Did Trevor Bauer try cheating?
In a follow-up tweet, Bauer claimed he could add 400 RPM to his fastball by using pine tar. He’s well known for using advanced technology to improve the effectiveness of his pitches. In the old days, pitchers would work on the side by adjusting their grips to figure out what effect it had on the ball. It was very much trial and error. Bauer goes way beyond that by using, as the linked article states, “Edgertronic high-speed video, TrackMan radars to Pitch F/X optical tracking cameras to Rapsodo, a radar-triggered camera system.”
Bauer’s comment caused a mini-stir on Twitter at the time. A few weeks later, Sawchik wrote an article about Bauer’s start on April 30. In the first inning of that start, Bauer’s four-seam fastball spin rate was 2579. For the rest of the game, his spin rate dropped back to the 2200-2300 range. His average for the season was 2322 RPM.
It very much looked like Bauer had done a little experiment with pine tar (or some other substance) to show the effect it had on his four-seam fastball. Bauer officially had “no comment” when asked about using something on the ball, but the numbers were persuasive.
During the 2018 season, the pine tar story was like a fire that simmered along with occasional flare-ups. Buster Olney wrote about it in April. In that piece, he pointed out that substances are commonly used by pitchers, whether it’s pine tar or a mixture of sunscreen and resin, or something else. Pitchers do it. Hitters know they do it. Umpires know they do it.
As long as it’s not blatantly obvious, no one does anything about it. One of the rare exceptions was the blatant use of something sticky by Michael Pineda in 2014 that Yankees announcers discussed in the following clip. In it, they say David Ortiz was asked about it after the game and said, essentially, “I don’t care. It’s not a big deal. Everybody in baseball does it.”
In a Bleacher Report article in May, a few major league hitters chimed in. Adam Jones said, “I use pine tar on my bat so the bat doesn’t slip out of my hands. So a pitcher can use pine tar on the ball so it doesn’t hit me in the face.” Bryce Harper and Mike Trout had similar views.