Rays ace Tyler Glasnow has a serious elbow injury, and he’s tying it back to MLB’s decision to start aggressively enforcing its foreign substance rules for pitchers.
First, the injury:
Tampa Bay Rays ace Tyler Glasnow has a partially torn ulnar collateral ligament and a flexor tendon strain. The plan for now is to try to rehab the injury to avoid Tommy John and eventually return, but it’s a brutal blow for Glasnow, who’s been phenomenal, and the MLB-best Rays.
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) June 15, 2021
That’s gonna cost him a lot of time this season if he’s lucky, and it’s gonna end in Tommy John surgery later this year if he’s not. It’s a big blow for the 27-year-old stud who was putting up what easily could have been his best big league season.
The twist, though, is that Glasnow is tying his injury to the just-announced efforts to crack down on foreign substance use by pitchers, which has always been illegal, but has never really been enforced. Jesse Rogers chronicled Glasnow’s take on Twitter, and I can understand why he would be very frustrated:
Glasnow: “In my mind that sounds dumb. That sounds like an excuse a player would use to make sure he could use sticky stuff. I threw to the Nats…I did well. I woke up the next day and I was sore in places I didn’t even know I had muscles in.”
— Jesse Rogers (@JesseRogersESPN) June 15, 2021
Glasnow explained how he had to change his grips: "I'm choking the sh– out of all my pitches."
— Jesse Rogers (@JesseRogersESPN) June 15, 2021
Glasnow: “Do it in the offseason. Give us a chance to adjust to it. But I just threw 80 innings, then you tell me I can't use anything in the middle of the year. I have to change everything I’ve been doing the entire season. I'm telling you I truly believe that’s why I got hurt.”
— Jesse Rogers (@JesseRogersESPN) June 15, 2021
“I am telling you, I truly believe that’s why I got hurt… I’m frustrated that they don’t understand… Pitchers need to be able to have some control & grip on the ball. I don’t want this to happen to anyone else." – Tyler Glasnow
(via @TriciaWhitaker)pic.twitter.com/a7FXD56GoQ
— FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) June 15, 2021
To be sure, it’s possible that Glasnow was dealing with an arm issue for a long time and just didn’t realize the severity until now. Maybe it would’ve happened right now no matter what. Correlation for one data point is not causation.
That said, there’s logic to it. When a guy has to change what he’s doing – pretty significantly! – in the middle of the season, there is risk. Of course, the flip side to that is the fact that MLB did make it pretty clear in the offseason that it was going to start enforcing these rules more closely this season (even if it took a couple months to actually get there). It’s not like pitchers HAD to start the season by using substances.
But even that has a flip side: it wasn’t really reasonable to expect that rosin+sunscreen was going to be targeted, too. For one thing, the impact of that mix has not been shown to be on the same level as the manufactured sticky stuff. For another thing, both rosin and sunscreen are available there for pitchers naturally, so to speak. For still another thing, it always felt like rosin+sunscreen really was more about grip than about spin rate. Case in point, Glasnow’s spin rate on his fastball didn’t appreciably drop in his last two outings, and the spin rates on his breaking pitches were down only negligibly.
This is just the beginning of the many unpredictable consequences, as I mentioned earlier today. I just didn’t think rosin+sunscreen was going to be an issue. Neither did Glasnow or the other players:
Glasnow: “Sunscreen and rosin is apparently the same as Spider Tack. Alright I guess I’ll adapt and learn. And the only thing I learned was that it hurts to throw a ball in the middle of the season, from having something to not having something.”
— Jesse Rogers (@JesseRogersESPN) June 15, 2021
Glasnow: “We had a union meeting and 36 reps were on there. And it was like, 'does anyone have a problem with sunscreen and rosin?' 'No.' Not a single person said there was a problem with it. Hitters said go ahead and use it.”
— Jesse Rogers (@JesseRogersESPN) June 15, 2021