well-known mound scientists, lubing up spitballs or scuffing the ball with secret emery boards or sharpened belt buckles and wedding rings to make pitches break unexpectedly. In the 1910s, Chicago White Sox pitcher Eddie Cicotte threw a signature 'shine ball' coated with talcum powder hidden in his pants pocket.

New sticky baseball pro#

It goes back to the dawn of pro baseball. 'This should be the biggest scandal in sports,' a team executive recently told Sports Illustrated. Major League Baseball began sending this year's game-used balls to a lab, finding suspicious 'dark, amber-colored markings that are sticky to the touch' on a majority of specimens. The average pitcher this season is striking out 1 in every 4 batters - on par with all-time greats such as Sandy Koufax and Nolan Ryan. The stickiness enables pitchers to throw harder while maintaining control, and to increase their pitches' spin rate and make sliders, curveballs, and sinkers bend and dive like never before. Unlike the classic spitball - which pitchers began throwing more than a century ago, using Vaseline, K-Y Jelly, or actual saliva to make the ball slip out of their hand and wobble unpredictably - the new trick relies on commercial substances that give pitchers improved grip.

Pitchers have been doctoring the baseball with sticky stuff, baffling batters with enhanced pitches that can seem unhittable. The players in our national pastime have always looked for an unfair edge.