The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball Blog

In the book, I mention Hal Chase’s abominable reputation for cheating, both while he was an active player and afterwards. I don’t dwell on it there, but Chase was the most corrupt player I’ve come across. What’s interesting and appalling, though, is that while Chase was active, while everyone knew, no one really went after him. It’s a testament to how corrupt and how tolerated that kind of thing was that you can’t find contemporary outrage, calls for his banning, columns constantly attacking him when he came to town, even though the writers knew as well as people in baseball what he was made of.

But as the Black Sox scandal unravelled (and Hal Fullerton entirely vindicated for his coverage after the 1919 series), you can start to see that scandals are more easily aired. For instance, I came across this throwaway mention in the February 10, 1921 Sporting News:

The divorced wife of Hal Chase might make a good witness in the trials of the accused White Sox. In testifying for her divorce in Cincinnati recently she swore Chase told her a lot about how he had been mixed up in baseball cheating. She “knew his nature,” she said and her knowledge led her to believe that when there was any crooked work being done Chase was in on it.

Now, it required something to be out there for them to point to, but it’s also clear reading this that the Sporting News isn’t dismissing her allegations and in fact wants people to look into them.

This is a huge change from 1919. Then, reporters like Hugh Fullerton who wrote about the Series or the aftermath were mocked and savaged by voices of establishment publications. Baseball Magazine, for instance, took many opportunities to fire at Fullerton. Eight Men Out quotes them at one point taking a story about Lee Magee, thrown out of baseball for his connection to Hal Chase rumors (Magee also finished 1919 on the White Sox but was not in on the fixing, it seems):

Magee, after all, has not hurt the game in which he will no longer have a part. The greater harm was done by sensational writers like Hugh Fullerton, men for whose actions there was not the slightest excuse.

But only a year later, the Sporting News openly encouraged investigation of the man Magee was thrown out for associating with.

I love it when research intersects. In the book, Sutton’s reputation as a cheater is covered, but I didn’t really get into umpires with particularly short fuses, and ones known for being quick to eject, or who will carry a grudge.

So. Umpire Bruce Froemming was both, and when he crossed Sutton. From Baseball Digest:

Don Sutton was pitching a shutout in Chicago when Froemming saw him scuff th eball on the pitching rubber.
“We caught him,” Froemming said. “Dick Stello asked for the ball at third base, and Sutton threw the ball so hard that Stello had to move and the ball hit into the brick wall. Now we can’t catch the scuff.”
When Froemming went to ask him what was going on, Sutton screamed at Froemming.
He was gone and there was nothing that could save him,” Froemming recalled.

That’s some quality quick thinking on Sutton’s part, even if it’s the wrong thing to do.

from “Here’s the Quickest Way to Be Ejected from a Game” by Bob Hertzel, 1986

I’m a sucker for jokes that require the other target to think about them before they get angry.

Larry Bowa made much of his reputation as a hard-nosed player from his expertise as a bench jockey. I found this in Baseball Digest, where he hassles Cincy shortstop Dave Concepcion.

“Elmer, yeah you, Emler.
“Me?”
“Elmer, isn’t your name Elmer? Every time I look at Reds box score I see E Concepcion. I thought the E stood for Elmer.”

In fourth game of the 1941 World Series, the Dodgers led the Yankees 4-3 in the ninth. Hugh Casey was pitching and with two outs and a three-and-two count on Tommy Heinrich, threw a spitball that Henrich swung on and missed, but got away from the catcher Mickey Owen. Heinrich made it to first.

Maybe Heinrich would have walked anyway, and what happens next didn’t require the spitball - but the Yankees then scored four runs to win, 7-4.

The interesting thing to me is that Casey would go to the spitball, knowing that it might be difficult to control and to catch, with a 3-2 count, two outs, and no one on. Clearly, weighing the risk/reward, he didn’t want to challenge Heinrich and risk a game-tying home run, so he’s trying to get a swing-and-miss to end the game and even the series at 2-2. But that Casey in such an important situation would choose to throw the spitter reveals that he thought it was the best pitch he could strike Heinrich out with.

Here’s a great article “by Ty Cobb”, written in Baseball Magazine in 1916 from an interview, on “Daring Feats that Have Made the Tigers Dreaded, and How They Were Thought Out and Executed, as Revealed in an Interview”.

I used to figure out dozens of these plays. They are all based on the so-called science of probabilities. Very often they would fail, but that isn’t the point. A certain percentage of them are bound to fail. Those that succeed are the ones that count. And even those that fail have their uses. They show the opposition that they can never know what to expect. You simply cannot prepare for the unexpected. Such a situation leaves a feeling of unrest in the defense. They are momentarily helpless. It is plays such as these which do more to demoralize a defense than a home run with men on bases.

His tales of stretching a hit and coordinated baserunning are awesome.

Check it out.

The worst part about writing the book was cutting it down. Early drafts were much, much longer than the final product, and even the final cut came down to my editor saying “I like this long chunk too much to cut, let’s go for it”.

This meant that a lot of fun stuff was left out, and I want to share those here in the hopes that you’ll like them enough to buy the book, which has the cream of the crop. (Pre-order now!)

The other problem, which I’m also going to try and address here, is there are many great cheating stories that I couldn’t find enough evidence for to include in the book, and I want to share those, too, and talk about how far I got if I researched them, and why they were left out, and how plausible they are.

The Story of Dick Williams and the Movable Second Base
Supposedly when he was leaving the Angels in 1976, he went out to one of the grounds crew and said “I don’t recognize you, are you new?” The guy said “Kind of, I’ve been around for a while (seasons/years).” And Williams said “Well, you can put second base back where it’s supposed to be, I had them move it two feet closer to first when I got here.”

Did Williams move the bases and, if so, how big of a difference would that have made?

Let me take the last one first. Two feet off a 90′ distance is significant - it’s a 2% reduction in distance, and that would indeed make it easier to swipe.

Say that it takes a player four seconds to go from his lead into second. Moving the base two feet closer reduces that to 3.9 seconds. That’s huge - teams time pitchers and catchers in order to determine how long their delivery time home and their time from catch to throw arrival at second is, and then knowing the speed of the runner, can make decisions on whether to send them. A consistent tenth of a second advantage sounds tiny, but in execution it could be huge. If one side knew and the other didn’t, that’d be a big advantage.

Did the Angels steal more? In 1973, they stole 59 bases (and were caught stealing 47 times), and only Sandy Alomar was any kind of threat on the basepaths. In 1974, Williams came in and managed the team for 84 games, and they stole 119 (and were caught another 79 times). 106 attempts went up to 198, but their success rate wasn’t great. In 1975, Williams’ first full season, we’d expect to see them steal like crazy, and they did - 220 stolen bases, 108 caught stealing (328 attempts!). 1976, he’s fired ninety games into the season, and they stole 126 and were caught 80 times. 1977, his first year gone, it’s 159-86.

1973 (no Williams) - 106 attempts, 56% success
1974 (half-season) - 198 attempts, 60% success
1975 (full season) - 328 attempts, 67% success
1976 (half-season) - 206 attempts, 60% success

Unfortunately, personell turnover makes this tough. Sandy Alomar was the team’s only real stolen base threat in 1973, but hardly played for them in 1974. Morris Nettles stole 20 bases in 1974 and 1975 but was gone in 1976.

Look at a player like Jerry Remy, a guy with speed. You’d expect that the team would make maximum use of their advantage by having their fast players attempt steals more often. But Remy’s attempts aren’t unusual in 75/76 compared with later years when Williams is gone.

The counterexample here is Mickey Rivers, who started to steal a lot more when Williams came to the Angels, peaking with 70 SB and 14 CS in 1975, and after 1976, post-Williams, throttling back significantly. Leroy Stanton’s the same way.

And that jump in success is interesting. I’d say statistically, this is plausible.

However, in practice, the chances he pulled this off take a hit.

First, moving second towards first seems to require that you move 3rd base towards home, too, creating a rectangle:

+-----+
|     |
+-----+

Where first-to-second and third-to-home are 88′ and home-to-first and second-to-third remain 90′. Otherwise, you could look straight over from second and third base would be off the line. But in total, it’s not that huge of an area reduction that it’d be obvious - 7,920 sq ft in the shaved version, 8,100 in the other. That’s enough that you probably wouldn’t notice it if you were looking at the whole diamond.

But what if you had an on-the-field view that would be particularly well-suited for this? For parts of three seasons, opposing catchers looked straight past the mound, a viewpoint they’d have grown used to over years and years, thousands of games, and seen that second base didn’t lineup directly behind the pitcher’s mound.

Catcher ----> mound ----> second base
        ~64'         ~64'

Two feet’s not going to line up from behind home plate. They could see, for instance, that instead of being about in the middle of the rubber, it was off towards the right.

But how much? I broke out the geometry and figured that it’s under a degree difference. Here’s the thing, though - the whole pitching rubber takes up about two degrees of their vision. So where second base is usually exactly in the center of the rubber as they look out, a two foot move means it jumps all the way to one side. I think they’d catch that. And catchers, as a lot, because they’re often enlisted in cheating, do tend to have a good sense for this kind of thing.

I was also unable to find any anecdotal evidence, in papers or biographies, for this story. However, I did hear it fairly late in the process, so it’s not like Tommy John’s ball-scuffing, where I could really go to town on it.

To sum up, then -
Could it have happened? It’s possible
Is it likely to have gone unnoticed for that long? I don’t think so