K

by Tyler Kepner

  Each team could designate up to two pitchers who would still be allowed to use the pitch in 1920. That year’s World Series was a spitball extravaganza: Grimes tossed a shutout for Brooklyn and Stan Coveleski won three complete games to lead Cleveland to its first title. As the rule stood, though, Grimes, Coveleski, and the 15 other eligible spitballers would suddenly be forced to give up their best pitch forever.

  In a letter to NL owners, Bill Doak, a 20-game winner for the Cardinals, argued that barring the pitch would “deprive all these pitchers of their greatest power,” and Grimes made similar pleas through the press. They met a sympathetic audience: the NL voted 6–2 to allow the designated spitballers to use the pitch for the rest of their careers, and the AL soon agreed.

  Three of the grandfathered spitballers—Coveleski, Grimes, and Red Faber, who used tobacco juice on the ball—wound up in the Hall of Fame. Grimes would be a World Series hero for the Cardinals in 1931, nearly spinning a no-hitter before President Hoover in Game 3 and then working into the ninth, despite severe abdominal pain, to win Game 7. Grimes’s secret: original slippery elm bark imported by his father from his native Wisconsin. Grimes had run out of his supply, wrote his biographer, Joe Niese, and the drugstore-brand tablets in St. Louis made him nauseous.

  Grimes outlasted all the other legal spitballers, retiring in 1934. Frank Shellenback, a marginal White Sox pitcher who was left off their list, flung legal spitters in the Pacific Coast League through 1938. That September, in Williamston, North Carolina, tenant farmers Evan and Ruby Perry welcomed a son named Gaylord into the world. He would master spitball skulduggery and ride its greasy path to Cooperstown.

  “Ballplayers don’t think a good spitballer is a criminal,” Perry would write, many years later. “They think he’s an artist.”

  * * *

  ————

  The ban on doctored baseballs simply sent the practice deeper underground. As a catcher for the Milwaukee Braves in the early 1960s, a young Joe Torre called spitters for a veteran, Lew Burdette. But that was all Torre knew.

  “You didn’t know where it was coming from,” he says. “I mean, Burdette threw a spitter and I caught him, but I couldn’t tell you where he got it, because he wouldn’t tell anybody. I knew what it was going to do, but I had no clue where he got it.”

  Perhaps he got it from Grimes, though both men denied it. After his playing career, Grimes coached in the Yankees’ minor league system in the late 1940s, just as Burdette was coming through. In a book interview with former commissioner Fay Vincent, Burdette said he asked Grimes how to throw a spitball, but Grimes refused to say.

  “But I’ll tell you one thing: you can go through gyrations and all,” Grimes told him. “If you can get hitters—who are egotistical so-and-sos, you know—if you can get one of the first three guys in the first inning to go back and complain, by the fifth inning the batboy will be yelling, ‘Look at the ball!’ ”

  Burdette would fluster hitters by holding his hand in front of his mouth, touching his forehead, fiddling with the ball in his glove, adjusting his cap and wetting his fingertips on his tongue. After Grimes watched Burdette on TV, he told him, “You got it down good.” Richie Ashburn complained constantly to Burdette, never cursing but accusing him on the field of throwing a “crapping spitter.” Finally, Burdette complied, digging the ball into the dirt on the mound to overload one side with mud. It zagged under Ashburn’s bat for strike three.

  “Now that’s a crapping spitter!” Burdette told him.

  “I’ll never complain again, Lew,” Ashburn replied. “I’ll never complain again.”

  Burdette was the hero of the 1957 World Series for the Milwaukee Braves, completing all three of his victories over the Yankees, including a Game 5 shutout against Whitey Ford. Ford had beaten Warren Spahn in the opener, and the two matched up twice again the next fall. Ford and Burdette had been teammates—under Grimes’s tutelage—in the Yankees’ farm system, and Burdette taught Ford his trick.

  “Did you ever notice how many times Whitey used to tie his shoelace during the game?” Spahn told Vincent. “Because Burdette taught him how to throw a mud ball. And he’d wet the ball and put it on the ground and it was a little heavier on one side than the other, and he’d make the ball move because of that.”

  Spahn said he toyed with Burdette’s spitter in the bullpen, but used it just once in a game and allowed a home run.

  “Then I talked to Burdette about it and he says, ‘You got to have two wet fingers and a dry thumb,’ ” Spahn said. “I remember him saying that so much.”

  In Slick, his 1987 memoir with Phil Pepe, Ford said Burdette taught him the mud ball late in his career; he gave no exact date, but hinted that it may have been 1963, when he went 24–7. Ford explained that he “needed something to help me survive,” and said he would simply wet the ball with saliva and touch it to the dirt while grabbing the rosin bag. He threw the pitch as hard as he could, with the dirt on top as he released it. The pitch behaved like a screwball, sinking away from a righty but rotating more than a pure spitter. If a hitter asked for the ball before he threw it, Ford said, he would lightly brush it against his pants leg, knocking off the dirt.

  The mud ball emboldened Ford. Seeking a new challenge, he thought of a way to scuff the ball while rubbing it up. One current major league pitching coach can do this with his fingernails, but Ford had a friend pay a jeweler $55 for a ring with a rasp—a half-inch long and a quarter-inch wide—welded onto it.

  “Why would anybody have any use for something like this?” the jeweler asked the friend, who told him just to shut up and make it. The handiwork delighted Ford.

  “I would put the part of the ring with the rasp underneath my finger,” he wrote. “On top, I covered the ring with flesh-colored Band-Aids, so you couldn’t tell from a distance that I had anything on my finger. Now it was easy to just rub the baseball against the rasp and scratch it on one side. One little nick was all it took to get the baseball to sail and dip like crazy.”

  Opponents suspected Ford, but umpires tended not to push too hard. Bill Fischer, a journeyman reliever of the era, recalls sweating profusely with the bases loaded one day in Cleveland. From behind he heard a voice: “This’d be a good time to load one up, Fish.” It was the second base umpire. Now imagine the deference shown to a pitcher like Ford.

  “There was one time when Whitey was scuffing up the ball and the umpire came out, and he knew,” teammate Jim Bouton said a few years ago. “I forget who it was, but he was one of those old-timer guys who’s not gonna be a wise guy or a big shot—this is Whitey Ford, he’s one of the greats. A certain amount of respect is due.

  “So he went to the mound and the conversation went, ‘Uh, Whitey, I see the ring there. I tell you what, what you need to do is call time out and go in and change your jock strap. And when you come back, don’t have the ring on.’ He was giving him a cover to do that.

  “That was just part of the deal: if you could sneak it in there, it was considered to be clever. It isn’t a criminal offense or anything like that. If you could get away with it, then do it. And everybody else, if they could have done it, would have done the same thing.”

  Ford had other ways of getting an edge, sometimes literally. His catcher, Elston Howard, might scrape the ball against a sharpened clasp on his shin guards; a contemporary of Ford’s, the Hall of Famer Jim Bunning, had used a similar technique with his belt buckle. Ford also mixed baby oil, turpentine, and resin to form a sticky substance he could use to grip the ball in cold weather. To conceal it, he hid it in a bottle of roll-on deodorant he would keep in his warm-up jacket. Boys being boys, Mickey Mantle once swiped the bottle, put it in Yogi Berra’s locker, and howled as Berra got his arms stuck to his sides.

  The most notorious AL cheater of the time, though, was probably John Wyatt, a reliever who earned 20 saves for Boston’s Impossible Dream pennant winners of 19
67. Wyatt was so committed to subterfuge that he was said to smother Vaseline nearly everywhere—even in his mouth. He finally came clean nearly 20 years later, to the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, with some sound logic.

  “I cheated, but I faced some tough hitters,” Wyatt said. “Had to do something against those cats. They could make a guy look real bad.”

  * * *

  ————

  In 1968, the year he threw 58⅔ consecutive scoreless innings, the Dodgers’ Don Drysdale capitalized on his (accurate) reputation for throwing the occasional slippery pitch. In a commercial for Vitalis hair tonic, Drysdale looked in for the sign against a Giants hitter. When the hitter called time out, Drysdale casually removed his cap and ran his fingers through his hair.

  “Greaseball! Greaseball!” cried Herman Franks, the Giants’ manager, storming from his dugout. “See him rub his hair! He’s gonna throw a greaseball, that’s illegal!”

  A disgusted Drysdale grimaced, tossed his glove on the grass, and retreated to the clubhouse. There, he found a bottle of Vitalis, returned to the mound and held the bottle high for all to see.

  “Vitalis has no grease, and spreads easily through your hair,” the announcer said. “If we all used Vitalis, we could help put an end to the greaseball.”

  Poor Gaylord Perry. He had the same idea as Drysdale, but his agent pitched it to the wrong company. Vaseline turned down Perry for an endorsement deal by sniffing: “We soothe babies’ asses, not baseballs.”

  Ever resourceful, Perry found other ways to monetize his money pitch. In 1974, he published a confessional memoir, Me and the Spitter, with Bob Sudyk. If it hurt his Hall of Fame chances, the damage was minimal. When Perry retired in 1983, just two other pitchers, Walter Johnson and Steve Carlton, had 300 wins and 3,500 strikeouts. He made it to Cooperstown on his third try, in 1991.

  As Grimes planted at least some seeds for Burdette’s trickery, another legal spitballer helped Perry. After his long career in the Pacific Coast League, Frank Shellenback served as a supervisor and scout for the Giants. He taught the secrets of his illicit pitches to Bob Shaw—“I do not recommend their use,” Shaw wrote in his pitching manual—and Shaw passed them on to Perry at Giants spring training in 1964. Watching Shaw throw his spitball, Perry wrote, “I knew how Tom Edison felt when he discovered the electric light.”

  “He wet his two fingers, placed them on top of the ball, wound and fired,” Perry wrote. “And down it went.”

  In Shaw, a future pitching coach, Perry had found a seasoned and savvy mentor. By then Shaw had played seven seasons, won a World Series game, and saved an All-Star Game. He and Perry were inseparable.

  “He was a good teammate,” Perry said in 2018. “He told me how his career went, and I paid attention to him. He was an excellent setup pitcher. I learned a great deal by watching him set hitters up, good hitters that he got out very easily.”

  In the musty files of the library at the old Sports Illustrated offices in Manhattan, a sheet of notes for a 1973 article included a primer from Shaw on how pitchers load spitballs:

  They apply whatever they use to the forehead, the back of the wrist, the forearm, the side of the pant leg, or the belt. The idea is to change the location, so when umpires look in one spot, it’s not there. You can hit your glove and remove it from your wrist in one motion. You never load up with more than you can remove with one swipe. When you do apply it to the hand, you put it on the second and third fingers. That way, you can pick up the rosin bag with the thumb and index finger and not disturb your load.

  Shaw detailed some of the loading agents: slippery-elm lozenges, saliva, Vaseline, or K-Y Jelly, the water-soluble lubricant. He said it was also essential to use plenty of mannerisms to bother the hitters. By 1973 Perry was expertly applying all these lessons, inspired by frank words from Shaw in the bullpen early in the 1964 season: “Gaylord, I don’t think you’ve got enough right now to be a starting pitcher. There comes a time in a man’s life when he must decide what’s important. He must provide the best way he can for his family.”

  For Perry, a 25-year-old mop-up reliever, that meant putting the spitter into action. He had a 4.50 career ERA when he came in to pitch the bottom of the thirteenth in the second game of a doubleheader on May 31, 1964, against the Mets at Shea Stadium. Ten slippery, scoreless innings later, a baseball outlaw was born.

  Perry would lick his fingers, legally, and pretend to dry them off with the rosin bag (a move he would practice with his daughter Amy’s bean bag). When his mouth got dry, a teammate gave him a slippery-elm lozenge. When the first baseman, Orlando Cepeda, got a ball to end the inning, he rolled it on the grass to dry it off. When a fight broke out in the stands, diverting people’s attention, Perry simply spit on the ball.

  “Nice going, kid,” Shaw told Perry. “You made it.”

  Perry called his spitter the super-sinker, and that is how it often behaved. It veered so hard, down and in on righties, that some refused to use their favorite bats for fear that Perry would break them. He learned to disrupt hitters with a series of six gyrations before the pitch, touching his hat, hair, ear, neck, wrist, and some part of his uniform.

  Like any smooth criminal, he constantly searched for new strategies. At the 1966 All-Star Game, on a broiling day in St. Louis, Perry noticed Sandy Koufax with red-hot Capsolin rubbed on his pitching arm. Koufax needed the searing heat to distract him from his aching elbow; Perry needed it to sweat more.

  “Capsolin is like putting on a blowtorch,” says Dave Duncan, who caught Perry with Cleveland and later coached him with Seattle. “He’d lay on the training table and the trainer would smear his entire back with a coat of it. You couldn’t even go in the room, it was so strong. Shoot, I don’t know how he did it. I couldn’t even put a drop of it on my shoulder without dying.”

  Perry was so furtive that, for a while, he strictly guarded his methods, even when another famous trickster begged him for his secrets at the 1970 All-Star Game. “Gaylord, tell me, where do you get it?” Richard Nixon asked, nudging Perry in the ribs with his elbow. “Mr. President,” Perry replied, “there are some things you just can’t tell the people for their own good.”

  Nixon erupted in laughter—Perry was, indeed, far better at concealing information than the president. When the book came out in 1974, Perry swore he was reformed, and Duncan says Perry indeed threw forkballs that season, not the spitters he had thrown the year before. But his spitball hiatus didn’t last long.

  Two years later, with the Rangers, Perry compared pitches with Bert Blyleven, a fellow future Hall of Famer. First Blyleven showed Perry his curveball.

  “Then it was my turn to lube up in the bullpen, and it was like a new toy, like Christmas time,” Blyleven says. “The ball’s sinking, no seams, you know. The ball’s slipping out of your hand, and all that slippage creates so much torque on your elbow, and the next day my elbow was barking. But Gaylord was a mule. He was a strong, strong son of a bitch.”

  Perry bounced to San Diego in 1978 and won his second Cy Young Award. He befriended a young setup man, John D’Acquisto, who encouraged Perry to run for exercise. Perry begged off. “I’ve got the magic pitch,” he said, and D’Acquisto knew what made it work.

  “You couldn’t find it, because it was K-Y Jelly,” D’Acquisto says. “K-Y Jelly dissipates, and he had it everywhere. There wasn’t one spot, and it just looked like beads of sweat. Are you gonna throw a guy out for sweating? What Gaylord told me was, ‘Johnny, you don’t need much, just a little bit.’ And I go, ‘Yeah, but you’ve got it everywhere,’ and he says, ‘Well, that’s so it doesn’t look like you’re getting it from one spot.’ ”

  Three years later, D’Acquisto was trying to hang on with the Angels, who thought he was losing his velocity. He found a tube of K-Y Jelly in his locker, a flashing red light from the pitching coach, Tom Morgan. “You need to start using this,” Morgan said, but D’Acquisto
says he didn’t have the right arm action to throw it. A year later, he had pitched his last game. If only he could have harnessed Perry’s pitch.

  “He was a beauty, man,” D’Acquisto says. “He was a beauty.”

  * * *

  ————

  Even in retirement, pitchers suspected of doctoring balls rarely like to talk about it. Don Sutton (who was sometimes called “Black & Decker,” after the power tool company) once threatened to sue umpire Doug Harvey, who ejected him from a game for allegedly defacing a ball. Sutton was happy to talk about his curveball, but not about scuffing.

  Phil Regan turned eighty in 2017 and was still coaching in the minors for the Mets. One morning that spring, I asked him about his well-known reputation for slick deliveries. This was a man who once dropped a Vaseline tube from his jacket pocket on the bases. Yet, at first, he demurred.

  “Who told you that?” he barked, then dove into a story about a game at Wrigley Field on August 18, 1968. Pitching for the Cubs against Cincinnati, Regan was repeatedly cited for throwing illegal pitches. Twice, when the batter put the ball in play for an out, the plate umpire Chris Pelekoudas ordered him back to the plate to hit again. It was quite a scene, Regan said; his catcher was tossed from the game, but he kept pitching because the umpires found nothing on his cap or glove. The next day, league president Warren Giles flew to town for an emergency meeting and promptly undercut the umpires, holding a news conference and praising Regan as a “fine Christian gentleman.” One little problem: the umpires were right about Regan.