Yankees: Tyler Glasnow injury created all new sticky stuff worry

Hey, MLB, you realized you were opening up a monstrous can of worms when you attempted to legislate pitchers’ use of foreign substances in the middle of the season, right?

Good, good, just confirming. Because we’re about to see a whole lot of unforeseen complications, and Rays starter Tyler Glasnow’s elbow injury this week — and his ensuing comments — set off plenty of Yankees-related alarm bells.

Glasnow departed his start on Monday with a tugging elbow, and Tuesday’s MRIs just about confirmed his worst fears: UCL damage.

Not for nothing, but plenty of dots are being connected across the MLB landscape, as Glasnow was one of many pitchers to present a significant spin rate drop over his past few starts.

We’ll need more data to determine if this is a pattern or a malfunction — after all, it’s not like UCL damage has been a rarity in recent years anyway.

Needless to say, though, Yankees fans should be terrified of this potential consequence of MLB’s meddling. Again, after all, it’s not like we have a roster entirely devoid of foreign substance users.

Yankees should be wary of Tyler Glasnow’s injury. Did abandoning sticky stuff help cause it?

Worried about the effect of removing foreign substances from the game so abruptly? Listen to Glasnow tell his tale after suffering elbow tightness on Monday:

Glasnow worked a clean fourth inning, striking out Yasmani Grandal and Adam Eaton to begin the frame. At that point, he said, he gripped a new, slick baseball “really hard” and threw a 98.2 mph fastball that Vaughn fouled off. He felt the pull then and on each pitch after that.Glasnow noted with some frustration that the ball was “extremely slick” on Monday night, which made it difficult to grip, but wasn’t sure if that contributed directly to his injury.“I think having to grip a ball extremely hard when you throw hard and when your muscle is already extremely tense, and then you have to somehow try to not hit someone in the face — I don’t know,” Glasnow said. “I think whenever I’m trying to hold the ball a lot tighter, it’s probably not going to add to a comfortable elbow feeling. Again, I don’t know. I just think it’d be nice to make it more consistent.”

Direct attribution to the ball feeling slicker and his inability to find the consistency he typically works with. Put aside all your concerns about branding Gerrit Cole and Co. as “cheaters”; this mitigating factor of their potential abandonment of the substances that got them here should be far more worrisome.

Though Glasnow intends to avoid Tommy John surgery, his diagnosis was still just about as daunting as it gets for any pitcher. And he absolutely went off on MLB when talking to the media on Tuesday.

Glasnow’s injury should theoretically give hope to the Red Sox, Blue Jays and Yankees, increasing their chances of catching the Rays in the AL East, though no one is celebrating this.

However, based on Glasnow’s experience, it should simply make those teams more wary about potentially being next in line to see a pitcher who’s accustomed to a different spin and elbow motion suffer the consequences of the league’s latest ruling.

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