Michael Pineda, pine tar, and the case of the possibly missing underwear

This is cheating, though why it’s cheating is a little difficult to pin down as no one asserts that a pitcher slathering himself in the tacky residue of an ex-tree alters the path of the ball to the plate in the way that cutting it or loading it up with gobs of phlegm does. They acknowledge that pitching is sweaty work and that the ball can get slippery when gripped in a moist hand or when weather conditions are difficult. Further, your average batter, when confronted with a choice between facing a pitcher who has transformed his hand into something with the consistency of chewed Bubble Yum and knows where the ball is going versus one who is as arid as Mercury and might accidentally stick the ball in the side of his head, would apparently much prefer that the pitcher be stained like an old Chippendale, syrupy as the underside of a table at IHOP, and glutinous as the Blob.

There was, shall we say, much discussion of this last time around. Given that, it was reasonable to expect that Pineda would face heightened scrutiny on Wednesday. That he apparently didn’t realize this, that no one on the Yankees, be he manager Joe Girardi or pitching coach Larry Rothschild, said to him, “There will be many eyes on you, watching for you to do that, so don’t do that,” is a rather massive failure of management to, y’know, manage.

“Again, I think there’s an accepted level of some additive used to gain a grip,” Farrell said. “Just felt like in the two starts that we’ve had against Pineda, that’s been a little bit above that. “Any substance is illegal,” the Red Sox skipper added. “But I think there’s a certain acceptance that it’s used and it’s discreetly used. Personally, I don’t think this is the case (here).”

“There is an acceptance.” If you read the article linked above, you’ll find that many Red Sox are all in favor of pitchers using pine tar so that the ball does not squirt out and maim them. This is not Gaylord Perry and the Vaseline, Joe Niekro with the emery board, Whitey Ford with his sharpened belt buckle, or Don Sutton and an acetylene torch. It’s just gripping the ball. The issue here isn’t the act, it’s the appearance. John Farrell doesn’t care if Pineda tars up, he just doesn’t want to know that he’s doing it. “[W]hen it’s that obvious, something has got to be said.”

Farrell wants Pineda to be Schrödinger’s cat, but a version that never reaches a resolution. Dr. Schrödinger’s paradoxical thought experiment in quantum physics (he never actually harmed Mr. Fuzzy Snuggums, don’t worry) is so well known in the culture so it requires only a brief explanation: You put a cat in an opaque box with an isotope that might or might not decay and release a poison that will kill the cat. Until you open the box, you don’t know the outcome. The cat remains in a quantum superposition, meaning it’s both alive and dead. Opening the box collapses the possibilities down and your outcome is determined.*

Farrell wants to be Schrödinger, but an uncurious Schrödinger who is never going to open the box, even if it starts to give off a really pungent odor. He just doesn’t want to know. Again, since most or all of the characters involved in this story agree that there is no cheating involved, the answer doesn’t matter except insofar as the safety of his own batters is concerned. Think about this as an underwear problem. Say John Farrell asks you out to dinner but attaches the following stipulation: “Rupert,” he tells you regardless of if your name is Rupert or not, “let’s get together for dinner tonight. You can wear underwear or not wear underwear. The effect of your doing so or not, as far as I’m concerned, is completely irrelevant to my enjoyment of the experience. The conversation, the food, the quality of the service are all going to be perceived by me in the same manner regardless of the presence, or lack thereof, of your undergarments. All I ask is that if you do wear underwear, you don’t tell me.”

Put yourself in the observer’s/Farrell’s position there. He cannot assume the underwear is present or not present. Therefore, he will proceed with dinner in the same way you and he always do, order what he wants to order, say what he wants to say, and have a good or a bad experience depending on dozens of factors. If, at the end of the evening, he finds out the answer to the Mystery of the Indeterminately Existent Boxer Shorts, it may retroactively recolor the experience of the evening, but that’s all. Nothing real will have changed about dinner with you except his perception of it.

Oddly, the rule book offers an out if the pitcher is caught spitting on the ball or rubbing the ball on his glove, person, or clothing. “If... in the judgment of the umpire, the pitcher did not intend, by his act, to alter the characteristics of a pitched ball, then the umpire may, in his discretion, warn the pitcher in lieu of applying the penalty...” There is no such escape hatch offered for the foreign-substance provision, so out Pineda went, again, not so much because anyone contends that he was doctoring the ball, but (a) because a pitcher cannot have a “foreign substance” on his person (see below) and (b) on the implied general principle that he had been so stupidly obvious about his bleeding patch of neck-goo that he had to go. He dared Farrell to report him and Farrell took him up on it. Brilliant. Next he can bet Farrell he can safely run across both lanes of the Ted Williams Tunnel at rush hour.

I should note (as per the comments below), that the rule book does speak authoritatively on “foreign substances.” The pitcher shall not [h]ave on his person, or in his possession, any foreign substance. For such infraction of this section (b) the penalty shall be immediate ejection from the game. Again, if everyone agrees that pine tar is a benign foreign substance then we haven’t really gotten anywhere. Pineda could have been ejected for having a rogue bit of shaving cream on his cheek, or an especially pungent cologne, but nothing that anyone would consider to be cheating would have occurred, whether the rule book considers it an illicit act or not.

But wait! No less an authority on foreign substances than Dwight Gooden said today that pine tar actually does alter the flight of pitches. So, maybe pine tar is like marijuana in many states, or even the ol’ 18^th Amendment at the end, when a lot of states had just decided that putting resources into policing alcohol consumption was just a waste of time and money. It is cheating, but no one cares anymore and therefore it has been effectively decriminalized, even if there has been no change of the rulebook repealing Rule 8.02 or legalizing it, a la Colorado’s recreational-use of cannabis law.

All I can say is either Major League Baseball had better declare a general amnesty on this pine tar stuff or they can start issuing umpires rubber gloves.