Bobby, @BuStA607: What’s your opinion on Gerrit Cole struggling since the crack down on Spider Tack? Do you think his success since leaving Pittsburgh is from cheating?
Starkey: I have many thoughts on this topic, Dr. Bob.
1 — Cole basically admitted to cheating when he did not answer a direct question posed to him less than a month ago: Have you used Spider Tack while pitching? Spider Tack is a super sticky paste. It is an illegal, and highly effective, way for pitchers to make the ball spin faster and become exponentially more difficult to square up.
2 — If you’re part of the “What’s-the-big-deal-they’ve-been-doing-this-forever” crowd, I’m not going to try to convince you otherwise. I’ll let recently retired MLB reliever Jerry Blevins do that.
Blevins had a stellar career in which he went 30-13 with a 3.54 earned-run average and 508 strikeouts in 495 innings. His tweet, as the crackdown approached: “Pitchers used sunscreen & rosin every day (myself included) for control of the baseball. Other pitchers used foreign substances to enhance the spin rate. The old, ‘give an inch, take a mile.’ It went too far. This is why we can’t have nice things.”
3 — Cole was a very good pitcher for much of his time here. He was a legit Cy Young candidate in 2015, when he went 19-8. But he was by no means a dominant strikeout pitcher. Not once in his Pirates career did he record more strikeouts than innings pitched.
4 — Almost the minute he left for Houston, Cole not only became a dominant strikeout pitcher but one of the most dominant strikeout pitchers of all time. His 326 strikeouts two years ago were the most of the 21st century by anyone not named Randy Johnson. The only modern-day pitchers who ever recorded more were Johnson, Nolan Ryan and Sandy Koufax.
5 — Any rational being would look at that transformation and wonder, how did it happen? It reminds me in some ways of the Barry Bonds story. Bonds was great when he was in Pittsburgh — a better position player than Cole was a pitcher — but he wasn’t 73-home-run great. Something very strange happened with Bonds. Something very strange happened with Cole.
6 — Now look: Cole’s numbers before and after MLB’s recent crackdown on pitcher substances is just a little eye-opening.
BEFORE: 2.31 ERA, .198 opponent batting average, .554 opponent OPS
AFTER: 6.46, .274, .884.
Small sample size, for sure, but if you’re asking me if I think his success since leaving Pittsburgh was from cheating — and you very literally asked me that — I’m leaning hard toward yes.
https://www.post-gazette.com/sports/...s/202107060086