Tampa Bay Rays pitcher Tyler Glasnow blames Major League Baseball’s ban on foreign substances for the injury to his pitching arm.
Glasnow said that he recently experimented with using no substance to help him get a grip on the ball, and it was a disaster. Usually, he uses sunscreen and rosin, but now the league suddenly banned substances in the middle of the season, and Glasnow is furious about the rules change.
“My lifelong dream — I want to go out and win a Cy Young, I want to be an All-Star, and now it’s all just shit on.”
Glasnow is particularly upset that the league made the new rule and demanded it be implemented without giving pitchers a chance to adjust slowly to the rule. And he says that going “cold turkey” without any grip-aiding substance altered the mechanics of how he held the ball and threw it that it messed up his arm.
Glasnow noted that the day after he pitched to the Nationals, he woke up and was astonished at how much the muscles in his arm hurt after a night without using any grip-aide.
“Waking up after that [Nationals] start, I was like, ‘Okay, this sucks,'” Glasnow told reporters. “Something is weird here. And then that same feeling is persisting all week long.
“And then I go into my start [Monday] and that same feeling, it just pops or whatever the hell happened to my elbow. Like, I feel it. Something happens. And I’m sitting up here like, ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.’
Glasnow has now been diagnosed with a partially torn ulnar collateral ligament and a flexor tendon strain.
In his comments, the pitcher also criticized MLB for the timing.
“Do it in the offseason. Give us a chance to adjust to it. But I just threw 80 innings, then you tell me I can’t use anything in the middle of the year. I have to change everything I’ve been doing the entire season. I’m telling you I truly believe that’s why I got hurt,” he said.
“I’m frustrated that they don’t understand how hard it is to pitch,” he insisted. “And to tell us to do something completely different in the middle of the season is insane. It’s ridiculous.”
The league maintains that it made the right move and said that pitchers found with sticky substances on the hands or gloves could face ejections, fines, and even suspensions.
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