CHICAGO — As Edwin Díaz stood on the infield grass Sunday night at Wrigley Field, surrounded by a pair of umpires and two of his teammates, he quietly pleaded his case.
Crew chief Vic Carapazza turned Díaz’s palm upward and placed his own hand on it, trying to gauge the stickiness. Díaz’s hand was mottled with black, which he later explained was due to what he felt was a legal combination of dirt, rock rosin and sweat. He implored Carapazza to smell his hand to confirm that nothing illegal was on it.
Carapazza believed the stickiness was due to a different substance. He ejected Díaz, barring the closer from throwing a pitch in the Mets’ 5-2 win over the Cubs and lining him up for an automatic 10-game suspension.
“As soon as they saw me, they were trying to throw me out of the game,” Díaz said. “I understood. That’s their job. That’s part of the game.”
Díaz became the third Mets pitcher to receive a sticky stuff ejection in the last 15 months, joining Max Scherzer and Drew Smith. Entering a save situation in the bottom of the ninth inning, Díaz submitted to the same sticky stuff check that pitchers undergo on a regular basis, sometimes multiple times per game.
But this one quickly became anything but routine. Carapazza lingered by Díaz, checking his hat, belt and glove. Although Carapazza found nothing amiss in any of those places, he lingered on the pitcher’s right hand, checking it multiple times while home-plate umpire Alex Tosi watched.
“It definitely wasn’t rosin and sweat,” Carapazza later told a pool reporter. “We’ve checked thousands of these. I know what that feeling is. This was very sticky. … Without a question [it] was way too sticky. It didn’t take me very long.”
Neither Díaz nor Mets manager Carlos Mendoza put up much of an argument. Díaz did not ask for permission to wash his hands and return to the field, as Scherzer did last April. Following the game, Díaz said he only used legal substances to make his hands sticky. But MLB rules state that rosin, a legal substance, can become illegal if used in excess.
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