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In the middle of the 2021 MLB season, baseball finally cracked down on one of the sport’s worst-kept secrets: pitchers using foreign substances — or “sticky stuff” — to get a better grip and generate more spin.

And almost immediately, things got chaotic.

Gerrit Cole found himself at the center of the controversy. Max Scherzer nearly stripped on the field during an inspection. Tyler Glasnow blamed the sudden adjustment for contributing to his injury. Spin rates dropped across baseball.

So it seems simple, right?

Take away the sticky stuff, expose the pitchers who depended on it, and give hitters their chance again.

Except that’s not exactly what happened.

In this episode of High Heat with Cheddar, I break down the entire 2021 sticky-stuff crackdown — why MLB finally acted, what substances like Spider Tack could actually do to a baseball, what happened to league-wide spin rates, and whether the crackdown really destroyed pitching dominance.

We also get into Gerrit Cole’s infamous Spider Tack answer, his incredible 129-pitch shutout AFTER enforcement began, the Max Scherzer inspection circus, Tyler Glasnow’s injury comments, Hector Santiago becoming the first pitcher suspended under the new enforcement, and what the numbers actually tell us about hitting after the crackdown.

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