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Unless you have been living under a rock for the last month, you have probably heard that baseball has a problem with foreign substances. The problem is so bad that league owners had to have an emergency meeting to issue a declaration that the league was going to crack down on it.
What has ensued since has been nothing short of calamity. Pitchers dropping their drawers and taking off their hats, belts and gloves for on-field inspections. Josh Donaldson trash talking Lucas Giolito after taking him yard and screaming about how it’s different now without the sticky stuff. Giolito firing back with the “We got the W,” then Donaldson confronting him in the parking lot. As you can see, tensions are high around the league about this situation.
What is the MLB crackdown all about?
In order to understand what is going on, we need to understand the why. A few years ago, the trend in pitching was to find the hardest throwers. Guys who could hit triple digits on the radar gun were getting promoted through the ranks and being paid massive amounts of money. Then Statcast came along and started measuring things like spin rate, drop and movement of pitches. Throwing hard is still important, but the emphasis moved from throwing hard to making the baseball move. Big-league hitters can catch up to and square up straight fastballs. What they have a harder time doing is squaring up pitches that are moving throughout the zone. Exploding sliders, sweeping curveballs and dancing changeups are creating more weak contact and easy outs than trying to gas fastballs by every hitter. With that knowledge in hand, pitchers started concentrating more on finding ways to get that spin rate up. The way many did so was by using a sticky substance to help them grip and spin the ball better.
How big a deal is this really? Well, we can look at that question from both a micro and macro level throughout baseball. The crackdown is only about a month old, and I want to caution people that sample size is still a bit small, but we are starting to see some changes. Baseball has had a run-scoring problem this year. Sure, we have the occasion game that gets 10-plus runs, but overall we had seen a record pace in the number of no-hitters thrown, and run scoring was below average across the league as a whole. The results since the change so far have been extreme. Take the Yankees’ Gerrit Cole. Before the meeting, Cole was the AL clubhouse leader in Cy Young voting on Tipico Sportsbook. He had a sub-3.00 ERA and was dominating opposing lineups. Since the meeting, Cole has been getting rocked, and his ERA since the start of June now sits at 5.24. Now again, I want to caution the sample size is small. Maybe it was just a run of suboptimal starts or maybe it was bad matchups, but the timing of the change is pretty curious given the subject matter we are discussing and what has happened all around the league.
What have been the effects of the crackdown?
In the month of April, hitters around the league combined for a .232 batting average, a .309 OBP, .389 slugging and an OPS of .698. May was not much better with a .239 average, .315 OBP, .398 slugging and a .712 OPS. The owners had their meeting the first week of June, and since then the numbers have leapt up. Hitters over the last 28 days are now at a .246 average with both slugging and OPS percentages up over 20 points since the crackdown. Maybe this was just a coincidence, but it is worth noting that the monthly numbers are well up from their baselines earlier in the season.
Was every pitcher cheating? The answer is no. But the problem was not just centered on one team, one division or a handful of guys who came from one organization. Was it 25%, 50% or 75% of pitcher’s using foreign substances? No one knows for sure. But many former and current players have taken a shot at answering this question and more of them lean toward the 50-75% range than those who think it is 25% or below. You can search through the stats of every MLB pitcher and look at their change in spin rate over the last month if you want to dig deep into the detective work. Those who have seen a drastic drop in that category along with struggles on the mound are likely some of the pitchers who were aided most by the use of foreign substances. Again, we have only a one-month sample size to go on so far, and jumping to conclusions without a more robust data set is never wise. That said, the numbers trickling in are starting to paint a picture that says this was a real problem, and baseball is on its way to cleaning it up. Scores and, more importantly for our purposes, betting lines are the next things that we need to watch. So far, the average projected scores have not moved up much in the last month, but it takes a little while for data to trickle into betting lines. The early numbers are showing some change, so the betting lines are likely to start following suit. Until they do, we can start to lean on the over a little more as scoring has ticked up and that trend is likely to continue.
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