The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball Blog

From “7 Ways to Catch the Fever”

6. Pick up a copy of “The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball” (Houghton Mifflin, $13.95) and see how the pros do it. “Ever see Mike Piazza block the plate, or Derek Jeter slide hard into second? Illegal. But it happens every game.” That promotional copy only leads to more treasures within Derek Zumsteg’s fun and revealing handbook. Find it online or at most local bookstores.

Sweet!

Check it out here.

Is it a good review? A bad one? I don’t really know what to tell you, beyond that it’s a little strange and I don’t know how to react to it.

From the loose clippings at the Hall of Fame library, I believe this is a 1921 clipping probably from The Sporting News, but I don’t have a date. Packs in the now-jarring — well, I’ll let it speak for itself

The Pirates training at Hot Springs are enjoying the sensation of being entertained and looked after by the only woman ground keeper in baseball. She is Mrs. O. H. Wilhelmi, whose husband is the ground keeper at the other ball park in Hot Springs, used by the Boston Red Sox. She is said to be an expert and has her park in fine shape, according to Pittsburg players, bossing a gang of negro grass manicurists like a real man on the job.

It’s always strange to go back to old documents and see advertisements for cigarettes that advertised health benefits, or whatnot, but I never quite managed to adjust to seeing casual discrimination. It makes me wonder what future generations are going to see in our media that will strike them the same way.

Anyway. Yeah. Check that out.

I went to the files to pull the cite for my quote on the Babe yelling at Cleveland groundskeeper Emil Bossard which, as Deanna put it, would have to occur before Bossard’s hiring is generally placed (see here for more).

“Emil Bossard: He was an artist in his field,” The Cleveland Press, May 8, 1980, p C1

There was the great Babe Ruth who looked upon Emil like an opposing pitcher at old League Park. “Give us a break,” The Babe bellowed at Emil, who made a quagmire in right field where Ruth played and softened home plate, not allowing him a toe-hold.

League Park opened April 21, 1910, and the Indians played there through 1946. Bossard, on the generally accepted timeline, was hired on or about the 1936 season, which means that he was indeed the groundskeeper there, and also that Ruth would have played there (often, from 1914 until moving to the NL in 1935). The article even later cites 1936 as Bossard’s hire date.

Nothing in that article clears up how Ruth could have been at League Park while Bossard was a groundskeeper, and the 1936 date cited seems to contradict the alternate history where “Bossard moved the fences around in the 1920s and 1930s”. If nothing else, I’ll be reassured that no less a writer than Bob Sudyk, while in Cleveland, bit on this, like I would over a quarter-century later.

Interestingly, in the article, Veeck repeats the story that Bossard moved the fences. But here’s the thing about that — Veeck didn’t buy into the Indians until 1946. And in the rest of the article, while there are many incidents described, they all place Bossard’s antics post-1936. Bossard, for what it’s worth, denied Veeck’s story (“That would be against the rules.”) in other articles I found.

I’m a little disappointed that pulling the original article didn’t offer more specific information on the Ruth incident, but the context of the whole article makes me even more skeptical that it happened at all. If Emil Bossard started in the 1920s and there were an extra ten years of hijinks at least, wouldn’t there be at least one good, verifiable incident that would put him in Cleveland during those years, somewhere. But I haven’t found any yet.

Fun side connection: the author of this article, Bob Sudyk, wrote Gaylord Perry’s autobiography Me and the Spitter, one of the best cheating books ever written (check out the book here).

I laughed when I read the Hong Kong horse racing track story. From the New York Times:

HONG KONG, March 26 — It was a device worthy of Rube Goldberg, or perhaps Wile E. Coyote. A remote-controlled mechanism with a dozen launching tubes was found buried in the turf at Hong Kong’s most famous horse racing track last week; it was rigged with compressed air to fire tiny, liquid-filled darts into the bellies of horses at the starting gate.

It’s proof that in order to get humor in front of reality, you need to be pretty ludicrous. In the Cheater’s Guide to Baseball, I lay out a way teams could bury devices in the basepaths to gain an advantage, but I never even considered using darts to dope up or poison players as they took a lead at first (or for that matter, you could set them up in any position and wait until they came out to field at the top of an inning, before the cameras get on them).

I would have thought that using darts was so far beyond the pale that they’d never warrant serious consideration. Maybe this is a good argument against allowing widespread sports betting after all — it does seem likely that the vast sums of money involved in Hong Kong horse racing made this lucrative enough to attempt.

Still, I had this mental image of a guy taking a two-step lead at first, frowning – did I feel something? – yawning, and then laying down for a quick nap while the first baseman tagged him out.

People email me to tell me their book’s shipped, or arrived early (which is great), and other people email to ask what’s up with Amazon not shipping their book not arriving yet, because they pre-ordered it in January, and my answer is “I have no idea.”

One of the things I didn’t realize until I started writing for the BP annuals was how little visibility authors have into what happens after the manuscript is turned over. I knew, vaguely, of a lot of different minor issues with this clearance or that photo, and I knew the release moved back because I had a spring training event I was originally supposed to be selling books for, and the release date slipped past that (I gave out bookmarks).

But I really didn’t know that Amazon was shipping books out the door until the day they did it. I didn’t know why some people’s date moved all the way up, and why other people’s copies didn’t ship until yesterday (or why the release date re-appeared as April 2nd for a while, though Amazon shipped a ton of copies out one day).

This is one of the reasons that authors are so obsessed with their Amazon sales rank. Amazon sales rank isn’t a great indicator of how many copies are moving, but they’re some piece of information, and the alternative is not knowing anything until you get a royalty statement from the publisher in a year or two.

All of which is to say – I’m sorry I haven’t been able to answer those questions. I wish I could, I really do.

Joe Posnanski’s new book on Buck O’Neil:

has a passage on steroids on p. 240:

People were always surprised that Buck did not have strong feelings about how bad steroids were for baseball. He did worry about kids ruining their bodies, but the cheating part did not move him much. In the Negro Leagues, he had known players to bend the rules to win – they corked bats, spit on the ball, popped amphetamines, stole signals, and even loaded up on coffee for the caffeine. They wanted to win. “The only reason players in my time didn’t use steroids,” he would say sometimes, “is because we didn’t have them.”

It’s interesting to fit this into the larger timeline of steroid use: later on, we’ll see that as steroids became available, players began using them immediately without any systematic means. My book touches on that a little, and I’ll write more about Tom House’s comments here soon.

Also, I laughed reading O’Neil’s reaction watching Palmeiro’s congressional testimony: “He’s lying.”

A blurb on Sabernomics about the Cheater’s Guide reminded me of an incident that’s not in the book —

As a Braves fan, I first checked to make sure he devoted some time to the evil 1991 Minnesota Twins. This team won the World Series by cranking up the AC to give Kirby Puckett a tainted home run off of Charlie Leibrandt. Zumsteg covers this, but misses the most egregious incident of that series: Kent Hrbek pushing Ron Gant off the bag to get an out. The play was so obvious that Hrbek couldn’t even keep a straight face when later describing the play.

On the 1991 home run, it’s interesting to note how well that fits into the known Twins AC-related cheating: that they tried to run it late in the game, starting at the bottom of the eighth, if the Twins were tied or behind, to give the offense a boost: it would get the Twins two innings (bottom of the eighth, bottom of the ninth) of wind-blowing-out assistance, while the visiting team only got one (top of the ninth). Now, in this case, they wouldn’t have the pretext of people leaving to crank them up, because in a tied World Series game, fans would stick around.

But it makes sense: crank them up for the bottom of the 8th (where all three Twins outs were in the air), and then leave them going.

The Hrbek story (btw, check out his picture on Wikipedia, that’s got to be a joke) — in the third inning of Game 2, Ron Gant hit a single, rounded first, and then retreated. The Twins threw to first, where Hrbek forced Gant off the bag as he returned safely. Drew Coble called Gant out and argued that it was Gant’s momentum that carried him off the base, but… no.

I wish I could point to a video clip of this, but the only instance of it I could find was removed “due to a copyright claim by MLB Advanced Media”. Because short video clips showing memorable plays in baseball history must be crushed.

The out ended the inning. Had Gant been called safe, the Braves would have had men on first-and-third with two outs and David Justice at bat. And the final score of the game was 3-2 Twins. We can’t know if Justice would have struck out or scored a runner, but it was a huge play in the game and might have changed the outcome of the World Series.

That kind of hard-tag force-the-runner off play really goes back to the rough days of baseball, when the hip check was relatively common, and it’s another example of how rough play, even with much better umpiring, still affects the outcomes of games and, one can easily argue, Championships.

It took under a day to get the first bug report. Thanks go to Deanna, of Marinerds.

On p.19, Babe Ruth is said to have yelled “Give me a break” at Bossard, who doctored the box and watered down right field for him. But Ruth played in the AL from 1914-1934, and only fielded from 1918 on.

Yet in describing Bossard’s career, I said that from 1911, it was “twenty-five years before he got his break” and took over major league grounds keeping… which puts it past Ruth’s time.

Further, it’s 1935 when Steve O’Neill took over Cleveland in 1935, and in 1936 the new GM, Cy Slapnicka, asked him to recommend a new groundskeeper, and O’Neill, who’d seen Bossard’s work in Toledo, told Slapnicka that Bossard was the best. Slapnicka gave him a two-year contract, and Bossard stayed on forever. That story’s frequently repeated, and given the people involved, it’s easy to pin down the time.

And yet Emil Bossard’s frequently credited as “a grounds keeper for the Indians in the 1920s and 1930s” and said to have moved the fences back when the Yankees visited. See, for instance, this ESPN article.

For Bossard to be there, moving the fences around, he has to have been hired or at least present in Cleveland well ahead of O’Neill/Slapnicka. Plus, reading histories, they generally say that grounds keeping as a profession came to be in the late 1930s, with Emil and his sons.

Right now it looks like there are a couple of choices:
- Bossard got to Cleveland earlier than O’Neill/Slapnicka, and started much earlier moving fences and getting into trouble
- Bossard didn’t get to Cleveland earlier than 1936, the Ruth story’s apocryphal, and I didn’t catch the two-year gap between Ruth’s career in the AL and Bossard’s career as a groundskeeper.
- Ruth, while playing in the outfield as a Yankee, played an exhibition or some other game against a team Bossard worked for

The problem with the last one is that all I have is the Ruth quote: there’s no location or date information to help me track it down.

(I tried to stall Deanna by pointing out that Ruth played for the Providence Grays in 1914 of the American Association and would have faced the Toledo Mud Hens, but Deanna was undeterred, pointing out immediately that at that time, Ruth was still a pitcher.)

And unfortunately, there’s no great Bossard biography I can read to check events against a well-documented timeline.

I’m going to try and look into this some more and provide an update.

Today people I knew kept mentioning that Amazon emailed them to tell them the ship date moved up, and I thought nothing of it, until someone told me they’d received a notice they’d be getting it on the 29th, which meant it was shipping now…

Yeah. I had no idea. I’d seen the date go back a few times, and that was my fear – to see it release a full week-and-change early is a little shocking.

And now… we’ll see. I have high hopes.