Was St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Gallegos singled out for ‘sticky stuff’? He thinks so
St. Louis Cardinals reliever Giovanny Gallegos said Wednesday he was “offended” by being singled out and asked to switch hats in Chicago on May 26 after umpires noticed a dark spot on his cap’s brim.
In his first public comments after the incident, Gallegos spoke to the News-Democrat on Wednesday near the Cardinals dugout, echoing concerns from around the league about the way players might be unfairly singled out by Major League Baseball’s planned crackdown on foreign substance use by pitchers.
“That entire situation, I felt really uncomfortable,” Gallegos said through team Spanish translator Antonio Mujica. “I felt like I was being kind of like publicly singled out for something that basically had nothing to do with everything that was going on in that game.
“I felt like I was used as a starting point for something that’s been going on forever.”
Gallegos, who says he does not and has not used illegal substances such as Spider Tack and Pelican Grip which are roiling the game, said that, “there’s a lot of other people that use other things and never got singled out the way I got singled out.”
Indeed, publicly available data seems to corroborate Gallegos’s claims of innocence. Changes in the spin rate of his pitches, as published by MLB’s Baseball Savant, have been negligible this season before, during, and after that appearance.
The public nature of MLB’s planned enforcement, which goes into effect Monday, has left pitchers scrambling to defend their reputations even as they deny being in violation of the league’s rules. Detroit’s Casey Mize was asked to switch gloves by home plate umpire John Tumpane on Tuesday night in Kansas City because, Mize said, Tumpane felt the color of his glove’s leather was too light.
“I assume everyone thinks that I was using sticky stuff, which I was not,” Mize told reporters after the game. “I just thought the timing of it was pretty (expletive), honestly.”
Cardinals reliever Andrew Miller, who is a member of the Major League Baseball Players Association’s executive subcommittee, met with reporters on Tuesday night to discuss some of the concerns that accompany the announced enforcement plan, which includes 10-day suspensions with pay for any players or staff found to be in violation of the prohibition.
St. Louis Cardinal reliever Miller calls it a ‘gray area’
Under the new policy, Gallegos would probably have been suspended, regardless of what was determined to have been on his hat.
“There’s been a gray area that has been comfortably worked in for years and years,” Miller said. “And I think that maybe we’re at a point where either the gray area was abused, or maybe the position of all the analytics and what they tell us maybe told us more about what was actually happening.”
Indeed, players say that benign substances like a mixture of sunscreen and rosin — a mixture which Cardinals manager Mike Shildt has defended as accepted by all in the game — serves only to improve grip and allow hard throwing pitchers to guide the ball accurately.
The more advanced chemicals introduce excessive spin to the ball, making it move in unpredictable ways and driving up strikeout rates at the same time it increases the rate of batters hit by pitches around the league.
Miller’s point about analytics is reflected in the ubiquity of systems like Edgertronic slow motion cameras which can measure to the single revolution per minute the spin of a pitched ball.
A tacky substance allows a pitcher’s fingertips to remain in contact with the ball for miniscule fractions of seconds longer than an untreated hand; that extra spin, roughly 200 to 300 RPMs added to a projectile traveling 60 feet, six inches in half a second, can bump a fastball from 2500 RPMs to 2800 RPMs, and can bump a pitcher’s strikeout rate by several percentage points.
Tampa Bay pitcher discusses usage of foreign substance
The extra feel provided by substances also, according to some players, takes away stress from the already unnatural motion of pitching a baseball. Tampa Bay Rays star Tyler Glasnow admitted Tuesday that he’d previously used a sunscreen and rosin mixture that allowed him to hold his curveball “like an egg.”
On June 8, against the Washington Nationals, Glasnow cut out his sunscreen usage and described waking up the next day with unusual soreness. On June 14, he started against the Chicago White Sox, and left the game with an elbow injury that could cost him at least the rest of this season.
“It’s not uncommon for the unforeseen consequences to be bad when we change some of the things,” Miller said after admitting he hadn’t considered the possibility of a spike in player injuries. “That just goes back to, you know, I think that usually these things work out best with a lot of player input.”
The press release which MLB distributed to the media Tuesday announcing the new policy featured quotes from commissioner Rob Manfred as well as Michael Hill and Raul Ibañez, who are both executives in his office. Bill Miller, president of the MLB Umpires Association, was also cited in support of the policy.
No active player or staff member of the MLBPA was quoted therein.
Pitchers expect relatively little sympathy for their predicament; the prohibition on foreign substance application to a pitch ball is one of the game’s oldest, dating to the use of tobacco juice to darken balls which may not be replaced for the duration of a game.
Concerns over being labeled a ‘cheater’
Public enforcement of that policy, though, potentially in front of the public, has players concerned about being affixed with the label of ‘“cheater” for merely operating inside a system which has only encouraged their current routines — right up until this coming Monday.
“I got a couple messages from pitchers around the game saying, ‘don’t worry about it, that’s something that’s been around forever,’” Gallegos said, explaining that his peers encouraged him to “just keep pitching.”
“I don’t really give a lot of mind to that.” Gallegos concluded. “If pitchers are using or not using, I don’t care. I go out there and do my job every day.”
