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by Tyler Kepner

  By that he means the opposite side; if both horseshoe areas are scuffed, they’ll counteract each other, to no advantage. If there’s a scuff where the seams narrow—the sweet spot—it creates a four-seam sinker, a pitch that spins like a straight fastball but veers away, in the direction opposite the scuff.

  But watch out for those high seams.

  “If the seams are really high, even if I’m scuffed up just a little bit, they’re gonna cause too much resistance naturally,” Mussina says. “It’s not gonna have enough of an effect to do anything.”

  A common lament among retired pitchers is that too many balls are now thrown out of play. To them, it underscores a lack of craftsmanship on the mound.

  “I’ve literally seen teammates, when there’s a scuff on the ball, they get rid of it,” Jamie Moyer says. “They’ll say, ‘Oh, it does funny stuff,’ and you go, ‘Wait a minute, that funny stuff can be a benefit to you!’ But they don’t know how to do it.”

  Maybe not, but they also rarely get the chance. Hitters are conditioned to ask umpires to discard any ball that skips. Umpires and catchers know this, so catchers tend to have an almost reflexive response: they’ll spear a ball from the dirt, transfer it quickly to their throwing hand, and hold it up for the ump to keep or reject.

  Some fielders still try: catchers may deliberately short-hop their throws before innings, and outfielders may do the same on routine throws to the infield. But times have changed.

  “When I played, a ball hit the dirt, it was still in play,” says Chili Davis, who played from 1981 to 1999. “Today’s game, if a catcher throws a ball down to second on a short hop, or a ball gets blocked in the dirt, that ball’s out of the game. It’s just automatic now.”

  Pitchers also seek ways to look natural while applying moisture or tackiness to their fingers. One former player, now a broadcaster, reached into his team’s ball bag for me and pulled out a canister of colorless Tuf-Skin, a spray that helps secure athletic tape. With one spritz of Tuf-Skin on my arm, I had an invisible island of instant tackiness for my fingers. That’s also why pitchers like putting clear BullFrog Sunscreen on their arms: grab the rosin bag, aimlessly touch the BullFrog spot, and you’ll have just enough stickiness to help guide your pitches. One catcher said he has seen pitchers leave the dugout between innings and wrap their fingers around a ball coated with pine tar, leaving just enough residue on their hands to get a better grip when they return to the mound.

  Next time you go to a game, notice all the surfaces a pitcher touches with his hand. Pitchers are fidgety creatures, constantly tugging and swiping and scratching their caps, their sleeves, their skin, something. Take a look at Corey Kluber, the two-time Cy Young winner for Cleveland who generates extraordinary movement with his pitches. Kluber grabs his tongue on the mound before every pitch—which has been legal again for years—then wipes his hand on the side of his pants.

  “The way they rub the balls up now, they rub them all up in advance,” Kluber says. “They’re not rubbed up all day, and they sit in the bucket with all the dust and stuff, and they get so slippery. Just get a little bit of moisture on your hand, at least. You’ve still gotta wipe it off, obviously, but you get a little bit of moisture on your hand so the ball’s not as dry.”

  Kluber does this no matter the weather, but such tactics are especially handy in the cold and at high altitude, where it’s harder to generate moisture.

  “I tell you what,” says one NL veteran, “if they could get a camera behind the dugout in Colorado, it would be like a mad scientist’s laboratory down there, people doing anything they can to find a grip.”

  Most players, even hitters, tend to accept this practice. A pitch can be an instrument of destruction, after all, and hitters would rather the pitcher know where it’s going than accidentally fire a cue ball at their head. It is a fine distinction, to be sure, but this is the logic: tackiness helps command and finish on a pitch, and that’s OK. Sandpaper or K-Y Jelly help enhance movement, and that’s not.

  “In the cold weather in Minnesota, you had to have something to grip the curveball,” says Jim Kaat, who starred for the Twins in the 1960s. “Pitchers for years have lobbied: if hitters can use pine tar to grip the bat better—it doesn’t help ’em hit it any farther—we should be able to use pine tar. It’s not like a Vaseline ball or anything like that. It just helps you get a little better grip on it.”

  Then again, it comes back to discretion: in 2014, when the Yankees’ Michael Pineda brazenly smeared pine tar on his neck on a chilly night at Fenway Park, it was so overt that the Red Sox felt compelled to object. Pineda got a 10-game suspension and widespread ridicule. But generally, as long as a pitcher is discreet, the other side has no problem with pine tar.

  This was even true in perhaps the most famous case of pine tar on a pitcher. On a damp and windy day at the 1988 NLCS in New York, Mets manager Davey Johnson asked umpires to inspect the glove of Dodgers closer Jay Howell. Joe West, the plate umpire who took the glove, said Johnson was a reluctant whistleblower.

  “Somebody saw it on TV, called the Mets, and the Mets’ owners got together and sent a message down to Davey and said, ‘Go check him,’ ” West says. “Davey didn’t want to check him. I said, ‘This is the playoffs, David.’ He says, ‘I know, but my boss is telling me I’ve got to check him, and I’ve gotta do what they say.’ ”

  The Mets had been tipped off to Howell by Tucker Ashford, a minor league manager in their system who had played with Howell on the Yankees, and with Perry on the Padres. Perry often pitched with a smudge on his cap, and while watching Game 1, Ashford noticed that Howell did, too.

  Howell was ejected from Game 3 and suspended for the next two games, but the Mets almost felt bad about it. Wally Backman, their second baseman, told reporters he felt Howell’s infraction was less serious than the scuffing the Mets suspected Scott of two years earlier.

  “Pine tar doesn’t make you throw the ball harder,” Backman said. “It doesn’t make his curve break more. It’s different than a guy using Vaseline or sandpaper. It’s not up to me to pass judgment on the suspension, but I think the rule has to be rewritten or clarified.”

  All these years later, it never has been. In the 2006 World Series, at least, the penalty was less severe. When the Cardinals spotted a pine-tar-like smudge on the pitching palm of the Tigers’ Kenny Rogers, La Russa asked the umpires to check. Rogers cleaned off his hand—he claimed it was dirt—and kept pitching, earning the Tigers’ only victory of the series.

  The next spring, I spent part of an exhibition game with Bob Feller as he signed autographs for fans in Winter Haven, Florida. One of them asked just what Rogers had been doing in that World Series game. Feller, as quick with opinions as he once was with fastballs, did not hesitate.

  “He was trying to cheat,” Feller said. “It’s not the first time anyone’s ever done it. They’ve been doing it from Day 1.”

  * * *

  ————

  But how much do they really do it anymore? Pine tar is one thing—cheating by the letter of the law, yes, but not by the spirit. Whatever happened to the spitball, the Hall of Fame pitch of Chesbro and Walsh, Coveleski and Faber, Grimes and Perry? Richie Ashburn—he of the “crapping spitter” charge to Burdette—always thought of pitchers as shifty characters, never to be trusted. Where have all the scoundrels gone?

  When I asked Perry in 2018 why more pitchers were not as, shall we say, crafty as they were in his day, he had a short but telling answer: “Well, maybe they don’t need it.” Dan Plesac, who pitched in more than 1,000 games, agreed.

  “You’re not looking for a Don Sutton now, a guy that can sink it and cut it and make the ball move,” Plesac says. “If you don’t have velocity, you can’t pitch anymore. How many guys, how many real power pitchers, need to scuff the ball to be successful? Not many. You don’t need to, if your stuff is that good.”

&nb
sp; Plesac works for MLB Network, founded in 2009, the hub of baseball’s vast and ever-expanding visual empire. Every fan can watch games on the At Bat app. Every team has a bank of video screens, usually just off the dugout, showing every conceivable angle for replays and analysis. Good luck evading the most sophisticated alarm system in baseball history.

  “When there’s so many TV cameras, it’s so hard to get away with it,” says Jason Giambi, who played 20 seasons in the majors. “Obviously you’re gonna get a few guys who’ve got pine tar in their glove and things like that to get a better grip on the ball. But the game has definitely evolved. You’ve got slow-motion, all these angles. Not only do you have players watching it, you’ve got the video guy down in the tunnel, and then your other video guys running the whole room upstairs.

  “So you have so many sets of eyes on these guys, and especially if they see a pitch that looks really abnormal, the guy rewinds it 5,000 times: ‘OK, what did he do different? Oh, he went to the side of his pants, he went to his belt, he went to the top of his hat.’ Then they start to put together the timeline of every time he’s pitched, does that ball do the same thing? What about his last start, his start before that? And before you know it, they’ve got it down—all right, go tell the umpire to check his hat, or check the side of his pants, or check inside his glove. You can’t hide anymore.”

  But what if you could? What if maybe, just maybe, the next Preacher Roe was hiding in plain sight on a diamond near you, fiendishly fooling all the viewers and video technicians at the ballpark and beyond?

  He could blacktop a lot of driveways by selling those secrets—and he’d probably keep the supplies after finishing the job. The sticky sealant just might come in handy.

  THE CUTTER

  At the End, It Will Move

  Roy Halladay threw the first no-hitter I ever saw, in Philadelphia for the opener of the 2010 playoffs. I was glad it was him. You never know if you’ll see a no-hitter, and I felt honored to witness his moment. Halladay had enthralled me like nobody else when I covered the Yankees in the first decade of the 2000s, and he was the Blue Jays’ ace. He made a lineup of seasoned stars look feeble, baiting them into check swings, weak pop-ups, and harmless ground balls.

  “Toughest on me? Halladay, that sinker and cutter,” said Derek Jeter, who batted .234 off Halladay. “I tried to just guess which way it’s gonna go—and I always guessed wrong.”

  The playoff no-hitter, against the Cincinnati Reds, didn’t feel random at all. All of us at Citizens Bank Park noticed something special going on, and even Halladay seemed to sense he might do it. After waiting 13 years to appear in the postseason, he looked like he could have kept going that way, forever.

  “I was so ready for that opportunity, and I felt like I had prepared so long for it, it’s just one of those where I felt like everything was on,” he told me. “I was able to locate, I was able to work quick, I was able to do all the things I wanted to do. Those are few and far between.”

  Halladay and I spoke in March 2017 at a picnic table in Clearwater, Florida, in the shadow of the left field foul pole at the Phillies’ spring training complex. He had just finished a morning session with the minor leaguers, coaching them on the mental side of pitching. He paused.

  “But, you know, it’s funny. When those actually happen it’s so anticlimactic, because you’re out there and it’s simply just making pitches. And all of a sudden it’s over, and it’s kind of like, ‘Well, now what?’ You want to keep going. You feel like, ‘Well, geez, there should be something more.’ ”

  Eight months after our conversation, Halladay’s family and friends gathered at that Clearwater ballpark to eulogize him. The son of a commercial pilot, he had learned to fly in retirement and reveled in the pursuit. Halladay was 40 years old and living his dream when he died, his small plane plunging upside down into shallow water in the Gulf of Mexico. He left behind a wife, two sons, and a legacy as a dedicated craftsman who strove constantly to improve.

  Halladay always seemed very serious. You’d get to the ballpark four hours early and he’d be there, alone, running up the concrete steps like Rocky Balboa at the Art Museum. He never seemed much for conversation, but I had felt moved to shake his hand in the clubhouse before the 2008 All-Star Game in the Bronx, just to tell him I appreciated the way he went about it. He smiled and thanked me.

  I didn’t know it, but Halladay was in the process, right then, of reinventing himself for a brief but glorious final burst of success. He had already won a Cy Young Award and made five All-Star teams for Toronto. But he thought he could improve his cutter, which was not as consistent as he wanted. He suspected the problem was his thumb position, but he was not sure. Sharing a clubhouse with Mariano Rivera, he knew what to do.

  Rivera was a legend by then, on his way to a record 652 career saves, five championships, and a 2.21 earned run average, the best of anyone born after 1889. He had become synonymous with the cutter, a pitch he found by accident but mastered like no other.

  “Mariano really helped me,” Halladay said. “When I got a chance to talk to him, sure enough, he told me that one of the keys for him was making sure he wrapped his thumb under and got it on the opposite side of the ball.”

  When Halladay was at his best, hitters had no time to tell which way his pitches would go. Would they bank this way for a sinker, or that way for a cutter?

  To keep hitters honest, both pitches needed to be sharp. When he threw his sinker, with his index and middle fingers along the narrow seams, Halladay placed his thumb directly underneath his index finger on the bottom of the ball. When he threw his cutter, which he held with his index and middle fingers across the wide part of the seams, he had always put his thumb in the same spot.

  Rivera showed Halladay his technique, bending his thumb at the knuckle and tucking it under the ball, so the nail was even with the middle finger, not the index finger. This kept the thumb pad from blocking the ball’s spin as it left his hand, allowing the index and middle fingers to pull through, unimpeded, and send it on its path. I gave Halladay a ball and he wrapped it in Rivera’s grip, holding his arm out straight.

  “So now if you look at it from behind, you have all the ball sticking out on this side,” he explained, and from the pitcher’s perspective, you could see at least half the ball peeking out from the left side of the hand. The rest of the ball was covered up by Halladay’s fingers.

  “So now it’s overloaded. It almost has to go that way. When I got my thumb underneath [the index finger], it was still centered. But as soon as I get it moved over, then all of a sudden, it overloads the ball on that side.”

  Did it feel natural right away?

  “It took a little while,” Halladay continued, “and it was so awkward at times that when it was really good, I traced my fingers on the ball with a pen. I just took a black ballpoint pen and traced it, right where my finger placement was, and I put it in my locker and just stored it and kept it with me. Well, the next spring, I was throwing it and it wasn’t working, I wasn’t getting results out of it. So I went back and picked up that ball and just grabbed it without looking at the marks. And sure enough, my thumb was back to here, where it felt comfortable.

  “So I put it back on that mark where it was a little uncomfortable at first, but sure enough, it came right back. Then you get used to it, and you’re like, ‘OK.’ But it was a pitch that you really had to monitor where you were, how you grip it, because you could get in bad habits just from long tossing. It’s just an odd place to throw a ball.”

  Halladay beat the Yankees three times in the second half of the 2008 season; when Rivera’s teammates learned of his generosity to a rival, they fined him in kangaroo court. For the next three seasons, one with Toronto and two with the Phillies, Halladay was never better. He went 57–26, won another Cy Young Award, threw a perfect game to go with the playoff no-hitter, and led all qualified pitchers in earned run a
verage, at 2.53, while throwing the most innings.

  A Phillies fan was so taken by Halladay that he started a blog called “I Want to Go to the Zoo with Roy Halladay”; when he retired, Halladay actually did go to the zoo with him. The site made “cutter” into a verb, and broke down Halladay’s strikeouts into “cuttered” and “so cuttered.” The pitch could not be ignored: in those first three seasons after the tip from Rivera, Halladay threw the cutter more often than he ever had before.

  “I didn’t get the Mariano cutter,” Halladay insisted, but he never stopped trying to perfect it. He was never far from the baseball with Rivera’s grip traced onto it.

  “I’d keep it in my locker, and when we’d go on the road I put it in my travel bag,” he said. “Stuck it in a shoe, wherever I went, and if I was struggling I’d just pick it up. I carried it the rest of my career.”

  Halladay retired after the 2013 season with three compressed discs in his back, a side effect of all that running he did between starts. He never reached the World Series, but found, to his surprise, that this did not really matter. In the end, all he wanted was a chance to win it, to prove to himself that he could be the same pitcher when the whole baseball world was watching. Maybe, he could be even better.

  Halladay finished with a 203–105 record and a 3.38 ERA. In December 2018 he was scheduled to headline the Hall of Fame ballot, posthumously, with Mariano Rivera.

  * * *

  ————

  The first decade of baseball in the new century ended with a cutter. With two outs in the top of the ninth inning at Yankee Stadium, in Game 6 of the 2009 World Series, Rivera angled his tenth pitch to the Phillies’ Shane Victorino just a bit lower than usual. It came in like a knee-high fastball, 91 miles an hour, and darted down and in—not much, but just enough for Victorino to pull a harmless grounder to second base for the final out. It was the fourth time Rivera had secured the last out of the World Series, more than anyone in baseball history.