Report: Multiple suspicious baseballs from Trevor Bauer's game vs. Oakland sent for inspection
Multiple balls that Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer threw during their 4-3 loss to the Oakland Athletics on Wednesday were collected and sent to Major League Baseball for inspection on Thursday, according to The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal.
The balls reportedly had visible markings and were sticky. Bauer pitched just more than six innings in the loss, giving up three hits and two runs with 10 strikeouts in his second start of the season.
It’s unknown if the league will be able to pin any foreign substances found on the balls on Bauer specifically. According to Rosenthal, balls were brought to umpires’ attention on Wednesday. Authenticators labeled the balls that were removed from the game, and compliance monitors were on site.
Bauer had criticized league memo
MLB said last month that it would start increasing enforcement of the rules that prohibit pitchers from applying foreign substances to baseballs. The league said in a memo that it would start reviewing Statcast data to analyze spin rate changes in pitchers, and that players were subject to discipline “regardless of whether evidence of the violation has been discovered during or following a game.”
Bauer wasn’t happy with the league’s memo about the increased enforcement efforts — and posted a 23 minute video to YouTube talking about it last month.
It isn’t the fact that they are trying to enforce the rule that really upsets him, he said, but rather how they are doing it.
“It’s only illegal for pitchers to have ‘foreign substance’ on their person, their body or whatever,” Bauer said, in part. “It’s not illegal for a catcher to have it on his shin guards or his chest protector, as we’ve seen. It’s not illegal for a third baseman to have it on his glove or a center fielder to have it on his glove ... So my question is, if I throw a pitch and it gets thrown out and tested and then has a foreign substance on it, how do they know that it came from me and not from the catcher’s glove or from the third baseman’s glove?
"Or on a foul ball, what if it happened to hit the handle of a bat where a hitter has pine tar or whatever other substance he wants — which is completely legal so long as it doesn’t go too far up the bat — how are they going to tell that that was me and fault me for using a foreign substance when that could have come from any host of other places that are all legal?”
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