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Post by PABraveFan on Jun 15, 2023 9:09:58 GMT -5
Today is Thursday 6/15. Had me confused a bit there with the heading.
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Post by wncbravesfan on Jun 16, 2023 10:07:16 GMT -5
Braves veteran Charlie Morton opines on sticky stuff and a better way to control it David O'Brien
ATLANTA — The question for Charlie Morton was about pitchers using sticky stuff, a subject back in the headlines after Major League Baseball suspended Mets reliever Drew Smith 10 games on Wednesday, one day after being ejected when an umpire’s routine check of his hands revealed what was deemed a substance too sticky and banned.
But what was it? And what is the threshold for “too sticky”? Morton, 39, whose curveball spin rate has been among the highest in baseball for years, said there is a better way — using spin-rate data now readily available to everyone — to determine whose spin rates are suspicious and to test those pitchers, rather than trying to find who’s using banned substances by asking umps to feel a sweaty pitcher’s hands as he’s walking on or off the field. He said there are too many factors for that method of checking to be accurate.
“I think it puts everybody in a difficult position,” Morton said. “Because you’re asking umpires to subjectively determine if someone’s hand is sticky enough to warrant a warning/request to wash it off, it seems like. Or just flat-out eject somebody. The umpires, I feel like, have been put in a pretty tough spot. And they’re affecting not only that game but the future games in a 10-day period of that team and whoever they’re playing.
“Maybe if they said, ‘Hey, you’re out of this game,’ the impact would be mitigated by a shorter punishment term. But I just feel like they’re put in a tough spot, because it’s like, if you feel somebody’s hand is sticky, it’s one thing to say, ‘Hey, go wash your hand off,’ and it’s another thing entirely to be responsible for basically doling out a 10-game suspension.”
Morton has always welcomed the hand check, or any other scrutiny, because he said he’s among pitchers able to spin the ball at a high rate naturally. He said he’s never used anything more than rosin or sunscreen to increase grip, but that such substances are necessary at times, especially in cold and/or dry conditions, or with some balls that feel particularly chalky or slick.
But rosin, which is not just permitted but supplied by MLB for pitchers in every game — it’s in a bag at the back of the mound — reacts differently on the fingers and hands of different pitchers, Morton said.
Umpire Bill Miller ejects Drew Smith on June 13. (Vincent Carchietta / USA Today) “Here (in Atlanta), and I’m sure in Houston, Miami — anywhere that gets hot and humid, the rosin, when it’s mixed with your sweat, it can get sticky,” he said. “If you know what rosin is — that’s one of the first things that (former Braves minor-league coach) Eddie Watt showed me in rookie ball, because I always saw the guys on TV playing with the rosin bag. My first professional bullpen, I picked up the rosin bag, and he said, ‘What are you doing?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know, this is what I’ve seen the guys do on TV.’ (Morton laughs.) And he was like, ‘Let me show you.’ And he got some rosin on his hands, or told me to get some on my hands, and said, ‘Rub your hands together really quickly.’
“We were in Orlando, at Wide World of Sports (the Braves’ spring training camp then). And lo and behold, my hands got sticky. And it’s a different kind of stick. It’s not like a viscous stick. It’s kind of like a surface layer, where there’s just friction, but it doesn’t feel like there’s a layer of substance on your hand.”
To be clear, Morton doesn’t believe pitchers shouldn’t be checked and penalized for overly sticky substances. To the contrary, as someone who said he’s worked to hone his curveball since spin-rate data was introduced in 2015, he thinks it’s wrong for some to take shortcuts or cheat by using extremely sticky substances, most notoriously Spider Tack, which was developed for use by weightlifters and strongman competitors.
Before MLB banned substances such as Spider Tack and various custom formulas in 2021, there were glaring examples of pitchers whose spin rates increased dramatically in short periods, increases that couldn’t be produced by just gripping a ball differently.
“I know myself, from being accused of using sticky stuff to up my spin rates, and looking leaguewide — because of all the spin data that’s available now — that some of those numbers are ridiculous,” Morton said. “Guys spinning fastballs at 2,800 or 2,900 RPMs, and breaking balls at 3,500, 3,600 RPMs on a regular basis, is — being a guy that can do it naturally — it’s frustrating. Because you’re like, ‘Dude, I could put Spider Tack on my hands and I could spin a baseball at 2,700 RBP at 96 miles an hour, and know that my breaking ball — because I’ve spun a breaking ball at 3,300 with zero (substance) on my hand — knowing that I could probably be spinning a breaking ball with 200-300 more RPMs than that regularly, knowing that, it’s frustrating.
“But at the same time, the precedent set by the league and by players, and by what was allowed for decades, was that it basically became an unwritten rule: Like, hey, if you feel like you needed stick on your hand to feel the ball, you used stick on your hands. But then it became something else.”
What it became is something that MLB contributed to by looking the other way, and team officials contributed to by rewarding pitchers who achieved massive spin rates that raised eyebrows but didn’t stop teams from trying to land those pitchers.
GO DEEPER
All your questions about MLB pitchers, Spider Tack and other foreign substances, answered
“Then it wasn’t just about feeling the ball, feeling the seams when it was cold out or dry out,” Morton said. “It became about knowingly altering the surface of the fingers to induce more spin. And guys were being incentivized to do that, because if you spin a ball at 3,000 RPMs and you back-spin a baseball, if you hop a baseball at 20-plus inches and you’re spinning it at 25, like, they’re paying you to do it. You’re telling me some of these organizations aren’t pulling guys aside and saying, ‘Hey, try this, try that’?”
Since the ban on sticky substances, hand checks by umps have led to five pitchers being suspended including two Mets this season; Max Scherzer was suspended for 10 games in April, and argued that he used nothing illegal. Morton said some pitchers had to completely alter what they did to become successful, and that umpires are the ones put in the middle.
Umpire Phil Cuzzi ejects Max Scherzer on April 19. (Vincent Carchietta / USA Today) “It just put everybody in a bad position,” Morton said. “Because guys were getting signed, or traded for, or even drafted, I’m sure, based on all these numbers. And then it was, like, ‘Hey, cold turkey. Cold, hard stop.’”
And that wasn’t realistic for some pitchers, Morton said.
“I’m not going to mention names, but you saw guys publicly come out and go, ‘I can’t pitch like this,’” Morton said. “I mean, and now you’re putting it on umpires to determine whether or not the hand is too sticky. It just put everybody in a bad spot.”
Morton explained why rosin in particular has caused so much confusion among umpires and pitchers.
“Rosin is just tree sap,” he said. “If you’ve ever been around a Christmas tree, alcohol breaks down (rosin). That’s exactly what’s happening, you’re basically melting it with alcohol into a liquid form. Like a different viscosity, turning it into a liquid. I noticed that after outings during the COVID season (2020). I would pitch, and I would use rosin, and then after the game, I would put hand sanitizer on, because I was trying to be responsible. And I was like, ‘Holy crap. This is extremely sticky.’
“I mean, you obviously would know what you’re doing, but under the guise of being safe and healthy, you could put rubbing alcohol or hand sanitizer on your hands for each inning — like, ‘I just wanted to be safe’ — and you would have some of the stickiest hands in the league. And there’s no way, because the environment changes — each individual may sweat more or less, and even oils on your skin are different. Who knows, all these variables can change how sticky rosin is on its own.”
He said many pitchers who use rosin aren’t trying to cheat, but some other pitchers using other substances are trying to get an unfair advantage.
“It’s like, the Spider Tack stuff …” he said, and pauses for 15 seconds. “There’s just such a difference between Spider Tack and sunscreen and rosin, to me. Like, just on a purely moral basis, stuff-wise … like, I’ve heard stuff about Spider Tack and I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ Like, it’s peeling the leather off of the ball. Guys would look down and see bits of leather on their fingers because the stuff is so sticky. And that, to me, that’s crossing the line.
“But if a guy can’t feel the baseball — it’s like sawdust some nights. It feels like this ball is literally rubbed up with chalk. And then they’re saying, ‘Hey, go control this. And make sure you don’t get hit around.’ And it’s 40 degrees out and raining. And for some guys, it’s just a ridiculous request.”
Morton believes there is a way to find those who are using the more extreme sticky substances: By looking at their spin-rate data year-to-year and game-to-game. He doesn’t think pitchers should be able to use anything extremely sticky just to jack up their spin rates.
“Because it might take a guy who’s below average in spin and make him an average spinner,” he said. “And it might take a guy who’s a high-spin guy and make him elite spin. And I feel like, really what the problem was — if you’re backspinning a fastball at 2,800 RPMs with 100 percent spin efficiency, and you’ve got like 22 to 25 inches of hop, your ball’s literally defying gravity. The brain can’t comprehend what that ball is doing. Those are the guys that I think should be under scrutiny.
“Like, if you want to say (to Morton), ‘Hey, you’re spinning curveballs at 3,300 RPMs every single time you throw a curveball, that’s suspect,’ you’re 100 percent right. Just like we have the CDT (drug testing) guys come in (the clubhouse). Like, ‘Hey, Chuck, you’re 39 years old and you’re still throwing 96 to 98 (mph), we should probably drug test you more frequently.’ That’s completely justified.
“But part of me thinks that if your tools are kind of average, that kind of scrutiny might not be justified. And I’m not saying that’s what umpires are doing; I don’t think that’s what they’re doing. I think umpires want to call balls and strikes, and they want to call safe or out, fair or foul. They don’t want to be involved in all this stuff.”
Morton added, “I don’t know what the right thing to do is. I just feel like we have the tools now to determine whether or not a guy’s able to make a ball, given the physics of a baseball, exceed what you should be able to do naturally without some kind of sticky stuff. Is the guy whose ability to spin the ball on a 3 out of 10 level, and it puts him up on a 5 or a 6, is that unfair? Yeah. Because he’s screwing the guy that’s not using the stuff, but is still getting by with 3 out of 10 stuff for spin. But I feel like the guy that’s elite already, and he’s using some kind of substance — those are the guys that I think the rule was intended for. The guys that are like, (hitters saying), ‘Dude, I can’t even see this ball. I swing at it and it’s a foot above the bat.’”
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Post by wncbravesfan on Jun 16, 2023 10:26:09 GMT -5
Mark Bowman @mlbbowman · 1h Even with the Rockies starting a RHP tonight, Snit is planning to keep Albies in the second spot.
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Post by wncbravesfan on Jun 16, 2023 13:10:31 GMT -5
David O'Brien Retweeted Ken Rosenthal @ken_Rosenthal · 6h Latest notes!
*Owners’ chance to question A’s move
*D-backs planning to push
*Reds positioned to buy
*Cardinals’ fielding woes, need for shakeup
*The “Pillow-fight” divisions
*Waiting for Twins’ offense
*Attendance on rise
*Bieber, Burnes, more
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Post by TomlinFoolery on Jun 16, 2023 15:30:07 GMT -5
Braves sticking with Ozzie in 2 spot, d'arnaud catching, hitting 4th, Olson remains in 5th today. Ozuna batting 6th as DH Rosario in left batting 7th. Arcia 8th, MH2 9th. Acuña goes without saying. Riley still at 3, but if he keeps slumping, I wonder if he too might see a slide down the line up?
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Post by Hart's Middle Finger on Jun 16, 2023 15:37:19 GMT -5
Braves sticking with Ozzie in 2 spot, d'arnaud catching, hitting 4th, Olson remains in 5th today. Ozuna batting 6th as DH Rosario in left batting 7th. Arcia 8th, MH2 9th. Acuña goes without saying. Riley still at 3, but if he keeps slumping, I wonder if he too might see a slide down the line up? I doubt he moves Riley after it took this long to move Olson.
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Post by wncbravesfan on Jun 16, 2023 18:10:16 GMT -5
Tonight's lineup: Acuna RF Albies 2B Riley 3B d'Arnaud C Olson 1B Ozuna DH Rosario LF Arcia SS Harris II CF
Shuster RHP
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