Watching Trevor Bauer baffle hitters and record double-digit strikeouts in an outing is nothing new — he's hit that total in 34 career games — but it's possible that he did so most recently, on April 7, with a little bit of extra help.
According to MLB insider Ken Rosenthal, the umpires who were officiating Bauer's outing against the Oakland A's on Wednesday — a game in which he tallied 10 Ks in 6.2 innings pitched — collected several baseballs that he threw that had "visible markings" and that were sticky. The balls were then sent to MLB offices for further inspection.
Even if the balls did contain foreign substances, Rosenthal notes, the league may not be able to prove that Bauer was responsible for the application of these substances. Rule 6.02 states that a pitcher shall not "apply a foreign substance of any kind to the ball" and/or "have on his person, or in his possession, any foreign substance." A notable instance of a pitcher getting caught in the act with this was when Michael Pineda kept pine tar on his neck, and the spot became quite visible.
A difference between the Pineda incident and the latest with Bauer, should the balls truly have been doctored, is that Bauer was not caught in the act, which makes a big difference according to one GM.
"I don’t believe unless you can catch somebody in the act, doing it in the moment, and you get something on their hand or on their person, that you can truly prove 100 percent that they are doing it," an anonymous general manager told Rosenthal. "We all know. But to suspend somebody for 10 games, you’ve got to have real evidence."
Rosenthal added that balls that come out of play are sent to the commissioner's office after every game for further inspection, though it seems that the ones in question from Bauer's appearance were specifically marked as "suspicious."
Bauer also knows about the fact that balls are taken from every game, and he made sure to point out that factoid in addition to ripping the report with a scalding pair of tweets.
ESPN's Buster Olney isn't a huge fan of how the whole situation is playing out, either, more so in regard to how MLB dealt with the investigation.
Following the game, NBC Sports Bay Area's Jessica Kleinschmidt tweeted that the inspection of Bauer's baseballs sounded "coincidental," and noted that Bob Melvin saw it as the league's initiative to inspect baseballs more frequently in an attempt to do "something uniform down the road as far as what substance could be used." This would fall in line with memos from the league, as Rosenthal mentioned, that detailed MLB's goal to ramp up monitoring and enforcement of rules regarding pitchers' application of foreign substances to baseballs.
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