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When will way to the woods com out8/28/2023 ![]() We know that Spider Tack delivered too much stick. For consistency, it would be best for the object to have the same size/shape as a baseball and a similar leather cover - the substance may not stick the same to, say, plastic - but that should do it.” If the thing just hangs there and doesn’t fall, his hand is too sticky. Have the pitcher put it on his hand and turn it over. “All you need is a standard-weight object (lighter than a baseball) and gravity. Meredith Wills, who has experience testing the differences in the MLB ball from year to year. “It strikes me as pretty straightforward,” said Dr. Gravity plus whatever weight baseball thinks is appropriate could create a test that was consistent and objective. What if gravity were used as the force? That’s constant in every park, with minimal differences even between parks at widely disparate altitudes. What about a simpler approach? Any measure of adhesion is just the amount of force required to separate two surfaces, and the trouble with using many established testing technologies is measuring that force. You get a concept in mind, and you play around with it.” You could calibrate the size of the tape. Maybe you could put it along the entire length of their finger. “You have to put the loop on the place they put the goop on their finger, for one. “It’s going to take some thinking,” agreed Adams. Could this thing be modified for baseball, made smaller, or housed in the dugout? Possibly. It’s also quite large, so the umpire won’t be lugging it to the mound. The machine costs as much as $5,000 per, so that’s one obstacle. For them, it would be as simple as observing that if the pitcher went over six pounds per square inch, that’s a red line, and they’re out of the game. Baseball could define a level of tack that it’s fine with, set that number in the machine, and umpires would just have to read the machine. That force is what we are concerned with. “As it peels, you have to apply a small force.” ![]() “The grip is connected to a load cell, and that’s measuring the force it’s applying,” Adams explained. By Saturday, all the pitchers have switched to Stevia. ![]() “Sugar has been added to the banned substance list,” comes the announcement on a Friday. Imagine the arms race this would kick off. There might be a CSI-type solution there - swab the hand, put it in a solution, and if it turns a certain color you’re busted - but the unintended consequences would be comic. It doesn’t seem like trying to test for substances on the mound is the way to go. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try to find a solution ourselves. Is there a way Major League Baseball could develop an objective on-the-field test that would give results almost immediately and eliminate this guessing game for the umpires, pitchers, and baseball fans? MLB declined to comment on whether they are pursuing anything in that vein. The current situation doesn’t seem fair to players who must figure out how much rosin is too much rosin, or to the umpires, who have to go with their gut to find that line themselves. The same pitcher, ostensibly doing the same things in both cases, has fallen on both sides of this precarious decision so far already. Over the last few years, baseball has tried several avenues of policing in order to get the tackier substances out of the game (with up and down results), but in the end, even today’s more stringent Sticky Stuff Policy comes down to a very subjective moment: the umpire, feeling the hands of the pitcher, has to decide what is sticky enough to demand a hand-washing, and what is sticky enough to eject the player. Pitchers could get as much as 500 RPM, and change the shape of their fastball enough to impact their results on the field. So only the most egregious offenders - pine tar splotches on the neck, maybe? - were singled out for punishment, and the rest of baseball looked the other way every other day.īut then it became obvious that there was a performance benefit that came from the added spin that stickier stuff could give a pitcher. ![]() The sport basically ignored the use of sticky substances most of the time, maybe because the idea was pitchers were trying to gain command of the baseball and didn’t want to hit the batter. Before, the rules were selectively enforced.
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