CHICAGO — While labor peace seems awfully challenging, Major League Baseball is making better progress on a recent affliction to hit the industry: Spider Tack withdrawal.
Commissioner Rob Manfred spoke optimistically Thursday, at the conclusion of the owners’ meetings, of a new, tackier baseball to help pitchers who found themselves stripped of their sticky-stuff weaponry in the middle of last season.
“We actually have a couple of options in terms of tackier balls,” Manfred said. “I think there’s going to be some testing done over the winter. I think … we’ll be far enough along that there will actually be, I’m hoping, live-game testing in spring training and we could be in a position to use it all of next year. Maybe it’s going to be ’23 instead, but we’re continuing to work on that project.
“The trick is [to make it] tackier but not so tacky that it’s Spider Tack.”
Rob Manfred at the MLB owners’ meetings on Thursday. APThe 2021 season found itself momentarily disrupted in June when umpires began enforcing long-standing bans on sticky stuff. Yankees ace Gerrit Cole turned into a poster boy for the problem, as his spin rates dropped noticeably once MLB spread the word that the change was coming.
