Idiots Write About Sports

A couple weeks back, I picked up The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers at my friendly neighborhood big-box bookstore. Early verdict: great book. The actual compendium of pitchers and the pitches they threw is interesting if a bit overwhelming — say… what did Mike Harkey throw? — and has some puzzling omissions. (Mark Mulder should be wedged between Hugh Mulcahy and Terry Mulholland; he isn’t.) But the sections where Rob Neyer and Bill James chronicle the history and evolution of pitches? Brilliant. Indispensible. Worth the price of the book alone. It’s now part of the Philip Michaels Collection of Essential Reference Books, along with Thinking Fan’s Guide to Baseball, Koppett’s Concise History of Major League Baseball, Weaver on Strategy and Spitters, Beanballs, and the Incredible Shrinking Strike Zone as the first places I go when I have a baseball question.

One question I have as I leaf through the book, though: there’s a portion where Neyer talks about the spitball and how, up until the pitch was explicitly outlawed, every pitcher was essentially doctoring the ball. (Short summary: why mess around with arm-straining pitches like the curve if you can use dirt and saliva and Lord knows whatever other substance to make the ball shuck and jive?) And even after the spitball was outlawed, you still had pitchers who earned a reputation for throwing less-than-legal pitches — Don Drysdale, Gaylord Perry, Don Sutton and so forth.

In fact, I remember back in the 1986-1987 timeframe, that you couldn’t go a week without some pitcher getting accused of tampering with the baseball. There was that memorable scene of Joe Niekro emptying his pockets at the request of an umpire, only to have an emery board come flying out. They found some sandpaper on Kevin Gross once, if memory serves. And Mike Scott seemed to spend the entire mid-’80s pitching under a cloud of suspicion that he was a scuffball artist — I still remember the footage of Howard Johnson pulling a Columbo and holding up confiscated baseballs to argue Scott’s indisputable guilt. And I’m sure I’m forgetting guys — I have a vague recollection that other Astros were accussed of scuffing the ball, and my memory tells me that anyone who learned the split-finger fastball from Roger Craig had to fend off scuffball allegations.

But after Jay Howell was found with pine tar on his cap in the ‘88 playoffs, I can’t recall any memorable spate of instances where a pitcher was caught, accused or otherwise suspected of monkeying with the ball. Obviously, there’ve been a few instances, but nothing like the steady stream of allegations I remember from my youth.

So my question is: what gives? What happened to the time-honored tradition of scuffing, defacing and mauling the baseball before you threw it to the plate? I don’t remember reading that any active pitcher is rumored to throw illegal stuff these days, and I read a lot about baseball. Am I missing something? Has the spitter faded entirely from the scene? Or are pitchers satisfied to do their cheating chemically in this the BALCO age?

I await the enlightment from the masses.

Born in January '85, I can't recall seeing one single scuffer in my lifetime. It's one of those little unfortunate quirks I always want to see when going to a game, along with
* a bench-clearing brawl (none of this 'heated discussion' stuff; I want punches thrown),
* a beanball war,
* someone getting chucked from the game (which would naturally stem from the first two),
* me on the Jumbotron or whatever name the team has for it (I'm a total famewhore at games. You should have seen me pester the poor woman the Brewers hired for between-innings fire-up-the-crowd work. Not proud of it, but not ashamed either.), and
* one or both teams (ideally the Cubs if applicable) scoring something on the order of 84 runs and forcing the other team to trot out some unfortunate shortstop to pitch in the later innings.

I figure it's a matter of convenience for the cheaters. They're a smidge lazy. It's too much work to conceal smudging agents or cork a bat, but they've got damn near undetectable steroids laying around (if Caminiti's right) all over the clubhouse, and all it takes to pull that off is one injection. It's easier and it's more long-term.

Sorry, but I say if you absolutely must cheat (which you shouldn't, but if you have to), I want you to be carrying smoking guns with you on the field. The Vaseline, the sandpaper, the superballs hidden in the bat, whatever. It proves you care enough about the integrity of the cheating industry (yea, yea, shaddap) to do a bit of work behind the scenes loading up. Gaylord did it right. Sosa (regardless of whether he meant it) did it right. McGwire (who we have an actual admission on which is why I mention him and not Bonds) did it wrong.

Man, you make me feel old, mtvcdm.

Like Philip, I've wondered whatever happened to the scuffers. (And the bat doctorers. Remember when Whitey Herzog constantly badgered Howard Johnson?) My theory is that the cheating still goes on, but there's a commissioner's, er, gentleman's agreement not to call anyone on it. How long did it take for Julian Tavarez to get busted for that obviously loaded cap? He wasn't even subtle. Clemens takes a little pine tar out to the mound every so often (take a look at his right cheek some time).

Nicking the ball a little is baseball tradition. I doubt it's stopped. And I've got a few suspects to cast aspersions on. Jose Lima maybe. Tim Worrell. Steve Kline. Just throwing names out.

The funny thing you see now that you didn't used to see is pitchers voluntarily giving up scuffed balls. Guy throws one in the dirt, the catcher whips it back, and the pitcher looks at the ball, sees a smudge, and alerts the ump! What the heck? As Krukow said after one of these sequences this season, "You're killin' me!"

That's the thing, Marty. Back in the Long Ago Time -- the 1980s -- you knew who was scuffing and who wasn't. People were pretty open about their allegations. Nowadays, we can speculate, but no one ever says for certain, "What's the secret to Roger Clemens' longevity and success? Hard-work, a good fastball, and the occasional dab of pine tar."

Even the corked bats pop up every couple of years or so -- Sammy Sosa, Albert Belle, Wilton Guerrero. But scuffers... it's been a long, dry spell.

The only guy, outside of Tavarez, I can remember getting kicked out of a game was Zach Day, and he apparently only had the Krazy Glue on his pitching hand to try and seal up a blister. That's just sad.

Right, they aren't open with the accusations, which leads me to believe Bud has ordered folks to put a cork in it. For the good image of the game, see.

So I look at the Neyer/James book, Neyer asks the same question and concludes that the split-finger and the circle change have taken the place of the doctored pitches, and since there are cameras everywhere, it would be a lot tougher to get away with defacing the ball.

But really, I bring the book up for another random reason. While leafing through it a few minutes after Game 3 -- during which Fox profiled Boston hitting coach Ron Jackson -- I came upon a picture of a youngish Nolan Ryan throwing for the California Angels. It's a shot taken from the first-base line, and peeking over Ryan's left shoulder is ... Ron Jackson. I grew up an Angels fan, and I have vivid memories of him as a player. Sort of a non-switching version of Terry Pendleton, but without the defense. This was a quarter-century ago, so forgive me if I'm confusing elements of Jackson with those of Thad Bosley or even Willie Mays Aikens.

Ain't baseball fun?

I can't believe I missed that part of the book, Marty. (For those of you who are interested, it comes at the end of the chapter on the spitball.) In my defense, I read that chapter when I was in Kauai, so it's possible my mind was on other things. It's interesting that the circle-change and the split-finger fastball are responsible for both the demise of doctored pitches as well as the screwball (which is a part of the book I _do_ remember. Neyer writes about how Jim Mecir may be the last of the screwball pitchers, since the circle-change does the same thing without the side effect of destroying your arm. Oakland fans may wish that Jim Mecir would have been the last of the screwball pitchers long ago after this season...)

As for the Ron Jackson thing, it always depresses me when I see players who were active when I was a younger man now coaching because it just reminds me that I'm going to die one of these days. I mean, I see Jose Oquendo coaching third for the Cardinals in the World Series... I remember when he was _playing_ in the damn thing.

I might as well pour myself another drink and just wait for the Reaper to arrive.

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