The Baseball Codes

by Jason Turbow

  But Perry wasn’t just a practiced spitballer—he was also a practiced spitball deceiver. One of the strengths of the pitch, according to virtually everybody who has been suspected of throwing it, is that making a hitter believe it’s coming is nearly as valuable as actually throwing it. “The more people talk and write about my slick pitch, the more effective I get,” wrote Perry in his autobiography, Me & the Spitter. “I just want to lead the league in psych-outs every year.” To this end, Perry turned into his era’s version of 1950s spitball artist Lew Burdette—all fidgets, wipes, and tugs once he stood atop a mound.

  “Perry’s big right hand started to move and people started to boo,” wrote Gerald Eskenazi in the Times, about its charted game. “First he touched his cap, sliding his fingers across the visor, bringing them down along the right side of his head, stopping behind his ear. Then the hand went across his uniform, touching his chest, his neck. Was all this to create a diversionary action? Was he simply having fun? … ‘I did the same things I always did,’ Perry said later, suppressing a smile. ‘If people want to read things into it, so be it.’”

  Partly in reaction to the uproar Perry caused, a rule was implemented in 1974 that removed the mandate for hard proof in an umpire’s spitball warning, saying that peculiar movement on a pitch provided ample evidence. It didn’t take long—all of six innings into the season—before Perry earned his first warning under the new rule. Not that it mattered; by the end of the season he had won twenty-one games, was voted onto the All-Star team, finished fourth in the Cy Young balloting, and was thrown out of exactly zero games for doctoring baseballs.

  It wasn’t until 1982, when Perry was forty-three and in his twenty-first season in the big leagues, that he was finally disciplined for loading up a baseball, when he earned a $250 fine and ten-day suspension after throwing two allegedly illegal pitches as a member of the Mariners—the first such punishment for this type of activity since Nelson Potter in 1944. By that point, Perry had become the most frequently accused spitballer in big-league history, and did little to dispel the notion: Not only was his autobiography suggestively titled, but it came out in 1974, nearly a decade before he retired; his North Carolina license plate read SPITTER; when his five-year-old daughter was asked by a TV reporter in 1971 whether her daddy threw a greaseball, she quickly replied, “It’s a hard slider.”

  Although Perry claimed, upon his book’s release, that he didn’t throw the spitter any more, Twins manager Gene Mauch was quick to respond, saying, “But he doesn’t throw it any less, either.”

  In 1991, after 314 wins over twenty-two seasons, Perry was inducted into the Hall of Fame. George Owens of the Utica Observer-Dispatch described the ceremony: “When Rod Carew was inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame, Panamanian flags waved. When Ferguson Jenkins was inducted, Canadian flags were flown. When Gaylord Perry was inducted, it began to rain.”

  Though cheating has been a steady practice throughout baseball history, rarely has a player endured quite the humiliation of Seattle’s Rick Honeycutt upon being caught. In a game at Kansas City’s Kauffman Stadium in 1980, members of the Royals thought the break on the pitcher’s offerings was too extreme, especially after the left-hander had held them to two runs over eight innings just six days earlier. Kansas City manager Jim Frey collected an assortment of blemished baseballs, then requested that Honeycutt be examined. The pitcher clearly wasn’t prepared for this eventuality. When umpire Bill Kunkel reached the mound, he found the pitcher, glove off, violently snapping his hand back and forth. He was trying, it soon became clear, to detach a flesh-colored Band-Aid from his index finger, through which was protruding the thumbtack he’d been using to cut the baseball.

  Not only did Honeycutt fail to remove the damning proof, but he went so far as to inadvertently prick Kunkel—himself a former big-league pitcher who was once accused of throwing spitballs—when the umpire grabbed his hand. “The evidence at that point was pretty irrefutable,” said Mariners general manager Lou Gorman. To that point, Honeycutt’s humiliation was only moderate. Things became truly embarrassing when the ejected pitcher, on his way to the showers with the tack still affixed to his finger, went to wipe the sweat from his brow and gashed his own forehead.

  The following day, Seattle manager Maury Wills handed Kunkel a one-square-inch piece of sandpaper that the umpire had failed to detect on Honeycutt before tossing him, saying, “You might as well get the whole kit.”

  “If you were good at it, you wouldn’t get caught,” said Honeycutt, long after his career ended. “To have something as blatant as a tack to scuff a baseball … it was just total inexperience and stupidity on my part.” (When Honeycutt was traded to the A’s seven years later, his clubhouse greeting included a passel of thumbtacks and a Band-Aid across the space where the nameplate over his locker belonged.)

  There’s no mystery to why players cheat, but Gorman suspected that Honeycutt simply wanted to return to form after an elbow injury decreased the effectiveness of his breaking ball, which helped lead to sixteen losses over his final nineteen decisions after a 7-1 start to the season. “Sometimes you can be so frustrated,” said the GM, “that you will practically do most anything.”

  Honeycutt’s deceit hardly made him a baseball pariah—far from it. He was hired as the pitching coach for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2006, after spending four years as the team’s minor-league pitching coordinator. If he stands out from the field at all, it wasn’t because he cheated—it was because he got caught.

  Honeycutt’s methods of choice, scuffing and cutting, are well documented through the game’s annals, and have been utilized by some of the greatest pitchers baseball has known, from the admitted (Whitey Ford) to the assumed (Nolan Ryan). A ball’s raised seams provide air resistance (the higher the seams, the bigger the break); similarly, a scuffed ball adds movement to a fastball and drop to a breaking ball. “It’s a huge difference,” said Lary Sorensen, who took to scuffing in the latter stages of his career to compensate for his diminishing fastball.

  Taping a tack to one’s hand is hardly the only method to achieve such dramatic effect. There’s a piece of sandpaper or emery board hidden within a baseball glove, or a sharpened belt buckle upon which the ball can be subtly rubbed—a tactic, it’s been reported, used by Hall of Fame Tigers pitcher Jim Bunning. A pitcher for the Milwaukee Brewers in the 1980s had a jigsaw blade sewn into his glove between the thumb and index finger. Another pitcher went so far as to change the insignia on his glove—a Rawlings logo consisting of a white “R” inside a red circle—to hide his tools. “He cut out the red material, slipped in the sandpaper and spray-painted the glove the same color red,” said his teammate, outfielder Billy Sample. “It looked believable. He wouldn’t scuff the ball on every pitch, just when he needed an out in a big spot.”

  Pitchers can also enlist the assistance of teammates. Infielders intentionally drop balls as they toss them around, marking them up in the process. Sharpened eyelets on a glove can produce extreme gashes in a leather surface. Catchers can hone their shin-guard buckles to give balls a quick working over in the process of cocking their arms for return throws to the pitcher.

  After Astros pitcher Mike Scott leaped from obscurity to win the 1986 NL Cy Young Award, then dominated the Mets in the NLCS (one earned run over the course of two complete games)—all amid accusations that he was a consistent scuffer—the league decided to crack down. In 1987, Phillies pitcher Kevin Gross was ejected after umpires found sandpaper in his glove. Also that season, Joe Niekro was caught on the mound with an emery board. (He insisted it was for filing his nails; two of his prominent defenders were ex-teammates Scott and another reputed scuffer, Dave Smith.) Yankees pitcher Rick Rhoden was put under suspicion, called to task by AL president Bobby Brown after umpires kept “more than three and fewer than 10” balls he used in a game against Baltimore, each of which bore thin two-inch scuff marks. (Rhoden was not disciplined.)

  “Rick Rhoden and Tommy John are reasons 1 and 1A for th
e Yankees’ presence in first place,” wrote Thomas Boswell in 1987. “If they don’t abrade the horsehide, then maybe the whole thing is just a UFO scare and nobody cheats.”

  Of course, the Yankees did end up finishing fourth in their division that season, which just goes to show that cheaters don’t necessarily win—or at least that they need some help along the way.

  Properly doctoring a baseball can achieve wondrous results, but it can take a significant amount of preparation. The easiest way for a pitcher to cheat is simply to inch down the mound. The closer he gets to the plate, the less time the batter has to react to his pitches and the less velocity the baseball loses in arriving. This happens more frequently than most people realize.

  “On occasion I’ve pitched from about six inches in front of the rubber when I’ve needed the big strikeout. And I know I’m not the only one who’s done that,” wrote Nolan Ryan in his book, Throwing Heat. “You just rock up, step in the hole, and you’re half a dozen inches closer to the plate. Normally there’s enough dirt and stuff on the mound late in the game to cover things up, but you have to work the area to dig a hole to get your foot in.”

  “If you covered the rubber up with dirt, it was easy to do,” said Whitey Ford. “It’s just something nobody’s ever looking for. When I coached first base for the Yankees, I never remember checking to see if the pitcher had his foot in contact with the rubber when he delivered the pitch. Sometimes you could stand with both feet on the rubber, get your sign, and then when you pitched, your first step could be about three feet in front of the rubber. Talk about adding a yard to your fastball.”

  For all the ways pitchers can cheat, hitters are pretty much limited to their lumber. The industry standard for bat augmentation involves drilling a hollow core into the barrel, about a half-inch wide and up to eight inches deep—any more would affect the basic integrity of the wood—then packing the hole with cork (a much lighter substance than the ash or maple that has been removed) or various forms of shredded rubber, which can remove up to two ounces from a two-pound bat. A plug is then inserted, and the bat end is sanded to look as much as possible like a whole piece of wood. “I played with a guy who saved the last inch-and-a-half of dozens of broken bats,” said Bob Brenly. “When he was ready to plug that hole, he would take all the little caps and match them up so the grain lined up exactly perfect with the plug. That’s a master craftsman.”

  The practice has been going on for generations, but its effectiveness is still up for interpretation. Lighter bats equal faster swings, which, according to Lawrence Fallon and James Sherwood’s “A Study of the Barrel Construction of Baseball Bats,” could make up to a 1 percent difference in the distance a ball travels, or about four feet on a four-hundred-foot home run. Skeptics counter that the bat’s decreased mass negates most of that advantage.

  The most prominent example of this argument comes courtesy of admitted bat corker Norm Cash, a four-time All-Star with the Detroit Tigers, primarily in the 1960s, who went so far as to demonstrate his bat-doctoring technique for Sports Illustrated after he retired. In 1961, using a bat he later admitted was filled with cork, sawdust, and glue, Cash led the American League with a .361 average, hit forty-one home runs and drove in 132 runs.

  Still, it’s difficult to explain the first baseman’s slump the following year, in which his .243 average represented the largest single-season drop-off ever for a defending batting champion (118 points). Teammates insisted the reason for Cash’s diminishing returns was his ongoing effort to become more of a power hitter, but it’s a specious argument; Cash connected for 377 longballs over his seventeen-year career, but never again reached the forty-homer plateau. Minus his ’61 season, his lifetime batting average was just .264. Why Cash stopped corking—or if he stopped—is largely conjecture. It’s difficult to believe, however, that the slugger went cold turkey on altered bats after the success of his monster 1961 season, especially as he struggled through his follow-up campaign. If corked bats led to consecutive averages of .361 and .243, it probably wasn’t the bats that were running hot and cold.

  One thing to which corked bats can contribute, however, is a positive mental attitude. Put simply, because a player thinks his bat is quicker, it might actually be. “Quickness is everything, but thinking about quickness usually makes you lose quickness,” said one big-leaguer with experience in the subject. “If you think your bat makes you quicker, then you stop thinking about being quicker and you probably are—not because of the bat, but because you’re not thinking about it.”

  Efficacy of the argument aside, there’s no disputing that many players buy it. The list of guys who have been caught using doctored bats contains prominent names, such as Sammy Sosa, Albert Belle, and Graig Nettles; others, such as Mets All-Star Howard Johnson, were long accused but never caught. Johnson, in fact, went so far as to leave one of his bats behind after his team concluded a series in Montreal in 1987, specifically for Cardinals manager Whitey Herzog—one of his primary complainants—whose team was due into town the following day. Attached to the bat were twenty wine corks dangling from strings. St. Louis pitcher Bill Dawley, who had served up a homer to Johnson less than a week earlier, wasn’t laughing.

  “Very funny,” he said when the bat was discovered. “He’s going to get drilled.”

  The most unsung cheaters on a baseball diamond are often the grounds-keepers, who don’t break rules so much as perform their tasks with an eye toward benefiting the home team. The possibilities are virtually limitless: baking the ground around home plate to help a slap-hitting team or watering the dirt into a stew to help a sinkerball pitcher; gently sloping the baselines either fair or foul, depending on which club is stocked with bunters; growing the infield grass long to slow the ball for a team with speed, while keeping the outfield grass short to help balls squirt into the gaps; deforming the mound just where the visiting pitcher tends to land, and making the batter’s box either too hard or too soft in the spot that the opposing slugger likes to set up.

  Groundskeeper assistance occurred as far back as the 1890s, when the great Baltimore teams of John McGraw and Wilbert Robinson won their games with the help of an unsurpassed collection of speedsters. The Orioles stole a ridiculous 342 bases in 1891 alone, and augmented their baserunning dominance by originating tactical maneuvers such as the hit-and-run. That, though, wasn’t enough. Creating a home-field advantage in the truest sense of the term, they mixed the soil near home plate with clay and left it unwatered through the summer months, until it hardened into a concretelike consistency. This became useful when implementing one of their inventions, the Baltimore chop, in which a fleet-of-foot hitter would drive the ball straight down, then race to first as the catcher waited helplessly for the bounce to return to earth. (Visitors could attempt chops of their own, but the swing took a fair amount of practice to perfect and proved beneficial only for the fastest runners.)

  Baltimore’s groundskeepers didn’t stop there; they also sloped the outside of the third-base line to push bunts fair (a tactic later used at Shibe Park for the Phillies’ bunter par excellence, Richie Ashburn) and mixed soap flakes into the downslope of the mound, which made it difficult for visiting pitchers to find solid footing unless they knew where to plant. The Orioles even went so far as to hide extra baseballs in the high outfield grass, for those times when chasing a hit all the way into an alley proved inconvenient. (This trick worked well until the day that two outfielders both picked up balls and threw them in simultaneously.)

  Except for the hidden baseballs, every trick mentioned above is legal. Some field alterations, however, go specifically against the rulebook, such as moving first base a foot closer to home plate to assist teams built on speed, or a foot backward, to hinder them. Groundskeepers have been known to extend the rear of the batter’s box, to give the home-team hitters more time to swing against a particularly hard thrower, or the front of it, to let them get at a curveballer’s offering before the pitch can fully break. The most famous instance of t
he latter happened under instruction from Seattle Mariners manager Maury Wills, who in 1981 ordered the Kingdome’s batter’s box to be lengthened toward the mound in an effort to help outfielder Tom Paciorek, who stood so far forward that earlier in the season he had a home run nullified because his foot left the box when he swung. (Oakland manager Billy Martin, who noticed Wills’s batter’s box irregularity, surmised that the reason was that the A’s had a curveball pitcher, Rick Langford, on the mound.)

  “I think the majority of teams probably hedge an inch or so for their clubs,” said White Sox groundskeeper Roger Bossard. Only Wills, though, was suspended for it—for two games. His primary complaint after the fact wasn’t even that he got caught, but that his own grounds crew gave up the goods on him after Martin alerted the umps. “I’m shocked and dumfounded,” he said afterward. “This never happened to me in 22 years of baseball.” It never would again. Wills was fired nine days later, and never managed again.

  19

  Caught Brown-Handed

  In the moment of his being caught red-handed—or brown-handed, as it was—it seemed for all the world that the most interesting thing about the smudge on Kenny Rogers’s left palm was that it put up for discussion the notion that not only do ballplayers cheat, but occasionally they don’t cheat very well.

  The situation was brought to national attention early in Game 2 of the 2006 World Series between St. Louis and Detroit, when television broadcasters Joe Buck and Tim McCarver spotted what appeared to be a muddy substance on Rogers’s hand. McCarver immediately noted its resemblance to pine tar, and the announcers discussed it at length—even after it vanished an inning later, leaving a marked skin discoloration. The question was quickly raised: Had Rogers, key to Detroit’s pitching staff, been cheating?