I reached for a ball out of a five-gallon bucket and stepped to the homemade pitching mound. I worked an eraser head's worth of Spider Tack into my right thumb, index, and middle fingers until it felt absorbed. The reporter tries his hand with the Spider Tack. A long band stretched from the jar to my index finger, like bubble gum stuck to the sole of a shoe. As I slowly moved my hand away from the jar, the Spider Tack refused to let go. I dipped my right index finger into the container and the substance immediately took hold. I asked Curran how I should apply the Spider Tack. Helping me with the research were two college arms in the transfer portal: Tom Colcombe, most recently of the University of Pittsburgh, and Spencer Curran from Seton Hill University, which is in nearby Greensburg, Pennsylvania. I was curious to see how different kinds of substances helped performance. I was here in Pittsburgh a few days before the Cardinals' kerfuffle to experiment and understand more about baseball's sticky situation.

'Why don't you start with the guys that are cheating with some stuff that's really impacting the game? … Let's go check the guys that are sitting there going to their gloves everyday with filthy stuff coming out.' Get every single person in this league,' Shildt said. 'You want to police some sunscreen and rosin? Go ahead. Shildt argues with West about Gallegos' cap Jonathan Daniel / Getty Images Shildt called sticky stuff baseball's ' dirty little secret.' He called out some of the secrets by name. Louis pitcher Giovanny Gallegos' ball cap due to a visible stain last week, Cardinals manager Mike Shildt ranted to reporters about MLB's policing of foreign substances. For Major League Baseball, foreign substances are becoming more of a problem.Īfter umpire Joe West confiscated St. They make their way to the pitchers' ball caps, gloves, and belts, and ultimately their fingertips. They are the kind of substances commonly found near major-league dugouts and in bullpen bags, according to sources familiar with such practices. While rosin is legal, when mixed with BullFrog or pine tar, it's said to create a performance edge. There was also a bag of rosin, a ubiquitous sight on major-league mounds. On the plywood pitching mound was a container of pine tar aerosol cans of BullFrog sunscreen and Cramer Firm Grip and in a shallow, circular container of something called Spider Tack, a super-sticky paste developed to help grip Atlas Stones in strongman competitions. Inside the netting surrounding the indoor bullpen at Performance Velocity Systems, a baseball training center in the southern hills of Pittsburgh, was an assortment of grip-enhancing substances. The menu options were laid out before me, like stepping up to the counter of a Chipotle for cheaters.

Bullfrog sunscreen target