The Los Angeles Dodgers may be in some trouble.
On Thursday, it was reported that multiple suspicious baseballs from Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer’s start Wednesday against the Athletics have now been sent to league officials to be inspected for foreign substances, according to The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal.
The balls were flagged because umpires noticed hey had visible markings and were sticky. Umpires reportedly removed one of the Bauer balls following the first inning of his last start.
Bauer declined The Athletic’s request for comment, but has openly challenged MLB and commissioner Rob Manfred after a memo was sent out to enforce the ban of foreign substances on baseballs.
The righthander posted a video to his YouTube channel a day later weighing in on the issue:
“It’s only illegal for pitchers to have ‘foreign substance’ on their person, their body or whatever,” Bauer said in the video. “It’s not illegal for a catcher or his chest protector, as you’ve seen. It’s not illegal for a third baseman to have it on his glove or a center fielder to have it on his glove—so far as I know, maybe there’s a rule change or some language—as far as I know the rules of baseball, it is legal for those guys to have stuff on their glove.
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“My question is, if I throw a pitch and it gets thrown out and then gets tested and has a foreign substance on it, how do they know it came from me and not from the catcher’s glove or the third baseman’s glove? Or on a foul ball, what if it happened to hit the handle of a bat where a hitter has pine tar or whatever other substance he wants, which is completely legal so long as it doesn’t too far up the bat?”
Bauer’s agent Rachel Luba responded to the article on Twitter, saying Rosenthal was making a “story out of nothing.”
