Major League Baseball plans to crack down on pitchers using foreign substances this season.
In a memo sent to all 30 teams on Wednesday, which was first obtained by Joel Sherman of the New York Post, the league outlined how it plans to prohibit the use of foreign substances in several different ways.
Among those included increased monitoring by compliance officers, inspections of baseballs taken out of play by a third-party lab and spin-rate analysis.
Players are subject to discipline by the commissioner whether evidence of doctoring the ball is found before or after games.
Per the memo, the compliance officers will monitor the dugouts, clubhouses, tunnels, batting cages and bullpens while baseballs taken out of play will be provided to the Commissioner’s Office for further inspection, which will cover both suspected and random baseballs evaluated by the third-party lab.
The lab will also search for the type of substance being used.
MLB will use Statcast data to compare spin rate to career norms.
The steps MLB is taking this year to prohibit use of foreign substances comes following a report this offseason in which a former Los Angeles Angels clubhouse employee claimed he provided substances for visiting players such as Gerrit Cole, Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander, Felix Hernandez, Corey Kluber and Adam Wainwright, in addition to a handful of Angels pitchers.
The employee, Bubba Harkins, was suing the Angels for defamation after the team terminated him last March. Harkins believes he has been cast as a “public scapegoat” as MLB began to further its crackdown on the use of banned substances.
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