Clay Buchholz accused of doctoring baseball, denies he is cheating

Clay Buchholz has been the best starting pitcher in baseball this season, and some think he is cheating to gain an unfair advantage.

After the Red Sox pitcher improved to 6-0 on the season following Boston’s 10-1 win in Toronto on Wednesday night, accusations came from Blue Jays broadcaster Dirk Hayhurst that Buchholz was doctoring the baseball with a substance he kept on his forearm (seen above).

Forget the hair, I just saw video of Buchholz loading the ball with some Eddie Harris worthy slick’em painted up his left forearm. Wow.

— Dirk Hayhurst (@TheGarfoose) May 2, 2013

“This was substantial. You could see it slathered on there,” Hayhurst wrote in another tweet.

Then on his radio show on Fan 590 in Toronto (listen here at the 11:00 mark), Hayhurst said that Buchholz “absolutely” is cheating.

Hayhurst is a former MLB pitcher and seems to be an expert on the subject. Hayhurst wrote a column for Yahoo! Sports last year in which he said the art of doctoring the baseball is alive and well.

Buchholz has gone at least seven innings in each of his starts this year. He has allowed just 27 hits, five runs, and 16 walks in 44.2 innings while striking out 47. He responded to the accusation by saying the substance on his forearm was rosin.

“There’s a rosin bag behind the mound and it’s there for everybody to use every inning after our warm-up,” Buchholz told MassLive.com on Thursday. “Put rosin on my arm throughout the game. Sweat, water, whatever. … Sometimes I put a little thing of water on my hip just to get moisture on your hands ‘cause sometimes the balls that they throw to you feel like cue balls off a pool table. Got to find a way to get grip. But yeah, I mean, definitely no foreign objects or substances on my arm.”

So what do you think? Based on the screenshot shown by SportsNet Canada, it doesn’t look like Buchholz was using rosin. Maybe Buchholz partially owes his Pitcher of the Month award for April to Eddie Harris.

H/T CBS Boston