MLB suspended Drew Smith of the Mets for ten games after he came into Wednesday’s game with two sticky hands.
Smith held out his pitching hand and pleaded his case, but he was ejected by first base umpire Bill Miller, the crew chief. New York will be a player short during the suspension.
“Drew Smith was ejected because he had sticky hands,” Miller told a pool reporter. “I don’t know what’s on his hand, all I know it was sticky — sticky to the touch. It stuck to my hands when I touched it. Not only his pitching hand, but his glove hand as well.”
Miller said Smith’s hand was the stickiest he has felt this season, and that the other three umpires agreed.
ESPN.com
This sounds pretty much like what the umpire said after ejecting Max Scherzer earlier in the year. Pitchers keep saying that the standards are different from crew to crew, but it seems that if the ump’s fingers stick to your hand, it’s too sticky.
The Sticky Fingers situation is not like being caught with a nail file or a piece of sandpaper or the like. The nail file and sandpaper automatically mark the pitcher as a cheater in a very binary (on/off) way. Sticky Fingers exist on a gradual spectrum; some degree of stickiness is good but another degree is bad and in between it’s not clear where the line is drawn. I can sort of agree with ejection from the game, though I’d prefer that the umpires merely insist on the pitcher’s fingers being cleaned off until an acceptable level of stickness is achieved. But suspending the pitcher for ten days on the say-so of a single umpiring crew when other crews have different standards? That’s crazy.