A sticky wicket

 Gaylord Perry is rolling his eyes right now, wherever that crafty old bird is perching these days. Could be he's throwing in a chuckle and a wag of the head, too.

See, Major League Baseball has another substance abuse issue on its hands. And Gaylord Perry knows all about it.

This is because the man rode to the Hall of Fame on the abuse of substances, though not the substances you likely think. His substance of choice was petroleum jelly. Or plain old spit. Or whatever else he could find to make the baseball do funny things on its way to the plate.

Perry was the master of the spitter, see, and he used to hide his illicit substances under the brim of his cap or on his belt buckle or on the front of his uniform or even on the back of his glove. Everyone knew he was throwing wet. He did it anyway. 

Even wrote a book about it after he retired.

So MLB's latest issue with pitchers doctoring baseballs must cause him some amusement, because, hell, it's as old as the game itself. Back in the game's infancy, the spitter was even legal. Then it wasn't, but pitchers kept throwing wet anyway.

Those who did were not so much regarded as hardened criminals but rascally schoolboys passing notes when the teacher's back was turned. Catching 'em at it became one of those game-within-a-game deals that made baseball charming before it became the strategy-deprived bore it is today.

In that regard, maybe pitchers such as Trevor Bauer and Gerrit Cole coating the baseball with sticky stuff like Spider Tack is merely an attempt to enliven the game. It's not like the Bauers and Coles are trying t hide it, after all. It's that MLB has been foot-draggy about cracking down on it -- perhaps because all these no-hitter suddenly sprouting like velvet leaf were tempering the other extreme that is baseball in 2021.

Which is to say, all the Home Run Derby business we've been seeing the last few years. Pitchers gotta do something to balance the scales, right, Gaylord?

The problem for MLB is this all comes on the heels of the Houston Cheatstros sign-stealing scandal, and so it's a PR issue more than anything. No one in the MLB boardroom wants the public to regard the product as a rigged game, so the powers-that-be have rolled out a crackdown on Spider Tack and whatever else pitchers are using to make the baseball perform unnatural acts.

Even if, as ol' Gaylord could tell 'em, it's as time-honored a baseball thing as a dog, a beer and a box of Cracker Jacks.