Game 69, Twins at Mariners: The Sticky Substance Shell Game
Chris Flexen vs. JA Happ, 7:10pm
The M’s won a game that had no business winning last night, as the Twins bullpen again managed to sink even lower. The Twins ‘pen is the mirror image of the M’s offense, and last night’s game was a cool microcosm of their respective seasons. The M’s offense is bad, and at home, they’re even worse. However, they’re at their best (which is a low bar, but go with me here) in close and late situations. Thus, their clutch score has been excellent this season, as a decent chunk of the comparatively few runs they scrape across are scored when the M’s really need them. Meanwhile, the Twins pitchers, and especially their bullpen, are equally hapless over all, but they too feel the gravity of close-and-late situations, and those big moments transform them. Into the worst possible versions of themselves. They’re bad, and then they get worse in the clutch. This is how a team with designs on the AL Pennant find themselves in last place and looking forward to selling at the trade deadline.
But no one cares about the M’s and Twins right now. Today, the biggest story by far is the release of MLB’s memo on pitchers using sticky substances to increase grip and generate higher spin rates. Umpires can check a pitcher for sticky substances, and because no one’s going to ask them to run tests on anything they find, *any* substance is enough for the pitcher to be ejected and face a 10-day suspension (with pay). Catchers, too, can be inspected. Managers can ask for reviews, though umpires can reject these requests and even eject a manager if they feel a request is made in “bad faith” somehow.
Pitchers, are, as a group, pretty upset about all of this. Tyler Glasow, who exited yesterday’s game with elbow soreness and is now diagnosed with a partially-torn UCL blames his injury on the crackdown: “”I just threw 80 something innings & you just told me I can’t use anything. I have to change everything.
I truly believe 100% that’s why I got hurt. I’m frustrated MLB doesn’t understand. You can’t just tell us to use nothing. It’s crazy.” Trevor Bauer agrees that a big part of the problem is the mid-season implementation of the…uh, enforcement priority (using foreign substances has *always* been illegal, but everyone in the game seemed fine with allowing pitchers to use a combination of either pine tar or rosin mixed with sunscreen). Are they right?
It depends on the magnitude of the performance enhancement one gets from pine tar or, especially, spider tack. The league has said that they will present some of this information, but it’s not clear what form that will take: are they solely going to focus on how hit-by-pitch stats change/don’t change? Or, as everyone keeps saying, is this more about generating more balls in play and/or increasing BABIP, still stuck at a multi-decade low. We’ve already seen the SI cover story calling this the “new steroids” and quoting a baseball executive saying that, “This should be the biggest scandal in sports.”
Is this another case of baseball’s ownership ham-handedly trashing players, as with steroids, and as with the contentious negotiations around last year’s Covid-shortened season and the upcoming CBA? Or did this push come from players who are upset about routine flouting of baseball’s stated/unambiguous rules? Here’s where it might be nice to go to the data to see what kind of impact this is really having. I mean, we can DO that, but you quickly run into the problem of confounding variables. So, yes, spin rates are up a bit over last year’s rates, which were up over 2019’s. But velocity is up as well, and spin rates move in tandem with velocity. Accounting for velo, the league’s average “Bauer Unit” is up fractionally.
But what about super spinny-fastballs, the pitches that have been at the center of this drama? Definitional issues abound, given the league-wide rate increase, but if we focus on four-seamers thrown with more than 2400 RPMs, we see that the batting average and overall production (wOBA) are down in 2021. However, such pitches are more likely to be barreled by batters this season. The results on those barrels aren’t as batter-friendly as they were in 2019, but barrels are more likely.
On pitches around league-average spin, wOBA is down as well (though up compared with the weird 2020 season). If we focus in on balls in play, and specifically fly balls, higher-spin fastball production is down more than average-spin production, but it’s impossible to say if it’s the spin doing the work here or if it’s velocity. Moreover, it’s probably a bit too early for any of this to really be dispositive.
The Athletic’s Eno Sarris (one of the people responsible for bringing this issue into the broader public fan’s awareness) has a great article ($) that shows that, while strikeouts are down in June (as the league’s long-rumored crackdown drew near), strikeouts *always* decline in June. I think Lucas Apostoleris at BP has shown that *something’s* going on, as a few pitchers really do seem to be seeing spin rate changes. And as Eno points out, there seems to be something to the relationship between K% and the Bauer units on four-seam fastballs. But even here, there’s room for debate. Throwing high-spin four-seamers up clearly gets more whiffs, but it leads to more fly balls and, as we’re seeing now, potentially more barreled contact. And for breaking pitches, it’s not even clear that you WANT all of this spin. MLB’s Tangotiger did an interesting look at results by spin rate using changes from the same pitcher in the same game (an individual pitcher’s rate varies by well over 100 RPM in each game, and some, like say Yusei Kikuchi, seem to exhibit even more variance). What he found was that high-spin fastballs were good for pitchers, but the lowest-spinning sliders were the best, in part because they didn’t swerve outside of the zone and end up as waste pitches or 57-foot breaking balls.
But spin is up, pitchers are using spider tack to generate more spin, and offense is down. QED, right? Well, no. We can’t talk about production without going back to the baseball itself. Today’s is not the first game-changing memo of 2021 from the league office. The first was admitting to intentionally altering the baseball to reduce its COI or bounciness, thereby reducing fly ball distance. They’ve done that. Balls hit at exactly the same angle and velocity just do not go as far this year. At least to me, this change has been poorly implemented; the league didn’t seem to anticipate just what could happen if you reduce fly ball distance, and what percentage of balls that used to be dingers would become doubles, and what percentage would be fly-outs. And as I’ve been hammering on all year, they *really* didn’t seem to guess how this would interact with the humidor-stored balls in 10 parks, nor about how this could play out in different venues. That is, this change may have had the intended effect in Colorado, with it’s gigantic outfield. But in Seattle, it has absolutely annihilated offense, and it seems clear that what’s going on in Seattle isn’t largely the result of sticky stuff.
When you see it that way, it’s hard to look at that quote from the SI story the same way. The league *could* take some of the blame for their failed attempt to generate a different kind of offense this year. Hey, it didn’t work, this stuff is complicated, unknown-unknowns, and all of that. But what if they could target something else, something that may have been going on for years and years, and say, “Forget about the ball, that over there is the biggest scandal in sports.” Changes in positioning are reducing BABIP, and the new baseball further erodes the value of hitting a fly ball. They can work in tandem, as the new ball’s higher exit velocities AND increased drag benefit infielders playing deeper, as they have more time to react to grounders. Meanwhile, some of baseball’s most effective, most whiff-producing pitches are things like Kendall Graveman’s sinker (with low spin, and with lower average spin this year than in prior years) or Pablo Lopez’s change-up. Lopez’s cambio comes in with less than 2,000 RPMs, but generates freakish armside run. John Means’ change, easily one of the best pitches in the game, used to have very high spin for a change, but Means has cut over 130 RPMs on it since 2020. But sure, the sticky stuff has completely changed the game. When in doubt, when in trouble, the league lashes out at players (a point Joe Sheehan has been making repeatedly).
Why would pitchers do it if it wasn’t all that effective? Well, I think for some of them, it is. If you have the kind of fastball that might benefit from increased rise, or if you throw over the top and want more spin on both a fastball and a curve, sure. They may be reacting to the perception that teams value high spin, and thus they could be seen as more promising or a safer bet for a contract extension. I think there’s something to that. But ultimately, these are the people who thought those Phiten necklaces or just wearing copper gave them a huge performance edge. There is real performance enhancement here, but there’s more than a little psychosomatic stuff, too.
1: Crawford, SS
2: Fraley, CF
3: France, 1B
4: Seager, 3B
5: Moore, 2B
6: Murphy, C
7: Bauers, RF
8: Torrens, DH
9: Long, LF
SP: Flexen
Yep, another catcher’s up from Tacoma, and it’s…not Cal Raleigh. It’s Luis Torrens. He’ll…DH? Whatever.
Tacoma’s wrapping up their series with Sacramento today.
Arkansas starts a series with Tulsa, Everett goes to Hillsboro to face Vancouver, and Modesto travels to San Jose.
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6 Responses to “Game 69, Twins at Mariners: The Sticky Substance Shell Game”
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I wonder if Torrens is showcasing for a trade, possibly as part of a package.
Crawford wasting no time.
And now France with a double.
Nice to see Happ roughed up a little early.
Everything’s clicking tonight.
Gee, I wouldn’t have gotten hurt if MLB didn’t decide to try and stop me from cheating like I have been…..
f’em. Karma. I have no sympathy for anyone who has been knowingly cheating and now suddenly is angry that the league has finally demanded ENOUGH ALREADY!
The timing of this is certainly questionable and it’s a clear deflection from MLB’s own failures with changes to the baseballs.
You can have multiple parties at fault. There isn’t always a good guy, and that might be the case here.