Spitballing: MLB deserves the blame for its foreign substance fiasco

“Spitballing” is a column by Nathan Ackerman about Major League Baseball.

How Gerrit Cole was not better prepared for that inevitable moment is beyond me.

It was Tuesday. The New York Yankees right-hander, the $324 million man, was addressing the New York media over Zoom. ForeignSubstanceGate had been rife in Major League Baseball spheres for the last week or so. Everyone knew what was coming (except, apparently, Cole), and Ken Davidoff of the New York Post delivered the foreseeable inquiry:

“Have you ever used Spider Tack while pitching?”

A pretty straightforward question. The answer? Anything but. Here’s the transcript:

“Um. I don’t —.” (Pregnant pause.) “I don’t know, I-I-I don’t know if, uh.” (A few more seconds of utter silence.) “I don’t know quite, I don’t quite know how to answer that, to be honest. Um.” (More human malfunctioning.)

I don’t quite know how to answer that. How about with the truth? Or, better yet, a somewhat coherent evasion of the question that any thinking person would’ve rehearsed in front of the mirror before hitting the hay the previous night?

The optics for Cole were horrendous. Even worse than the fact that his first start after MLB announced 10-game suspensions for pitchers caught using foreign substances was a suspicious five-run outing. (Better, however, than the fact that he later absolved himself with a two-run outing against the Twins, which included an 0-for-3, two-strikeout performance by Josh Donaldson mere days after he called out Cole for his slightly lower spin rates in that previous start.)

But none of that is the point. Cole made a bad situation worse by fumbling around in his proverbial bag of vocabulary words for a painful half-minute before uttering anything that resembled a language invented by humans, but he’s not the posterboy of the foreign substance movement because of it. All we discovered in that hellbound press conference is that Cole has no potential for a future in politics.

That’s because focusing on any individual player — and singling them out, pretending like they’re the root and the cause of the foreign substance issue and that all evil in the universe revolves around them — is completely counterproductive. The issue won’t be solved by independently investigating every player in the league and retroactively tarnishing their reputation. It’ll be solved when MLB actually starts to care.

That’s a nice segue into the second of the two primary culprits of the foreign substance issue, at least if you only listened to Twitter: Trevor Bauer. Bauer has been singled out by the anti-substance crowd (and by vengeful Astros shills looking for a figure to bear the brunt of their whataboutisms) as an alleged hypocrite for using the “sticky stuff” years after sounding the alarm bells about it. If you only read clickbaiting headlines, you’d surmise that Bauer criticized other players of cheating, only to go on to cheat himself, and that’s all there is to know.

The SparkNotes version isn’t entirely inaccurate, it’s just incredible reductionist history. Bauer warned MLB of this issue years ago in hopes of a level playing field — either legalize or don’t. When the league proceeded to sit on its hands and do absolutely nothing about it, Bauer (allegedly) made the only logical decision that anyone in that situation would do given its wide usage across the league and MLB’s indifference. Foreign substances didn’t give him a leg up. They placed him on an even playing field with nearly every other pitcher in the league.

This situation is in no way analogous to the pro-juicers-in-the-Hall-of-Fame crowd or the pro-Astros-banging-trash-cans crowd — a clarification I must make, as this is the point in the conversation where those two groups like to call me out for supposed hypocrisy. The argument that “everyone does it” falls flat when in the steroid era, the majority actually didn’t do it, and it falls flat in the sign-stealing debate when the response is as disproportionate and extreme as the Astros’.

But in the case of foreign substances, it’s different. As ESPN MLB insider Jeff Passan said on Tuesday’s Baseball Tonight with Buster Olney podcast: “I would say, on every pitching staff, there might be one guy who doesn’t use something. Maybe. Maybe. And I think there are some staffs where everybody uses something.” As he went on to say, that might vary from the relatively modest sunscreen-and-rosin combination to the more aggressive Spider Tack, Pelican Grip Dip or pine tar, but the point is, everyone has at least dabbled.

How did it get like this? It got like this when MLB decided to do nothing about it until this year (somewhat puzzling given its obsession with higher offensive output the last few years), pitchers realized the only way they could compete on the free agent market was to join the herd in using and it became so widespread that everyone — umpires, managers, hitters — just accepted it.

So what good does it do to single out Bauer or Cole just because their stats are better than almost everyone else’s? It’s not some crazy revelation to point out their suspicious spin rate dips or press conferences and draw the conclusion that they’ve been using the sticky stuff. The culprit of this issue isn’t the players who understandably took MLB’s inaction as tacit permission. It’s the league’s handing it down in the first place.

Bauer and Cole have each had the opportunity to deny their involvement in the foreign substance movement, perhaps most blatantly with Cole on Tuesday. Neither have.

Maybe we should consider why.