Driveline Baseball founder and pitching expert Kyle Boddy dropped a thinking-face emoji in response to a Twitter user’s observation about Astros pitchers’ spin rates and set off a very 2018 baseball spat that one can only hope will escalate to the point that someday soon, two or more professional athletes square off in front of the mound to angrily exchange spreadsheets and yell, “Show me the data, bruh” while teammates half-heartedly hold them back.
Indians starter Trevor Bauer, a longtime advocate of pitch-tracking technology who trains with Boddy, jumped in with a series of thinking-face emojis of his own followed by a sarcastic comment suggesting a secret method to swiftly improving spin rate.
In ensuing tweets, Bauer noted tests showing that the use of pine tar for grip increases spin rate and called Major League Baseball “hypocritical to the max” for its selective enforcement of the rules governing doctored baseballs.
It’s a poorly kept secret that many big-league pitchers rely on tacky substances like pine tar and sunscreen to enhance their grips on baseballs, and many hitters — who prefer guys throwing the ball 99 mph have a sense of where it’s going — don’t object. But the league typically intervenes only when television cameras pick up a pitcher egregiously flouting the rules. Bauer’s gripe appears to be based in part on MLB forbidding him from using surgical adhesive to hold closed the stitches on his pinky finger after his drone mishap in the 2016 postseason.
Statcast data available at baseballsavant.com does indicate increases in spin rate for pitchers like Justin Verlander and Gerrit Cole upon joining the Astros. But Astros pitchers tend to be fairly well-versed in baseball’s wealth of new information, and one pitcher jumped in with a counterpoint based on his own performance.
Oh, it’s on now!
Things are really heating up.
Bauer added that he is preparing to publicly divulge his data on the way foreign substances enhance spin rate, which will certainly just throw gasoline on this towering inferno of a baseball fight.