MLB gearing up to refocus on ‘sticky stuff’ enforcement: Here’s what it could

CLEARWATER, Fla. — For the third straight season, Major League Baseball is gearing up to address the use of “sticky stuff” by pitchers across the sport.

Major-league sources told The Athletic that message emerged loud and clear over the past week at MLB’s annual spring meetings with clubs being updated on new rules and other changes for the coming season. In those meetings, sources say, MLB has informed club officials it will encourage umpires to refocus on the use of sticky stuff this season.

Teams have not been told yet of every step umpires could take as part of that effort. But according to those sources, who have knowledge of MLB’s meetings with the clubs, this is what could happen:

• Umpires’ inspections of pitchers’ hands and fingers, which began last season, would be more thorough than the often-perfunctory inspections that umpires performed last year.

• Those inspections would also be more random, as opposed to last season, when inspections of starting pitchers were generally performed after the same innings every game. Hitters have suggested that pitchers were using stickier substances in innings when they knew they wouldn’t be checked. And as The Athletic’s Eno Sarris has written, inning-to-inning variation in SVR (Spin to Velocity Ratio) has raised eyebrows.

• Umpires also could resume checking pitchers’ caps, gloves and belts — a practice they employed in 2021 but abandoned in 2022 in favor of more streamlined inspections of hands and fingers.

• Most significantly, umpires would be empowered to be more aggressive about inspecting pitchers than in the past. So if an umpire observed a pitcher wiping his hand in the same spot repeatedly, for example, the ump could go to the mound, to perform an inspection, in the middle of an inning.

Team officials were told these moves are not in response to any particular incident, such as Mets manager Buck Showalter’s celebrated request that umpires check the ears of Padres pitcher Joe Musgrove during last year’s postseason. Instead, this effort is a response to data that shows spin rates have ticked up steadily since MLB’s much-ballyhooed June 2021 crackdown on Spider Tack and other high-potency sticky stuff.

As Sarris wrote in another story last September, that data seems like a clear indication pitchers have found substitutes for Spider Tack that are less detectable and easier to mask or wipe away. What does that data show? Take a look at how average spin rates, for four-seam fastballs, spiked just before the crackdown in June 2021, dipped dramatically after the crackdown, and now have crept back up in the months since.

(*month before crackdown)
(**month after crackdown)
(***MLB begins inspections of pitchers’ hands and fingers for the first time)

(Source: Eno Sarris, Statcast)

As that chart…