Mike Fiers is a hypocritical scumbag, so don’t take this the wrong way … but how did the cheating help him with the no-hitter? Was there some pitching scheme happening also?
No, I am not aware of any pitching scheme and if there was one, we would know by now. However Fiers used substances to impact how the ball moved. He was FAR from the only one on the Astros or the league, but his use of substances was the most obvious since Jeff Suppan. The Cards were the class of the league at doctoring.
Sticky Stuff gets outlawed, arm injuries go up? (I don't know if there's any correlation or causation here, I'm just talking s**t)
Cole basically did what a lot of guys were doing with HOU, NY, LA and Padres. Fiers used substances purely for movement. He would try to space out when he would use it to eliminate being caught.
Every young pitcher with lots of success in the first half of his career hopes to be that guy someday. Get an extra 100 wins by pitching to age 40 on fumes and various cancer causing substances. I remember asking Dan Schatzader about it. He pitched with the Astros a long time ago and was a PE teacher at a high school close to me after retiring. He told me that free chewing gum spit was the best. Claimed green colored worked better and he would load up before every inning when he would pitch and by the end of his career he would do it when getting in bullpen work… knew it was an issue when he was throwing to his high school students and did it without realizing it.
As a total aside, I saw somewhere that MLB medically allowed Addrerall prescriptions are at an all time low. Biggio faints.
Yeah - like 80% by the time that they stopped it. Astros were on cutting edge of getting substances to work on spin rate. Of the guys not doing it - many of them were doing something else against the rules. I have tried to explain the steroid era like that. Almost every hitter was doing it - especially for coming back from injury. A lot of “anti- steroid” guys used HGH/Roids to recover from injury and didn’t view it as cheating… and let’s not talk about the guys abusing uppers and “focus” pills. Only guys on Astros I can say were 100% clean were Lance Berkman and Tim Bogar… Lance didn’t do anything illegal or against the rules. No “special coffee” or drugs for him. Bogar was supposedly the same way. Some of the scrawny middle infielders and pitchers were huge abusers of speed…. Catchers and middle infielders struggled physically to play 150 games a year and only did so because of Mr. Pep.
I am sure there is a substitute at this point - but the real battles are from moles inside an organization selling or stealing information. Interview a lower level executive, keep in contact and make future promises. It’s a huge issue when it comes to international scouts and why some franchises don’t show anyone out of 2-3 people in an organization.
