K

by Tyler Kepner

  “They said they called 14 illegal pitches,” Regan said. “They missed three!”

  Then he winked, smiled, and walked away.

  Policing pitchers was a tedious and somewhat humiliating process for umpires, who could rarely catch pitchers in the act. Before that 1968 season, baseball had tried to strengthen the 1920 rule by decreeing that any pitcher going to his mouth before delivering a pitch would be ejected. The leagues hoped to eliminate fruitless mound searches and speed up the game, but by mid-March, after a rash of spring training ejections, the rule was amended again: the penalty would be a balk with runners on base, or a ball without, and a pitcher could still blow on his hand or lick his fingers, just not while standing on the dirt. Six years later, umpires were told they could issue a spitball warning without evidence, just by observing something strange in the flight of the ball.

  Yet for all of that, few pitchers were actually caught in the act. One of the most notorious, and hapless, perpetrators ended up teaching pitching for a living: Rick Honeycutt, the future coach for the Dodgers. It was the last day of September in 1980, the end of an All-Star season gone awry. After starting 6–0, Honeycutt had gone 4–17 for the last-place Mariners. He was starting in Kansas City against the World Series–bound Royals. On his way to warm up in the bullpen, Honeycutt passed a bulletin board. Foolish inspiration struck.

  “I saw a thumbtack and I was like, ‘Well, I know that would scuff up a ball,’ ” Honeycutt says. “You hear about guys doing certain things, and you think, ‘What the heck, why not?’ It was just a stupid and idiotic move, really.”

  Honeycutt knew only the basics: when a ball is scuffed, you put the scuff on the opposite side of the way you want it to move. But he had never practiced it before, and had no plan for disguising the thumbtack. He tried to stick it through his glove, but when it wouldn’t pierce the leather, he taped it on with a flesh-colored bandage.

  For two innings, Honeycutt tried nothing. Then, with two out in the third, he scraped a ball and delivered it to Willie Wilson, who smacked it to right for a triple. On the next ball Honeycutt sliced, George Brett singled.

  “Then Kunkel comes out,” Honeycutt says. That would be Bill Kunkel, the very last umpire you’d want behind the plate if you were nervously trying to scuff a ball with no clue how to do it. Kunkel had pitched for the 1963 Yankees, with Whitey Ford.

  “He said he’d loaded up a ball once in a while when he was pitching,” says Jim Evans, a fellow AL umpire at the time. “We would chat and he would say, ‘Here’s a guy you gotta watch, this is what he does.’ ”

  Honeycutt might not have been a suspect before, but these shenanigans were just too obvious. Kunkel ejected him, and Honeycutt panicked. “They can’t kick me out of the game forever, can they?” he asked a coach. Honeycutt was relieved to get a fine and the standard 10-day suspension, but he never pitched for the Mariners again. They traded the young lefty to Texas that winter and he went on to pitch 17 more seasons.

  The opposite of Honeycutt, in every way, was Mike Scott. While Honeycutt was clumsy, ineffective, and easily caught, Scott was cunning, overpowering, and elusive. In four years as a Met, from 1979 to 1982, he was 14–27 with a 4.64 earned run average. He went to the Astros, won a Cy Young Award, nearly won another, notched 306 strikeouts in a season, threw a division-clinching no-hitter, and got his number retired.

  Here is an alternate summary of Scott, from a former major league All-Star of the era who saw Scott’s image on TV in the Fenway Park clubhouse in 2015: “Mike Scott, when he was with the Mets, he was the worst motherfucking pitcher in the league. As soon as he started scuffing, it all changed. He said ‘split-finger.’ Split-finger, my ass!”

  The cranky ex-player was crudely accurate, in a way: in those first four seasons, among all major league pitchers with at least 350 innings, Scott was indeed dead last in the category ERA+—he performed nearly 25 percent worse than the average pitcher of the time. But Scott did learn a split-finger fastball, as described in that chapter. That was the pitch that dove into the dirt. The pitch that nearly vanquished the Mets in the 1986 NLCS was something different.

  “It was like sandpaper, chicken scratch,” Keith Hernandez says. “It was all right there, one side. It overloaded one side when he threw it, whichever side had the scratch, and he’d make it run this way, and he’d turn it over and make it run the other way. He was doing it on his fastball. It would move a foot and a half, trying to get you to chase. I never saw a guy whose fastball ran that much—and he threw 97, 98, and he knew exactly what he was doing with it, too.”

  In Game 1 of the NLCS, Scott shut out the Mets with 14 strikeouts. He threw another complete game four days later, allowing three hits and a run. The Mets collected every ball Scott pitched that came into their dugout, and claimed to have dozens scuffed in the same spot. Yet Dutch Rennert, the plate umpire that night, said the Mets never asked him to check a ball that hadn’t already hit the dirt. Rennert said he checked at least once an inning, and found nothing.

  “I believe the pitches Mike Scott are throwing are legal, and I believe it with all my heart,” Doug Harvey, who worked the plate for Game 1, told the writer George White. “During the season I must have checked 65 to 70 balls that Mike Scott threw, and not one showed any sign of scuff marks.”

  The Mets believed the umpires couldn’t catch Scott because one of his fielders was scuffing the ball for him—and, Hernandez says, because Sutton’s threatened lawsuit, in 1978, had essentially handcuffed baseball’s cops. (Sutton withdrew it, having made his point when the league backed down without a fine or suspension.)

  Only by winning Game 6 at the Astrodome, in 16 wild innings, did the Mets survive the series. Had they played a Game 7 and faced Scott—who was named Series MVP—they knew they had no chance.

  “Mike Scott intimidated a ball club that did not get intimidated by anybody,” said Bobby Ojeda, who won Game 2 of that series. “All he had to do was throw his glove on the mound and we’d go, ‘OK, we don’t want to play today.’ But he was a master at making that thing work, which is kind of cheating, you know? But you’ve still gotta make it work. It’s like Tom Brady with the deflated footballs. You’ve still gotta make the throw.”

  Alan Ashby, the Astros’ catcher in that series, speaks in amazement about Scott’s splitter, the way he didn’t even have to spread his fingers very wide to get devastating action.

  “But the splitter was a part of the arsenal,” Ashby says. “It was a combination of stuff, and I’ll leave it at that.”

  I suggested that maybe Scott does not get enough credit for how great he was, since he is so widely remembered for alleged scuffing. Ashby smiled, uncomfortably. He didn’t know how to respond.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Ashby replied. “He’s got a Cy Young to enjoy. He’s playing golf every day. Hard for me to answer and be real with you.”

  Scott has never admitted to scuffing, exactly, and rarely appears in public. The closest he came was in an MLB Network documentary about the 1986 postseason: “They can believe whatever they want to believe,” Scott said. “Every ball that hits the ground has something on it….I’ve thrown balls that were scuffed but I haven’t scuffed every ball that I’ve thrown.”

  * * *

  ————

  The Mets went on to stage another epic sixth game in the World Series against Boston. Facing elimination at Shea, they were down to their last strike when a wild pitch by Bob Stanley skipped under Mookie Wilson’s legs and past catcher Rich Gedman, scoring the tying run just before Bill Buckner’s infamous error. Ron Darling said he has always assumed, because of the way the ball moved and Stanley’s well-known reputation for throwing a spitter, that Stanley had, indeed, loaded one up for the fateful wild pitch. That’s sort of how it sounded when I asked Gedman about it, during his final season in the majors with the Cardinals in 1992.

  I had been captivated by the 1986
World Series—who wasn’t?—and was writing a piece about it for my homemade magazine. I remember Gedman speaking very quietly and thoughtfully.

  “You’re probably the first guy that’s asked me that since about a week after it happened,” he said. “It was just one of those pitches that did something it normally doesn’t do. Bob Stanley’s a sinkerball pitcher. I was waiting for a sinker and got what appeared to be a cutter or a slider. I don’t know if it was the grip on the ball or what.

  “I look back and I see the pitch in my mind and there’s no business I had missing that ball. But the pitch itself did not—it’s like getting crossed up in a way. I felt like Bob Stanley took a lot of heat for no reason at all. If I had to see that pitch on TV, I’d say that was a passed ball and not a wild pitch. But I also know what happened.”

  Stanley has coached for years in the Blue Jays organization, and I saw him a while back at spring training. He talked about his sinker, and said he threw it about 90 percent of the time because breaking balls were harder on his arm. When I asked if he ever threw a spitter, Stanley was surprisingly candid.

  “Yeah, I cheated, sure,” he said, explaining that he simply loaded sweat on his fingers by wiping his brow. “You just grip the ball without any seams, just flat.”

  He talked a bit about how times had changed, how a pitcher like Perry—“Oh my God, he had all kinds of shit in his mouth,” he said—would have a tougher time today. For Stanley, who pitched from 1977 to 1989, it was fairly easy.

  “When I threw it, they never saw me do it,” he said. “When I wanted them to think a spitter was coming, I’d throw ’em a palmball instead. I’d get away with it because I had a good sinker. They could never catch me because it was sweat, it wasn’t like Vaseline. If they checked [someone else’s] ball, they could feel the Vaseline, but this was just sweat—‘I don’t know, it dripped off my fingers.’ ”

  He said he would only throw it with two strikes, never on the first pitch. That was my signal to go for it, to ask about the pitch I’d always wondered about, from the moment it left his hand to Gedman’s heartfelt recollection to Darling’s assertion. Here goes:

  “What about the wild pitch in Game 6?” I asked. “That was with two strikes—was that a spitter?”

  “That was a fastball in,” Stanley said. “They set up outside, it went in.”

  Oh. Just an ordinary fastball.

  In my mind, I could hear the losing horn from The Price Is Right, the jingle they play when someone falls short of the big prize. If a guy with a two-strike spitter really did let one slip at the absolute worst moment in 1986, I guess we’ll never know.

  * * *

  ————

  The next year was a strange one, marked by a curious single-season spike in home runs and a cluster of ball-doctoring incidents in August. First was the Joe Niekro episode in Anaheim, when Niekro, then with the Twins, emptied his pockets for umpires and flung an emery board and sandpaper to the grass. A week later in Philadelphia, umpires found sandpaper glued to the glove of the Phillies’ Kevin Gross. Both were suspended 10 games.

  Later that month, the Yankees visited the Angels, starting Tommy John against Sutton. A year before, Sutton had earned his 300th victory for the Angels, cheekily telling reporters, “I’ve been trying legally, and illegally, to get here for years.” Given his reputation, and the hot topic in baseball at the time, it was no wonder the Yankees’ telecast zoomed in on Sutton throughout the game, focusing on a small patch on the palm of his left hand. When he rubbed up a ball with both hands, was Sutton defacing it?

  Jim Palmer, the Hall of Fame Orioles pitcher, had always believed as much. When he lost to Sutton on the final day of the 1982 season, giving Sutton’s Brewers the AL East title, Palmer said he noticed scratches across the name of the league president on the balls Sutton threw. At some point in their careers, Palmer said, Sutton told him how he scuffed.

  “I said, ‘How do you scuff a ball?’ ” Palmer says. “He said, ‘Well, you use 180 sandpaper, you superglue it on your hand and you rub the ball up.’ I said, ‘I don’t rub the ball up.’ He said, ‘Well, if you want to scratch the ball, you just put it there and rub the ball on it and you’ve got your scuff.’ ”

  Sutton has denied a version of that story, but that method was on George Steinbrenner’s mind as he watched the broadcast. Steinbrenner angrily, and repeatedly, called the Yankees’ dugout until reaching manager Lou Piniella. He demanded that Piniella tell the umpires to check Sutton, but Piniella would not. He didn’t want the umps checking John, too.

  John and Sutton had been teammates, and John was also a frequent target of suspicion. He said he told Piniella to do whatever he wanted that night, because he was clean. And John knew what Sutton was up to, anyway.

  “Sutton had a Band-Aid, and the reason he did was because he wanted the Yankee people to respond to him,” John says. “I know he did, because I did the same thing to Tony La Russa.”

  John explained that Piniella had once argued about an Oakland pitcher the night before John’s scheduled start. John expected La Russa, the A’s manager, to retaliate by asking the umps to check him. That morning, he visited a baseball card store in New Jersey and bought a card of La Russa.

  “I had it in my hip pocket and I had a Sharpie,” John says. “I wanted the umpires to come out and check me. I was gonna back away, go into my pocket, draw my hand up, and flip the card on the ground. When they picked it up, I was gonna go over to Tony with the pen and say, ‘Tony, would you sign this for me please?’ But he never checked me! He messed up my time for fame. I would have been on Johnny Carson.”

  Brian Moehler had no such plans when umpires checked him at Tropicana Field in 1999. Moehler, a Tigers right-hander, was pitching well against the Devil Rays, who thought his pitches were moving suspiciously. Umpires inspected Moehler and may—or may not—have found sandpaper taped to his right thumb. He was suspended 10 days and did not appeal.

  So, what was really on his thumb? Moehler still isn’t saying.

  “Well, it depends who you ask,” he says. “One of the umpires said he saw something and the next one said he didn’t, and they said they had some balls that had some scuffs on ’em.”

  Pause.

  “Does that stuff go on?” he continues. “Yeah, it does. Do I sit here and say I know how to do it? Yeah, if I had gotten a scuffed ball, I had a pretty good idea how to do it. It’s not something that’s taught, but as a pitcher you kind of fool around with it, like someone with a knuckleball, you joke around with it, you get a scuffed ball that hits the track or something, you learn where the scuff is and which way to make the ball move.

  “So have I ever had a ball that’s scuffed that was given to me? I remember I had an umpire one time, the game had gotten out of hand and the ball had hit the track. They always check the balls, obviously, and he brings the ball to me and he goes, ‘Have fun!’ I was like, ‘OK!’ Was I aware of how to do it? Oh yeah, I was aware of how to do it. I think a lot of guys are.”

  Actually, Moehler says, in the moment he was more concerned about his glove, which had metal eyelets around the holes for the laces. Those were once standard on gloves, but are illegal now because pitchers could easily use them to scuff. Moehler got his glove back, no questions asked, and he used it for the rest of his career.

  In some ways, he says, his crime helped him. After that, some hitters would always ask the umpires to check the ball.

  “I would walk halfway to home plate, flip the ball to the umpire, and then when he gave me another ball I’d stand there and act like I was scuffing it up and walk back to the rubber,” Moehler says. “If a hitter went up there thinking I was scuffing the baseball, I had an advantage. Because the hardest thing in sports is hitting a baseball, and he’s gotta worry about doing that—but now in the back of his mind, he thinks I’m scuffing it.”

  Moehler ended up leading the AL
in losses in 1999, with 16, and he finished his career well under .500. But he tricked hitters long enough to last 14 seasons in the majors, through 2010, and now scouts amateur talent in Georgia for the Red Sox. Friends say he would make a great pitching coach.

  * * *

  ————

  The mental edge of a scuffball suspect is nothing new. These words come from Chet Brewer, a star for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro National League in the late 1920s, but they sound timeless:

  “A cut ball? I got credit for that,” he told John Holway in Black Diamonds. “If I picked up a rough one, I didn’t throw it out of the game. I didn’t exactly put the cuts on it myself, but I could pitch it.”

  Brewer, who died in 1990, said that when he barnstormed against Swede Risberg, one of the banned members of the 1919 White Sox, the balls Risberg brought came pre-scratched. Knowing how to use a scratch was a matter of survival.

  “When I learned the screwball, they said, ‘Heck, he’s scratching the ball,’ so I knew that I was getting on them,” Brewer added. “I’d face the outfield and rub the ball up, turn around, throw a screwball: ‘Oh, he cut it!’ But it was more a psychological thing.”

  Scuffing charges never dogged Mike Mussina, but like any smart pitcher, he would never reject a ball that came to him with a mark. This was Mussina’s order for every catcher: if a ball hits the ground, never volunteer it to the umpire. Any ball that touches dirt, around the plate or the infield, might be a bar of gold in the pitcher’s hand.

  “Say a guy hits a ground ball to short and they throw it back to me from first base—as soon as I grab the ball, I’m running my thumb over these,” Mussina says. He is holding a ball and referring to the white area within the horseshoe. “Do I have a sinker out of this ball? And if I find one I think’s pretty good, I flip it to the other side to see if it’s scuffed up on the wrong side.”