New Year’s Holiday Sale: ends december 31st
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When Major League Baseball banned foreign substances in 2021, chaos followed. Spin rates plummeted overnight. Pitchers lost command. Hitters braced for wild pitches, and the baseball world collectively wondered whether injuries would surge as a result of pitchers gripping slick baseballs at full velocity.
Then came the anecdotes—none louder than Tyler Glasnow’s. After suffering a UCL tear just weeks after the ban, Glasnow blamed the new rule for forcing him to grip the ball harder, increasing elbow stress. The assumption spread quickly: take away Spider Tack, see more torn ligaments.
But a two-season comparison from Samborski et al. (2025) just flipped that narrative. In the first major data-driven look at the policy’s effects, researchers analyzed injury rates and performance metrics from 2019 vs. 2022—one pre-ban, one fully post-ban.
The results? No spike in injuries. No increase in wild pitches or hit batters. And, surprisingly, several performance metrics improved.
This is one of those moments where the numbers don’t just challenge our assumptions—they expose how fragile our intuitions about cause and effect can be in baseball performance.
The fear surrounding MLB’s foreign substance ban was rooted in an understandable assumption: grip equals control, and control equals safety.
For decades, pitchers relied on a range of substances—some subtle, others extreme—to increase friction between their fingers and the baseball’s smooth leather. The logic was straightforward. Better grip meant finer spin control, lower arm tension, and fewer wild pitches. Remove the tack, and pitchers would have to grip harder, throwing with more forearm tension and less precision.
The projected outcome seemed inevitable: more elbow and shoulder injuries, more hit batters, and general chaos on the mound.
Except that’s not what happened.
The 2025 study compared 828 MLB pitchers from 2019 (pre-ban) with 867 pitchers from 2022 (post-ban). Instead of a disaster, the data revealed stability—and even improvement—across multiple domains of pitching performance.
Here’s what the researchers reported:
Every assumption about chaos and danger proved wrong. The ban didn’t destabilize the league—it coincided with cleaner statistical outcomes and no measurable injury increase.
The implications reach beyond policy. This study illustrates something fundamental about how we misjudge physical performance: we conflate feel with efficiency.
Pitchers equated tack with safety because it felt safer. A firmer grip seemed to lower risk. But in reality, many of the mechanical compensations created by artificial tack—longer hold times, higher wrist tension, altered release timing—may have been neutral or even slightly detrimental to joint loading patterns.
When the ban forced pitchers to adapt, those same athletes likely refined their natural grips, adjusted seam pressure, and improved command through repetition rather than adhesive assistance. The end result: stability born from adaptation, not augmentation.
It’s also possible that the cultural shift around pitch design and data usage softened the transition. By 2022, nearly every MLB club had access to Hawkeye tracking, advanced spin analytics, and individualized bullpen feedback. Pitchers were no longer guessing how to replicate “sticky spin”—they were learning how to reproduce it naturally through finger pressure and seam orientation.
The most impressive finding isn’t that injury rates held steady. It’s that performance improved despite removing a variable that was long considered indispensable to success.
Of course, it’s easy to declare victory after a single data window. But we should be cautious.
The study only analyzed 2019 and 2022—essentially two static snapshots. It didn’t include the transition season of 2021, when enforcement was chaotic, nor did it separate chronic injuries from acute ones. And while aggregate injury rates didn’t change, that doesn’t rule out subtler alterations in tissue stress distribution or recovery profiles.
For instance, it’s plausible that the ban indirectly shifted injury location rather than total incidence—less flexor strain, more biceps tendinopathy, or changes in shoulder workloads due to altered release mechanics. Without a multiyear biomechanical dataset, we can’t yet know.
Still, the lack of any measurable spike in UCL or shoulder injuries across nearly 900 pitchers should quiet the “sticky stuff caused injuries” argument—at least until longitudinal evidence says otherwise.
At VeloU, this research reinforces one of our core training philosophies: don’t confuse external enhancement with internal capability.
The conversation around tack mirrors what happens in athlete development more broadly. Players often seek an external cue—a grip aid, a weighted ball, a mechanical “fix”—when what they need is internal adaptation. The most durable improvement comes from refining control, not outsourcing it.
In applied terms, that means we emphasize grip strength and grip differentiation instead of artificial grip assistance. We teach athletes to modulate pressure across finger pads, adjust seam interaction, and maintain forearm relaxation throughout acceleration and release.
By training precision under variable friction—dry, humid, or slick—we build throwers who can command the baseball under any condition.
The MLB data simply validates what we already see at the training level: adaptation is the most reliable stabilizer in performance.
The 2021 policy was an experiment in unintended consequences—and the outcome was quieter than anyone expected. The league feared chaos, but got consistency.
And that’s the deeper takeaway: baseball performance is remarkably self-regulating. When the environment shifts, the system adapts. Pitchers don’t need foreign aids to maintain command—they need feedback, time, and refined proprioception.
As researchers and coaches, we should take that lesson forward. If an entire league can adjust to a fundamental rule change without a rise in injury or drop in performance, imagine what an individual athlete can adapt to with the right structure and intent.
The 2021 ban was never about “sticky stuff.” It was about testing how adaptable elite performers really are. And now, with data in hand, we know the answer.
Samborski, S. A., ElAttrache, N., Karnyski, S., Bergeron, B., Ladnier, K., & Banffy, M. (2025). The effect of the 2021 MLB foreign substance policy on pitcher injury rates and statistics.Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine, 13(6), 23259671251346984. https://doi.org/10.1177/23259671251346984
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