by Tyler Kepner
The Brooklyn Dodgers met an old friend on a trip to St. Louis early in the 1955 season. Preacher Roe, a sly and slender lefty who had just retired to West Plains, Missouri, entertained his former teammates at the Chase Hotel. He needed their advice.
“We sat around a big table, all talking to Preacher,” recalls Carl Erskine, a top Dodgers starter then. “He said, ‘Fellas, I want to ask you a question: Sports Illustrated has offered me $2,000 to tell them how I threw the spitter. You think I should do that or not? With that $2,000 I can blacktop my driveway and I can fix up my house. I could really use that $2,000. What do you think?’
“The guys all said, ‘Yeah, go ahead, Preach, sure, why not?’ I did not. I admired Preacher. He was a great study to watch pitch. He was very clever and won a lot of games; he was really a pitcher’s pitcher. So I didn’t say yes to that. As we were leaving the dining room, Preacher said, ‘I didn’t hear you speak up.’ I said, ‘No, I didn’t, Preacher. You were such an outstanding pitcher without the spitter, I’d hate to see you taint your whole career by talking about throwing it.’
“So anyway, Preacher did the article, he got the $2,000, and sometime later when I talked to Preach he said, ‘Carl, you know what? I just ruined my chances for the Hall of Fame by admitting I threw the spitter, and you’re the only one that advised me not to do it.’ And I said, ‘Well, Preacher, I saw you pitch, you were a pitcher’s pitcher. You could have won without the spitter.’ ”
Maybe, maybe not. While Erskine believed in Roe, the man himself didn’t: in his confession, Roe said he turned to the pitch after slumping to 4–15 with the Pirates in 1947. Reviving the spitter, which he had practiced with Harry Brecheen as a Cardinals farmhand, was his last chance. He made the most of it, becoming a regular All-Star, though not quite a Cooperstown candidate, for the Dodgers. Cheating only made sense.
“Why shouldn’t I have?” Roe told Dick Young in the story. “I was about through when I decided to get me the pitch. ‘If I get caught,’ I told myself, ‘they’ll kick me out. If I don’t, I’m through anyway, so how can I lose?’ ”
He didn’t lose very often. Roe won so much—a .715 winning percentage over seven years with Brooklyn—that he guessed the spitter earned him $100,000. On the bench between innings, Roe would pop a stick of Beech-Nut gum in his mouth and announce, “I’m gonna get me a new batch of curveballs.” In the game, he’d spit on the meaty part of his thumb while pretending to wipe his brow. Then, while hitching his belt, he’d subtly wipe his index and middle fingers on the saliva. Two wet fingers on top, a dry thumb underneath, and Roe was ready. He compared it to squeezing a peach pit or watermelon seed with your fingertips.
“The idea is to get part of your grip wet, and the other dry,” he said. “When the ball leaves your hand, it slips off your wet fingers and clings, just tiny-like, to the dry part of your thumb. The ball jumps on account of it. If it’s a good ’un, it drops like a dead duck just when it crosses the plate.”
Roe’s confession only confirmed his reputation. As Stan Musial wrote decades later, “I’d always be first-pitch hitting against Roe, because when he had two strikes on you, he’d usually load up, and I hated to get a shower.” Anticipation of the spitter helped Roe, and he knew how to destroy evidence. He was never caught in the act.
“Preacher was a psychologist—he would psyche guys out,” Erskine says. “They thought the spitter was coming every pitch, practically, and half the game they’d be saying to the umpire, ‘Look at the ball, look at the ball!’ So the umpire would call for the ball, and Preacher would stomp around and look at his hand like, ‘Uh-oh, you probably got me this time,’ and then instead of tossing the ball in, he’d roll it to the umpire on the ground!”
Like steroid users decades later, Roe stayed ahead of the cops and thrived. But his pang of regret to Erskine—at least for going public and bursting his cloud of mystery—showed that he knew what he had done. The specter of the dark arts would indeed follow Roe to his grave; when he died in 2008, the word “Spitball” appeared in the headline of his New York Times obituary.
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Spitballs and scuffed balls are something like the Wonder Twins of pitches. They don’t really belong in the team picture, like Superman, Batman, and the rest. But they’re two of a kind, they’re constantly shifting shapes, and lots of folks would rather not admit to their existence.
They’re also illegal, but they didn’t start that way. After two chaotic decades or so, the spitball was banned for 1920, the same year the country went dry under Prohibition. The rule simply turned the mound into a speakeasy, with many pitchers going undercover to get the same slippery edge as their predecessors.
The physics behind the spitball is simple enough: when the ball slides off wet fingers, it loses backspin and therefore rotates less—something like a knuckleball, which should not rotate at all, or a forkball tumbling in its final plunge.
Defacing the surface of a ball produces the same kind of effect—added movement, to the opposite side of the scuff. This also dates to the game’s early days. Imagine what the baseballs looked like in the early twentieth century:
“We’d play a whole game with one ball, if it stayed in the park,” said Wahoo Sam Crawford, a Hall of Famer who played from 1899 to 1917, in The Glory of Their Times. “Lopsided, and black, and full of tobacco and licorice stains. The pitchers used to have it all their way back then.”
Crawford hit often against Jack Chesbro, who won 41 games for the Highlanders (now the Yankees) in 1904 while throwing almost nothing but spitters. Four years later, Ed Walsh of the White Sox won 40 and worked 464 innings; in between, he dominated the 1906 World Series. The spitter helped Walsh to a 1.82 career ERA—the best in baseball history for pitchers with at least 1,000 innings.
“I think that ball disintegrated on the way to the plate and the catcher put it back together again,” Crawford said. “I swear, when it went past the plate it was just the spit went by.”
Nineteenth-century pitchers experimented with spitballs, too. Bobby Mathews, a curveball pioneer of the 1870s and 1880s, would spit on his palm and apply the saliva to a specific area. Umpire Hank O’Day, who had been a pitcher in Mathews’s time, wrote of this in Baseball Magazine in 1908: “In the course of two or three innings, the ball would be perfectly black except in the spot where it was rubbed and there it would be perfectly white.”
Mathews had a few big years, but apparently not enough for his pitch to spread. For that, it took a playful and perceptive minor leaguer, George Hildebrand, who wasn’t even a pitcher. Hildebrand—who later served 22 years as an AL umpire—played briefly in the outfield for Brooklyn in 1902, the same year he was teammates in Providence with a young righty named Frank Corridon. Fooling around with a wet and soggy ball while warming up on a drizzly day, Corridon pegged his catcher in the shins. Hildebrand noticed and encouraged Corridon to “shoot ’em in faster.” Hildebrand and Corridon both continued experimenting with the pitch, and when Hildebrand joined a team in Sacramento later that season, he shared the idea with another pitcher.
That pitcher, Elmer Stricklett, would be the Johnny Appleseed of the spitball. When a group of major leaguers visited for an exhibition series, Stricklett captivated them with his spitball, and he proudly spread the secret. In spring training of 1904, he passed it on to two future Hall of Famers who propelled the pitch to prominence.
Stricklett pitched in the White Sox’ chain then, but was loaned to a New Orleans team for an exhibition with the Yankees. Chesbro took notice of the spitball, and Stricklett encouraged him to learn it. Mostly, though, he had made Walsh his project that spring in Marlin, Texas. Walsh didn’t even know what the spitball was when Stricklett suggested it.
“He showed me what he meant and threw the spitball, and I saw something!” Walsh would tell the Courant Magazine in 1956. “It broke two ways, straight down and out.”
Stricklet
t instructed Walsh to place his fingers on a wet spot between the seams and let the ball slip out. The two were not teammates long—Stricklett pitched only once for Chicago—but Walsh worked on his parting gift for two years before deciding to trust it in 1906. Sharp-eyed opponents could tell when Walsh was about to throw a spitter, because his cap would bob from the movement of his jaw when he wet his fingertips behind his glove. But it couldn’t have been much of a problem: for a seven-year stretch, through 1912, no pitcher had more strikeouts than Walsh, and only Christy Mathewson had more wins.
The spitter was legal throughout Walsh’s career. Just before his death in 1959, he railed against the injustice of its ban to the Fort Lauderdale News:
“Everything else in the game favors the hitter. Livelier baseballs, smaller ball parks. They’ve practically got the poor pitchers working in strait jackets. Those guys have the right to make a living, too.”
Walsh said curveballs, not spitters, hurt arms, and that knuckleballs were more prone to hit batters. He said he admired his successors for breaking an unjust law.
“Some people call ’em cheaters,” Walsh said. “They’re not. They’re just guys doing everything they can to win.”
That’s one way to think about it. Satchel Paige offered another: “I never threw an illegal pitch,” he said. “The trouble is, once in a while I toss one that ain’t never been seen by this generation.”
The ethics of spitters and scuffed balls offer a window to a kind of logic that seems convoluted, yet makes perfect sense to many in the game. To Keith Hernandez, whose Mets were flummoxed in the 1986 playoffs by Houston’s Mike Scott, the method of subterfuge is everything: do something illicit away from the field—corking a bat, injecting steroids—and that’s cheating. Do something on the field, in front of everyone, and get away with it? As Hernandez wrote in his book, Pure Baseball: “More power to you.”
Orel Hershiser nods and laughs at the distinction between cheating and its benign cousin, gamesmanship. “Oh, I understand,” he says, “if you can be a magician.” Hershiser doesn’t quite buy it, and offers this definition:
“A pitcher is cheating when he puts a certain spin on the ball but the ball does something unnatural for that spin. That’s cheating. Because a hitter hits off of spin and release and trajectory, so he’s reading all of those things and hitting what he predicts the ball is going to do because of what you’ve told him from the spin and the release and the trajectory. So if I put Vaseline on the ball, which creates a completely different spin for the release and trajectory, and that makes the ball dive because of that—OK, then that’s cheating. If I cut the ball and the ball has a certain spin but now it does double the movement it should for that amount of spin, that’s cheating.”
When Larry Andersen would be accused of scuffing the ball, he felt both flattered and offended. It happened to Andersen frequently, because he played for the 1986 Astros and had wicked movement on his pitches. But he swears he left the funny stuff on the side.
“I could go out to the bullpen right now and scuff it and make it do stuff,” Andersen says. “But mentally and emotionally, it wasn’t right. I played with a lot of guys who didn’t always go by the rules, but for me, I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get it out of my head that I was cheating if I did it.”
As manager of the Chiba Lotte Marines, Bobby Valentine was mystified by his pitchers’ attitude toward using a doctored ball. In Japan, it is just not done.
“The code of honor that all Japanese pitchers pitch by concerning the ball is that it has to be a perfect sphere,” Valentine says. “So they use balls right out of the box. We rub ’em up to make ’em dirty, but if the ball is ever dirty there, if it’s ever scuffed, if it ever has a piece of pine tar from the bat on it, it’s illegal to throw—and they don’t do illegal.”
Pushing the legal limit is a personal decision, and players generally stay out of each other’s way on those matters. That code explains the silence that helped stoke the steroid era; if you suspected your rival of juicing, you kept it to yourself—partly because you wouldn’t want anyone snooping around your clubhouse, either.
For all the stories of players howling from the dugout about scuffing or spitball suspects, most of the time they kept quiet for one simple reason:
“Because there was always somebody on your team that probably did something, too,” Joe Torre says. “Guys used to come back and bitch about it and you’d say, ‘Hit the dry side.’ What are you gonna do?”
Now, as the chief baseball officer for MLB, Torre must punish pitchers who flout the rules. Few cases come up, though, partly because players allow subtle rule-bending. Most will accept some chicanery—like applying something tacky to the pitcher’s fingers, to get a better grip—as long as it’s done right.
“Just don’t make it blatant,” says A. J. Ellis, the veteran catcher. “Because when you make it blatant you’re basically saying that we don’t care, we’re not afraid of you, we’re not afraid you guys are gonna get upset about this. We don’t respect you; we don’t really think you guys are worthy of hiding anything.”
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The movement to outlaw the spitter, and other forms of doctored baseballs, was rooted at least partly in business. In the 1919 regular season, Babe Ruth swatted 29 home runs in his final season with the Red Sox, stoking the public’s appetite for offense. Taking away a pitcher’s weapon could only help offense—which, in turn, would be popular with fans. And removing that kind of weapon, which was unsavory by nature, would signal that baseball was actively striving for a clean game. That, perhaps, could help the image of a sport still trying to appeal to a wealthier class of fan.
Mostly, though, the whole thing was just kind of gross.
“There is nothing very pleasant in the sight of a big fellow emptying the contents of his face upon a ball,” wrote Sporting Life magazine. “There’s something creepy and ‘slimy’ in the very suggestion of the spitball.”
That piece—quoted by Dan Gutman in It Ain’t Cheatin’ If You Don’t Get Caught—was written in 1908, and one of many columns pleading for an end to so-called freak deliveries. Pitchers were making a mockery of the game, as Rob Neyer has written, scrambling to top each other with new and creative ways to deface the ball. “Frankly,” Neyer wrote, “it became a joke.”
Barney Dreyfuss, the influential Pirates owner who helped create the first World Series, led the banishment brigade. Before the 1918 season, he warned pitcher Burleigh Grimes that the spitball would soon be banned, and told him to learn something new in the minors. When Grimes refused, Dreyfuss traded him to Brooklyn. Grimes would return to the Pirates after 10 years and 177 victories, and said decades later that pitchers basically ruined all the fun with their unrelenting hijinks.
“The real reason the spitter was barred,” Grimes said, “was because pitchers were roughing the ball with pop bottle caps, sandpaper, emery and whatnot, ripping a stitch or two of the seam with razor blades and such, and discoloring the ball with tobacco, licorice, coffee and in other ways.”
Sometimes, though, they made such discoveries by accident. Warming up under the stands on a rainy day in Atlanta in 1907, minor leaguer Russ Ford threw a pitch that struck a post behind his catcher, Ed Sweeney. When Sweeney returned the ball, Ford noticed a rough spot from where it had struck the post. When he pitched the ball again, it veered sharply, away from the scuffed side. Ford knew he was on to something, and worked on the pitch for two years, scuffing the ball with a jagged soda bottle and fooling his teammates in batting practice. Eventually Ford found safer ways to scuff; an umpire said he hid emery paper in a hole in his glove, and Ty Cobb believed he used an emery ring. Ford wanted hitters to think he was throwing the spitter. “He would deliberately show his finger to the batter,” Cobb wrote in his memoirs, “and then wet it with salvia.”
For a while, it worked. After a one-game cameo in
1909, Ford went 26–6 with a 1.65 ERA for the Highlanders in 1910—the only season ever by a Yankees pitcher with that many wins and such a low ERA. He managed to keep the pitch a secret until 1913, when Cy Falkenberg of Cleveland caught on. It spread from there, and after the Yankees’ Ray Keating and the Cubs’ Jimmy Lavender were found with emery paper on the mound in 1914, the pitch was banned. Ford and Falkenberg quickly faded from the scene.
A similar fate befell Hod Eller, who found a “shine ball” with the Reds in 1917. On a dark, damp day at the Polo Grounds, Eller noticed his pitch behaving strangely after he had vigorously rubbed off the dirt from one side. He quickly learned that by doing this and throwing hard, he could make the ball rise—three to four inches vertically, he said, somewhat dubiously, or five to six inches to the side.
“I used to reverse the break sometimes by holding the smooth spot on the under surface of the ball,” Eller told Baseball Magazine. “You could get a terrific drop to the ball by holding it that way, somewhat like the break of a spit-ball and much more effective than the average curve.”
The AL president Ban Johnson swiftly ordered an end to the shine ball, an edict as toothless as an 1897 rule forbidding players from defacing the ball. Life was grand for Eller, who went 19–9 in 1919 and beat the White Sox twice in the tainted World Series. Chicago’s Eddie Cicotte also threw the shine ball—he rubbed it against colorless paraffin wax on his pants—but he conspired with gamblers to lose. So did Lefty Williams, whom Eller beat twice. Eller retired Shoeless Joe Jackson, another of the “Eight Men Out,” on a grounder to end the farce in Game 8.
The Black Sox scandal would not explode until 1920, but the curious performances had at least stirred suspicion in the immediate aftermath. Coupled with the financial incentives in boosting offense, the atmosphere was ripe for a rule change. By spring training, this had become law:
At no time during the progress of the game shall the pitcher be allowed to: (1) Apply a foreign substance of any kind to the ball; (2) Expectorate either on the ball or his glove; (3) Rub the ball on his glove, person, or clothing; (4) Deface the ball in any manner; (5) or to deliver what is called the “shine” ball, “spit” ball, “mud” ball, or “emery” ball. For violation of any part of this rule the umpire shall at once order the pitcher from the game, and in addition he shall be automatically suspended for a period of 10 days, on notice from the president of the league.