The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball Blog

4-2-2007, against the Rangers, K-Rod put something on the ball repeatedly during the 9th inning, and wasn’t even subtle about it. First, I’m going to admit these are bad pictures. Patches welcome, as they say in the open source world. Or suggestions on how to get better stills — but any set of stills isn’t going to be as good as watching it yourself: if you’ve got mlb.tv, it’s worth checking out.

Pitches:
to Wilkerson
1: wipes brim of cap during long walk around mound, ball
2: video cuts back to him too late to see. 94, ball
3: grabs, rubs brim of cap, (2:48:28 on the mlb.tv feed)brings hand down, touches back of hand to back of jersey, rubs hand on jersey leg. 95.

4: nothing, 94, strike
5: grabs, rubs brim of cap (~2:49:15, same deal, running thumb inside) quick jersey touch. 95, strike.

6: video cuts back to him too late to see, fouled
7: good thumb work while walking back to the mound, 94, fly to center

to Laird
8: walking back to the mound at ~2:50:20, he crabs the brim and works the thumb for a couple seconds. Ridiculously blatant. Ball.

9: no camera, 94, strike
10: late camera, ground to 2b. Touches cap brim, thumb thing.

to Kinsler
11: no camera, 95, ball
12: no camera, 94, strike
13: crowd shots, 94, foul
14: ~2:52:47, off the rubber, he does the cap brim thing again, touching jersey before and after. Ball goes into the dirt, Napoli swings, ball’s picked off the ground and he’s tagged out

Compare the movement on those pitches to the movement on the fastballs where he clearly doesn’t go to the hat brim.

Also, watching the video, it’s a lot more striking than stills convey — it’s clearly not a cap adjustment, but something else entirely. He grabs the front of the cap and then rubs his thumb on the underside of the cap, picking whatever it us up. On the video, it’s quite striking.

Update: check out this still, where he’s tilting his head, courtesy of Sal Baxamusa

Update: from today’s game, you can repeatedly see that there’s a glop of something white on the underside of his brim on the right side. Here are two shots. First, the straight still:

And then, adjusting the levels to make that a little brighter

In the 4-3-07 game, there isn’t the kind of totally blatant grab-the-brim-then-rub-thumb repeatedly, but it’s even more clear that there’s something on his hat brim and he’s putting his thumb right on it.

Selected timings of shots of K-Rod’s brim, for your own reference:
2:45:49
2:46:07 (good)
2:46:18 (good)
2:47 (good)
2:52:30 – decent shot of the brim
2:54:50 – decent shot of the brim
2:56:48 – decent shot of the brim
2:57:50 – nice shot of the brim followed by K-Rod putting his thumb right in it

Update: MLB’s looking into it. The Rangers have denied complaining to the league, which is what I’d heard when I was told about the Opening Day inning.

Update: The story’s on ESPN, including some fine video footage and highlights of what was under his brim. I have yet to receive apologies from everyone who accused me of faking it in Photoshop. :p

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.

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.

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

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.

In the first rule changes since 1996! Glory be!

There are large changes to scoring rules, including how plays are defined.

Ball doctoring:
- implemented a rule that a position player who scuffs or defaces a ball is ejected and receives an automatic 10-game suspension
- aaand, as the story puts it

The same Rule 3.02 now specifically prohibits placing “soil, rosin, paraffin, licorice, sandpaper, emery paper or other foreign substance” on the ball. The rule’s penalty phase dictates, “The umpire shall demand the ball and remove the offender from the game. In addition, the offender shall be suspended automatically for 10 games.”

This is particularly interesting. I see this as a reaction to the Kenny Rogers World Series incident, where Rogers appeared to have something on his hand during the first inning.

Moreover, though, I wonder if there’s a perception within baseball that there’s a lot more of this going on than we know out in the general public. Baseball hasn’t changed the rules that attempt to prevent ball doctoring in ages. Why now? While position players have traditionally been accomplices in scuffing or doctoring, was there some reason that the rules committee needed to make a change? Doctoring on the whole is way down from its heyday — there isn’t any pitcher operating today for whom an illegal pitch is a primary part of their arsenal.

There are some “pace” rules, which will almost certainly be ignored
- the totally unenforced “time to deliver a pitch” when no one’s on base is now only 12 seconds. Penalty is a called ball.
- batters are supposed to keep at least one foot in the box the whole at bat, with certain exceptions

Baseball’s tried this before, and it doesn’t work. Umpires don’t want to time the game with a stopwatch, and they don’t want to affect the game outcome over things like this. How many times did Steve Trachsel ever get a ball called for violating the 20-second rule?

What else…
- the suspension rules have changed to almost entirely eliminate ties
- on a dropped third strike, if the batter leaves the dirt area around home plate, they’re out – the catcher doesn’t have to chase them,
- players can’t run into the dugout to catch a foul
- the rules around suspended games changes, so there almost can’t be a tie anymore.

I’m disappointed by the changes. Baseball cracked the rules open to fix some things and didn’t change, for instance, the horrible rules around rainouts. That whole section’s going to ruin a post-season game or a pennant race eventually, and baseball’s ignoring it until they’re forced to confront the situation.

It’s weird that baseball announced this with a tiny story late on Friday, attempting to avoid the news cycle (this is why politicians release all their unflattering news on Fridays – by Monday it’s stale and the press doesn’t cover it). These are substantial changes, especially to the way things like sacrifice bunts are scored, and deserve notice and discussion.

I’m sad to learn this morning that Lew Burdette passed at eighty. What I haven’t heard yet is a good tribute to his talent for the spitter. Here’s what I wrote about Burdette in The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball:

Lew Burdette was the greatest spitballer of the 1950s. He debuted in 1950 but didn’t ttstart pitching regularly until 1952 at the age of 23. Everyone accused Burdette of throwing the spitball because of the dramatic downward break he could get on a pitch, but he always denied it. When he hung up the spikes in 1967, he had won 203 games, gone to two All-Star games in 1957 and 1959, and in 1958 finished third in Cy Young voting.

Burdette would get good hitters to come up to the plate and stare at him, waiting for the spitball, watching strike after strike go past them, right over the plate, and then they’d go sit down, angry they hadn’t seen a spitter.

Burdette, like other great cheaters, helped force a rule change that prohibited pitchers from going to their mouth while on the mound. Burdette, like some of the other great trick pitchers, eventually did admit he’d been putting something on the ball, but not what he was accused of: “I wet my fingers by bringing them to my mouth once in a while like a lot of other pitchers do. It’s a nervous habit. But I go to my eyebrows a lot more, and that’s when my fingers get real wet. I’m a prey good perspirer, one of the best, and the sweat runs down my forehead and soaks my eyebrows.”

It seems strange to know Burdette from reading all those game stories for so long, and then in reading these stories, not see this part of his game mentioned. Burdette was a fun player to research, and I feel like I miss him a little already.