Why Do We Care About the Spitball?

Much of (baseball) history comes down to who you believe. Let’s take Gaylord Perry, for example. Here’s an excerpt from his Society of American Baseball Research bio:

Following the season, the rules committee finally outlawed the practice of a pitcher putting his hand to his mouth anywhere on the pitcher’s mound, instructing the umpire to call a ball upon each infraction. According to Perry’s later confession, spitballers had to learn to use foreign substances like Vaseline or hair tonic, rather than saliva. In Perry’s words, “That rule virtually eliminated the pure spitball in baseball. I had the whole winter and spring to work out an adjustment. It wasn’t easy.” Prior to the rule change, Perry would touch his cap and mouth, and fake a wipe of his fingers. Now he had to get his moisture somewhere else on his person, and also learn a new series of elaborate decoy moves. He spent the winter practicing in front of the mirror. After a rocky spring training, he managed just fine.

Seems pretty bad. And at the end of his long, illustrious/infamous career, Perry would actually be ejected for having a ball covered in vasoline. But then, consider his Hall of Fame plaque. Its second sentence reads:

Playing mind games with hitters through array of rituals on mound was part of his arsenal, 20-game winner 5 times with lifetime ERA of 3.10.

His Hall of Fame bio also downplays Perry’s skirting of the rules, portraying him more as someone who “played to type” and even positing that his spitball might be “imagined.” Though they do recognize the 1982 ejection, they couch it as him having a 21-year run of not being ejected. Perhaps it was real, perhaps it wasn’t. I was only three years old when he was ejected, so I can’t say that I lived through that era. But generally speaking, where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and if Perry were totally innocent, then he picked an odd title for his autobiography. But so what if he did? Would his career ERA have jumped to 3.50? Would he have won only 295 games instead of 314? He’d still be a Hall of Famer.

Why are we talking about this? Well, because last night Will Smith became one of the periodic few pitchers tossed out for having a foreign substance on his arm — by Smith’s account, it was a combination of rosin and sunscreen. If you take Smith at his word, the substances are hilarious. Rosin is provided for pitchers on the pitching mound, and Major League Baseball obviously wants its pitchers to use sunscreen. Or, at least it has since Derek Lowe got skin cancer. It’s not like he was sticking jalapeno’s in his nose.

Where it turns unfunny is when you consider the game situation. Manager Fredi Gonzalez got him tossed in the midst of a close game with runners on base, and after Smith was ejected, the far inferior Neal Cotts came into the game and promptly allowed a run to score. It was academic shortly thereafter, as Michael Blazek then entered and opened the floodgates, but the game was very much in the balance when Gonzalez decided to have Smith ejected. Yes, Smith had hit the previous batter, but as Freddie Freeman noted after the game, using foreign substances makes a pitcher less wild, so Gonzalez using that as an explanation rings hollow. Here’s what Freeman said:

“Every pitcher does it,” Freeman said. “As a hitter, you want them to do it so they’ll have a better grip so we won’t get hit in the head.”

In that same piece, Gonzalez intimated that Smith forced his hand by making it “as plain as could be.” In other words, Gonzalez was offended by Smith’s brazenness, more than the cheating itself. Whenever I see stuff like this happen, I always recall this brief passage from the book Band of Brothers:

Chickenshit is so called – instead of horse- or bull- or elephant shit – because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously.

To me, this is the perfect way to sum up the actions of Gonzalez last night, or the actions of John Farrell against Michael Pineda, or the actions of Davey Johnson against Joel Peralta. Those may have been even worse, actually. The Red Sox were winning when Farrell had Pineda checked, and Peralta had pitched for the Nationals two seasons earlier and someone no doubt tipped off Johnson to the practice.

It’s hard to walk away from any of these situations and feel good about yourself, even if your team benefits from it. There are a lot of things at play here. One, if everyone actually does do it, as Freeman and many others have posited, then any manager that has a pitcher checked is a hypocrite. Second, there’s the question of whether it actually helps. The answer is probably not. If you want to take the position that Pineda stopped cheating after he was nailed, then he’s been even better — his strikeout rate is up six percent this year.

Finally, and most importantly, it just reinforces that the game of baseball is one where you can’t have fun, and that everything is super serious. As kids run away from baseball, this sort of message — that the game is populated by rule-following robots who hate bat flips and have 10-foot poles stuck up their hind quarters — is pretty much the opposite of what the game needs.

Will Smith put some stuff on the ball last night. Gaylord Perry put some stuff on the ball for 22 years. One is currently being reviled, one is among the game’s most celebrated pitchers. Doesn’t make much sense to me, and as such I’m not sure why I’m supposed to care about the spitball. In the meantime, I’d like to go back and see that inning played over again. Will Smith’s slider has been a lot better than Neal Cotts’ since the start of last season, and Jace Peterson has a hard time hitting sliders. Perhaps if that at-bat turns out differently, the Braves don’t laugh their way to a win.