by Jason Turbow
—Former major-league manager George Bamberger
There’s cheating in baseball like there’s cheating in all sports, because competitive instincts direct players toward any possible advantage. Some are able to corral those instincts to within the limits of the rulebook, but for many, the field of play is open to possibilities.
When it comes to cheating in baseball, however, many tactics that go against the letter of the law are viewed as perfectly acceptable, both by those who utilize them and those against whom they’re used. It’s a soft-focus that turns lines that are sharply delineated in the view of an outsider into so much gray area at the level of the playing field. Think about it this way, because others certainly do: Deceiving an umpire is cheating, but deceiving an opponent (say, by stealing his signs) is simply hard-nosed competition.
Take it from no less an authority than Frank Robinson, who, in addition to his Hall of Fame career as a player and manager, served as Major League Baseball’s discipline czar from 2000 to 2001. “Some of that stuff might be against the rules or against some code, but none of it is against the law,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with trying to find an edge. That’s smart—that’s not cheating.”
That said, there are numerous ways to go about “not cheating,” all of which offer their own subtleties and intrigue.
Take, for example, an instance from 1987. George Steinbrenner was watching his Yankees play the California Angels on television, and was shocked when the camera zoomed in to show close-ups of what appeared to be a small patch, or even a bandage, on the palm of Angels pitcher Don Sutton’s left hand. The WPIX broadcasters brought it up whenever the pitcher appeared to grind the ball into his palm between pitches. It was, they said, probably why Sutton’s pitches possessed such extraordinary movement that day. He was in all likelihood scuffing the baseball.
Outraged, Steinbrenner called the visitors’ dugout at Anaheim Stadium and lit into Yankees manager Lou Piniella. Was he aware, asked the owner, that Sutton was cheating? “Our television announcers are aware of it,” yelled Steinbrenner. “I’m sure the Angels are aware of it. You’re probably the only guy there who doesn’t know it. Now, I want you to go out there and make the umpires check Don Sutton!”
This wasn’t exactly breaking news about Sutton. He had been thrown out of a game in 1978 for scuffing. In 1981, a secret feature he was scheduled to shoot for NBC in which he detailed many of the ways pitchers cheat was scrapped when word about it leaked. (To protect his identity, Sutton was to have worn a ski mask and the image was to appear reversed, so he would appear to be a lefty.) By the time the Yankees’ broadcasters started musing over the possibility that Sutton might be scuffing, the pitcher was already among the most discussed ball-doctors in the game.
“George,” Piniella responded, “do you know who taught him how to cheat?” Steinbrenner confessed that, in fact, he did not. “The guy who taught Don Sutton everything he knows about cheating is the guy pitching for us tonight,” Piniella said. “Do you want me to go out there and get Tommy John thrown out, too?”
America is built on the shoulders of its honest icons—George Washington and the cherry tree; Honest Abe. We’re raised to believe that cheating is bad, that truthfulness and integrity make the man. We warn against cheating in school, look with indignation at cheating spouses, and above all proclaim that cheaters never win.
That last part, of course, is factually inaccurate. Cheaters do win. They win a lot. It’s why they cheat. And in professional sports, where every athlete seeks every advantage that can be comfortably tolerated (and some that can’t), the concept of cheating is continually stretched to its maximum breadth.
If baseball is a business, cheating has become little more than a business practice, and, like sign stealing, is generally abided as long as it stops once it’s detected. This covers a wide range of endeavors: pitchers applying foreign substances to the ball, and hitters doctoring their bats; outfielders acting as if they’ve caught balls they actually trapped, and hitters pantomiming pain from balls that didn’t hit them. It’s why, when Sammy Sosa was caught using a corked bat in 2003, Cubs president Andy MacPhail said, “There is a culture of deception in this game. It’s been in this game for 100 years. I do not look at this in terms of ethics. It’s the culture of the game.” MacPhail might be easy to dismiss as a company guy protecting his star, but he spoke the truth.
“Everyone cheats,” said White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen. “If you don’t get caught, you’re a smart player. If you get caught, you’re cheating. It’s been part of the game for a long time. If you’re doing whatever you’re not supposed to do and you don’t get caught, keep doing it.”
This is why Tigers star Norm Cash, in the rare instance when he was on base when a rain delay was called, would try to advance illicitly before play resumed, returning to third if he had been on second, or second if he had been on first. That he never got away with it hardly matters—it’s the effort that counts.
Or take the time in 1941 when a loaded pitch from notorious Tigers spitballer Tommy Bridges broke so severely that it squirted away from catcher Birdie Tebbetts. When Yankees manager Joe McCarthy asked the umpire to check the ball, both Tebbetts and the batter, Joe Gordon, raced after it. Tebbetts got there first and, with the bases empty, promptly threw the ball into the outfield, where it was tossed from fielder to fielder before being returned to the umpire, clean. Unimpeachable, Bridges continued his ways.
In the pantheon of cheaters, Bridges was merely an All-Star; Rogers Hornsby was a legend. Owner of a lifetime .358 batting average and three .400 seasons, Hornsby is widely considered to be the greatest second baseman of all time. In 1961, after his playing career and fifteen years managing six big-league teams were behind him, he authored a story for True magazine titled “You’ve Got to Cheat to Win in Baseball.” In it, he wrote, “I’ve been in pro baseball since 1914 and I’ve cheated, or watched someone on my team cheat, in practically every game. You’ve got to cheat. I know if I had played strictly by the rules I’d have been home feeding my bird dogs a long time ago instead of earning a good living in baseball for 47 years.” By Hornsby’s own estimation, cheating was all that stood between the Hall of Fame and a lifetime of kennel work.
Or take it from Orioles manager Earl Weaver, who, upon visiting the mound to talk to pitcher Ross Grimsley during a bases-loaded situation, offered a simple suggestion: “If you know how to cheat, this would be a good time to start.”
With the preponderance of such low-level dishonesty in the game, it’s surprising that more players aren’t called out by ex-teammates who know every detail of their methodology. The reason is simple: If Player A calls out Player B, he can be assured that Player B will return the favor—if not directly, then against one or more of Player A’s teammates, who will then also respond in kind. This can get messy quickly, with players forced to offer perfunctory answers to boneheaded questions from an obligated media. There’s little to be gained from forcing a colleague to decry a practice that, in his heart, doesn’t bother him a bit.
It’s why Indians pitcher Jason Grimsley (no relation to Ross) was willing to crawl through the Comiskey Park ductwork and break into a locked room to spirit away a corked bat that umpires confiscated from teammate Albert Belle. It’s why the Yankees allegedly made a secret after-hours practice during the late 1980s of checking the bats in the Yankee Stadium visitors’ clubhouse for cork, but never acted on whatever information they might have picked up. It’s why Lou Piniella, looking after the best interests of his own pitching staff in 1987, didn’t want Don Sutton checked by the umpires.
Leave the definitive sentiment to Dick Williams, the Hall of Fame manager who won two championships with the A’s, and pennants with Boston and San Diego. “Anything short of murder,” he said, “is okay.”
• • •
Pitchers have always cheated. They’re crooks and scoundrels. I don’t trust any of them.
—Richie Ashburn
Casey Stenge
l wasn’t a rookie manager in 1949, but he was about to start the most important job of his life, at the helm of the New York Yankees. In nine seasons managing the Boston Braves and Brooklyn Dodgers he had never finished higher than fifth, so when he was plucked from the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League to lead the mighty Yankees—winners of fifteen pennants and eleven championships over the previous twenty-six seasons—the pressure was on. Stengel inherited a third-place club returning all its key players, and another flag was expected to soon be raised atop Yankee Stadium.
By July 24, New York held a three-game lead over the Cleveland Indians, but something was missing. The pitching staff, led by veteran hurlers Vic Raschi, Allie Reynolds, and Eddie Lopat—all over thirty—was solid but aging. Perhaps the forward-looking manager started to fear for his own future job security should his valuable arms falter in coming seasons. His solution: pitcher Ralph Buxton.
Managers bring up promising young pitchers from the minors all the time, but Buxton was hardly that. Thirty-five years old, the right-hander had appeared in all of five big-league games in 1938, then spent more than a decade bouncing from minor-league outpost to minor-league outpost. His most recent stop had been with the same Oakland Oaks club that Stengel had managed to the PCL title a year earlier. Buxton’s 13-3 Triple-A record under Stengel in ’48 was certainly a factor in ending his eleven-year minor-league exile, but the manager’s decision to summon him to New York was at least partly based on his nickname: “Pine Tar.”
The sobriquet originated during Oakland’s championship run, during a game in which Buxton was a strike away from beating the cross-bay rival San Francisco Seals. Before he could deliver the decisive pitch, however, Seals manager Lefty O’Doul shouted from the dugout for the umpires to check Buxton’s glove. O’Doul’s suspicions weren’t exactly new: Clubs around the league had long presumed that the reliever regularly loaded up the baseball. “He stuck [the pine tar] on his pants along the crease,” said former big-leaguer John Babich, the Oaks pitching coach. “All he’d do is rub his hands on his pants.” With a quick search the umpires quickly found the substance, which led O’Doul to protest the game. The league suspended the pitcher for ten days and ordered the final inning to be replayed at a later date. (The Oaks won the replay, as well.)
Buxton’s arrival in New York in July 1949 was ostensibly aimed at shoring up the Yankees’ bullpen, but the twenty-six innings he threw didn’t help much in that regard. The best service Buxton performed was explaining his trade secrets. By the end of the year, said Buxton, “the whole Yankee staff was using my pine tar.”
New York went on to win the World Series that year, as well as the following four, for a still-unmatched five-year streak of titles. It would be inaccurate to attribute that success to the lessons of Ralph Buxton, but his brief appearance in pinstripes did show that even the winningest team in baseball history made a point of looking for every edge it could get.
What does pine tar do for a pitcher? How about Vaseline? Spit? They’re all considered to be foreign substances, and banned from use under two of baseball’s official rules: 3.02, which states that “No player shall intentionally discolor or damage the ball by rubbing it with soil, rosin, paraffin, licorice … or other foreign substance,” and rule 8.02(a)(6), which says, “The pitcher shall not deliver what is called the ‘shine’ ball, ‘spit’ ball, ‘mud’ ball or ‘emery’ ball.”
Generally speaking, the prohibited substances fall into two categories: those that add friction and those that remove it. Tacky substances like pine tar or even mud are used by pitchers to improve grip in cold weather, but can also add snap to a breaking ball and, by weighing down one side of the baseball, can lend an extra degree of sink. The slick substances like petroleum jelly create what’s generally known as a spitball. They allow pitchers to deliver offerings at near-fastball speed but with substantially less rotation, because the ball squirts out of the hand rather than being spun across the fingers upon release. This lack of backspin provides significant late drop. “Vaseline is the best and K-Y Jelly is next,” said former Giants, Expos, and Cubs manager Charlie Fox, reviewing the pantheon of spitball substances. “The advantage to K-Y Jelly is that it doesn’t adhere to the ball and can’t be detected by the umpire. Balls with Vaseline on them will be hit on the ground and a big glob of dirt will be stuck to the ball.”
Substances can be hidden virtually anywhere on a pitcher’s body, on his uniform, or under his cap. Dodgers manager Charlie Dressen cut pieces of slippery-elm bark—which produces copious amounts of saliva when chewed—into sticks and wrapped it like gum so that his pitchers could pop it into their mouths without suspicion during games. Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis, an African American, withstood significant grief for wearing hair curlers on the field, but knew that the beads of sweat collecting at the ends of his straightened tresses would be ripe for harvesting. In the 1980s, several of Billy Martin’s pitchers on the Oakland A’s were said to regularly slather their legs in baby oil, which would soak through their uniforms for easy access during the course of a game, while others applied heating ointment to whichever part of their body sweated most copiously, producing faster and more reliable perspiration. Yankees pitcher George Frazier kept a supply of a Chicago-area shampoo that made his hair exceptionally oily, saying, “During a game I’d just reach back behind my neck for some [of the ensuing] grease.” A’s closer John Wyatt went so far as to keep a stash of Vaseline inside his mouth.
Many sources credit Frank Corridon with inventing the spitball in the early 1900s, though a 1931 Baseball Magazine article quoted Phonney Martin, a pitcher with the 1872 Brooklyn Eckfords, lamenting the spitter thrown by his contemporary, Bobby Matthews of the Lord Baltimores. Foreign substances were outlawed in the game’s earliest days, but saliva was not, and the spitter soon caught on around the league. White Sox star Ed Walsh, among others, rode his expectoratory success into the Hall of Fame, using a pitch that went by many names: the “spitball,” “brown spitter,” “country sinker,” “damp sling,” “wet ball,” and “wet wipe.”
By 1920, pitchers were using the spitter to such great effect that it was outlawed by Major League Baseball, which claimed that because the pitch was difficult to control, it put hitters at risk. Seventeen recognized spitball pitchers were grandfathered into the rule and allowed to ply their trade legally through the end of their careers; the last of them, Hall of Famer Burleigh Grimes, was also the best, and threw baseball’s last legal spitter in 1934.
Outlawing a practice doesn’t stop people from doing it, however, and the ruling simply meant that those determined to throw spitballs needed to increase their secrecy. The first man to be ejected for the practice was Browns pitcher Nelson Potter in 1944, for wetting his fingers before touching the rosin bag, in defiance of the umpire’s warning against doing exactly that. Potter, however, was an exception; others received far more leniency. Cardinals pitcher Red Munger, who played at the same time and in the same city as Potter, was known by opponents and umpires alike to load up balls with tobacco juice. After umpire Larry Goetz called the second strike of an at-bat on one of Munger’s doctored pitches, the hitter complained that the pitch had been a spitter. “Yes it was,” Cardinals catcher Joe Garagiola recalled Goetz saying. “Strike two.”
The 1950s, said Dodgers pitcher Claude Osteen, was “the [decade] of the spitter, and everyone took a turn at trying it.” It grew so pervasive that in 1955 Commissioner Ford Frick lobbied for the pitch’s relegalization; a Sporting News poll found that only 30 percent of 120 players, coaches, and managers surveyed would have a problem with this. (“Restore the spitter?” asked Dodgers shortstop Pee Wee Reese. “When did they stop throwing it?”) Still, the groundswell was insufficient to spur action, and the spitball stayed banned. Nonetheless, it continued to evolve.
Doing his predecessors one better, in the 1960s, Yankees great Whitey Ford mixed up a concoction of turpentine, baby oil, and rosin that he stored in a roll-on deodorant container that he freely brand
ished in the dugout during games. (After Yogi Berra grabbed the wrong container in a search through Ford’s locker for some antiperspirant, his armpit hair had to be cut away to free him from the stuff.)
The pandemic only grew through the 1960s and ’70s, to the point where Pete Rose claimed Angels pitcher Bill Singer threw him four straight spitters in the 1973 All-Star Game, one of which hit American League catcher Carlton Fisk in the knee before bouncing away. Recounted Rose: “He looked up, rubbed his knee, and said, ‘He didn’t even tell me the damn thing was coming.’”
That April, Yankees outfielder Bobby Murcer had exploded to the press after facing Cleveland’s greaseball king Gaylord Perry in the pitcher’s second start of the season, yelling: “Just about everything he throws is a spitter…. The more he knows you’re bothered by him throwing it the better he is against you. He’s got the stuff behind his ear and on his arm and on his chest. He puts it on each inning. I picked up the balls and they’re so greasy you can’t throw them.” Murcer went so far as to call commissioner Bowie Kuhn “gutless” for refusing to respond—and this was after the outfielder had recorded a three-hit game against Perry. When the pitcher was confronted with Murcer’s accusations, however, he said that Murcer hit “fastballs and sliders,” not spitballs. It would have been a more credible excuse had Perry been on the same page as his catcher, Dave Duncan, who in a separate, contrived denial said that Murcer had hit “off-speed stuff.”
To further the argument, The New York Times hired an unnamed Yankees pitcher to chart Perry’s every pitch throughout the game, marking those he thought to be spitballs. When the resulting pitch chart was compared with a replay of the game, the Times noted that, before every pitch identified as a spitter by the Yankees operative, Perry tugged at the inside of his left sleeve with his right (pitching) hand—an action he did not take for the rest of his repertoire. Yankees second baseman Horace Clarke, according to the chart, struck out on a spitter that, on replay, was seen to drop at least a foot. In the fourth inning, Thurman Munson asked to see the ball twice during his at-bat—during which, said the chart, Perry threw four spitters.
