This Is Cheating

A knuckleballer gets sticky in the name of research

Welcome to Warning Track Power, a weekly newsletter of baseball stories and analysis grounded in front office and scouting experiences and the personalities encountered along the way.

If you don’t already subscribe (for free), please consider doing so today. And if you enjoy WTP, go ahead and share it.

Like every other Major League pitcher these days, Orioles knuckleballer Mickey Jannis was checked for foreign substances on his way off the field during his debut, which remains his only big league appearance to date. In fact, Jannis was checked twice.

In the spin rate era of the moment, the previous paragraph is a set-up in search of a punchline.

As opposed to conventional pitchers, the success of knuckleballers is predicated upon a spin rate that can be tracked with the naked eye. The ideal knuckleball flutters on its way towards the plate, rotating no more than once along the journey.

Mickey Jannis shows the ump that he doesn’t have the keys to the batter’s box. Will Newton/Associated Press

But MLB can cite precedent when it comes to knucklers doctoring the ball. Once upon a time, Joe Niekro was infamously caught with an emery board in his back pocket. Niekro’s scuffing of the ball (or fastidious in-game manicure routine, depending on whether you buy his alibi) was intended to make his pitches dance a little more.

If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying, right?

On that night in August of 1987, as the shenanigans begin to unfold on the field at Anaheim Stadium (then the home of the California Angels), the unwitting announcer is updating viewers on the one-hit complete game victory thrown by Indians knuckleballer Tom Candiotti against the Yankees. (A true embarrassment of knuckleballing riches; there were two of them starting on Aug. 3, 1987!)

Candiotti, at the time, was in the early stages of a 16-year career during which he’d win 151 games, log more than 2,700 innings, and throw 68 complete games.

Still curious about the impact of MLB’s sticky substance crackdown on knuckleballers, I spoke with Candiotti to get his input on how the goo pertains to his craft.

“I bought some of that Spider Tack,” Candiotti said, setting the stage for the results of recent independent research. “I wanted to see what it was like.” He provided an order of operations to get any young Vaseline-baller started.

First, he doctored up an old glove by putting some Spider Tack on a tongue depressor and applying it to the thumb area. Then he diluted it with lotion: “I got it real good.”

So, what was the outcome?

“That stuff is so damn sticky,” he said, “that it makes a difference — stickier than pine tar... You can grab a ball and I swear you can make it break twice as much. It's unbelievable the grip you get on it.

“This definitely is cheating.”

As a pitcher who broke into the big leagues in the early ’80s with a traditional repertoire, Candiotti says that he fiddled around with putting a little pine tar on the heel of his glove “to get a little tack.”

Once he reinvented himself as a knuckler, though, he didn’t want anything sticky on the ball.

Very simply, anything tacky would create spin on the pitch. Great for a curveball, disastrous for a knuckleball.

Eddie Harris would have never survived in today’s game. Paramount Pictures

When Candiotti played in the National League, he wore batting gloves on both hands while he hit. He wanted to make sure that no pine tar could possibly transfer from the bat to his hands.

Candiotti, who is in his 15th season as the D-backs radio analyst, has made himself somewhat of an expert on MLB baseballs over the years. (Because of Pedro Martinez, I was very careful about the wording of the previous sentence.)

Routinely throughout his big league career, he would snag a game ball that had been rubbed up by clubhouse staff — intended for game use — to play around with in the dugout. He still has many of them. “Those balls are so rubbed up compared to balls I see now,” he said.

During his playing days, he also noticed that the balls that entered games in the later innings were not rubbed up as well as those in circulation soon after first pitch.

“So many times you have to go to the mound, spit on your hands, grab some dirt, and rub the ball up,” he said. “I needed something to get a grip on those balls.”

To that end, Candiotti understands the plight of all pitchers with today’s baseballs. He offers a simple solution:

“I truly believe that if someone spent the time rubbing balls up like they once were, you wouldn’t have as much of a problem.”

Wouldn’t it be something if a dilemma involving rosin, sunscreen, a variety of sticky substances and Rawlings employees in lab coats could be solved by mud?

Evolving landscape in July

Early returns indicate that four-seam fastballs, sinkers, and curveballs are generating fewer swings-and-misses since the crackdown. Sliders and changeups, meanwhile, appear less affected. (See this article by Rob Arthur in Baseball Prospectus for more on the matter.)

We’re just beyond the halfway point of the 2021 season, so there’s plenty of baseball to be played under these new conditions. That said, there’s only about three weeks until the trade deadline.

No doubt teams are working on this new riddle, calculating which players will benefit in this less adulterated environment. The rules have changed after first pitch. Baseball is a game of adjustments, and the teams that can correctly adjust their valuations of players in today’s game stand to benefit most in the trade market.

Thank you for reading Warning Track Power. Subscribe now to have WTP — now free of Spider Tack — delivered to your inbox every Thursday.