Topps cards were always cheaper, but you also had that shitty piece of bubble gum.
Many a ball card died in the spokes of my bike, but whatta sound.
MLB 2021 season: Corn-Driven Humidity
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Topps cards were always cheaper, but you also had that shitty piece of bubble gum.
Many a ball card died in the spokes of my bike, but whatta sound.
That shitty bubble gum was food from the gods. I was so disappointed when they tried to go (slightly) upscale by eliminating the gum. 
Topps cards were always cheaper, but you also had that shitty piece of bubble gum.
Many a ball card died in the spokes of my bike, but whatta sound.
We used playing cards. 70's era playing cards were so much more solid.
Tyler Glasnow is blaming his elbow exploding for the second time on MLB's crackdown on sticky stuff, saying that it affected his delivery. That's an impressively hilarious bit of deflection.
And MLB has a very clear solution to the sticky stuff issue with pitchers. NPB already uses a ball with a significantly more tacky / coarse surface. All MLB would have to do is ask the Japanese for what their ball recipe (Ball Recipe: Awesome band name alert) is and it would quiet this entire thing down immediately. But, no, MLB can't possibly seek outside help, because Manfred gonna Manfred.
And MLB has a very clear solution to the sticky stuff issue with pitchers. NPB already uses a ball with a significantly more tacky / coarse surface. All MLB would have to do is ask the Japanese for what their ball recipe (Ball Recipe: Awesome band name alert) is and it would quiet this entire thing down immediately. But, no, MLB can't possibly seek outside help, because Manfred gonna Manfred.
Didn't MLB do something with the surface a few years ago? I remember players saying it got shinier and smoother. Maybe 2018 or 2019?
And, that might put these guys out of business.
Bintliff is collecting the mud that is used to treat every single regulation major league baseball, roughly 240,000 per season.
Mud is a family business; it has been for more than half a century. For decades, baseball’s official rule book has required that every ball be rubbed before being used in a game. Bintliff’s mud is the only substance allowed. Originally marketed as “magic,” it’s just a little thicker than chocolate pudding—a tiny dab is enough to remove the factory gloss from a new ball without mucking up the seams or getting the cover too filthy. Equipment managers rub it on before every game, allowing pitchers to get a dependable grip. The mud is found only along a short stretch of that tributary of the Delaware, with the precise location kept secret from everyone, including MLB.
https://www.si.com/mlb/2019/08/07/baseball-mud-rawlings
If it isn't doing the job anymore, maybe they need to find a new use for their mud.
I very vividly remember Justin Verlander and David Price complaining in 2018 about the ball being juiced and saying that the new ball was too smooth, meaning they couldn't get a grip on it. That's also around the time that Clayton Kershaw and Trevor Bauer started stopping just short of saying, "Yeah, I use sticky stuff," basically daring the commissioner's office to go after them.
Wouldn't a smoother ball make home runs go down a little? Like opposite of when a hitter tried putting tar on the bat to make it jump more.
Looks like they may have taken that post down.
The Mets' team doctor 
read DeGrom's MRI
and said everything is just fine.
read DeGrom's MRI
and said everything is just fine.
I screwed up my link formatting. It's fixed, now.
That's some remarkably bad baserunning on Toronto's part.
That's some remarkably bad baserunning on Toronto's part.
I mean, most triple plays involve some sort of error on the part of a baserunner, even if it's that they just took too much of a lead, but two blatant TOOTBLANs on a single triple play is something that I cannot recall, in my memory, ever happening.
I had to look that up. I've never heard of TOOTBLANs before now but that's definitely appropriate here.
The idea or thought--and I'm not sure if it was ever scientifically tested--was that with a smoother ball, pitchers weren't able to grip it enough, which led to a drop in the efficacy of pitches with movement, like breaking balls or two-seamers, which in turn resulted in more meatballs over the plate, ergo more dingers.
I do know that the cores of the 2018 and 2019 balls were tested against sample balls from the prior five seasons, and no even remotely significant change was found in the cores, unlike the deadened balls that went into effect this year.
With pitchers throwing harder than ever, slick baseballs that they cannot controls could lead to someone getting killed.
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