On Tuesday, Cleveland Indians pitcher Trevor Bauer sent out a series of tweets that seemed to imply the Houston Astros were using an illicit substance on the baseball to generate extra spin.
🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
— Trevor Bauer (トレバー・バウアー) (@BauerOutage) May 1, 2018
If only there was just a really quick way to increase spin rate. Like what if you could trade for a player knowing that you could bump his spin rate a couple hundred rpm overnight…imagine the steals you could get on the trade market! If only that existed…
— Trevor Bauer (トレバー・バウアー) (@BauerOutage) May 1, 2018
And as various people, including several Astros players, replied to his claims, Bauer indicated he was talking about “sticky stuff,” specifically pine tar, and that he actually supported Houston’s right to use it. His problem, he said, was with Major League Baseball outlawing foreign substances and then enforcing its rules “selectively.”
Just pick one But to not let me use non sticky surgical grade glue to reinforce the stitches on the back side of my pinky finger that has no chance to touch the ball while simultaneously allowing people to blatantly use sticky stuff is hypocritical to the max
— Trevor Bauer (トレバー・バウアー) (@BauerOutage) May 1, 2018
Not jealous my friend. Promise you that. I respect what you all are doing over there. My gripe is with the hypocrisy of @mlb for selectively enforcing rules when it suits them
— Trevor Bauer (トレバー・バウアー) (@BauerOutage) May 1, 2018
Spin rate increases about 350 rpm on average in our tests when using pine tar vs no pine tar. That was at 70ish mph. The effect is slightly less pronounced at higher mph, but still between 2 and 3 hundreds rpm increase at about 90mph
— Trevor Bauer (トレバー・バウアー) (@BauerOutage) May 1, 2018
We can’t say for sure whether pine tar helps explain why Justin Verlander, Gerrit Cole and Charlie Morton all improved substantially upon arriving in Houston, but it does seem as though there’s something to Bauer’s claims about foreign substances and spin rate.
Maybe the most interesting tweet over the course of the entire Bauer saga came from Driveline Baseball founder and Bauer buddy Kyle Boddy, who implored Astros righty Lance McCullers to “look at Trevor’s recent data” (or have analyst Sig Mejdal do it for him).
https://twitter.com/drivelinebases/status/991350266195668993
As it happens, Eno Sarris of The Athletic did look at Trevor’s recent data, and he did see something weird. In a piece published Tuesday afternoon, Sarris posted a chart showing the spin rate of Bauer’s fastball in the first inning of his latest start compared to in all first innings of his career, then wrote the following:
In that first inning, Bauer averaged a 2600 RPM on his fastball, up from his average of 2280 RPM on his career. That’s more than a standard deviation, and as you can see, a clear outlier from his past spin rates. He’s only twice averaged even 2400 in the first inning before. He never averaged 2500 in an inning before. And here’s one inning of 2600+, before returning, the very next inning, to his customary ~2300 RPM.
Boddy declined to comment, and we’ve reached out to Bauer but have not been able to speak to him yet. But there’s certainly a sequence of interesting events, paired with some preliminary evidence here. Plenty of smoke, if not necessarily centered around the Astros.
Basically, it appears as if Bauer used an illicit substance on the ball during his start to prove a point about the effect tackiness can have on spin rate. And his gambit seems to have worked.
Obviously Bauer’s little experiment doesn’t prove anything about the Astros, but when you consider what Bauer found and the fact that, as Sarris documents, pitchers’ spin rates seem to increase when they join Houston, it seems safe to say this isn’t the last we’ll hear of this story.
