For the most part, the crackdown on sticky stuff has been about as successful as I reckoned MLB hoped it would be. From the data, you can tell that pitchers clearly abandoned using the worst of the substances. So if that was the prime directive, mission accomplished.
I would argue there was a secondary directive, and that it has also been a success: actually bust as few pitchers as possible. I don’t think MLB actually WANTED to nail anyone publicly for this. They wanted everyone to stop using, and then go on as if nothing had happened. Every player actually busted is a reminder that dudes were cheating, rampantly, for years, and the league did nothing about it while it got worse and worse.
So, then, with enforcement kicking in two months ago, it is a success – from MLB’s perspective – that until last night, only one pitcher had been busted for sticky stuff, Mariners lefty Hector Santiago (who was subsequently suspended for PEDs!).
Last night, though, pitcher number two got popped. Diamondbacks lefty Caleb Smith got tossed after umpires found two spots on his glove that they deemed sticky enough to conclude the spots must have been a foreign substance:
Smith vociferously denied that he had anything sticky on his glove after the game.
“It’s dirt,” Smith said, per Diamondbacks.com. “The inside of my glove is baby blue, where my hand goes in is blue. Last time I checked, we play baseball and you get dirty in baseball; you sweat a lot. I touch the dirt a lot. There’s not a foreign substance on there. There’s not pine tar. There’s nothing on there. I don’t use that. I was very surprised. He checked it the first time and everything was fine. Nothing changed between the time he checked it the first time and the last time he checked it and had a problem with it. I have no clue ….
“I’m really [ticked],” Smith said. “If I was cheating, I would be the first one to say, ‘Hey, you caught me, I was cheating.’ I’m not stupid. I know the main two things that they check are your glove and your hat. If I were using something — and I wasn’t — I wouldn’t put it in my glove or my hat. That’s just ignorant. They are, I guess, saying I cheated. And just by doing that, it drags my name through the mud.”
The umpiring crew, which was the same crew that busted Santiago, by the way, was unanimous in believing they had found a foreign substances, for what it’s worth (USA Today). The glove will head to MLB for more forensic examination, and Smith will be suspended for 10 games unless that examination reveals no foreign substance.
Smith, 30, has a 5.12 ERA over 95.0 innings pitched this year, and did see a pretty noticeable decline in his spin rates around mid-June. Fun fact, he was briefly on the Cubs back in the spring of 2017 as a Rule 5 pick, but did not make the team.