Baseball Miscellany by Matthew Silverman

Author:Matthew Silverman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2011-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

Go down the road, across the pond, around the world, or back in time . . . the answer is the same: Baseball had many fathers. Those who played the game loved it enough to keep developing baseball and passing it along. The game proved as adaptable as the people who played it.

WHY IS THE SPITBALL ILLEGAL?

The history of the spitball tells more about baseball’s attitude toward cheating than it does about a pitch that’s difficult to hit. The spitball began in baseball as a legal pitch. It was outlawed in 1920, but its top practitioners were allowed to continue using it. And in recent decades the pitch has been accepted with a wink even as hitters using performance-enhancing substances have been subjected to far more scrutiny by the game and society.

A spitball is thrown by putting a foreign substance on the ball, whether it is spit, sweat, emery board, Vaseline, or a similar substance. (We’ll include the modern version of the scuffball and pine tar pitch in this category since that defaces the ball as well.) Generally thrown with a fastball motion, the altered spot on one side of the ball creates unpredictable movement, often at the last instant. It generally moves like a knuckleball, only it’s thrown harder—and illegally.

Though legendary sportswriter Hugh Fullerton claimed that pitcher Tom Bond threw the first spitball using glycerin in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1876, and others may have dabbled with the “aqueous pitch,” the pitch did not come into prominence for another quarter century. Elmer Stricklett was hailed as the inventor of the twentieth century spitter, but a 1913 article in Baseball Magazine by former minor leaguer P. A. Meaney credited Frank Corridon with developing the spitball. Meaney explained that while warming up before a minor league game in Providence in 1902, the 21-year-old Corridon “absentmindedly wet his fingers and applied them to the ball, which he cut loose with all the speed he had. The result astonished him, the ball taking the sharpest kind of break from its original course.” Corridon, thrilled by this new pitch, called over outfielder George Hildebrand and asked him to grab a bat—both were astonished at the ball’s movement. Hildebrand moved on to Sacramento, where he showed Stricklett the pitch and the cult of the spitballer grew exponentially.

Jack Chesbro, whose team was victimized by Stricklett’s spitter in California in the fall of 1902, soon mastered both the pitch and the American League. He won an astonishing 41 games in 1904 thanks to his miracle pitch. Yet it was a spitball that flew over the head of catcher Jack “Red” Kleinow and cost his New York Highlanders the pennant against Boston on the last day of the 1904 season. Big Ed Walsh, the only other pitcher since 1891 to win 40 games in a season, relied on the spitter to turn the trick for the 1908 White Sox. When Meaney wrote the spitball article in 1913, he claimed that “many of the foremost baseball men of the day regard Walsh as the premier pitcher of all time.

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