I loved researching The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball because it meant I discovered all kinds of cool stuff. For instance, I never knew Tommy John cheated before I started writing the book.
At first, I came across some veiled references, insinuations, and then I found an amazing Peter Gammons column attacking the league for tolerating cheaters which told the story of a coach for an opposing team that collected foul balls or balls the umpire tossed, each of them scratched in exactly the same place as Gammons described it.
Here’s the interesting thing, then - many of cheaters would come out and admit it at some point, usually after they’d retired and didn’t need to fear the wrath of extra-vigilant umpire. But I couldn’t find Tommy John ever fessing up - I found denials, and the evidence wasn’t strong enough for me to write up a feature about it (though it does turn up in passing).
Yet Tommy John pitched for 26 years. Even if you figure he started cheating after 1975, he came back in 1976 and pitched through the 1989 season. That’s a long time to generally avoid attention, but if Gammons’ article was correct, together with the other complaints, Tommy John cheated for a long, long time without any of the attention or notoriety that Gaylord Perry labored under.
In the end, I couldn’t put a range around when he might have been cheating, but it lead me to one of the more important conclusions of the book: that there’s a lot of cheating that goes on I’d have to dig for, while at the same time being careful to draw distinctions about what the evidence was. And yet if you asked for my opinion, I’m 100% certain he scuffed, and only slightly less certain he did it regularly during his awesome six-season run from 1977-1981.
What’s even stranger is that in 1979, John admitted he’d thrown a spitter to Murray Chass in the New York Times (6-25-1979):
“I threw a spitter to Mickey Mantle once,” John admitted the other day. “I think it was in 1967. I was with the White Sox at the time, and we were way ahead. I threw the spitter, and the ball went straight down. Mickey fouled it off. I don’t know how he did it. But he just looked at me and started laughing. I started laughing and had to walk off the mound. After the inning, he said ‘Man, your sinker really improved on that one pitch.’”
That John at least experimented with and could throw the spitter without putting it into the stands means it’s likely he looked into other ways to doctor the ball as well, which brings us back to Gammons, and the persistent rumors he engaged in scuffing.
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