Chris Pelekoudas makes a couple of appearances in the book, as an umpire trying to enforce the spitball and foreign substance rules through his career even when baseball’s offices didn’t back him. His confrontation with Phil Regan provides a great example of how the dynamics of these confrontations worked. In 1968, the umpires were supposed to call suspect pitches balls even if they didn’t find anything on the ball.
So in the first game of a Cubs-Reds doubleheader on Auguest 18th, Pelekoudas went out to the mound after the first greaseball…
“I said to him, ‘Phil, I’m not going to search you. I just want you to know that any time you throw one it’s going to be a ball.’
Leo Durocher came out and threatened to forfeit the ballgame. He said we didn’t have evidence. He never once denied that Regan was throwing them. He merely said to show him the evidence.”
(Dick Young, 8/25/1968)
I’m not as convinced as Pelekoudas was that Durocher was admitting through not denying, since Durocher may well have wanted to avoid questioning Pelekoudas’ judgement of pitches, but okay.
Another umpire, Shag Crawford (what a name) gave Regan the once over, found something greasy, and ended up wiping Regan off with a towel.
Pelekoudas invoked the rule to call balls repeatedly and at one point called Pete Rose back after Rose made an out: Pelekoudas “called it a no-play and Rose was given another swing. He singled.”
Mack Jones got out of a fly to center as well, the pitch ruled a ball.
Check out the boxscore and play-by-play, courtesy of Retrosheet and see what happened to the game, though — once Regan comes into the game in the 7th, there are two ejections immediately, and then Regan’s catcher is ejected after complaining about the Rose second chance, and then Rose is ejected after being caught stealing at second. Four ejections in two innings.
So in that game, the umpire used a rule as he was intended to use it and much more aggressively than perhaps had been anticipated, and one of his crew found something on Regan’s person that was greasy (this is “wiped the inside of his cap” in some accounts, but that they wiped his face and neck in others). What’d the league do?
They met with the pitcher, his manager, and the Cubs general manager.
“Phil told me he did not have any Vaseline or other lubricant on his sweatband,” said Giles later, “and I believe him. Chris Pelekoudas suspected he did have a lubricant of some kind, but told me his judgement of an illegal pitch was based almost entirely on the action of the ball in flight.”
Nothing happened to Regan.
It’s no wonder that by and large umpires didn’t want to even try to enforce ball-doctoring rules, given the support they got.
There’s another great example of this in Gaylord Perry’s career… which I’ll get to in due time.
