I’m sad to learn this morning that Lew Burdette passed at eighty. What I haven’t heard yet is a good tribute to his talent for the spitter. Here’s what I wrote about Burdette in The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball:
Lew Burdette was the greatest spitballer of the 1950s. He debuted in 1950 but didn’t ttstart pitching regularly until 1952 at the age of 23. Everyone accused Burdette of throwing the spitball because of the dramatic downward break he could get on a pitch, but he always denied it. When he hung up the spikes in 1967, he had won 203 games, gone to two All-Star games in 1957 and 1959, and in 1958 finished third in Cy Young voting.
Burdette would get good hitters to come up to the plate and stare at him, waiting for the spitball, watching strike after strike go past them, right over the plate, and then they’d go sit down, angry they hadn’t seen a spitter.
Burdette, like other great cheaters, helped force a rule change that prohibited pitchers from going to their mouth while on the mound. Burdette, like some of the other great trick pitchers, eventually did admit he’d been putting something on the ball, but not what he was accused of: “I wet my fingers by bringing them to my mouth once in a while like a lot of other pitchers do. It’s a nervous habit. But I go to my eyebrows a lot more, and that’s when my fingers get real wet. I’m a prey good perspirer, one of the best, and the sweat runs down my forehead and soaks my eyebrows.”
It seems strange to know Burdette from reading all those game stories for so long, and then in reading these stories, not see this part of his game mentioned. Burdette was a fun player to research, and I feel like I miss him a little already.
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