The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball Blog

Over at Baseball Prospectus, you can listen to an interview with the guy who makes Bonds’ pad. Or read Will Carroll’s write-up if you’re a subscriber.

Good stuff — the guy says that the pad’s not designed to impinge or aid motion in any way, and more interestingly, that he takes detailed measurements of Bonds’ arms every year to build the pads, and Bonds’ measurements haven’t changed in 12 years, which — that’s a particularly interesting thing to say, given what we know about Bonds and his workout regime, and particularly given what we learn in Game of Shadows about Bonds’ use of steroids starting in 1998.

The hot cheating story of the day is Bonds and his elbow pad. Over at Editor and Publisher, Michael Witte argues that it’s actually a mechanical aid that helps his swing. Check it out, he’s got six ways he thinks that monstrosity affects the swing. It’s interesting speculation:

1) The apparatus is hinged at the elbow. It is a literal “hitting machine” that allows Bonds to release his front arm on the same plane during every swing. It largely accounts for the seemingly magical consistency of every Bonds stroke.

I think it makes a little too much of his Home Run Derby performance, and too little of the consistent swing he showed before wearing the pad, but the possibility that protective gear might have a secondary benefit is fascinating.

The only thing I’d take issue with is this:

At the moment, Bonds’ apparatus enjoys “grandfathered” status. Similar devices are presently denied to average major leaguers, who must present evidence of injury before receiving an exemption.

This is not true, and pretty easily verified: in 2002, when the “crackdown” on body armor happened, Bonds was allowed to wear a compliant elbow pad because he had a medical exemption (see here, elsewhere), as required by the rules implemented then.

We’ve seen proposals before that players hit on the pad shouldn’t be awarded a free base, but that only addresses the all-plunking side of this (that you get extra HBP and better plate coverage). If Whitte’s article spurs baseball to look into whether this kind of gear can confer an extra mechanical advantage, I’m all for it, if only because I’m as interested in anyone to see if there’s been some quality cheating going on under everyone’s noses for years.

(thanks to the several readers who bugged me to write this up)

So this week we saw Bonds hit 755 and Neifi Perez get suspended for violating the league’s amphetamine policy (which is a whole different punishment schedule than steroids). It’s an interesting pairing to me because one of the things I really found in the years I took to write the book is that as far as we know from test results and anecdotal evidence in the grand jury testimony is there’s a huge split in steroid use between the marginal player, who stands to gain a lot if he can stay in the majors over AAA, and the huge sluggers, the Bonds-McGwire-level guys.

What I didn’t know, and I’ve been following this with great interest, is if that’s true of amphetamine and stimulant use. Historically, every account of players using uppers has made it sound that everyone in a clubhouse would do it, from the utility guys to the bullpen pitchers.

So far, though, you could really make the same argument. Bonds supposedly failed one of his amphetamine tests, and now we’re seeing Perez, a no-hit glove guy, get punished under the same policy. I wonder if, despite what we know about how the drug used to be used, the same cost/benefit tradeoff is driving the same players willing to use steroids to use other drugs, and what that might mean in the long term for baseball’s drug policy.

For a long time, I held two seemingly unrelated positions: I didn’t particularly care about the issue of drugs in baseball, from the cocaine scandals to the increasing steroids hysteria. I loved baseball and felt like without being able to discern who was cheating from who wasn’t, there was little point in condemning anyone.

At the same time, I was a huge Barry Bonds fan. I didn’t care at all that he had a poor relationship with the press, or teammates. I loved his game. Bonds was, for much of his career, the most complete offensive player I’ve ever seen: he hit for average, he drew a hundred walks a year, he hit for doubles and home runs, and he had speed on the basepaths too. I loved watching him play.

During the time we now know from Game of Shadows that he started using deca/THG/and so on, I wrote articles at Baseball Prospectus arguing that “hey, we don’t know, and he was awesome way back when” (and so on) in part because I’d followed him for so long, and felt like having seen all that, if anyone could be so productive so late in their careers, it would be him.

I look back at that, and I don’t know what to think. I don’t know how anyone could have condemned him, or any other player, for making the same decision to turn to drugs in 1998 after the Sosa-McGwire craziness. It’s especially hard to fault him for using THG when it was not only not tested for but technically legal. And yet today I look at my Bonds bobblehead and I don’t think of how much joy I used to get watching his performances at the plate, during the run where he was the best hitter in baseball and as far as anyone knows, entirely clean.

I feel the same way I do now, deciding whether I want to tune into a game and watch him possibly tie Hank Aaron’s home run record: I’m devoid of any enthusiasm, unable to find any thrill in his performance or his achievement.

I feel empty.

I’ve been out for six weeks at a writer’s workshop, and I haven’t seen a whole game in that time (which was horrible for me). I came home today in time to catch the last three innings of the Tigers-Angels game, and saw… cheating! Awesome, awesome cheating!

In the 8th inning, with the game tied 3-3 and two on, Garret Anderson hit a long fly ball to the wall, and a fan reached out to snag it. They made a great catch, home run. Detroit manager Jim Leyland went out to scream at the umps over the call, they talked it over, and let the call stand.

I wrote a whole chunk of this in the book: when fans should reach out, and when they should let the ball drop, so this made me really happy: here, the ball drops and gets off the wall, it’s a likely double. A long one, which would score Vladimir Guerrero from second at least, and Gary Matthews Jr. might even score from first. But trying to keep the Angels from blowing the game wide open, 4-3 with men on is a lot better situation than being down 6-3

Now, the Angels kept scorching Tim Byrdak, and Detroit never scored again to lose 10-3. But it was great to come back from time off to immediately see a smart play like that.

I came across a beautiful pristine copy of this book, and thought I’d write it up. It came out

The Hidden Language of Baseball is a small history of signs. And that’s it. If you liked the sign-stealing chapter in my book, you should enjoy Dickson’s work. It traces the start of signs (Chapter 1 is “From Signal Flags and Torches on the Battlefield to the Early Game”) and the increasing complexity of both signs and sign-stealing through baseball’s history.

It’s great – like every chapter, I feel like I left so much on the table when I wrote the chapter on sign stealing, and reading Hidden Language is almost relaxing for me, because I think “ahhh, that’s covered.” There’s a great bit on how Connie Mack was suspected of stealing signs in the 1911 World Series by having his hunchbacked mascot and batboy Louis Van Zelst, who supposedly could see the catcher’s signs by being “being near the ground, on account of his short stature”.

The whole book’s like that, with a chapter on what to watch for during a game, and a sweet appendix with glossary. It’s small-format, pretty quick reading, and if you’re into signs, you’ll probably enjoy it a lot.

Amazon link:

Because of a prior outside commitment, my posting over the next month is going to be much less frequent than it was, unfortunately.

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.

Does this count? joser pointed me to what may, or may not, count as a hidden ball trick. In the June 8th Boston at Arizona game:

Arizona 3B Alberto Callaspo fell victim to a hidden-ball trick in the third. After beating a throw to second base, Callaspo stood to dust himself off, pulling his left hand off the bag. Lugo, standing behind him with the ball in his glove, made the tag. “Lugo just kind of slipped behind him,” Beckett said. “I was actually back there trying to get him to throw me the ball. I’m glad he didn’t throw me the ball.”

Mike Lowell, the best active player at the trick, said it shouldn’t count:

“That’s not a real hidden-ball trick,” Lowell said yesterday , “although I’m sure the stats say it is.”

And that’s an interesting distinction. If someone slides through second while the fielder keeps the tag on for the out, that wouldn’t be considered a hidden ball trick. The hidden ball trick’s usually defined as happening when the play is well over and requiring some amount of deception, but does time or manner matter? Lugo waited, took advantage of the runner not paying attention, and got the out. It may not have been quite as sweet as some of Lowell’s plays, but it works.

More Phil Regan-related goodness. In the 6/29/1968 Sporting News (p16), Braves manager Luman Harris vents about the strange enforcement of new anti-spitball rules that year.

Harris and the Braves claimed that Regan got a substance of some kind from his forehead and put it on the ball.
“He did it every pitch,” said Harris.
But I don’t blame Regan, I don’t blame (Leo) Durocher and I don’t blame the umpires. What he did is legal, the way the rule is today.
“Why, you can set a bucket of water next to the mound and stick your hand in it all day just as long as you don’t go to your mouth.”

Harris is obviously exaggerating there, but let it go, as Harris talks about the new rule that going to the mouth while on the mound is an automatic ball.

“They’re enforcing that, all right,” said Harris. “But you can put stuff in your hair, on your cap or uniform. I know what these guys are using – and where they get it. It comes in a tube. But what’s the use of saying anything?”

The interesting thing is that Harris is entirely right: pitchers like Gaylord Perry and Phil Regan, seeing the rules change to focus enforcement on the mouth, figured out how they could continue to throw their “hard slider” and get away with it.

I found writing the book that there were a lot of little hints like this that rewarded more research, or confirmed other suspicions. Sometimes, like here, I could track the rest of Regan’s hijinks until Harris’ remarks fit into a larger puzzle, and sometimes, like with Tommy John, I ended up with nothing substantial enough to put in the book.