ST. LOUIS – With offense down across the league this season, attention is turning to the illegal foreign substances that many pitchers are believed to use.
After St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Genesis Cabrera was forced to change hats before he pitched against the Chicago White Sox last week because of an apparent illegal substance on the brim, manager Mike Shildt argued and was ejected from the game. Shildt called it “baseball’s dirty little secret” and said it shouldn’t be on umpires to police it.
“Is it illegal or is not illegal to put stuff on a ball?” Castellanos said in an episode released Thursday. “It’s illegal. The league obviously knows that they are doing it, but the league doesn’t care. They don’t care because if it was really a problem that they wanted, they would put people in the bullpen to check gloves, to check hats, whatever. The league would do something about it. But honestly, I don’t think it’s that important to them.”
Castellanos was asked whether it should be an issue at the forefront of MLB.
“Listen, if I truly start speaking my mind, I usually get in trouble,” Castellanos said. “It’s just the league has to figure out if it wants it to be illegal or not and stick by it.”
Hitters are batting .236 as a collective league this season, which is an all-time low. It’s even lower than the .237 batting average in 1968, which prompted MLB to lower the mounds. The league had a collective .255 batting average as recently as 2017.
