Remembering Gaylord Perry, Rule-Bending Rogue (1938-2022)

Gaylord Perry presented some kind of mathematical paradox to the mind of this young fan. If baseball had outlawed the spitball some 60 years earlier, how could this admittedly gray-haired guy in his early 40s have been grandfathered in? Yet there was Perry, throwing — or at least appearing to throw — wet or otherwise loaded baseballs with impunity, preceding each pitch with a detailed routine in which he’d rub his brow, both sides of the underbill of his cap, then the brim, then the side, then the brim again before delivering. Sometimes it was a decoy for the fact that he was hiding the foreign substance on his wrist, his neck, or somewhere on his uniform.

Master of the “spitball”. Made players angry, including Reggie Jackson was fuming. #RIPGaylordPerry pic.twitter.com/uH9PQAaqxx

— BaseballHistoryNut (@nut_history) December 1, 2022

The math didn’t work, but the wet ones, or at least the belief that he was throwing them, did. In my early years of watching baseball, the rubber-armed, rule-bending rogue brought vivid color (not just the Padres’ infamous brown-and-yellow) to the more black-and-white corners of the game’s history, planting the evocative names of bygone spitballers such as Burleigh Grimes and Urban Shocker in my mind while earning his own spot in the annals. In 1978, the year I began closely following the game, Perry became the first pitcher to win a Cy Young Award in both leagues and just the third pitcher to reach 3,000 strikeouts, after Walter Johnson and Bob Gibson. On May 6, 1982, while a member of the Seattle Mariners, he became the 15th pitcher to reach 300 wins, the first in 19 years and the first of six from his cohort to reach that milestone; that season also brought the only time he was ejected for throwing an illegal pitch. On August 13, 1983, about six weeks from the end of his 22-year major league career, he became the third pitcher of that group, after Tom Seaver and Steve Carlton, to surpass Johnson’s previously unassailable record of 3,508 strikeouts.

“Put it this way, baseball’s a lot drier now,” he said after his final outing when asked to confirm if he was throwing spitballs. Often, he would refer to his illegal pitches as forkballs, dry sinkers, or “supersliders.”

The cagey Perry was a polarizing figure; opponents, teammates, and writers sometimes characterized him as a cheater, not without some measure of admiration. From the back cover of his 1974 autobiography, Me and the Spitter (with Bob Sudyk):

Stories of Perry’s accomplishments and his brazen flouting of the rules added color to the game long after his retirement, and they will continue to do so now that he’s gone. On December 1, Perry died at his home in Gaffney, South Carolina, at the age of 84. He had contracted COVID-19 last year and never fully recovered, according to his daughter, Allison Perry.

An imposing right-hander who stood 6-foot-4 and weighed 205 pounds (or more, later), Perry pitched for eight different teams (not counting his second stint with the Rangers) and earned All-Star honors five times while sticking around the majors long enough to rank in the top 20 in several pitching categories — not all of them flattering ones — with totals hard to fathom in this age of limited workloads. He’s fifth in hits allowed (4,938), sixth in innings (5,350) and losses (256), seventh in batters faced (21,953), eighth in strikeouts (3,534), ninth in starts (690), 13th in bWAR (93.0), 16th in shutouts (53), 17th in wins (314), and 18th in S-JAWS (65.7). (Baseball Reference is alas silent on the number of times an umpire searched him.) He and his older brother Jim Perry, who pitched in the majors from 1959-75 and was his teammate in Cleveland in ’74-75, are the only brothers to win Cy Youngs; Jim won his in 1970 with the Twins, and Gaylord (who was runner up to Gibson in the NL that year) won his first in ’72 with Cleveland. The Perrys — who for six days in September 1975 had identical career won-loss records of 215-174 — combined for 529 wins, which stood as a record until 1987, when Phil Niekro and his brother Joe Niekro surpassed them.

Perry was born on September 15, 1938 in Williamston, North Carolina to tenant farmers Evan and Ruby Perry. Evan himself pitched semiprofessionally, once winning both ends of a doubleheader, and he reportedly turned down a minor league contract because his family needed him to work the farm. He became a father to Jim at age 17, and was just 19 when Gaylord was born. The young Perry boys helped their parents by working on their 25-acre farm, where they grew tobacco, corn, and peanuts. Their father nurtured their baseball abilities, and later played with them on the same semipro team. “I remember our neighbors saying, ‘All those Perry boys want to do is play baseball, and their dad is even worse,” Perry recalled during his Hall of Fame induction speech in 1991.

Athleticism was Perry’s ticket off the farm. “The boy always had to work hard at things. He didn’t take to books,” an unnamed friend and former major league scout told Sports Illustrated’s Pat Jordan in 1974. “If he hadn’t been such a natural athlete, he might never have gone beyond the ninth grade. He proved to me that you don’t have to be brilliant to be a great pitcher… Gaylord just has a natural talent for pitching a baseball, and he can throw the ball wherever the catcher tells him to.”

At Williamston High School, Perry encountered indoor plumbing for the first time, and starred in three sports. He earned All-State honors as an offensive and defensive end before giving up the game as a senior due to injury concerns. He was even better on the basketball court, leading his team to a 94-8 record in his four years. On the diamond, he and his brother pitched and played third base; when Gaylord was a freshman, the pair threw back-to-back shutouts to sweep the best-of-three finals in the state tournament.

Perry drew numerous scholarship offers in basketball, but desired to follow in brother Jim’s footsteps. Though he hoped to sign with Cleveland, as Jim did, in the end it was the Giants who signed him for a $73,500 bonus in 1958. Already 19 years old, he began his pro career at C-Level St. Cloud of the Northern League, where he went 9-5 with a 2.39 ERA and 7.8 strikeouts per nine. He spent most of the next two seasons at Double-A stops, then all of 1961 at Triple-A Tacoma. He made the big club as the 10th pitcher in 1962, but was tagged for four runs in 2.2 innings by the Reds in his April 14 debut. His five-inning, two-run performance against the Pirates on April 25 earned him his first major league win, and five days later he threw a four-hit, one-run complete game against Pittsburgh as well, but he soon began to struggle, lost his spot in the rotation, and pitched sparingly before being sent back to Tacoma in mid-June.

After pitching well enough to lead the circuit with a 2.48 ERA and earn the endorsement of Hall of Famer Carl Hubbell, then the team’s farm director, Perry returned in mid-September, finishing the year 3-1 with a 5.22 ERA in 43 innings. In his final appearance of the season, the second game of the best-of-three tiebreaker series against the Dodgers, he drew the ire of manager Alvin Dark by not attempting to throw out Maury Wills at third when fielding a bunt and instead making the less risky play at first base. Wills soon scored the winning run, though the Giants took the third game and the pennant before losing to the Yankees in the World Series. Perry was ineligible to pitch, and alas never appeared in a Fall Classic.

Perry spent most of 1963 in the Giants bullpen, going 1-6 with a 4.03 ERA in 76 innings over four starts and 27 relief appearances. Even after a strong showing in the Dominican Winter League alongside teammates Juan Marichal and the Alou brothers, and a good spring in which he added a slider to his arsenal, Perry was barely hanging onto his spot in the majors when Dark summoned him into the 13th inning of the nightcap of a May 31 doubleheader against the Mets in Shea Stadium.

“On May 31, 1964, I became an outlaw in the strictest sense of the word — a man who lives outside the law, in this case, the law of baseball,” wrote Perry in the opening chapter of Me and the Spitter. More:

On May 31, 1964, I started down — or up, depending upon your point of view, I suppose — a path that would lead me through the mud ball, the emery ball, the K-Y ball, the Vaseline ball and the sweat ball, just to name a few. During the next eight years or so, I reckon I tried everything on the ol’ apple but salt and pepper and chocolate sauce toppin’.

In that appearance, the 25-year-old Perry broke out a spitball that he had been working on in the spring under the tutelage of teammate Bob Shaw, one of the best practitioners of the dark arts at the time. He’d experimented with the pitch in games before, but had yet to commit to it. At the urging of catcher Tom Haller, he broke it out, wiping his mouth with his index and middle fingers (allowed at the time) and then keeping them wet while handling the dry rosin bag. His first one “dipped in the dirt like a shot quail,” and Haller blocked it. Perry, who had thrown two innings in relief the day before, went on to throw 10 shutout innings that evening, the first of 37 times he’d throw at least 10 innings in a game; that’s the most in the post-1960 expansion era, as many as the second- and third-ranked hurlers, Jim Palmer and Seaver, combined. Aided by a slippery elm lozenge that helped him summon the saliva when necessary, he struck out nine while allowing seven hits and earning the win in the 23-inning marathon.

Convinced by Shaw that “hitters are taking the bread out of your mouth,” Perry devoted himself to the spitter. “It was either that or wearing out the seat of my britches on the bullpen bench till it was time to hang up my spikes and head home to the tobacco fields of North Carolina. And I wasn’t ready to go home,” he wrote.

On June 30, in his first start of the season, he shut out the same Mets on three hits, though it wasn’t until August that he joined the rotation full-time. He finished the year 12-11 with a 2.75 ERA (129 ERA+) in 206.1 innings over 19 starts and 25 relief appearances.

Perry took a step backwards in 1965, securing and then losing his spot in the rotation while going 8-12 with a 4.19 ERA (86 ERA+) in 195.2 innings. He lashed out at teammates for defensive lapses — a common occurrence during his career — and argued with umpires before manager Herman Franks made him apologize. The following spring, after adding a hard overhand slider to his three-quarters one as well as his fastball, curve, changeup and spitter, the 27-year-old Perry broke out, making his first All-Star team while going 21-8 with a 2.99 ERA (124 ERA+) and 201 strikeouts in 255.2 innings.

That was the beginning of a six-year run with the Giants (1966-71) during which he went 110-79 with a 2.75 ERA (128 ERA+) while averaging 296 innings, 292 strikeouts, and 5.4 WAR, placing among the top 10 in that category in every year but the last one. His best year in that run was 1970, when he led the NL with 23 wins (against 13 losses), 328.2 innings, and five shutouts while posting a 3.20 ERA (125 ERA+). His 7.6 WAR that year was second only to Gibson, who took 23 out of 24 Cy Young votes; Perry did make the All-Star team for the second time.

Speaking of Gibson, Perry threw his lone no-hitter against the Cardinals and opposite the Hall of Fame righty on September 17, 1968. In a 1-0 squeaker where Ron Hunt’s solo homer (one of just four hits the Giants collected) accounted for the only run, Perry struck out nine while walking just two, delivering the eighth of nine defeats to the pitcher who would set the modern record with a 1.12 ERA. The Cardinals’ Ray Washburn returned the favor the next day, no-hitting the Giants.

Perry went 16-15 himself that year with a 2.45 ERA (122 ERA+), one of several seasons with middling won-loss records due to a lack of run support. For 1968, the AL and NL adopted the rule preventing pitchers from going to their mouths on the mound, and empowered umpires to eject pitchers for illegal pitches. Forced to get more creative, Perry — who had often used Vaseline, spread on his forehead, to get the results he wanted but had also tried baby oil, soap, fishing line oil, hair tonic, mustache wax, and more — switched to quick-drying, water-soluble K-Y lubricant. He also developed a more elaborate pre-pitch routine that he used before every pitch, whether or not he was loading up: “hand to the hat, hair, ear, neck, wrist, to some part of my uniform.”

On July 20, 1969, Perry hit his first and only major league home run, shortly after Apollo 11 touched down on the moon (but not, as is sometimes said, after Neil Armstrong took one giant leap for mankind). Sources differ as to the date (1962, ’63 or ’64) and the site (spring training, Candlestick Park, or Pittsburgh), but a writer named Harry Jupiter asked Dark about Perry showing some power in batting practice, and the manager had responded, “There’ll be a man on the moon before he hits a home run.” As MLB official historian John Thorn would say, “The story is too good to check,” but some have nonetheless. At one point in 2002 Snopes did a partial debunking, mainly on the inconsistencies of the date of Dark’s statement in various retellings (have they ever heard a baseball story?), but more recently, supporting evidence came to light, with Sports Illustrated’s S.L. Price penning the closest thing there is to the definitive account in conjunction with the two events’ 50th anniversary in 2019.

By the point of his big 1970 season, Perry had developed a forkball and split-fingered fastball, both of which mimicked the diving action of his spitter to the point that umpires struggled to distinguish the pitches. Where he had once thrown the spitter as much as 80% of the time according to Sudyk, he became far more selective — not that he ceased planting the notion in the batter’s head that one was coming.

In 1971, Perry helped the Giants win their first NL West title. His overall numbers weren’t spectacular (16-12, 2.76 ERA, with a career-low 5.1 K/9), in part because he didn’t like the team’s switch to a five-man rotation. While he posted an 0.93 ERA in 58.1 innings over his final seven starts, the Giants somehow lost four of those games as part of a slide that winnowed their lead from 8.5 games to one; they did win his final two starts, complete games in which he allowed one run apiece, and staved off a challenge from the Dodgers. Prior to his NLCS-opening start against the Pirates, a television reporter asked five-year-old daughter Allison if her father threw a greaseball. “It’s a hard slider,” she responded. Perry threw a complete-game win, but Pittsburgh took the next two games and then piled seven runs in 5.2 innings in Game 4 to secure the pennant in what was then a best-of-five series. Alas, it was the only postseason series of his career.

At the Winter Meetings that December, the Giants traded the 33-year-old Perry and infield prospect Frank Duffy to Cleveland for 29-year-old lefty fireballer Sam McDowell, who had made six of the previous seven AL All-Star teams while leading the league in strikeouts five times. The conventional wisdom regarding the trade tilted towards the Giants, but McDowell was already on the downslope of his career due to alcohol problems. Motivated by the trade even though his new team had lost 102 games in 1971, Perry completed 29 out of 40 starts and overcame dreadful run support (2.9 runs per game) going 24-16 in 342.2 innings with a 1.92 ERA; with a save in his lone relief appearance, he had a decision in every game. Playing in the AL for the first time, he found a whole new set of opponents to drive up the wall with his antics. From Mark Armour’s fine SABR bio of Perry:

If anything, the circus atmosphere surrounding his starts rose to a new level. In an early season game against the Athletics, Mike Epstein waved his bat at Perry and threatened to head for the mound. Perry was strip searched after a protest by A’s manager Dick Williams, and ordered to change shirts. Billy Martin brought a bloodhound to a game to sniff baseballs. In late August, Indians general manager Gabe Paul protested the treatment of Perry to league president Joe Cronin, who asked the umps to back off.

Perry’s win and complete game totals led the league, as did his 10.8 WAR; he made his third All-Star team and edged knuckleballer Wilbur Wood (24-17, 2.51 ERA, 376.2 innings 10.7 WAR) for the Cy Young Award. The team improved to 72-84 in the strike-shortened season. After a down 1973 season, he had a huge ’74, preceded by the publication of Me and the Spitter, in which Perry offered insight into his craft, but also claimed to have reformed, though his tongue seemed firmly in cheek:

“I’m a pure, law-abiding citizen. I’ve come to realize that spitting is a nasty habit, and unsanitary to boot. Unfortunately, a cloud of suspicion still hangs over my head, but that’s not my fault. I can’t help it if some people have suspicious natures, and most of them happen to be opposing managers.”

The confession didn’t stop Perry from offering to endorse Vaseline. “We soothe babies’ asses, not baseballs,” read the one-line rejection postcard.

For 1974, MLB’s rules committee gave umpires the authority to rule a pitch illegal if it behaved like a spitball, with the first offense an automatic ball, the second an ejection. Perry was called for a ball on Opening Day, and in early May the team set up a bullpen demonstration of his forkball for umpires so they could observe the pitch’s sinking action mimicking the spitter even while he was under close scrutiny and not loading up.

During spring training, Jim Perry was acquired from the Tigers in a three-way deal that also involved the Yankees. In his age-38 season, alongside his younger brother he went 17-12 with a 2.96 ERA. As for Gaylord, on April 17, he threw 15 innings in a 16-inning loss to the Brewers; no one else has gone that far since 1972. Immediately after that game, he embarked upon a stretch of 15 complete games in 16 starts, going 14-1 with a 1.19 ERA and earning his lone All-Star start. He finished 21-13 with a 2.51 ERA and an AL-high 9.5 WAR.

For as good as the Perrys pitched, the team remained stuck in 70-something win territory. Late in the year, they traded for Frank Robinson, who just after the end of the season would be named the game’s first Black manager. He and Perry clashed even before the promotion, with the pitcher publicly suggesting he would demand one dollar more than Robinson’s salary (somewhere around $173,500, though sources vary), which almost led to a clubhouse fight; he didn’t get the money, signing a two-year deal for $150,000 or $160,000 per year, depending upon the source.

Perry argued with the manager over his conditioning routine, and began the season 6-9 with a 3.43 ERA. On May 20, his brother was traded to Oakland, and on June 13, he himself was traded to the Martin-managed Rangers in exchange for three pitchers (Jim Bibby, Jackie Brown, and prospect Rick Waits) plus $100,000. Said his new manager, “I realize how wrong I was. I’d like to get on the record immediately as saying Gaylord does nothing illegal.” Robinson, whose team faced Perry two days after the deal, flip-flopped in the other direction, saying that Perry threw the greaseball on occasion, but not catching him doing so in Cleveland’s win.

Perry’s performance improved, though Martin was soon fired, and by the end of the season had taken the helm of the Yankees. Perry had two more solid seasons in Texas, most notably helping the Rangers — who also had future Hall of Famer Bert Blyleven as well as Dock Ellis and Doyle Alexander in their rotation — to a 94-68 second-place finish amid the chaos of three managerial changes in 1977. The team had resisted the temptation to make the 38-year-old hurler available for the November 1976 expansion draft that stocked the Blue Jays and Mariners, with owner Brad Corbett saying, “Gaylord’s value to this team is much more than just as a pitcher.”

By 1978, with Perry making $200,000 per year, Corbett thought differently, particularly after the Rangers added Fergie Jenkins after swapping Blyleven for Jon Matlack as part of a four-team blockbuster. With the threat of a potential trip to the bullpen looming — absurd given that he had thrown 238 innings with a 122 ERA+ and 3.0 WAR in 1977 — Perry and $125,000 were sent to the Padres for Dave Tomlin. Perry responded with a 21-6 season and a 2.73 ERA (122 ERA+), allowing just nine homers in 260.2 innings, including one in 139 innings at home. On October 1, he struck out the Dodgers’ Joe Simpson for his 3,000th career strikeout. While his 4.3 WAR was nowhere near the best (Phil Niekro had 10.0 WAR while going 19-18), his gaudy won-loss record netted him his second Cy Young, making him the first to win in both leagues, and the third to win at least 20 games in a season with three different teams (joining Carl Mays and Pete Alexander).

A big dip in run support dropped Perry to 12-11 in 1979, though he made his final All-Star appearance. He was unhappy, locking horns with manager Roger Craig, criticizing teammates for their defensive mistakes, and eventually bolting the going-nowhere club in early September. Desiring to be closer to his North Carolina home, and with Corbett having openly lamented the mistake he made in trading Perry, he was dealt back to the Rangers. Again getting into hot water for disparaging his teammates, he only made it until August before being dealt to the Yankees, who won the AL East, in exchange for two players. After the season, Perry became a free agent for the first time, and he inked a $300,000 deal with the Braves. He went 8-9 with a 3.94 ERA (89 ERA+), leaving him three wins short of 300; if not for the seven-week player strike, he’d probably have reached the milestone that season.

The Braves released Perry at the end of the season, and only after making a call to Seattle general manager Dan O’Brien, who had shared GM duties in Texas during Perry’s tenure there, did he land a contract for 1982. Yes, at 43, he became an ancient Mariner, with an incentive-based deal that went month to month. He pitched credibly (10-12, 4.40 ERA, 97 ERA+ in 216.2 innings) for the 76-win team. Facing the Yankees on May 6, he threw his first nine-inning complete game of the season and earned his 300th win.

It had been nearly 19 years since Wynn won number 300, but over the next eight years, five other pitchers (Carlton, Seaver, Niekro, Don Sutton, and Nolan Ryan) would pass the mark. On August 23, an umpire finally rang him up, as Dave Phillips warned and then ejected Perry for throwing two illegal pitches, the first after finding a foreign substance on the ball. “I don’t know. I’m not a chemist. It’s something slippery,” said Phillips when asked to identify the substance. Perry called him a liar, and said that the ejection was payback for complaining about the strike zone earlier; later he would threaten legal action. With the ejection came a $250 fine and a 10-day suspension, which was delayed until after he lost an appeal. The Washington Post protested the suspension on his behalf, on the grounds that it was a “system that allows an umpire to be judge, jury and executioner.” Grimes, baseball’s last legal spitballer, weighed in to the Associated Press:

Perry returned to the Mariners in 1983 but his performance declined, and in late June he drew his release. He soon caught on with the Royals, and most notably absconded with George Brett’s bat from an umpire during the July 24 Pine Tar incident, for which he was ejected. On August 13, he notched his 3,509th strikeout, surpassing Johnson by punching out Boston’s Tony Armas. On September 3, 12 days before his 45th birthday, he blanked the Rangers for his 53rd and final shutout and, as it would turn out, the last of his 314 wins.

Perry experienced misfortune after retiring to his North Carolina farm. Falling crop prices forced him to declare bankruptcy in 1986. A year later, his wife Blanche Manning was killed in a car accident, and a year after that, his father Evan died in a boating accident. In retirement, Perry worked for a Mexican food chain owned by Corbett, coached baseball at Limestone College (where he met his second wife, Carol Caggiano), and earned a considerable income touring the country, making appearances via talk shows, card shows, and old-timers games, and so on.

Perry became eligible for election to the Hall of Fame on the 1989 ballot. Though he was just the second pitcher to reach the ballot after compiling 300 wins and 3,000 strikeouts, he received just 68% of the vote, as some writers left him off their ballots on moral grounds. He was finally elected two years later, and was inducted alongside Jenkins and Rod Carew.

I met Perry in Scottsdale, Arizona in 2014, when he was signing autographs during a Giants spring training game. I didn’t need his signature, but I did get to tell him how much I enjoyed watching him and his pre-pitch antics. When I mentioned it, he pantomimed going to his brow, his brim, his hair, his ear, and his brim. It was as perfect a few seconds as I’ve ever had in talking to a player.