Looks like Max Scherzer knows he doesn’t have it anymore so he had to revert to using illegal foreign substances:

Umpire Phil Cuzzi actually made Scherzer change his glove earlier in the game and issued him a warning because of a sticky substance in his glove:

When Scherzer was being investigated on the mound again he tried to explain it as rosin:

So not only did the guy cheat once. He tried to cheat twice?! The MLB hands out 10 game suspensions for the first violation. Scherzer broke it twice! He’s spitting in the face of America’s Pastime! Anything less than a 20 game suspension for this cheater is lax.

Remember this is a guy who adamantly denied ever using sticky stuff before it was banned. Even though Bubba Harkins, the guy who developed the sticky stuff for pitchers like Justin Verlander and Gerritt Cole, had text messages from people in the Nationals organization close to Scherzer that he wanted the substance overnighted via Sports Illustrated:


To back his claims, Harkins has provided to SI additional corroboration—most of which was not included in his suit nor previously made public—in the form of text messages, Venmo transaction records and photos of tracking labels and shipping receipts showing the addresses of the Yankee Stadium visitors clubhouse (to the attention of a visiting team staffer) and the Nationals’ spring training park.

“Bubba, Max need 2 batches please,” said one text, which came from a Nationals staffer’s number, in February 2017. (Scherzer was the only Max on the roster; returning to his argument that pitch doctoring is a systemic, not individual issue, Boras, who represents Scherzer, points out, “That isn’t a Max [text]. That’s a Nationals [text].”) Harkins later sent to the staffer’s phone a photo of a UPS label listing the Nationals’ spring training complex as the delivery address, complete with a tracking number.

Joe Girardi is finally vindicated two years later: