![]() Pitchers already start with an ideal amount of tack on the ball for control, any additional doctoring is not tolerated. NPB umpires can then bring these balls into play without needing to rub them with some magic Delaware River mud, and critically, enforce crackdowns on foreign substance use. Since adopting an official baseball supplied by Mizuno in 2011, NPB baseballs have come pre-tacked with a proprietary polymer substance that adds a layer of “tack” to the ball fresh out of the box. This is different than the other highest-level baseball league in the world, Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball. This hasn’t just created an unbalanced playing field between hitters and pitchers, but between pitchers, since I’m using a mixture that is better than yours, and all the financial and competitive incentives are for me not to tell you what my mixture is. After that, tack is the wild west, with wide latitude of use by pitchers, and generally only enforced when it’s painfully obvious - the Gallegos and Michael Pinedas of the world. Major League baseballs are rubbed down with a rare mud from the Delaware River, which adds “grit,” a sandpapery texture, to what’s otherwise a glossy and unvarnished leather surface. ![]() These are the kind of additions that take a great fastball or hard biting slider and turn them into near-unhittable pitches. until you add sunscreen, or pine tar, or custom blends of various substances to the equation. So the theory goes, there’s a natural cap on the amount of spin you can impart on a baseball. The only method that Bauer and Kyle Boddy identified of increasing rpm/mph rates on a fastball was applying a sticky substance to a pitcher’s hand or ball to improve the pitcher’s grip, thereby increasing spin ![]() While spin increases with velocity, Driveline discovered that pitchers have natural rpm/mph fingerprints, which they dubbed Bauer Units in order to normalize and compare pitches and performance.
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