by Jason Turbow
The points of those who argued in the affirmative were bolstered by the pitcher’s disastrous postseason history. In five wretched playoff starts prior to 2006, Rogers was 0-2, with a 10.26 ERA (plus another loss pitching in relief for the Mets in 1999, when he walked in the winning run of the NLCS), not once making it out of the fifth inning. So it was something of a surprise when, in 2006’s earlier rounds, Rogers ran off fourteen consecutive scoreless frames against the Yankees and Athletics. When footage from those starts was reviewed, the same brown smudge showed up on the same spot on his palm. What else could it be?
Shortly after Buck and McCarver began discussing Rogers’s hand, Cardinals manager Tony La Russa—apparently tipped off by someone watching TV in the clubhouse—engaged in a protracted conversation with the umpiring crew, who then ordered the pitcher to go wash up. Conspicuously missing from La Russa’s end of the conversation was a request that Rogers be checked for a foreign substance, even though he clearly appeared to be in possession of one. Had the umpires found anything on him, baseball’s rulebook called for an automatic ten-game suspension. Rogers could well have missed the rest of the World Series.
Afterward, both La Russa and Tigers manager Jim Leyland refused to condemn the act. Digging through the aftermath, the viewing public was left to wonder why.
Rogers had long been known as one of baseball’s premier red-asses, the guy who had punched a cameraman as a member of the Texas Rangers in a widely broadcasted dustup just a season earlier. His smudged hand in the World Series wasn’t even the first time he had been accused of cheating; in 2002, Cleveland’s Milton Bradley said that Rogers was scuffing the ball after the left-hander came within six outs of a perfect game against the Indians. In the face of such controversy in the World Series, the Gambler did the only thing he could reasonably do—he cleaned his hand and continued to pitch well. Fifteen postseason shutout innings with an obvious foreign substance were followed by seven shutout innings without it. Alleged pine tar or no alleged pine tar, the Cardinals, who scratched out only two hits against Rogers in eight innings, fared no better than the Yankees or the A’s had in earlier rounds. Had Rogers’s tour de force helped swing the series to Detroit rather than simply provided the Tigers with their lone victory, it would have reaped even greater scrutiny.
Still, why didn’t La Russa put up more of a stink?
Pundits immediately turned to the manager’s relationship with Leyland, positing that the Cards’ skipper wouldn’t do anything to embarrass his longtime friend, a theory dismissed out of hand by both La Russa and Leyland. Closer to the truth was La Russa’s general acceptance of a base level of cheating in his sport. A baseball man through and through, the manager harbored clear notions of on-field propriety, spending significant time considering the integrity of his actions and those of others. To him, baseball’s Code allowed for subtle bending of the rules. Just as sign stealing is rarely a retaliation-worthy offense, La Russa saw pine tar—as benign a foreign substance as can be found illegally coating a pitcher’s palm—as an acceptable violation of the rules.
After all, the manager’s own players bent certain rules to get whatever edge they could, as did those on every club in major-league baseball. Only two seasons earlier, Cardinals pitcher Julian Tavarez had been caught by umpires with pine tar slathered across his notoriously dirty hat, after three teams—the Phillies, Braves, and Pirates—accused him of doctoring the ball. He was suspended for ten days, and La Russa called it “an example of bullshit baseball.”
With this in mind, the manager’s play-and-let-play credo shouldn’t have been surprising. “There was a time when there was a rage of corked bats in the American League,” he said in response to a question about why he failed to have Rogers checked. “And the only time I ever challenged a corked bat was when somebody did some B.S. on the other side. You want to mess around? Hey, go check his bat.”
There’s also the fact that many people within the game view the use of pine tar as perfectly valid. “The only [illegal substance] I ever saw was pine tar, and I guarantee 80 percent of the pitchers still use it,” said Cy Young Award winner Jack McDowell, who insisted that its primary purpose is “to get a grip for a breaking ball.” McDowell recalls balls thrown by Dennis Martinez that were discolored “right where his curveball grip was,” leaving “two black finger-marks.”
In his press conference following Game 2, La Russa was blunt in describing his reaction to Rogers’s palm. “I said, ‘I don’t like this stuff, let’s get it fixed. If it gets fixed let’s play the game,’” he said. “It got fixed, in my opinion…. I detest any B.S. that gets in the way of competition.”
The fact that Leyland knew every intricacy of the Cardinals, having spent the previous six seasons scouting for them, helped make this a can of worms that La Russa had little inclination of opening. Just as he’d excuse a sign thief who stopped pilfering upon being caught, once Rogers washed his hand the problem of cheating ceased to exist for the St. Louis manager. “Tony’s been through a lot himself,” said Tigers legend Jack Morris after the incident, “so I don’t think he wanted to push that envelope.”
One didn’t have to look far for precedent illustrating how ugly things can get in this type of situation. Just a year earlier, members of the Angels had been convinced that Washington Nationals manager Frank Robinson was tipped off to pine tar on the glove of reliever Brendan Donnelly by outfielder (and former Angel) Jose Guillen, who had recently left Anaheim under acrimonious terms. Robinson used the information to the fullest extent of the rules, having Donnelly checked as soon as he entered the game; the right-hander was ejected before he could even throw a pitch. Furious, Angels manager Mike Scioscia confronted Robinson on the field and threatened to “undress” Nationals pitchers in response.
“There’s etiquette and there’s lack of etiquette,” said Donnelly at the time. “And the other day, you saw the latter.” The pitcher was ultimately suspended for ten games.
To listen to pitchers like Donnelly tell it, the question is less about why players use pine tar than why the punishment for using it is so steep. Much of its desired effect is, as McDowell said, to gain a better grip on the ball, especially on cold, wet nights. The substance isn’t so far removed from rosin (another tacky substance used to increase grip), which is so legal that a supply of it is kept in a bag atop every big-league mound. Technically, rosin is a powdered form of resin, which comes from the sap of pine trees—essentially making it powdered pine tar. When a pitcher picks up a bag filled with the stuff, tacky residue coats his hand; when wet, the two substances can be remarkably similar. “Pine tar is accepted practice for pitchers,” said Scioscia after Donnelly was caught.
At the time of Rogers’s first World Series pitch against St. Louis, it was forty-four degrees and raining. In his victory over the A’s in the previous round, it had been forty-one degrees. Against the Yankees in the Division Series it was fifty-four. All of these numbers were great reasons to want a better grip. The pitcher also claimed that even if the substance on his hand was pine tar—which it wasn’t, he said—it wouldn’t lend anything to the ball’s movement. “I don’t put anything on the baseball,” he said. “I really don’t see how that would benefit it, except to maybe throw it twenty feet short.” This is mostly accurate, except for the part about benefit; if utilized properly, extra tack can have a profound impact. “Better grip means better spin on the ball,” wrote former pitcher Jim Brosnan in a bylined article in The New York Times. “Better spin means better movement on the pitch.” This means that, through the use of pine tar, an average curveball can conceivably become an outstanding curveball.
What is it about pine tar that makes people so crazy? It’s been in use at least since the early 1900s, and had made several prominent appearances in games of significance well before the 2006 series. The most noteworthy of these was the 1983 contest in which Yankees manager Billy Martin had George Brett’s go-ahead, ninth-inning home run negated because the future Hall of Famer had pin
e tar twenty inches up his bat (a common practice to improve grip) when rules mandated an eighteen-inch limit. Upon hearing the umpires’ ruling, Brett came tearing out of the Royals dugout at full speed and in a state of near insanity, arms flailing, his face a twisted mask of rage—“about as much of a lunatic act as you’ve ever seen on a field,” he said. (Ironically, the one guy on the Kansas City bench with enough foresight to try to hide Brett’s lumber was none other than Gaylord Perry, who grabbed the bat from umpire Tim McClelland, initiating what was essentially a relay race to try to get it off the field and away from the authorities. It didn’t work.)
Of course, even Martin had to admit that too much pine tar did nothing to help Brett put distance on a batted ball, and, days later, American League president Lee MacPhail ordered Brett’s homer reinstated, which eventually led to a Royals victory. More like Kenny Rogers was Jay Howell, the Dodgers reliever who in 1988 was found to have pine tar on his glove during Game 3 of the National League Championship Series against the New York Mets.
In Darryl Strawberry’s autobiography, Darryl!, the outfielder wrote that Mets manager Davey Johnson grew suspicious when he saw the extreme break on Howell’s pitches, though other sources say Johnson heard about the pitcher’s use of the substance from Tucker Ashford, a minor-league manager in the Mets system who played against Howell in the mid-1980s. Either way, Johnson ordered all eyes on Howell as soon as he entered the game. First-base coach Bill Robinson noticed the pitcher tugging at the leather strings on the back of his glove, and Johnson waited until the eighth inning to pounce. With Howell trying to hold a 4–3 lead and a full count on leadoff hitter Kevin McReynolds, Johnson asked the umpires to search the pitcher; they found the pine tar, ejected him, and continued the game. New Dodgers pitcher Alejandro Pena served up ball four to McReynolds, which helped ignite a five-run rally for New York. Howell was ultimately suspended for two days by National League president Bart Giamatti, the first time any player had been suspended from postseason play for cheating.
Dodgers manager and former pitcher Tommy Lasorda, who admitted to his own occasional use of pine tar during his playing days with Brooklyn, brought up a point that would become a staple eighteen years later in conversations about Rogers. “I don’t think (Howell) was cheating,” he said. “What he did was simply to get a better grip.”
Whether or not Rogers cheated, there are holes in his story. Plate umpire Alfonso Marquez said that he talked to the pitcher about removing the “dirt” as Rogers came off the field. Crew chief Randy Marsh said he told La Russa that Rogers was being instructed to wash his hand. Both these accounts were confirmed by umpiring supervisor Steve Palermo. In Rogers’s version, however, the pitcher noticed the dirt himself and wiped it off on his own accord, and said that his discussion with Marquez concerned the amount of time between innings, not pine tar or his pitching hand. He also said the smudge was the result of his rubbing up warm-up baseballs with mud and rosin before the game. “It was a big clump of dirt,” Rogers opined. “I like the dirt on it, mud on it, spit, rosin, whatever you want to talk about. I use all that stuff to get the ball to where you can feel it.”
Not everyone bought it. “I don’t believe it was dirt,” said La Russa the next day. “Didn’t look like dirt.”
If both the conversation and the foreign substance are conjecture, the reaction Rogers received upon returning to the Tigers dugout in the second inning was indisputable: The pitcher was caught on television being ordered into the clubhouse by Tigers first-base coach coach Andy Van Slyke. Although Van Slyke said that he told Rogers only to “get down in the tunnel and stay warm,” there was a brown clump on the pitcher’s palm when he disappeared, and nothing but residue from whatever had just been washed away when he returned. As Tim McCarver asked on the air: “If it wasn’t illegal, why was it washed off?”
“What they’re doing,” said Palermo after the game, explaining why the umpires had Rogers clean his hands but didn’t discipline him, “is that they’re trying to remove doubt in that situation.”
But if an illegal substance Rogers claims wasn’t on his hand wouldn’t help him, how about the other noted liberty he took during the game? Instead of a regulation Tigers cap, as was worn by every one of his teammates, Rogers sported a batting-practice cap. The difference? The hat on his head was darker under the bill—the better, said skeptics, to hide a foreign substance. The pitcher’s explanation made about as much sense as anything else he said: The regular cap gave him headaches.
After the Rogers incident, the person to whom reporters repeatedly turned for comment was eight hundred miles away, on his fifty-eight-acre North Carolina farm. Gaylord Perry was used to it, having made a career of applying various lubricants to baseballs. The day after the Rogers incident, Perry had to interrupt work to field no fewer than sixteen calls seeking his opinion on the matter.
He told everyone who asked that he concurred with most of the principals in the affair, ceding that pine tar is used primarily to help a pitcher’s grip when the weather is cold and the ball is damp. Then he added, “Pine tar in North Carolina is clean…. It doesn’t show up. [Rogers has] to get some of that.”
PART FOUR
TEAMMATES
20
Don’t Talk About a No-Hitter in Progress
If baseball ranked practical jokers like it ranked home-run hitters, Bert Blyleven would be the all-time leader—by a mile. His was a relentless pursuit of the perfect clubhouse prank, with his teammates living in a perpetual state of giddy terror, horrified at the notion that they might end up on the wrong end of what he continues to describe as a sense of humor. But, as beloved as Blyleven may have been, and with as much leeway as he was afforded for being both slightly addled and from the Netherlands, he still found a way to take things too far. Hotfoots, buzzers, firecrackers, and liniment oil were his staples, but it wasn’t with any of them that the right-hander overstepped his limits when he broke one of baseball’s most hallowed unwritten rules.
It was September 22, 1977, in Anaheim. Blyleven, the ace of the Texas Rangers, was dominating the Angels with the best curveball in the game. Through seven innings, the only baserunner he allowed had come on an error by Rangers shortstop Bert Campaneris. As Blyleven sat in the dugout next to catcher Jim Sundberg, he looked up at the scoreboard and started pondering. “Hey, Jimmy,” he said as casually as if he was complimenting Sundberg’s sweatbands. “You know we got a no-hitter going?” The catcher was speechless. He looked at Blyleven. He thought about an appropriate response. He looked at Blyleven again. In the end, he could manage only to walk away in silence.
“He wouldn’t even talk to me,” said the right-hander quizzically. “I don’t know why. [Bringing it up] kind of relaxed me a little bit, but it made Jimmy very nervous. I thought I had friends on the team until I got to a situation like that, and then they leave you pretty much alone. That’s just the way it is.” Despite the faux pas, Blyleven got his no-hitter.
Not talking about a no-hitter in progress is among the oldest of baseball’s traditions. It’s relatively unique among the unwritten rules, in that, whereas the majority of the Code has to do with respect, this one is sheer superstition. Some players take their totems very seriously—from never touching a baseline as they walk on or off the field, to refusing to wash their clothes when they’re riding a hot streak—but this is the only one to garner virtually unanimous consensus.
Don’t talk to the pitcher. Don’t sit near the pitcher. Don’t interact with the pitcher. Don’t look at the pitcher. Don’t change the pitcher’s routine in any way. Don’t change your routine in any way. The same rules apply to the pitcher himself, who is expected to avoid his teammates with the same fervor they use in avoiding him. The subclauses of the rule are plentiful, and if one of them is broken and a hit is subsequently surrendered, it’s the fault of the jinxer, not the pitcher. “Don’t ever do that,” said Phil Garner. “You don’t ever say anything. It’s just something you don’t ever do. Don’t ever mention i
t. Never.”
“If you even think about telling him he’s got a no-hitter going, somebody’s going to smack you one,” said Mark Grace.
Superstition aside, the concept is designed to protect pitchers from outside influence, removing unnecessary pressure in case they hadn’t yet taken note of their accomplishment. The question, of course, is whether that’s even possible.
“I knew it. I mean, shit, anybody who says he didn’t know he had a no-hitter, he must have been worse than Dock Ellis was on the one that he threw,” said Dick Bosman, who threw a no-hitter for Cleveland in 1974, referencing Ellis’s famous LSD-fueled masterpiece in 1970. (Even Ellis claimed he was aware of what was happening at the time.)
“There’s no way he can’t know,” said Dodgers pitcher Rex Barney, who no-hit the Giants in 1948. “Every time he looks at the scoreboard for the outs or the count he sees that 0-0-0 up there.”
In the modern era, players also have television. Starting pitchers regularly make between-innings trips to the clubhouse, where it’s virtually impossible to avoid game broadcasts in which their performance is likely the primary topic of discussion. (During David Cone’s perfect game in 1999, for example, the right-hander listened to Yankees broadcaster Michael Kay talk about it from the fifth inning on, which is when the superstition usually kicks in.)
If, beyond all odds, the feat still manages to escape the pitcher, he can pick up a clue from incrementally decreasing interactions with his teammates. “You start to see the guys easing away,” said Oscar Gamble. “When they get that no-hitter you start to notice a little bench space on both sides of the pitcher getting bigger and bigger.”