With MLB rules, is Mets’ Max Scherzer a cheater or a victim?

There’s a stretch of freeway on I-94 through the middle of Chicago where the posted speed limit is 45. Needless to say, if you actually drive 45 during the few times when traffic is flowing smoothly, you will find other drivers closer to your rear bumper than the average trailer hitch. But if you drive the same speed as everyone else, you might get pulled over. That seems unfair, but one of the certainties of life is that if the cops on the side of the road can pull over just one of the thousands of speeding cars, they will choose you.

Which brings us to Max Scherzer of the New York Mets, who is facing a 10-game suspension for reportedly having some sort of illicit substance on his glove during a game. Scherzer, of course, claims to be utterly befuddled by his ejection and suspension. He states that the only substance on his glove was rosin, which is legal. The umpires state that the substance in question was stickier than rosin, which seems like an awfully subjective standard, especially since all three ejections since the new standard went into effect have been handed out by the same umpiring crew.

If you’re Scherzer, you no doubt feel like the one guy on the freeway who got a ticket for speeding, except that in this case the speed limit is a matter of opinion. There are umpiring crews that barely glance at or touch a pitcher’s glove between innings … and most of them have enough of a routine that a smart pitcher would be able to find a new hiding place for sticky stuff if he wanted to. Scherzer happened to catch the one crew that believes the rules are the rules.

Most pitchers say they need some way to improve their grip or they would have no control over where the ball ended up. Another way to improve control would be to throw 85-90 miles per hour rather than 95-100 or more, which is the way baseball worked for the first 100 years or so of its history. It’s doubtful that many pitchers would sign up for that, or that those who have found a way to make the ball break in a way that seemingly defies the laws of physics will happily surrender the tools that allow them to do so.

Athletes tiptoeing right up to the line of what is permissible (and occasionally just over that line) is as old as sports itself. It’s certainly more likely to happen when a rule is as vague and unevenly enforced as this one. You can’t, for instance mix sunscreen with rosin. However, certainly in an afternoon game, pitchers can’t be expected to take the field without some sort of protection from the sun, and we all know that stuff ends up everywhere but where you need it (like my eyes, more often than not). We don’t know if Scherzer was doing the same thing he always does and finally came across umps who rigorously enforce the rules. Maybe he got the mixture wrong on this particular day, resulting in a slightly more viscous blend and placing him just on the other side of the line that he has always steered clear of.

Or maybe these umps just have a different line from everyone else. We know, for example, that some NFL refs are orders of magnitude more likely to call holding and pass interference than others, regardless of who is playing. And we all know that Chris Paul somehow lost 13 consecutive playoff games that were officiated by Scott Foster.

Maybe all those things are a coincidence. But I have been watching football for 50 years and I still guess wrong about half the time about pass interference. That’s what happens when a rule is poorly defined and inconsistently enforced. That’s how Max Scherzer could feel certain that he was operating within the rules while the umps thought he was doing something so egregious that he should be ejected from one start and suspended long enough to miss two more.

There is no easy answer, not when the standard involves something as vague as “stickiness.” But surely we can do better than this.