Baseball’s Oldest Profession, Revisited

Spare me the moral posturing, please. Knock it off with the yammering about these stinking cheaters, and not just because steroids basically cannot enhance a baseball player's field or plate performance.

(I say again: name one steroid proven to accentuate bat speed, hand-eye coordination, or vision or any skill faculty past mere muscle mass. Or, ask yourself why it was that Barry Bonds sharpened his own hand-eye coordination and vision -- he has had the reputation for the best batting eye in baseball tracing back to long before he was involved with the Fabulous BALCO Boys -- whereas Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield, never mind Jose Canseco and the as yet unidentified small host of others, did not. Or did I miss where Sheffield went from great to off the charts?)

Because actual cheaters should get away with it? No, because a) the Spruce Juicers are probably cheating their health more than the game, and b) anyone who thinks cheating in baseball began in earnest with the Fabulous BALCO Boys is in dire need of a history lesson. Class is now in session.

1) So hated was Ty Cobb that, on the 1910 season's final day, when he was neck-and-neck with Napoleon Lajoie for the American League batting crown, the St. Louis Browns' third baseman played his position as far back as feasible to help Lajoie back into the batting crown by letting him drop bunts guaranteed to be beaten out for hits. Fat lot of good that did. The actual race ended in a dead heat, but American League president Ban Johnson, "seeking an essential truth in lieu of true facts," as Bill James phrased it, "made up a couple of extra hits for Cobb and declared him the champion, anyway."

2) The 1919 World Series. Yes, children, it is possible to cheat to lose, particularly when there's a payoff in the thousands awaiting you at the end.

3) Groundskeepers in old Shibe Park, aware enough that the Philadelphia Whiz Kids (the pennant-winning 1950 Phillies, young and fresh and built for speed) included a particularly expert baseline bunter, future Hall of Famer Richie Ashburn, sculpted the third base line in such a fashion as to ensure that Asburn's expertise at dropping dying bunts up that line didn't bump into foul territory.

4) Entire books have been written around the idea that the 1951 New York Giants -- years before anyone ever heard of the "eye in the sky" grandstand scout -- had an assistant in the stands stealing signs, as they made their magnificent comeback to force a playoff for the pennant with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

5) With a newspaper egging them on, Ohio fans actively and unapologetically stuffed the All-Star Game's ballot box, including multiple voting, to make the 1957 game into the Cincinnati Reds versus the American League. Commissioner Ford Frick intervened and substituted three players (Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, and Stan Musial) for three Reds (George Crowe, Wally Post, and Gus Bell). And within a year, the fans would lose the All-Star Game vote until the 1970s.

6) Preacher Roe, Brooklyn Dodgers left-handed pitcher and as elegant a competitor as ever pitched in Flatbush, admitted after his retirement, in an article for Sports Illustrated, "The Outlaw Pitch Was My Money Pitch." Once, he faced Eddie (Slow, Slower, Slowest) Lopat in a World Series game. "Them two fellas certainly make baseball look like a simple game, don't they? Makes you wonder," Yankee manager Casey Stengel marveled. "You pay all that big money to great big fellas with a lot of muscles and straight stomachs who go up there an' start swinging, and they give 'em a little o' this and a little o' that and swindle 'em."

7) The mid-to-late-1960s Chicago White Sox, at the reputed insistence of manager Eddie Stanky (he who once kicked a ball out of Phil Rizzuto's glove when Rizzuto otherwise had him cold on a play at second base), liked to store the game baseballs in a cool, damp place. "You had to wipe the mildew off before the game ... and put them into new boxes," former White Sox backup catcher Jerry McNertney told his Seattle Pilots teammate, Jim Bouton. "The idea, of course," Bouton wrote in Ball Four, "is that cold, damp baseballs don't travel as far as warm, dry baseballs, and the White Sox were not exactly sluggers."

8) Bouton also revealed that there were indeed umpires in his day who would call the balls and strikes based upon personal grudges, singling out Ed Runge as regards a Yankee rookie named Steve Whitaker. Whitaker apparently beefed a little too snippily over a Runge call behind the plate. The word getting back to the Yankee dugout, said Bouton, was that the opposing pitchers figured out the strikes didn't have to be "too good" if Whitaker was at the plate. Then Mickey Mantle prevailed upon Whitaker to kiss and make up with the veteran ump. He did, and saw a lot less dubious strikes for his trouble.

9) Mantle's fondest desire at the end of the line, in 1968, was to finish ahead of Jimmie Foxx on the all-time home run list. Denny McLain, who pretty much had his 31st win in his hip pocket, decided to make Mantle's wish come true. "He's told me to tell you what's coming," Detroit catcher Bill Freehan told the Commerce Comet as he approached the plate. "He wants you to get it." Mantle simply waggled his bat at the spot where he most liked to connect, McLain obliged, and Mantle drove one into the Tiger Stadium upper deck. (The on-deck hitter, Joe Pepitone, not hearing the original exchange, thought McLain was in such a good mood that he might get a groove pitch to hit. Pepitone waggled his bat to the spot where he liked to connect ... and McLain smashed three straight unhittable fastballs past him.)

10) Whitey Ford not only knew a few tricks of his trade in his final few seasons and used them (including catcher Elston Howard scraping balls on his shin guard buckles before returning them to the mound), but it became such second nature to him that he finally did it in an Old Timers' Game. "I got tired of getting my jock knocked off," Ford admitted later.

11) Norm Cash, whose lifetime batting average wasn't even close to the .361 by which he won the 1961 American League batting championship, admitted after the season that he had used a loaded bat. He even cooperated with a magazine article in demonstrating just how he loaded the bat. Revealed subsequently: he used the same bat in 1962. And his batting average collapsed by (you can look it up) 118 points.

12) Bobby Richardson, a neat-fielding, clean-living Yankee second baseman (he was so unapologetic a Christian that he was nicknamed, not necessarily derisively, "the Right Reverend"), needed one hit to finish 1959 with an even-.300 batting average. "We don't have a single .300 hitter on this team," manager Stengel said, "so if you get a hit your first time up, I'm taking you out."

Stengel was not the only one pulling for Richardson. The Baltimore Orioles, facing the Yankees on that final day, were only too willing to let the Right Reverend get it. Starting pitcher Billy O'Dell also happened to be a fellow South Carolinian and an offseason hunting buddy of Richardson's, according to Bill Madden's Pride of October: What It Was To Be Young And A Yankee: "Don't worry, I'll be throwing one right in there for you." Moments later, up came Brooks Robinson: "I'll be playing real deep at third if you want to bunt." Catcher Joe Ginsberg: "I'll tell you what pitch is coming." Even first base umpire Ed Hurley was in on the action: "If you hit it on the ground, just make it close at first."

Richardson, to Madden: "I got my pitch and hit a line drive to right field that Albie Pearson made a diving catch on. Pearson was one of my closest friends in the game -- we'd spoken together at church! He must have been the only person in the ballpark who didn't know I was supposed to get my hit!"

13) Two words: Gaylord Perry. "Of course, everybody thinks Gaylord Perry means spitball," wrote former major league pitcher Milt Wilcox, briefly a Perry teammate in Cleveland, for Ron Luciano's The Fall of the Roman Umpire. "And everybody is right. I remember after he had pitched one day, I looked at catcher Ray Fosse's glove. There was a big old ring of Vaseline around the rim of the pocket. Either Gaylord's pitches splashed a lot, or Fosse was loading it up for him."

14) Four words: Tommy John, Don Sutton. Once, when John was a Yankee and Sutton an Angel, they went against each other in a game in Anaheim. George Steinbrenner was watching and figured Sutton out quickly enough. He phoned the Yankee dugout to manager Lou Piniella, demanding Piniella get Sutton thrown out. The account in Bill Madden and Moss Klein's Damned Yankees is priceless.

"George, do you know what the score is?" Piniella replied. (The Yankees were ahead, 1-0.) "If I get the umpires to check Sutton, don't you know that the Angels are going to check TJ? They'll both get kicked out. Whatever they're doing, TJ is doing it better than Sutton. So let's leave it alone for now." The Yankees went on to win, 3-2. "Tommy John and Don Sutton," Madden and Klein quoted an unnamed scout. "If anyone can find one smooth ball from that game, he ought to send it to Cooperstown."

15) Cork's actual effectiveness is very much open to debate, but that stops no one from believing it does, as you might have fathomed in 2003 when Sammy Sosa was caught with a plug. When Hillerich and Bradsby sent a touring exhibit of historic bats around major league parks, in 1983, a group of Seattle Mariners were admiring one of Babe Ruth's bats until Dave Henderson, according to Dan Gutman (It Ain't Cheating If You Don't Get Caught), spotted something amiss: the round end of the bat did not match the barrel's wood. The end also had a crack the rest of the bat didn't. "That's a plug!" Henderson hollered. "This bat is corked."

As a matter of fact, the Sultan was a real corker: he was in fact the half-inspiration for then-American League president Ban Johnson imposing a policy outlawing "trick bats" in 1923 ... after Ruth was found using a bat made of four pieces of wood glued together.

"As I see it, wrote Bill James, in The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, "nothing could be more typical of Ruth than to use a corked bat if he could get by with it. Ruth tested the limits of the rules constantly; this was what made him who he was. He refused to be ordinary; he refused to accept that the rules applied to him, until it was clear that they did. Constantly testing the limits of the rules, as I see him, was Babe Ruth's defining characteristic."

And thus be it ever that boys will be boys. Even in the Great and Glorious Era of the Golden Age of the Grand Old Game.