I dont care if Bauer...or any pitcher...puts four ounces of pine tar on the ball. Some sort of doctoring of the baseball has been going on since baseball players started getting paid in 1869.
The one thing I want to know is the accuracy of Bauers claim that baseballs have been confiscated all over MLB this season, but only his has been publicized.
If that claim is correct, then this whole thing with Bauer is hocus. If not, .....
MLB says it wants to speed up the game and provide more action. BS. If that was true, it would do several things that would do both, but that it has refused to do for years.
MLB, not the players, got themselves into this mess. It knowingly allowed steroid use, because it wanted home runs and softball scores. Fans did, too. (Look at the thread comparing our last three WS teams. Great love for the mashers. Not so much for the 2016 club, even though it had some of the greatest pitching in Tribe history...Kluber and the Allen-Miller-Shaw back end)
1) Stop the stalling of both pitchers and batters.
2) Start rewarding the type of players who provide the on field action...bat control guys who can eliminate the shift and can bunt.
More Whit Merrifields, less Kris Bryants.
But in reality, most fans don't want that either. Just look at all the debates on Tribe baseball forums over the last decade about prospects. The debates favor power bats that K alot over contact hitters who put the ball in play and get on base... by a three to one margin.
Look at all the threads on possible trade targets. The two names that come up most frequently are Andujar and Frazier. Neither provide the kind of action that MLB says it wants to have.
Fans and MLB still dig...and pay for...the long ball. The byproducts are 25% K rates, which people now shrug at, and station to station baserunning.
About twenty years ago the NHL began decrying the lack of skating skills, esp among Canadians. There was a lot of brutish hockey going on, at the cost of the beautiful skating, which only the Russians seemed to be doing. The reasons were twofold. The fans dug players getting smashed into the corners and high sticked, and in the lower levels of Canadian hockey, the skating fundamentals weren't being taught.
Baseball in its own way has done the same thing.
Don't blame the sticky stuff. Its been around forever, and there always have been batters who could hit it. And if they couldn't hit it, they could bunt it. There just aren't nearly as many as there used to be.