After a short-lived crackdown on ball-doctoring, MLB is allowing pitchers to cheat again

An example of what really motivates sports leagues and governing bodies to enforce their own rules, or not

When I started following baseball at a comprehensive level as a tween—before then I could memorize statistics, but had little concept of how these translated into integrated on-the-field results—I remember reading claims by physicists, or at least people claiming to be scientists, that the curveball was a phantom concept.

These pundits were the equivalent of today’s biological-sex deniers, postulating that a phenomenon visible in plain sight to everyone was imaginary. (The curveball-deniers are more easily forgiven owing to the apparent sincerity of their convictions and the absence of societal consequences produced by their nattering.) Anyone who observes that a baseball has seams and understands that air is a fluid, not a vacuum, can be talked into understanding why a pitcher can impart “action” on a thrown baseball, usually but not always on purpose. Failing that, if you’ve ever thrown a wiffleball or merely seen kids playing with one, you immediately grasp the effect of both the low density of the plastic ball and the holes cut into its flank.

If you prefer visual lesson, here’s a good YouTube compilation of elegantly effective curveballs.

Pitchers have been using strategies to further enhance the liveliness of their tosses since the game began, all of which have been banned by Major League Baseball upon their discovery. In the 1970s and 1980s, pitchers would occasionally be caught with stuff like gobs of Vaseline under their caps or tacks hidden somewhere for scuffing the surface the ball, adding more air-disturbing irregularities to the surface. Hall-of-Famer Gaylord Perry was the proud face of spitballs in this era. Knuckleball specialist Joe Niekro was once caught on the mound with sandpaper in his pants pocket during a game, an event memorable for Niekro nonchalantly trying to ditch the evidence on national television as the umps searched him.

Cheating in sports is a technological arms race no matter the game or the contest. In baseball, the spin rate (number of rotations per minute) of a pitch can be automatically calculated. (Here’s a wonky explanation of the physics and geometry, along with a great video of softball player Maggie Gallagher giving a beautiful demonstration of a stable spin axis.) When a pitcher is throwing balls that spin faster than a certain threshold, this serves as indirect evidence that the pitcher is doctoring the baseball. This is analogous to the pre-EPO-test days of cycling and Nordic skiing, when any competitor found to have a hematocrit level above 50 percent was presumed to be using the drug and was pulled from competition in a multi-stage race.

Meanwhile, even as MLB has improved its ability to identify cheating by pitchers indirectly, pitchers have improved their ability to sneak ball-doctoring substances onto the playing field.

Toward the end of the previous decade, this had become so pronounced that baseball was seeing a trend toward more walks, more strikeouts, and fewer hits—the expected combined result of pitchers with more action, much of it less predictable than previously. Fewer balls put in play means a decline in fan interest. Baseball fans talk up the virtues of pitching and defense, but every one of them would rather see Aaron Judge hit a 480-foot home run than strike out, walk, or be hit in the face by a pitch. Even Red Sox fans, most of them, don’t want to see a Yankees player nailed in the head by a solid object moving up to and sometimes over 100 miles per hour.

Baseball, like track, is perfectly willing to tolerate universal disregard of its own rules as long as it livens up the game and draws eyeballs. While MLB knows it can’t completely stop cheating by pitchers, it does need to make an effort to keep cheating in a range that prevents too many batters from getting injured. This consideration, plus the need to have more balls put in play by batters, is what led the league to start cracking down on pitcher cheating last season and into this season. A lot of this was inspired by outrage over unrelated cheating involving sign-stealing by the Houston Astros in recent seasons.

As described in this video, MLB’s administrative officers and its pitchers have arrived at a sort of detente. It didn’t become apparent until this season that batters are safest at some non-maximal level of ball-jizzing by pitchers.

If pitchers resort in high numbers to more traditional methods of doctoring, hits, walks, strikeouts, and hit batsmen are all within a fan-friendly range. This is because these methods work primarily by allowing for an improved grip on the ball rather than by ensuring a great deal of largely random movement after the ball is released. If they don’t cheat at all, home runs will bloat to c. 1995-2005 levels, creating a different problem. If they’re allowed to slime up the ball at will a la recent seasons, then more frightening episodes like this one are likely.

(Amazingly, Harper, a great player who will probably have a too-short career thanks to his admirable recklessness and being despised by almost everyone in baseball, didn’t go on the injured reserve list until three weeks later.)

When sports leagues and governing bodies punish cheating—be it a single instance by a single competitor—it is never, ever because they were previously unaware of it. Issuing rule changed or handing out suspensions is done almost solely in the service of massaging the sport’s image. (Since some administrators really are human on the inside, player safety enters the picture, too.) Alternatively, competitors who go out of their way to antagonize officials will find themselves punished no matter their popularity.

Sprinter Marion Jones now ranks among track and field’s most disgraced American figures. At the peak of her career, she was married to world-class shot-putter C.J. Hunter. According to insider chatter, when Jones was the hottest of hot athletic commodities, Hunter—Jones’ manager as well as her husband—would tell European meet promoters that his wife would not run at their venues if she were drug-tested.

This worked for a while, but then it pissed off the wrong people. In 2000, Hunter qualified for the Sydney Olympics by taking second at the U.S. Olympic Trials, but withdrew from the Olympics citing a knee injury. But almost immediately after Jones won the first of the five medals she would win in Sydney and ultimately be stripped of, it was announced that Hunter had failed four doping-control tests that summer. Among the substances found in his system was the then-popular, now-unknown-in-Portland steroid nandrolone. Already in Sydney, Hunter was stripped of his coaching and other official credentials and ordered away from the Games.

If this timing seems to echo that of Alberto Salazar’s 2019 suspension, which was announced when he was already in Doha, Qatar for that year’s World Athletics Championships, it should. Hunter’s strong-arming had gone too far. Not only will the administrative goons come for you eventually, they’ll stick it as far up your ass as they can. Jones herself would not become formally embroiled in drug-scandal until four years later, by which time she and Hunter were no longer a couple and Bay Area Laboratory Cooperate (BALCO) drug lord Victor Conte had started blabbing about the widespread use of “the clear” (tetrahydrogestrinone, or THG) and other designer steroids as well as the universality of doping in sports.

In 2006, Jones tested positive for EPO, but like Bernard Lagat was cleared after her “B” sample was (hee! HEE!) determined to be clean. But soon everything fell directly the fuck apart, and in 2007 Jones finally admitted that she had used steroids before the Sydney Olympics and lied about it under oath. She wound up spending six months in jail. She was an incredible athlete. So was Barry Bonds, whose exclusion from the Baseball Hall of Fame is understandable but also a complete joke given the realities of the overall climate.

It seems like years since Shelby Houlihan first owned up to being months into a four-year doping suspension, but it’s been less than fifteen months. It took many years for Lance Armstrong to be knocked from his “clean cyclist who beat cancer” perch despite an abrasive persona and literally everyone involved knowing better. The issue with these delays is always the reach of the controversy or conspiracy; it’s unheard of for a professional athlete to dope in isolation, and I have absolutely no doubt that Houlihan has the goods on a lot of people—athletes, coaches, and others now striving to keep her happy enough to prevent her from blowing the whistle on her club from many years behind.

Houlihan’s unwillingness to entertain the idea that she used PEDs intentionally will have ripple effects on women’s pro running for years even if she decides to clam up, which she won’t. Does anyone, especially anyone within the BTC, even really want to break her American 1,500m or 5,000m outdoor records at this point, knowing the unwanted attention that could bring as well as its potential to trigger the baldly egomaniacal Houlihan?

Perhaps at, say, Thanksgiving dinner in 2025, after her post-suspension comeback proves far more useless than she now believed it will, Houlihan will start talking. Maybe her loved ones and friends will encourage her to come clean. I highly doubt it’ll play out this way, but someday it’s coming. All sports are tainted by the unfair distribution of cheating, but scum seeks its own level in accordance with the needs of a given sport’s lawyers and marketing gurus (track doesn’t have any of these gurus, but they’re found in other sports). Because pro running is highly doping-tolerant, it always has a burden of sidelined stars with plateloads of resentments over being singled out and itchy lips to match. It’s just a matter of time in this case, as always, and it won’t take someone being nailed in the face by a 97-MPH slimeball to provoke the spillage.