MLB needs to get ahead of this right now. This could easily explode like the steroids scandal. Astros already won one World Series. If it drags on for three years and the stats guys put three years of data together and conclude that nearly every pitcher the Astros acquired during this timeframe had an immediate and significant increase in spin rate, then it's obvious that they are doctoring the baseball and then all the writers are completely justified in saying that MLB should have been on this early in 2018. First ex-Astro that would come out and say "yeah we were cheating, everyone knew and nobody cared" would completely blow the lid off. If I was the commissioner the order would have already gone out. When a pitcher gets on the mound an umpire checks his hat, glove, belt, forearms and face/neck for any foreign substance. Rosin on bill of cap OK. Anything else comes with automatic ejection and fine. This is not an opinion on if pitchers should be allowed to use pine tar or not. I have no problem if they change the rule this coming off season and make it legal for 2019. But right now it's not legal and if MLB decides to just look the other way, then they should take the same beating from sportswriters as they took after all the steroids stuff went down. It's also kind of an unwritten rule that no team does anything about another team doing it because their pitchers are doing it too. You can't just single out the Astros for the umps to check. You would need to check every pitcher and every catcher too because they could just as easily put something on the ball. I think that's what he was implying.