Frayed Knot wrote: Are pitchers allowed to use sticky substances manufactured domestically? The best one apparently is, behold SPIDER TACK! https://theathletic.com/2631711/2021/06/07/spider-tack-is-the-stickiest-stuff-in-baseballs-foreign-substance-controversy-its-inventor-had-no-idea/https://theathletic.com/2631711/2021/06/07/spider-tack-is-the-stickiest-stuff-in-baseballs-foreign-substance-controversy-its-inventor-had-no-idea/ While most major league pitchers use some sort of grip enhancer to improve spin rates, there's one sticky substance many of them feel is a step too far. “Get Spider Tack out of the game and I don't care about anything else,” an MLB pitcher said, singling out a substance so spectacularly tacky that it suddenly has expanded beyond its initial market (strongmen lifting Atlas Stones) to a much larger one (pitchers hurling five-ounce baseballs). “What was it even created for?” a third pitcher asked. “It wasn't baseball.” I already had the short answer, but it took falling through an internet mineshaft to learn more about Spider Tack. It's easier to get your hands on the stuff — $35.99 plus shipping for a nine-ounce container on Amazon — than it is to get ahold of the people behind it. Their website is bare-bones, their social media accounts dormant. The parent company, Spider Strength LLC, has no office. A little amateur sleuthing leads to a LinkedIn profile, then another, then an address, then a phone number, and then I'm cold-calling a pharmaceuticals lab on the outskirts of Denver. The woman who answers the phone patches me through to the lab's president and CEO, Mike Caruso. He is willing to talk. He is a retired strongman, once one of the strongest men in America. At 40, he's still so muscular he looks like he could crush a baseball with his hands. This is the man who invented Spider Tack. And he is confused about why I'm calling. When I ask Caruso what he thinks about his tacky — that's the term among strongmen and strongwomen — becoming the talk of baseball, he answers cautiously. “This is news to me,” he says. “I had no idea it was popular in baseball.”