This sticky stuff issue can get very messy in a lot of ways

Oh, what a tangled web Spider Tack was able to weave this past week.

Batter vs. pitcher.

Player vs player.

Player vs the commissioner.

General manager vs player.

And on it went.

Open a can of sticky stuff and it becomes a veritable Pandora’s box for baseball, the latest in a line of controversies that have tugged at the fabric of the sport like a loose thread from a sweater.

What began in spring training as a warning label attached to 2021 by MLB’s effort to curtail runaway substances applied to the baseball got dragged into the pending labor showdown between the owners and the Players Association. That shouldn’t be too surprising. Most things do, especially with the collective bargaining agreement expiring in December.

But nothing comes easy with baseball. On the surface, enforcing Rule 6.02 (c) is fairly straightforward. The pitchers are limited to the league-approved rosin bag when it comes to grippy substances, and anything beyond that technically is a violation.

The Twins’ Josh Donaldson has been so fed up with the widespread abuse that he called out the Yankees’ Gerrit Cole by name, creating all the additional drama when the two teams faced off this past week at Target Field.

The Mets’ Pete Alonso took the debate in an entirely different direction: His problem isn’t with the sticky stuff as much as what he perceives to be MLB’s manipulation of the baseball depending on that year’s free-agent class.

Alonso didn’t come up with this idea on his own. And he’s never been one to complain about the baseball anyway, repeatedly dismissing questions about this year’s introduction of the dead ball to throttle back the sport’s home run pace. Alonso has insisted that if he barrels a pitch, it’s gone, regardless of the ball’s composition.

His startling allegations had to do with MLB, which owns the baseball-manufacturing company Rawlings, juicing the ball one season to work against a pitching-heavy free-agent class, then essentially deflating it the next when more sluggers hit the market.

"I think that the biggest concern is that Major League Baseball manipulates the baseballs year in and year out depending on the free-agency class or guys being in an advanced part of their arbitration," Alonso said this past week. "I do think that’s the big issue. The ball being different every single year. With other sports, the ball is the same. Basketball, football, tennis, golf — the ball is the same. That’s the real issue with the changing of the baseballs.

"Maybe if the league didn’t change the baseball, pitchers wouldn’t need to use as much sticky stuff."

Alonso went on to say this is a "fact" that players have talked about, which peeled back the curtain on how militant the behind-the-scenes strategy may be getting with the Players Association in the coming months. Then on Friday, this offshoot of the sticky stuff debate got even stickier when Mets acting general manager Zack Scott attempted to debunk Alonso’s argument.

While the two share the same Mets goals, they are on different sides of the labor battle, so Scott’s stance wasn’t unusual — just a bit forward as it pertained to his own player.

Scott made a joking reference to Alonso being a "conspiracy theorist" and then offered a counter-balance to those ball-manipulating accusations.

"I think if they’re doing that, I don’t know what their incentive is," Scott said. "If you’re doing that, you’re also helping some other players, so you can’t do one without the other.

"The way teams evaluate performance is relative to levels. So we’re not going to be fooled by offenses way up or way down. We’re going to look at players relative to how the league is playing as a whole, so it would have no influence on how players are valued or paid."

Alonso specifically referenced 2019 as a year when the balls were juiced to hurt pitchers in that free-agent class, but the top five signed for a total of $852 million that winter. Cole and Stephen Strasburg accounted for $569 million of that, but it's still a pretty good haul regardless.

That doesn’t summarily dismiss Alonso’s point. It just goes to show how many levels there are to the examination of the baseball.

In recent years, and since its purchase of Rawlings, MLB has expressed the need for transparency when it comes to the production and performance of the ball, but convincing everyone of that has been an uphill climb. In regards to policing these grippy illegal substances, however, finding a way to make the ball’s surface tackier out of the box is becoming a priority.

Many pitchers say their only goal in this debate is to have a level playing field, that everyone should be restricted to the same methods in improving their grip on the baseball, not perfecting their own custom formulas or sneaking Spider Tack and Pelican Grip onto their gloves, belts or caps.

Of course, the rulebook already is supposed to be doing that, but it’s been largely ignored.

Crafting the right amendment to Rule 6.02 (c) is tricky. Some believe that coming up with a widely approved substance for pitchers — similar to pine tar for hitters — is a workable solution. Something has to evolve from this, however, because it doesn’t seem plausible that pitchers can just go cold turkey after getting their fix for all these years.

"I don’t know what the answer is for that, honestly," the Yankees’ Jameson Taillon said. "I know MLB tried [tackier] baseballs a few springs ago — some guys liked it, some guys didn’t, the pre-rubbed baseballs with a little bit of stuff on it. I wasn’t a huge fan of those. Everyone’s so specific with the way they like the ball, I think it’s best right now just to completely eliminate [the sticky stuff] — police it, really enforce it."

MLB says that’s the plan, even though an exact date for the crackdown has yet to be given. Presumably we’ll start seeing umpires routinely checking pitchers as early as this week, but just the threat of what’s coming already has made an impact.

So far, the media has acted as the sport’s investigative arm, not only asking players directly if they’ve used these banned substances but also more diligently chronicling spin rates as an indicator of behavioral patterns abruptly changing.

This past week, the Yankees were especially under the gun. Nearly all of the pitchers made available on Zoom were asked about using the sticky stuff (before or after their appearances and sometimes both, in Cole’s case).

Cole has dual exposure as a member of the union’s executive subcommittee, and in this CBA season, he viewed the infighting among players — as illustrated by Donaldson’s public whistle-blowing tactics — problematic in the bigger picture.

"I certainly think the player vs player-type things, there’s a way to go about those, and especially in a bargaining year," Cole said. "There’s probably a smart way to go about it. With a lot of the heat on us, and obviously going into a situation where we can legislate some of the on-field rules and such, hopefully we continue to have conversations in out clubhouse and on the union calls. That’s the forum to share your opinions."

Cole obviously didn’t appreciate getting dragged through the mud by Donaldson. But as we’ve come to expect from baseball, it tends to be a messy business.

By David Lennon

dave.lennon@newsday.comDPLennon

David Lennon is an award-winning columnist, a voter for baseball's Hall of Fame and has covered six no-hitters, including two perfect games.