Tampa Bay Rays star Tyler Glasnow, who was off to a brilliant 5-2 start with a 2.57 ERA entering Tuesday night, had to leave his start after only four innings due to "tightness" in his elbow. And though he didn't immediately pin what happened on any one reason, he acknowledged that the varying texture and slickness of the baseballs, a change due to the league's crackdown on foreign substances, forced him to modify his grip and thus alter his usual delivery.
"I think having to grip a ball extremely hard when you throw hard and when your muscle is already extremely tense, and then you have to somehow try to not hit someone in the face, I don’t know," Glasnow said (via Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times). "I think whenever I’m trying to hold the ball a lot tighter, it’s probably not going to add to like a comfortable elbow feeling. Again, I don’t know. I just think it’d be nice to make it more consistent."
On Tuesday, everything became a little bit more serious. "Everything" includes his injury, seeing as he has a partially torn UCL and a flexor tendon strain, which may unfortunately lead to Tommy John surgery. And "everything" also includes his frustration and anger toward the league's crackdown in the middle of the season, which he was much less subtle about this time around.
"I'm not trying to blame anyone, I'm not trying to say like, oh, this is MLB's fault," Glasnow said. "They got thrown into this situation, too, they're doing the best they possibly can to navigate around this. They're trying to make this fair for people, I understand that.
"...Whether you want us to not use sticky stuff or not is fine. Fine, do it in the offseason, give us a chance to adjust to it. But I just threw 80-something, 70-whatever innings, and then you just told me I can't use anything in the middle of the year. I had to change everything I've been doing the entire season. Everything, out of the window, I have to start doing something completely new.
"I'm telling you, I truly believe that's why I got hurt."
Glasnow's rant comes after speculation that the league's crackdown on foreign substances could potentially lead to these sorts of issues with gripping and throwing the baseballs. ESPN's Jeff Passan had a long thread about the league's new foreign-substance rules, and mentioned within it a question that has to do not only with the safety of the pitchers but of the batters who are now vulnerable to decreased accuracy:
One point I heard over and over from players: If MLB is going to draw a hard line, pitchers will have no access to grip agents. And with nothing -- not even sunscreen and rosin -- their fear of controlling the ball, the original reason for grip enhancers, becomes very palpable.
And then, as Passan subsequently noted, there's the potential for more offense as an indirect result of all of this.
The most interesting potential consequence of that: If a pitcher does not feel like he can throw a max-effort, full-tilt pitch safely anymore, will he pull back on his stuff? And if enough guys pull back even slightly on their stuff, do the more hittable pitches = more offense?
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What certainly wasn't intended by this midseason crackdown, however, was increased injury risk to pitchers. Apparently, if Glasnow's frustration holds true, that could become a problem. Just another dilemma in our beloved national pastime.
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