The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball Blog

From today’s Kansas City Star, on Mike Sweeney:

Sweeney found four bottles of Dom Perignon in his locker after the game. They represented the completion of a promise from last season by Twins outfielder Torii Hunter: a champagne party for sweeping the Tigers in the final series last season, which enabled Minnesota to win the American League Central Division.

This is dangerous. It’s prohibited in Rule 21, Misconduct:

(b) Gift for defeating competing club. Any player or person connected with a Club who shall offer or give any gift or reward to a player or person connected with another Club for services rendered or supposed to be or to have been rendered in defeating or attempting to defeat a competing Club, and any player or person connected with a Club who shall solicit or accept from a player connected with another Club any gift or reward for any services rendered, or supposed to have been rendered, or who, having been offered any such gift or reward, shall fail to inform his League President or the Commissioner or the President of the Minor League Association, as the case may be, immediately of such offer, and of all facts and circumstances connected therewith, shall be declared ineligible for not less than three years.

Did Sweeney inform Selig when Hunter made the offer? Did Selig tell him it was okay? Or are we going to see both Sweeney and Hunter sit out for three years? Orrrr is baseball going to ignore this?

Three years seems a harsh penalty, but there’s a reason behind it. As I discuss in The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball, the misconduct rules, which cover gambling, payoffs, and other like behavior, came into being as baseball tried to move away from the close ties to gambling and crime interests that led to the 1919 Black Sox scandal. Howard Rosenberg documents more incidents of these kind of payoffs than I can easily recount in his Cap Anson series, particularly Cap Anson 2: The Theatrical and Kingly Mike Kelly: U.S. Team Sport’s First Media Sensation and Baseball’s Original Casey at the Bat, and Ginsburg’s The Fix Is in: A History of Baseball Gambling and Game Fixing Scandals.

When teams made friendly bets on who would win a series, it was mostly innocuous, but it was in these same kind of bets and payoffs that some of the worst cheating was forged. By paying off another team to take out a divisional opponent, teams affected the strategies used and tampered with the game’s outcome: if there’s a large monetary reward to beat the team you’re playing today, there’s a huge incentive to do everything you can, even if it means you’ll be much worse off when you face the next team.

Those kind of bets and payoffs led to the constant noise in baseball up to the Black Sox scandal, when many division races were affected (or just as damningly, from a public perspective, rumored to be affected) by one competitor paying a third team, out of the race, to beat their rivals for the pennant. It wasn’t far from paying a team to beat another to paying them to lose to you, and when teams were taking money coming and going from outside sources in other teams, it wasn’t a big jump to take money from gamblers and other interested parties…

This is why baseball put such huge penalties around gambling, and these kind of friendly wagers and promises of gratitude: it’s a remnant of baseball’s hard-won experience fighting corruption. As time’s passed, baseball’s forgotten those lessons. For a long time, baseball wouldn’t associate at all with casinos, even exerting pressure on former players to refuse work as greeters, and now they’re happy to run ads for casinos in stadiums.

We’ll see if they take any action on this violation of the misconduct rule. I’d bet on no.

For a ridiculous amount of additional information on gambling, there’s a whole chapter in The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball, or you can check out the Rosenberg or Ginsburg books for entire volumes devoted to it.

hat tip to Ian for the pointer to the article

Check it out. Pretty pro, I would say.

It’s interesting he mentions the Black Sox chapter being long: we really struggled with the length of this one, and I ended up chopping a ton of stuff out of it to try as we worked to get the book under wordcount. I really wanted to talk more about Hal Chase, and some of the other connections, and the allegations in 1920 that the team was throwing games in part because they were being blackmailed over 1919, but the draft version so dominated the book that I had to trim it repeatedly.

Size, both in total and relatively, was a continual compromise. I wish I could have done a “complete” version that ran 200,000 words, where balance issues would work themselves out through exhaustive detail… but that’s turned out to be what the blog’s for: additions and expansions.

The pizza incident in Boston provides a great example of something I talk about in the book: the fielder has no right to a ball in the stands, so home crowds should prevent visiting fielders from catching fouls. Here, you see that Garret Anderson has a play on the ball but the Sox fans, going for the ball, stop him from making the catch — and it’s correctly not called fan interference.

And then the fun starts.

From this interview at White Sox Interactive:

ML: How about the ‘doctored’ baseballs and the field? How much did that have an effect?

JK: “We knew that they doctored home plate. That was because they had all those ground ball and sinker ball pitchers, and one time I was pitching against them and the baseball felt like a snowball in my hand, it was that cold! When I came to the Sox I remember talking to Roger Bossard (Author’s Note: Now the White Sox head groundskeeper) and I said something like ‘I’m pitching Saturday, make sure you’ve got the field ready.’ (laughing) And it’s a fact that the Sox used to have a light in the scoreboard at Comiskey Park that would tip off their hitters as to what kind of pitch was coming. Today the teams are more concerned about beautification of the field then about giving the home team an advantage.”

I discuss the White Sox freezing baseballs and the sign stealing in two chapters of The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball.

When I wrote the K-Rod post (and follow-ups), many people wrote in to offer other pitchers I should look at, and Joe Nathan came up a lot. So skip ahead a few weeks, and right now I’m watching him pitch against the Mariners — and there’s pine tar on his cap. I saw it a lot heavier in some of the evidence readers sent in, but there’s a light-brown patch on his brim that’s almost the exact same size of the four fingers of his hand.

It’s not resin. Even if you want to argue that whatever was under K-Rod’s cap was a wacky localized migration from the rosin bag, here’s a pitcher with something that couldn’t possibly get there without his knowledge (unless you want to argue that someone else regularly puts pine tar on his hat and he doesn’t notice).

Interestingly, though, while I’ve seen the pine tar much heavier and I’ve seen him directly rub pine tar spots while getting ready, tonight I didn’t see him touch that pine-tar smear at all — but he went to the back of the cap with his hand repeatedly, including a couple rubs. Unfortunately, watching on TV you don’t get good close-ups of the back of his cap, but it didn’t look like there was something there.

All of which raises a different set of questions for me —
If Nathan didn’t go to the pine tar to get a better grip, why risk going out there like that, unless (as we saw with K-Rod) pitchers having illegal personal stashes of sticky substances on their uniform goes unenforced?

If he’s not using it to get a better grip on a cold, damp night – when he went out there, it was about 44 degrees, 82% humidity, raining very lightly – when would he use it? Or is it not about grip at all?

King Kaufman mentioned that there’s a new book out about groundskeeping:

Writing my own book turned me into a total geek for groundskeeping. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet (I’ll post a longer review later) but I’m excited to read this. This part of the description:

Peter Morris demonstrates that many of the game’s rules and customs actually arose as concessions to the daunting practical difficulties of creating a baseball diamond.

Sounds exactly like the central tenet of The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball,

Emil Bossard’s widely credited with the invention of “modern” groundskeeping, including the invention of the batting practice screens, tarps, and most of the techniques that are associated with what we think of as the work of the grounds crew today. He (and his kids) dominate the groundskeeping chapter in Cheater’s Guide, and in the Notes I mention how much I’d have loved to have seen a whole book about their work.

I’m intrigued to see how groundskeeping worked when just getting a field together was a monumental task, when parks burned down fairly regularly, and the people tasked with maintaining them wouldn’t have access to the same tools, resources, and knowledge that Bossard did.

I read this story in The Guardian with interest, because many of the techniques used for doctoring the ball are the same, in principle and practice, as those used in baseball, just as the sports share a lot of gameplay.

Check out this insinuation:

Devil Rays manager Joe Maddon told Tampa-area reporters that there was more to speedy Carl Crawford being thrown out twice on the bases Tuesday than met the eye. Maddon said the dirt around first base had been thoroughly soaked and turned into a quagmire, which is why Crawford was thrown out twice in a game for the first time in his career.

“I don’t know if they had a sprinkler problem or whatever it may have been, but it was a little bit damp on the first-base side,” Maddon said.

Ron Washington notes in response that Jamey Wright’s delivery is really fast.

Speeding up or slowing down the basepaths to affect a team’s running game is one of the greatest traditions of groundskeeping. There’s a whole chapter of this in The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball if you’re interested in this kind of thing.

There’s a lengthy interview I did with King Kaufman about cheating over at Salon for your possible enjoyment.

I spent the first half of my day in an ER, and I’m under instructions not to go anywhere or do anything but lie around and drink fluids. Reschedule to be announced.