PITTSBURGH — Ken Davidoff of the New York Post asked Gerrit Cole a simple, direct and potentially explosive question Tuesday: "Have you ever used Spider Tack while pitching?"
Davidoff, to his credit, was essentially asking this: "Are you a cheater?" Spider Tack is an illegal, and highly effective, way for pitchers to make the ball spin faster and become exponentially more difficult to square up.
The question hit hard because baseball players, for the most part, no longer do. The sport is mired in a hitting crisis not seen since 1968, when it responded radically by lowering the mound.
A localized translation of the question to Cole might have looked like this: "Are your comically ridiculous strikeout numbers — compared to the ones you put up in Pittsburgh — the result of using illegal substances?"
In some ways, this was the 2021 version of Sports Illustrated's Rick Reilly walking into the Chicago Cubs' clubhouse and inviting embattled slugger Sammy Sosa to take a steroids test.
Sosa had mentioned he'd be "first in line" for steroids testing if Major League Baseball and the players union agreed to it. By this point, July of 2002, he and Mark McGwire were becoming widely viewed as cheaters and frauds for what many believed was a steroid-fueled home chase in 1998.
Reilly gave Sosa the address of a testing lab and said, "Why not step up right now and be tested? You show everybody you're clean. It'll lift a cloud off you and a cloud off the game. It'll show the fans that all these great numbers you're putting up are real."
Let's just say Sosa was not on board.
"You're not my father!" he yelled. "Are you trying to get me in trouble?"
Cole might have had similar thoughts as he pondered Davidoff's question, but he did not get angry. He merely fumbled around like Rashard Mendenhall in a Super Bowl before delivering this beauty: "I don't quite know how to answer that, to be honest."
"Yes" or "no" would have sufficed. By delivering neither, Cole basically said, "Yes, I have cheated," and thereby put a match to what is potentially baseball's newest scandal.
Hitters can't hit anymore. The league-wide batting average of .236 through May 31 was the lowest since 1968. Strikeouts are outpacing hits. Part of that is on the batters and their all-or-nothing approach.
But it sure seems like the bigger factor is cheating pitchers.
Studies have proven that certain substances radically increase spin rate. This isn't some cutesy little Gaylord Perry spitball we're talking about, although Cole and others might want you to believe that. He mentioned something about "customs and practices that have been passed down from the last generation of players to this generation of players."
Please. To compare the substances pitchers are using these days — particularly Spider Tack — to some guy using a nail file to doctor baseballs is like comparing the amphetamine users of the 1970s to the PED freaks of the 1990s and early 2000s.
The earlier substances helped a guy get through his day. The later stuff changed the very nature of the game and resulted in silly numbers across the board.
Let me present one of those, as MLB prepares to crack down on outlaw pitchers (magically, Cole's spin rate declined pretty much the minute that news broke, although he had a good start Wednesday):
Cole's strikeouts per nine innings went from 8.7 his last season with the Pirates (2017) to 13.8 in Houston two years later. That is an increase of 58.6% — or precisely the increase Barry Bonds saw from his best pre-PED home run total (46) to his record 73.
Cole's spin rate exploded upon his leaving the Pirates, which in turn had people savaging his former pitching coach, Ray Searage, who quickly went from savant to simpleton in many people's eyes.
Could it be that Searage either didn't have the proper tools to cheat or didn't want to?
The first person to compare today's pitchers to yesterday's steroid sluggers was Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer. He has become this budding scandal's answer to Jose Canseco — part whistleblower and (perhaps) part perpetrator.
Bauer was on this story two years ago, telling HBO how spin rate — via the use of increasingly enhanced illegal substances — is a "bigger advantage than steroids ever were."
Why's that?
"Because if you know how to manipulate it," he said, "you can make the ball do drastically different things from pitch to pitch at the same velocity."
Bauer implicated his former college teammate and long-time enemy Cole, who has now implicated himself.
Where does all this go from here?
I don't quite know how to answer that, to be honest, but it should be interesting.
