Baseball’s Sticky Secrets

Remember the good old days, when pine tar was just something that George Brett got upset about? Well, things have changed. Now Brett is known as the inspiration for a world beating pop song by a teen-ager from New Zealand. And pine tar has a lot of people upset, after the Yankees pitcher Michael Pineda was ejected from Wednesday night’s game against the Red Sox, when a smear of the sticky stuff was discovered on his neck in the second inning. Pineda had been caught by TV cameras with pine tar on his hand during his last start against the Red Sox, on April 10th, but Sox manager John Farrell hadn’t protested. This time, Farrell asked the home-plate umpire to take a look, which led to a comical scene at the mound, with the ump rubbing his finger on Pineda’s neck before promptly tossing him from the game. [Update: The league suspended Pineda for ten days on Thursday.] Meanwhile, the folks inside baseball have some explaining to do.

Pine tar, which is the sticky byproduct of a process of firing pine wood under pressure, has been a part of baseball for decades. Hitters are allowed to put it on their bats, to keep them from slipping out of their hands and flying dangerously at players on the field, or into the stands. Pitchers, meanwhile, are not allowed to use it. By the letter of the rules, they cannot “apply a foreign substance of any kind to the ball.” That includes tacky substances as well as slippery things like Vaseline. They are also not allowed to spit on the ball, rub it on their bodies, or otherwise deface it. The rationale behind these rules is that messing with the ball makes it do weird, unfair, and potentially dangerous things in flight. A lubed-up spitball, for instance, is as likely to hit a batter as it is to make it over the plate. It gets confusing, though—not all foreign substances are banned. Pitchers are allowed to use rosin, which is another gripping agent that comes from pine trees; it’s openly available in a bag kept to one side of the mound.

On Wednesday night, after the game, the roundtable of experts on ESPN’s “Baseball Tonight” mocked Pineda for his inelegant attempt at sneaking pine tar onto the ball. They did not, however, castigate him for using the stuff in the first place. That’s because, as they repeatedly insisted, everybody does it. It’s just that most people do it more covertly. They even made suggestions: put some on your sleeves; get your catcher to put it onto the ball; or ask one of your infielders to do it. Pineda wasn’t a cheater, simply a knucklehead, and, as the subtext of this conversation implied, he was ruining a good thing for all the other pitchers in the league. The Red Sox hitters, whom you’d expect to at least feign some rivalrous outrage, were ambivalent, even suggesting that a pitcher using pine tar was good for everyone. “I’d rather have a guy have control over the ball when it’s cold, but you really can’t do it that way,” the first baseman Mike Napoli said. The catcher A. J. Pierzynski offered pitchers some advice: “Put it on your hat, put it on your pants, put it on your belt, put it on your glove, whatever you’ve got to do.”

If everybody does it, and even the batters don’t mind, then why is it against the rules? In a recent post for Deadspin, the former pitcher Dirk Hayhurst laid out, in engaging detail, the various substances that big-league pitchers put on the baseball—including pine tar, shaving cream, sunscreen, and various lubricants. Despite having tried some of these himself as a player, Hayhurst is plain about the fact that all of these methods give the pitcher an unfair edge, and so should be against the rules. Pine tar may improve a pitcher’s accuracy, thus cutting down on dangerous wild pitches, but it can also make his curveballs and sliders markedly better. There is some romance in the notion of a crafty pitcher using handed-down secrets of the trade to gain a slight advantage on the mound. There’s even a term: “ball doctoring,” as if it were a science. But Hayhurst is not sentimental. Using pine tar, in his view of things, is cheating.

In the final years of commissioner Bud Selig’s tenure, Major League Baseball has taken a firm position on the need to clean up the game, to insure fairness and justice across the board, and to root out any players who are cutting corners in order to get ahead. This has mostly focussed on performance-enhancing drugs, which have been officially labelled a scourge. But watching current and former players and managers shrug about the Pineda ejection, we’re reminded that deception is still part of the mythology of the game. So is an informal code of silence, resting on the idea that fans don’t quite deserve to know how things really work, or that we might not understand if we were told. (Remember how long the league held out against the use of an instant-replay system.) It’s clear that many baseball insiders would have preferred to leave this particular wrinkle about pine tar alone—to maintain the winking status quo that left its use mostly unpunished—just as, in the past, other baseball people have preferred not to talk about the obviously more significant issues of racial discrimination, owner collusion, amphetamines, or steroids. Farrell, the Red Sox manager, looked miserable during his post-game press conference, like a cop on TV who’d been compelled to turn his partner in to internal affairs for taking one too many bribes.

Pineda has given the league an opportunity to clarify its policy. M.L.B. can admit that it has, in the past, failed to properly police the use of foreign substances by pitchers, and step up those efforts going forward. Or else it can grant the fact that pine tar, sticky sunscreen, and other bonding agents have long been an essential tool for pitching in the majors, and therefore make some standardized use of them allowable. Enforce the regulation fully, or else change it. The fewer so-called “unwritten rules” in baseball, the better.

Photograph courtesy ESPN/AP.