Baseball's dirty little secret is out – we decided to experiment

Do you mean like the last 2 years or something longer than my entire life span

I feel like basketball has a similar issue with optimization for shooting 3 pointers vs. 2 pointers. It makes for a far less exciting game, IMHO.

It was banned in two steps. In 1920, players could assigned up to two pitchers to throw the spitball. After that season, 14 players were grandfathered in and allow to continue throwing a spitball. Burleigh Grimes threw the last legal spitball in 1934.

Carl May threw a pitch that killed Ray Chapmen in 1920, which the spitball rules still allowed teams to have spitballers. May was generally a wild pitcher, in fact he had hit Chapman's teammate, and manager, Tris Speaker in the head in 1918. May's claim was Chapman was crowding the plate, He throw a high inside fastball, that his May's teammates claim was a strike, to brush him off the plate. It was an unwritten rule about brush back pitches that lead to Chapman's death. Chapman's death had nothing to do with getting the spitball getting banned.

Rivera was the best pitcher I have seen in throwing a cutter. His long fingers let me get unique grip on it.

The problem that MLB didn't see was that my providing information about spin rates, pitchers would be able to start experimenting, see results, and adjust.

I agree baseball selectively enforces rules. But I think the spitball has been enforced since the 1980s/Gaylord Perry era. And Joe West is a particularly egregious umpire, probably the worst in the game.

It seems like more realistically, baseball is the only support that you understand enough to appreciate to this degree? I don't think you can make a legitimate argument that soccer, for example, has less tactical depth and management pressure than baseball?

If you propose unlimited doctoring then I propose unlimited corking and composite bats with unlimited diameter. Then together we can make a complete joke of baseball.

This could be the next NFT! They could sell the rights ahead of time (1st hit attempt for _x_ player), or after the fact. Maybe if you catch the ball you get the rights automatically to incentivize buying tickets to the games.

They already go through on average 80-100 balls per game anyway, which means the average ball only sees 2-3 pitches as it is.

Scuffed balls, spitballs, various sticky substances, etc has been used to alter baseball pitches for decades. A pitcher from my high school got caught (and banned from the league) for doing this in 1992. It's all fairly obvious how it works from a physics perspective. There's absolutely no secret at all.

Pitchers have always added substances to baseballs, but they were mostly doing it by feel. It was only roughly a decade ago that technology was first introduced that could accurately measure a pitch's movement. It was even more recently that technology was introduced that could accurately measure the spin of a pitch. Now that pitchers are armed with this tech, they can optimize for spin and movement. They can experiment with all sorts of different substances, do the exact experiments described in this article, literally hire chemists to come up with better formulas, and share the most effective substances with their teammates.

In the end, this measurement technology has led to a drastic improvement in the effectiveness of the use of these foreign substances. That has altered the balance between pitchers and hitters that is important to keep the game actually entertaining to watch.

This particular form of manipulating the ball is just too widespread and too effective and that is why the crackdown is happening.

There are multiple people in the league that corroborate the fact that most pitchers are doing this. Some clubs are allegedly paying chemists to improve their doctoring. It's come too far from putting a little spit on the ball. Time to drag it into the light.