HOUSTON – Astros right-hander Ronel Blancoone of baseball’s best players through the first six weeks of the regular season, could face a 10-game suspension after being ejected from Tuesday’s 2-1 overtime victory against the A’s because the umpires found a sticky substance inside his glove.
Blanco, who was 4-0 with a 2.23 ERA in seven starts before the game, had held Oakland scoreless for three innings when first base umpire Erich Bacchus made a standard check of his glove then as he headed to the mound to start the fourth. . All four umpires converged and inspected the glove, and Blanco was subsequently ejected by third base umpire Laz Diaz, the team leader.
“They told me they found something sticky in the glove and that’s why they told me I couldn’t continue throwing with the glove on,” Blanco said per the intermediary of a team interpreter.
Blanco said the sticky substance was rosin that he put on his forearm and that it had seeped into the glove from sweat. It’s illegal for pitchers to have a sticky substance on their non-throwing hand, a rule Blanco admitted he was unfamiliar with.
“No, I didn’t know it was illegal,” said Blanco, who threw a no-hitter in his first start of the season April 1 against Toronto. “I see other pitchers come and do it too, so I thought it was normal.”
Astros manager Joe Espada was able to examine the glove and said he could see white powder inside. He asked the umpires if Blanco could get a new glove and continue throwing and was told no.
“It’s too bad because he was throwing the ball well,” Espada said. “I think I kind of saw the substance in there and the stickiness of it.”
Bacchus checked Blanco’s hands and glove after the first inning, when Blanco needed 29 pitches to escape a bases-loaded jam, and found nothing.
“Then when I went to do his second check, before the fourth round, I asked for his glove,” Bacchus told a pool reporter. “That’s the first thing I checked. And I felt something inside the glove (he pointed to his palm while saying this). This is the stickiest thing I’ve felt on a glove since we’ve been doing this for a few years now. So, I brought in the crew. The crew put their heads together and then we went from there.
Diaz said the glove was on its way to the commissioner’s office, but said it was not up to the referees to determine what substance it was.
“We just felt like it was sticky, sticky enough that our fingers would get stuck,” he said. “So now it’s all up to the Bureau on what it was and all that.”
Blanco tried to plead his case before being ejected.
“What I told him is if you find something sticky in my glove, you should also check my hand because it should be on my hand as well,” he said. “If you find anything there, just check my hand. And he didn’t.
Major League Baseball last year began ramping up in-game inspections for foreign substances after initially launching a crackdown in June 2021. First-time offenders are suspended 10 games, and Blanco said he would appeal if it was suspended.
“It’s obviously something that’s extremely frustrating,” he said. “I want to go out there and compete and try to help the team and I couldn’t do that.”
Despite losing Blanco after three innings, five Astros relievers held the A’s to one run and three hits over seven innings, including two innings by Tayler Scott and Josh Hader, who pitched the ninth and 10th innings. Alex Bregman’s third homer in two games put the Astros ahead, 1-0, in the second, and Victor Caratini had a walk-off single to win it in the 10th.
The Astros, winners of three in a row and five of their last six, are at the start of a 29-game-in-30-day stretch and recently opted for a six-player rotation to help ease the workload on starters . Losing Blanco would certainly come at a bad time.
