The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball Blog

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.

A reader suggested checking out a weird spot on Bobby Jenks’ cap. In the tradition of the K-rod photos, I present this low-quality still:

I would say “now that’s what a light dusting of resin looks like”. Other cloud-like interpretations welcome.

One of the themes in The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball is that the greats who really study and know how to take advantage of the rules contribute to the game’s advancement. Today, I wanted to bring up Paul Richards. Richards loved finding ways that he could gain an advantage. I love this quote from his Hall of Fame Veterans Committee profile, from baseball historian Warren Corbett:

“He pushed the envelope,” Corbett said. “He was always looking for an edge. He would skate up to edge of rule. Sometimes he would skate over the rule.”

He encouraged his players to get hit by a batted ball if it would break up a double play, for instance, which resulted in a rule change. But that’s not what I wanted to write up.

In the rules, there’s an interesting aside in Rule 3.03, which covers defensive switches.

Rule 3.03 Comment: A pitcher may change to another position only once during the same inning; e.g. the pitcher will not be allowed to assume a position other than a pitcher more than once in the same inning. Any player other than a pitcher substituted for an injured player shall be allowed five warm-up throws. (See Rule 8.03 for pitchers.)

8.03, if you’re curious, covers how many warm-up pitches they can take.

This is in order to prevent a team from (say) having a right-handed pitcher and a left-handed pitcher in the game at once, hiding one in left field while the other pitched and swapping them back and forth so that right-handed hitters only faced righties, left-handed hitters only faced lefties, and switch hitters would presumably get whoever the manager liked more in that situation.

You will occasionally see a pitcher head to the outfield for a batter and then resume pitching, but that’s it: at that point they’re forbidden from moving him again.

I mention this because Keith Scherer pointed me to this as at least party the result of the antics of Paul Richards, who was notorious for using bait-and-switch lineups and stuff like this. Richards is generally noted as the inventor of the oversized catcher’s mitt used when they draw the short straw and have to catch a knuckleballer.

Unfortunately Retrosheet doesn’t have a box score for these.

June 25, 1953, he brought Harry Dorish in, moved pitcher Billy Pierce to first (!) for two batters. On May 15, 1957, there’s another Dorish/Pierce move. Richards took the unusual move of putting pitcher Harry Dorish at third so that Billy Pierce could face Ted Williams. As much as the Williams shift (where teams put as many fielders as they dared on the right side of second) made it seem tempting for Williams to pull the ball to the left, with a pitcher at third it’s almost comical. Williams popped up and Dorish returned to pitch.

September 11th, 1958 — well, here’s the Baseball Library write-up:

Orioles manager Paul Richards lists three pitchers in his starting line-up, hoping for a scoring chance in the first inning, at which point he can remove the extra pitchers for a batter of his choice. Billy O’Dell, batting 9th at P; Jack Harshman in CF, batting 5th; Milt Pappas at 2B, batting 7th. Only O’Dell bats as he goes to 14–11, losing to KC’s Ned Garver, 7–1. The A’s plate five in the 8th, paced by Bob Cerv’s 33rd home run.

That, along with Earl Weaver’s use of phantom DHs, helped create the rules around declared lineup restrictions and substitutions.

And, obligatory plug, if you enjoy finding out why the rules are this way, you’ll like the book.

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.

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.

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.

The book offers a whole chapter on sign-stealing (buy it!). Here’s another example of electronic sign-stealing. I found this at the Hall of Fame library loose files, while researching rumors that the Al Lopez-managed White Sox stole signs early in the 1960s (a period from ~1959 to ~1962). The article clipping’s dated 9-30-1967 and I believe it’s from the Sporting News, based on the layout and some other cues, but it’s unlabeled. The article is “By Joe Falls, In the Detroit Free Press”.

The article discusses various means the White Sox used: stealing out of the center field scoreboard, and using flashing lights and even using a loudspeaker in the dugout. But the unique part was that they

…wired the third base coaching box for sound and even gave pitcher Early Wynn an electronic receiver to use in his cap so that Manager Al Lopez could communicate with him on the mound

The coaching box harkens back to the earliest incident of electronic cheating ever (which is in the book) but for the team to wire the pitcher - I believe that’s the only instance I came across.

It gets better, though.

The White Sox even installed wires around the third base coaching box and equipped Cuccinello with a special receiver which was pinned under his uniform shirt. This enabled him to get signs from Lopez without ever turning around to look at his manager.

Billy Martin tried something like this (with funnier results) in an incident that’s in the book, but I don’t want to spoil that joke.

This 1915 Baseball Magazine article, “The Emery Ball Strangest of Freak Deliveries,” traces the development of the emery ball, in which the surface of the ball is scuffed, from the “spitballing” of Russel Ford which turned out to be something else entirely.

“Pitching the emery ball was not unlike handling a stick of dynamite. It was the best delivery in the world, and yet the pitcher never knew when the very excellence of the delivery might not work against him and throw away for him the game he was winning by his fine work in the box. I speedily discovered this deadly proclivity of the emery ball and guarded against it as much as possible. In fact, I made a scientific study of the ball and its freak moves, and as I was the only pitcher who even knew that it existed, I had the field to myself.”

Cy Falkenberg ends up spoiling the deal for everyone. It’s a fascinating contemporary article.