Baseball is truly a game of goops and guns. Clubbies prepare pearls with Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud. Position players glue their bats with pine tar and pump their gloves with leather warmer. Coaches soothe sore muscles with Icy Hot or Tiger Balm, and coaches spray the field with tobacco juice. Between innings, players toss caramel-filled stroopwafels specially designed to fill up elite athletes while fans slather hot dogs with mustard, salsa, chili, and a blinding nacho cheese sauce that, in fact, is none of those three things. And of course, pitchers have been known to hide everything from sunscreen to petroleum jelly to Spider Tack on their person. If it defies easy categorization as solid or liquid, it has its place in football.
Rosin lives somewhere in between. It's a powdered plant resin that sits on a mound inside not one but two cloth bags, but it doesn't work its magic that way. It needs liquid to release its adhesive properties. The only liquid allowed is sweat, where the player may go in his hair or on his arm, but even then, there are limits. David Cone showed the power of rosin after Max Scherzer was fired last April. With a little water and rosin, enough to create only a slight flex in his fingers, Cone can make enough tack to make the baseball defy gravity.
Keep mixing the sweat and rosin together – throw in dirt for good measure or maybe throw in something stronger than the sweat – and the mixture can cross the line and become too sticky, not to mention moldy or rotting and starting to form in the pot's hand. After his ejection, Scherzer told reporters, “my hand was a little too tight on the wheel.” If you've seen right-hander Edwin Díaz's closeout from ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball broadcast, you'll understand what he meant.
I spent a lot of time staring at that close up. I'm not sure what constitutes the right moment to stare at Díaz's hand, but whatever it is, I've definitely passed it. I brought the screenshot into Photoshop and zoomed in until the pixels swirled around in a fuzzy blur. I played with brightness and contrast, making whatever was in his hand jump off the screen like the stripes of a clownfish under ultraviolet light.
I stared long enough that I stopped analyzing the rise and change of color and began to notice a finer detail: Díaz's pants piping. The way most of the stadium lights hit his hand to create five different sets of shadows just before the pipes. The appeal of the referee's pants. A catch up the sleeve of Mets manager Carlos Mendoza. The fact that Mendoza is seen wearing a $2,500 Aquis made by Swiss watchmaker Oris.
With the notable exception of Michael Pineda, who was arrested 10 years ago because of the highly visible pine tar around his neck, I'm surprised we haven't seen a shutdown like this before. Maybe it just takes more cameras and the associated purpose of national broadcasting to make it happen. In a very narrow sense, the picture doesn't change anything. Even if you didn't see it, you had to imagine that Díaz's hand looked and turned somewhat backwards. And even if Díaz was using nothing but sweat, rosin, and dirt – and personally, I'm inclined to believe he wasn't – he clearly used his hand to cross the line and deserved to be kicked out.
But in the context of baseball as a whole, this image, which clearly shows the object at hand, changed the contour of the story. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and the photo allows everyone to be a novice sleuth. Ever since the league began cracking down on stickies, the ejections have followed a set pattern. We see a short video clip of the referee talking to the manager and the offending bowler, then after the game we get three quotes:
First, the striker insists he was within the rules and tells the story of how he persuaded the referees to believe him. “I just said I use the same thing,” said Díaz. “Rock rosin, sweat, and put my hand in the dirt a little because I need to catch the ball.”
Second, the boss supports the player, throwing in some budding science for good measure. “I got your back,” Mendoza said. “I really believe what they were telling us. Edwin said rosin and sweat. What he said was that it was humid so he had to go there more than at the beginning of the year when it was cold. Maybe that had something to do with it. I believe in my player and I will stand by him.”
Third, the referee presents a short disappearing quote from the pool reporter, using poetry to express the critical interplay of consciousness and human perception that determines the legitimacy of a handshake. Quoth umpire Vic Carapazza:
I told him it was very sticky
And we must take action.
I came
That's when I touched it. It was
The way
Again
Sticky.
It wasn't like that at all
rosin and sweat.
We've tested thousands of these.
I know
What is that feeling.
This was very sticky.
And then, having heard from all concerned, we move forward. But apparently, those quotes are not enough to put a picture in your mind, because now that we have a real picture, the established pattern is broken. In this case, we found each type of quote, but the visuals gave the drama of the story, as well as enough staying power and enough questions that the journalists were able to release several interesting details.
First, Díaz said he protested his innocence by encouraging the referees to smell his hand: “I just said, 'Hey, you can check my hand, smell my hand.' They didn't smell anything.” I'm curious to know what perfumes he thought they'd go for, and while his offer was kind, it's hard to blame the judges for turning it down. “Never smell anything that someone is trying hard to smell” is a rule that everyone learns at a young age. But what I like is that when you see this quote out of context, it becomes ambiguous. It's not immediately clear if Díaz is saying the umpires outright rejected the smell test, or if he's saying they took a breather and decided they didn't smell anything bad. In any case, as the last line of defense, “They didn't smell anything” is difficult to eliminate.
Carapazza's line is equally evocative: “We've tested thousands of these.” These, meaning human hands. Not only is he right, he's not selling it. The number is actually hundreds of thousands. Umpires check those human hands up and down every inning, which means they go through several thousand every month. Since MLB instituted its policy to enforce tactile tackiness in June of 2021, they have gently tested about 260,000 hands. They found exactly eight in need.
We also learned the practicalities, because this story made Major League Baseball feel enough pressure to lift the veil just a little bit. According to Will Samson, referees decide whether or not to give players the opportunity to wash their hands because “if the referee feels that a player has crossed the line by sticking… In cases where a player is allowed to wash his hands, the referee feels something solid but not sticky – they have been trained in the difference – or the situation involved a change in color or dirt without subtlety.” It seems that Díaz's formidable hand, with its unhappy triangle of adhesion, dirt, and discoloration, didn't stand a chance.
From Andy Martino we learned how Major League Baseball has trained its umpires to tell the difference between tacky and sticky, between acceptable and out:
Several people stood in line, using things in their hands.
Some test cases use Spider Tack, some sweat and rosin, some pine tar, and so on, without being told which. Their instructions were simple: If the hand stuck, a release was required.
“Actually it wasn't difficult,” said one participant.
Some of this story has to be turned around. It is a clever trick to spread the idea that not only is it possible to find a doctor's hand, it is very easy. I'm not sure I buy the base, at least not in game condition rather than in clean MLB test kitchen condition. That said, the story sounds real enough. How can you train other referees? But it also sounds, in a way, like the stories we often hear about adhesives being released. It's a rumor that doesn't put a picture in your mind, and every answer raises a new question.
Did this happen in a conference room at MLB headquarters? How similar was it to a middle school science fair? Who volunteered or was drawn to serve as a testing hand? Who really doctors hands? Who taught the referees the exact location of the line between tacky and sticky, and how much gun is too much gun? Were the players or their union involved? If the process was scientific and above board, why reserve it for an anonymous leak rather than trumpet it as a step forward?
I doubt we will get answers to these questions anytime soon. The truth often comes in drips and drabs. But as we learned this week, a picture is all it takes to loosen up a bit.
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