Lookit what them rules done

 I don't know Tampa Bay pitcher Tyler Glasnow from glasnost, but the man gets major points for gall on the Blob's scale of stuff for which it awards points. He's come up with a novel justification for cheating his tush off.

Cheating kept him healthy.

Getting to glop up the baseball with a foreign substance -- for Glasnow, it was sunscreen -- gave him better grip, and never mind that it also made batters frequently swing and miss. Following the rules, on the other hand, just got him hurt.

That's his story and he's sticking to it, in the wake of MLB finally getting around to banning pitchers from doctoring baseballs, which it has only been banning for a century or so. Problem is, baseball has never been very good at the banning part. And so pitchers have gone right on doctoring baseballs with everything from spit to tobacco juice to, I don't know, Dippity-Doo, maybe. 

None of them, when caught, ever were as creative as Glasnow, though.

In advance of MLB's latest crackdown on foreign substances, Glasnow ditched the sunscreen, and now he says that's why he now has a partially torn ulnar collateral ligament and a flexor tendon strain. He said without the sunscreen, he had to change all his grips, and that's what tore and strained his shoulder after just two starts.

"I had to put my fastball deeper in my hand and grip it way harder," he said in a video news conference. "Instead of holding my curveball at the tip of my fingers, I had to dig it deeper in my hand."

Didn't seem to affect his performance any. In his first start without mother's little helper, he struck out 11 Nationals in seven innings' work. This he used to bolster his argument that, nah, he wasn't glopping up the ball to get people out, he was doing it solely to improve his grip.

Of course, artificially improving one's grip itself  helps pitchers get people out, a little detail Glasnow conveniently decided to ignore. And if the practice is as widespread as it seems, that would help explain why no-hitters are suddenly popping up all over -- in some cases in the most unlikely of precincts.

As to Glasnow's contention that cheating kept him healthy ... well, maybe. But generations of pitchers have managed to properly grip their curveballs and sliders without resorting to Super Glue, and have somehow managed not to tear up their arms in two measly starts in spite of that. So why can't Glasnow and his crowd?

The Blob has some theories about that, and about the general fragility of pitchers in this particular era. But that's another Blob for another day.

For now, there is only the subverting of conventional wisdom by a clever young man from Tampa Bay.

Cheaters do prosper, it seems. And fall victim to calamity otherwise.