terrynever said:Who is dumber ... Pineda or Clemens?
Is A-Rod an acceptable answer?
terrynever said:Who is dumber ... Pineda or Clemens?
JimBoSox9 said:Which would only make Rothschild the crown dunce of the whole affair. Pitching coaches discouraging stickum? Sure thing.
NESN cameras have shown Buchholz pouring water from a water bottle on his head in the dugout betweeen innings.Snodgrass'Muff said:
You guys are missing my point. Slicking his hair with oil would make the ball more slippery and thus, make the ball behave erratically, more akin to a spit ball. What we know, and all of baseball knows is that Clay uses the sunscree+rosin mix to make his fingers a bit tacky or sticky to enhance grip and make it easier to control where the ball is going.
Sterling is a moron for taking what we know, and spinning it into something on the opposite end of the spectrum with absolutely no evidence to support it. His pitches weren't moving unexpectedly and he wasn't having trouble locating them. The idea that he was oiling his hair is preposterous and unnecessary since we know he was doing something else. Why not just say what happened instead of trying to make it sound worse? Or, if you are going to trump it up, at least do it in a believable way... not in a way that couldn't possibly be more different.
Supposedly Girardi and Rothschild spoke to Pineda who doesn't speak English. Maybe what Cashman was pissed off about was that Tony Pena his bench coach was somehow not able to advise his pitcher how to " cheat better."JimBoSox9 said:Which would only make Rothschild the crown dunce of the whole affair. Pitching coaches discouraging stickum? Sure thing.
Which is just another reason why claiming he puts oil in his hair is stupid.Doctor G said:NESN cameras have shown Buchholz pouring water from a water bottle on his head in the dugout betweeen innings.
ThePrideofShiner said:Bud Selig weighed in, albeit briefly, at an Associated Press Sports Editors commissioners meeting today:
APSE @APSE_sportmedia 6h
Selig on Pineda/pine tar: "There's a million ways to do it. This one, I can understand why Joe Torre reacted how he did. It was obvious."
Edit: I have no idea how to make Tweets show up properly. If someone wants to PM me instructions, that'd be great.
If pitchers were just using rosin, you might have a point. But since most are using less obvious stuff than pine tar, and also cheating, I don't see what the problem is in reevaluating substances in general.mt8thsw9th said:For fuck's sake, just use the rosin bag. All statements like that do is bail Pineda out. Of course it helps grip, but its main use is to doctor the ball. Will MLB look into rules preventing hitters from taking steroids because it might help them grip the bat more tightly?
Unless you slathered it on so heavily that the ball was brown, it doesn't change the aerodynamics of the ballEvilEmpire said:If pitchers were just using rosin, you might have a point. But since most are using less obvious stuff than pine tar, and also cheating, I don't see what the problem is in reevaluating substances in general.
Also, your statement is the first time I've heard anything that suggests pine tar doctors the ball and presumably changes movement. Everything I've seen talks about grip. Do you have anything to back that up?
I think most of us are in agreement as to grip. Grip is important enough that we've been hearing for weeks about how most pitchers feel compelled to cheat in order to improve it. Most if them of course use substances other than pine tar and are much more subtle about it.FarvinMoosey said:Yeah, I agree, I guess what I am saying is that the effect of better grip is potentially equal to doctoring the ball and there's a lot of back and forth about it and there really doesn't need to be. Both give the pitcher an advantage above and beyond the rules.* Basically my retort was more general than to just the current swing of this thread.
Plus, all Pineda had to do was watch Major League for potential hiding spots.
*as currently constituted.
Average Reds said:Unless you slathered it on so heavily that the ball was brown, it doesn't change the aerodynamics of the ball
It is used for grip, period.
Spin results in movement, so creating friction between the fingers and the surface of the ball, the seams or the white part of the ball, is very important.”
Nathan, who blogs about the physics of baseball, said that he truly believes Pineda—and many pitchers in baseball—use pine tar only for grip. But it’s not out of the question that the substance could be used in other ways.
“Taken to an extreme, putting a foreign substance like pine tar on the ball can do more,” Nathan says. “It can affect the trajectory. It can give the ball unexpected movement. I doubt that is what was going on, but a real glob of pine tar could make the ball move a lot. But that would be hard for a pitcher to get away with. In the hands of a reasonably skilled pitcher, a lot can be done when the ball is loaded up.”
EvilEmpire said:I absolutely hate the idea of a Yankee pitching coach or teammate feeling obligated to school Pineda on how to cheat better. I also don't much care for all the splitting of hairs on how some ways of cheating for better grip are more or less acceptable than others. Cheating is cheating. Thankfully there hasn't been a lot of that in these forums, but listening to talking heads on various broadcasts talk about it that way irritates me.
Of course, both grip and location vary along a spectrum. No hitter wants a pitcher to be so wild as to be all over the place, and speaking as a former pitcher who nailed a mascot or two in his day, a bad grip (say, from the cold) can lead to such disasters. So in this sense, hitters are certainly willing to have pitchers have a good enough grip to avoid danger. But no, they wouldn't wish them to have pinpoint control (not that grip alone guarantees any such thing), and neither would they want them to be able to get an extra feel on a good curveball (for instance). I always found that extra grip made it far easier to throw a much sharper curveball.HriniakPosterChild said:
Someone once said: If you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'. (I think it was Abner Doubleday, shortly after he invented baseball in Cooperstown, NY, but I am having trouble finding a link for it.)
I have heard the YES commentators explain that hitters want the pitchers to have a better grip because, my goodness, they don't want the pitchers to miss their spots. That doesn't make sense to me. If the pitcher is trying to spot a fastball in the Maddux low and away spot on the black, and the ball ends up middle-middle, why is the hitter going to be upset about that?
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Edit: formatting.
terrisus said:I had thought a player had to actually be physically able to play in order for a suspension to take place - so that, for instance, a suspension couldn't take place during a time when a player was injured and wouldn't have been playing anyway.
Is that only if they're officially on the DL? Or am I just imagining that was the case entirely?
rembrat said:That makes no sense. If a player is suspended is he barred from any baseball activity? Could he not pitch simulated games?
https://twitter.com/Joelsherman1/status/461341948855738368JohntheBaptist said:
Pineda is returning this season from shoulder surgery. When he pulled himself from the simulated game, the initial inclination was that his lat muscle was sore and Girardi said “the good thing is it’s not in his shoulder.” The subsequent diagnosis is not as good. The Daily News spoke with an orthopedic surgeon – who is not treating Pineda – but said the Teres Major plays a role in the stability of the shoulder socket.
Source: http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/yankees/pineda-pulls-simulated-game-putting-return-jeopardy-article-1.1773245#ixzz30Txgtpnb
Joe Girardi sounded optimistic about Michael Pineda’s most recent injury, diagnosed as a Grade 1 strain of his teres major muscle, in his upper back. Girardi said a three-to-four-week timetable was “pretty fair.”
http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2014/05/11/michael-pineda-will-need-more-than-four-weeks-to-recover-from-shoulder-strain/While throwing in a simulated game towards the end of April, Yankees starter Michael Pineda suffered a strain of the teres major muscle in his shoulder. The diagnosis purported Pineda would need three or four weeks to recover. Unfortunately for the Yankees, Pineda will need more than four weeks now, according to manager Joe Girardi, via Jorge Castillo of The Star-Ledger.
Pineda played catch at a distance of 60 feet on Saturday, Castillo writes, and everything went well, but Girardi is in no mood to rush the right-hander considering his four starts this season were his first for the Yankees since they acquired him in January 2012 in the Jesus Montero trade.
Pineda, of course, made headlines when he was caught on national television with pine tar on his neck, but when he wasn’t brazenly breaking baseball’s rules, he was pitching well for the Yankees. In four starts, the 25-year-old posted a 1.83 ERA with 15 strikeouts and three walks over 19 2/3 innings.
Van Everyman said:They must really not want him to serve that suspension.