When the MLB announced that they would be checking all pitchers for foreign substances between innings, understandably, MLB pitchers weren’t exactly thrilled. For one, a rule that was never enforced was about to be enforced and they’d have to reconfigure their pitches using only resin and dirt along with some sweat from their head. On Wednesday, August 18, we saw two ejections during the substance checks.
Diamondbacks pitcher Caleb Smith was ejected in the top of the eighth inning when umpires believed they had found a foreign substance on his glove. Smith was having a terrible year up until this point and was taken out of the rotation and given relief work because of it. The storyline would make you believe he was using foreign substances but we won’t make assumptions just yet.
When asked about it after the game, crew chief Tom Hallion gave his side of the story. “He has a blue leather lining on the inside of his glove, so that stood out pretty noticeably,” crew chief Tom Hallion said. “There were two dark — I’ll just call it darker areas of the glove — one on the left side, one on the right side of the heel. We touched those, kind of went around the glove to see if there was any other place that had anything. So there were the two spots that [seemed like] a foreign substance that had a sticky feel to it.”
What’s weird about this whole situation was that Smith had been pitching in the sixth inning. Phil Cuzzi inspected Smith after that inning and didn’t see anything wrong. Oddly enough, in the eighth inning, Smith gave up a home run and was then checked in the eighth inning again and that set things off. Smith gave his side of the story after the game as well. “It’s dirt,” Smith said. “The inside of my glove is baby blue, where my hand goes in is blue. Last time I checked, we play baseball and you get dirty in baseball; you sweat a lot. I touch the dirt a lot. There’s not a foreign substance on there. There’s not pine tar. There’s nothing on there. I don’t use that. I was very surprised. He checked it the first time and everything was fine. Nothing changed between the time he checked it the first time and the last time he checked it and had a problem with it. I have no clue.”
The reality is, MLB umpires aren’t trained to know what every foreign substance feels like. The glove will be reviewed and will go through testing. If MLB finds out it’s a banned foreign substance, Smith will be suspended and it’ll penalize the Diamondbacks pretty badly. We can only speculate as to what it was until we know for sure. “I’m not going to stand here and tell you what exactly it was,” Hallion said. “We don’t have that kind of training. If you want to say it was rosin, I’ll leave that up to Major League Baseball to decide whether it was or it wasn’t. It’s kind of out of our hands. We’ll write the report, send that in tonight, they’ll get the glove tomorrow and then what they do is up to them.”
According to betting sites, Smith was adamant that he wasn’t cheating and believes his reputation could be damaged because of this. “I’m really [ticked],” Smith said. “If I was cheating, I would be the first one to say, ‘Hey, you caught me, I was cheating.’ I’m not stupid. I know the main two things that they check are your glove and your hat. If I were using something — and I wasn’t — I wouldn’t put it in my glove or my hat. That’s just ignorant. They are, I guess, saying I cheated. And just by doing that, it drags my name through the mud.”
Smith’s got his manager Torey Lovullo on his side and while he didn’t criticize the umpiring crew when asked about this situation, he did stick by his players’ side. “Look, I believe my player,” Lovullo said. “I’m going to stand by my player. He told me there was nothing malicious happening. I asked to see his hand and his hand was bone dry. He just maintained that those little hotspots were a result of the rosin bag. It’s in the league’s hands right now. They’ll get the glove examined and determine exactly what was there and what was causing that stickiness. You can see Caleb goes to the ground a lot to get dirt on his hands. He has a pile of dirt on the side of his pant leg as a result of wiping down the dirt off of his hand. There’s nothing on his hand that, in my opinion, resulted in him being able to manipulate the baseball.”
That was the big foreign substance check. The funnier one was Lance Lynn getting thrown out of the game for tossing his belt at an umpire during a foreign substance check. Lynn wasn’t using any foreign substances but had weird antics when being checked that resulted in getting tossed from the game against the Athletics. It taxed their bullpen but the White Sox still found a way to win.
What a wacky Wednesday for foreign substance checks and MLB odds.
