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By Chelsea Janes, Andrew Ba Tran, Elyse Samuels, Dalton Bennett, Sarah Cahlan and Daron Taylor July 2, 2021 at 3:21 p.m. EDTWashington Nationals ace Max Scherzer, hat on the ground, unbuckled his belt as umpires stood around him. Oakland Athletics reliever Sergio Romo walked off the mound and pulled down his pants. New York Mets star Jacob deGrom laughed as he held out his hat for on-field examination.That was the scene across baseball this June, as MLB began its much-anticipated crackdown on so-called sticky stuff, the increasingly tacky substances that have allowed pitchers in recent years to hurl baseballs that spin faster and faster, causing them to dive and slide through the strike zone in ways batters have never seen.Before the spectacle of on-field enforcement even began, word of its arrival trickled out around June 3, as MLB made it known it planned to increase scrutiny amid record-high strikeout rates.It appears to be working. Spin rates — or the number of revolutions per minute a baseball makes on its way to home plate — have decreased across the sport, according to a Washington Post analysis. Pitchers have said in recent weeks that it’s difficult to grip the ball, and the Post analysis shows that, too: Some pitchers appeared to be searching for grip — using rosin, trying to find sweat and licking fingers — behavior that suggests they are trying to adjust to this new reality.Spin rate can be key to a pitcher’s success: A pitch thrown with the same velocity will move differently depending on how fast it spins, and a pitch with a higher spin rate often moves more sharply than one thrown with the same velocity but less spin.The Post analyzed the spin rate, controlling for velocity, for nearly 2 million pitches, focusing primarily on fastballs, of more than 1,400 players from about 9,000 games from 2017 to 2021 — including almost 70,000 pitches since June 3. After climbing year over year, spin rates fell in the three weeks after June 3 to levels lower than in 2017, when the data first started being tracked reliably, according to a Post analysis of data published by Baseball Prospectus.But the steep fall, combined with batters’ increased ability to make contact, appears to show that MLB’s effort has been effective in reducing pitchers’ advantage over hitters, at least in the short term — a noteworthy development amid historically anemic hitting. About 70 percent of the pitchers who threw more than 10 fastballs after June 3 saw a decrease in their average adjusted spin rates compared to earlier in the 2021 season, according to the Post’s analysis.
Chelsea Janes and assistant think the MLB check is working. They have data.https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2021/07/02/sticky-stuff-baseball-data/
That explains Cole, who was a decent but not superior pitcher with Pittsburgh. Maybe that's why the Pirates were willing to trade him for Michael Feliz, Jason Martin, Colin Moran and Joe Musgrove.
So Cole, in cringeworthy fashion, all but acknowledged that he's a cheat.
