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MLB plans to approve substances to improve grip on the ball | baseball 123

Frederlin Castro | @fr3djcd

The MLB has been unable to come up with a good baseball in recent years.

A little over a month into the 2022 Major League season, the headache of players, fans and other people linked to baseball, so far has been the ball.

For example, the league batting average is .233. It is the lowest in MLB history. The league’s batting percentage is .371, which would be the lowest since 1981. Teams average 4.06 runs per game, which, again, would be the lowest since 1981.

Obviously, great shooting is part of the equation, as is much better defense. Still, we’ve seen plenty of dead balls in the safety zone that looked like home runs, so the eye test says the ball is part of it.

Of course, on a very related topic, it has been launched a campaign against pitchers who use sticky substances to alter balls. There is a lot of discussion about which tackifiers are acceptable and which ones would qualify as “performance enhancers”.

Manfred, is looking for a middle ground.

“We have two products that we’re testing, both with major leaguers and minor leaguers, designed to address the grip issue,” Manfred said, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred told The New York Times. “There are two approaches. different in terms of what’s best and most functional for gamers.

“We want to give pitchers a grippier, again more consistent ball, without providing — let me use the phrase ‘performance enhancement’ — associated with crazy sticky stuff.”

In the last part of that answer, Manfred is surely referring to the “Spider Tack” and substances like that, something more than just a grab and entering “cheating” territory.

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