How Pitchers Get A Grip On Hand Woes

Pickle juice? Superglue? Peeing on their digits? This is the gripping tale of how far pitchers go to get an upper hand.

- Eddie Matz And Anna Katherine Clemmons

REMEDY

ACRYLIC NAIL

ARCHIE BRADLEY, DIAMONDBACKS

After multiple cracks in his nail curtailed the use of his curveball, the Arizona reliever found relief at a local salon.

Aaron Sanchez is staring at his cuticles, pondering a seemingly simple question. The Blue Jays pitcher has just been asked to describe his relationship with his fingernails. At first, he considers using words to tell the story. But words won’t suffice to describe the medical ordeal that transformed him from Cy Young contender to replacement-level player. No, only images can do that. Graphic ones. So Sanchez pulls out his phone to share the grisly photos.

“It started like this,” says Sanchez, sitting shirtless at his locker in the visiting clubhouse at Camden Yards before a late-August game. He taps open a close-up of his right middle finger, a burgeoning blood blister beneath the nail and what appear to be small burgundy skid marks on the flesh bordering the top of it—the cost of doing repeated business with a baseball. He then scrolls through the dozens of pictures that tell the story of his lost 2017 campaign, each gnarlier than the last:

There’s the one taken just two weeks into the season, after a surgeon sliced off the entire left third of his nail in an effort to destroy the blisters that had started bubbling up the year before.

There’s the one of him pitching against Tampa Bay a few weeks later, when the remaining nail split in half horizontally during the first inning—his only inning—and his finger began, as he says, “leaking,” blood oozing everywhere, nary a Band-Aid in sight.