A rare but not unusual incident in Major League Baseball occurred on Wednesday night. New York Yankees pitcher Michael Pineda was ejected in the second inning for having pine tar on his neck.
Rule 8.02 states: “The pitcher shall not apply a foreign substance of any kind to the ball.” Nor can a pitcher scuff, cut, or otherwise mark a ball to change its aerodynamic properties. The rule has been around since 1920 after a spitball struck Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman in the head, killing him.
Pineda admitted that he applied pine tar to himself before the second inning, saying that he was having trouble gripping the ball on a cold evening. While plausible, any pine tar left on the surface of the ball would also have affected the flight of the ball, thus giving Pineda a significant — and illegal — advantage.
Pineda is likely to be suspended long enough to miss two or three starts. To MLB, it’s a player safety issue. A doctored ball is unpredictable and at speeds approaching 100 MPH, the ball can end a career and do permanent injury. Not only is the pitcher somewhat in the dark about where the ball may go, the foreign substance or other doctored attributes made to the ball cause it to break sharper and later than a legal pitch. This reduces the time a player has to get out of the way.
Of course, the fact that the ball breaks so precipitously is the reason pitchers still cheat today. The inventive ways that pitchers “load up” a ball, or cut it, scuff it, shine it, grease it, muddy it up, or otherwise change its path to the plate are limited only by imagination.
Consider the case of Hall of Fame pitcher Gaylord Perry. Perry admitted in a 1989 Sports Illustrated article that he used “K-Y jelly, vaseline, saliva, fishing-line wax, resin, sweat and dirt to make baseballs do peculiar things.” But Perry’s gambit was also psychological. He had a set routine while standing on the mound preparing for the next pitch. He’d rub his uniform front, brush his pitching hand over his leg, grab the bill of his cap with his fingers — all to make the batter think he was loading up the ball. In the end, Perry got into the head of most of his opponents, leading to a successful career.
How widespread is cheating among today’s Big League pitchers? Most pitchers will admit they know how to throw a spitter, or a shine ball, but swear they never do. In fact, it’s difficult to get away with. Most benches have one or two coaches who know all the tricks and can spot a cheater if given enough time. Game video is also examined to ferret out cheating pitchers.
That’s what happened in Boston to Pineda.
Pineda also appeared to have pine tar on his palm during an April 10 start against the Red Sox at Yankee Stadium, but Boston didn’t complain that night because the substance disappeared the inning after Red Sox manager John Farrell was made aware of it.
This time, Farrell spotted the smudge on Pineda’s neck quite clearly and brought the issue to the attention of home-plate umpire and crew chief Gerry Davis, interrupting a 1-2 count on Grady Sizemore with two outs in the second inning.
“I could see it from the dugout,” Farrell said. “It was confirmed by a number of camera angles in the ballpark. And given the last time we faced him, I felt like it was a necessity to say something.”
In 1987, Joe Niekro, playing for Minnesota at the time, was pitching against the California Angels. In the bottom of the 4th, the Angels complained to home plate umpire Tim Tschida that Niekro’s knuckleball was behaving in ways that even that wacky pitch wasn’t supposed to.
The resulting search by umpires became baseball legend.
Hall of Fame pitcher Don Sutton once remarked he should get “a Black and Decker commercial” because of all the ways he marked up baseballs.
One clever way pitchers cut and scuff a ball is by prying up the metal eyelet on their glove where the lacing is pulled through, and giving the ball a few swipes over the exposed metal surface. The resulting cuts in the ball can make it “hop” several times on the way to the plate.
Sometimes the complainer is the batter himself. There are numerous incidents over the decades of batters asking the umpires to examine a pitcher after being doused by a foreign substance flying off the ball as it whizzes by.
Also, many cut or scuffed balls make a distinctive whining sound as they flash by the batter. The normal sound of an undoctored ball is the whirring one hears as air moves over the seams. But most batters will tell you that a cut ball will have an extra high pitch — a sure sign the pitcher is up to no good.
The reaction by the Yankees front office to the incident was admirable:
Manager Joe Girardi and pitching coach Larry Rothschild had multiple discussions with Pineda after the April 10 outing, trying to make Pineda aware that pine tar use is illegal and that he would be risking discipline from the league by continuing to do so.
“We certainly are responsible,” general manager Brian Cashman said. “There’s certainly failure on our part as an organization as a whole that he took the field in the second inning with that on his neck. He’s responsible for his actions, but we failed as an organization for somehow him being in that position.”
Girardi said that Pineda’s decision to apply the pine tar was unknown to the team, and that he used “poor judgment” on Wednesday. Rothschild said that Pineda might have believed that on a windy, 50-degree night, the ends would have justified the means.
“I’m not sure that he understood the implications, and I think it was more in his mind that he needed to grip the baseball,” Rothschild said. “Whatever he had to do, I’m not sure if he thought there’d be an understanding of it, but it’s one of those things where I’m not sure he understood what the penalties were — even though I had told him what could happen. I think in his mind, he needed to grip the baseball.”
In the future, Pineda said that he will “go out there and pitch my game. I won’t use it anymore.”
Or, he will find a way to use it more surreptitiously.
The romantic notion of “sportsmanship” disappears when players are signing half a billion dollar contracts and the pressure to win a championship is felt by everyone from the president on down. It’s the same mindset that led to the steroids scandals. Unless you want to take the big money out of baseball, cheating is likely to continue to be as much of the game as the infield fly rule.
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