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Or should I try to start a discussion about cheating? Though it has quieted down a bit since last year’s revelation of The Mitchell Report and Barry Bonds’ breaking of the all-time home run record, the issue of cheating still seems to be one of the dominant themes in baseball today. Bonds can't get a job this year, even though he wants to play and surely can still hit better than all but a few people on earth. I suppose this is mostly due to teams not wanting the headache of the media circus sure to erupt upon Bonds’ arrival with the team. Part of that circus would certainly include the copious use of the word cheater. At the recent Hall of Fame induction ceremony, this issue was also present, in the form of an absence. By now, Mark McGwire’s prodigious numbers would have certainly gained him entry into the Hall of Fame, but it looks instead that he may never get in, voters unwilling to elect someone who is roundly assumed to have cheated by using performance enhancing drugs. The obvious hypocrisy that I’m driving at with all the finesse of a bulldozer is that in that very Hall of Fame is a plaque for the man pictured here, who rather openly admitted to cheating whenever possible. The thing is, while I see intellectually that this is a double standard, I feel on a gut level that I'm OK with this double standard. The baseball world at large seems to agree. I wonder why? Maybe it has to do with romance. Gaylord’s an Old West cardsharp, crafty and skillful. McGwire, Bonds, and Clemens, on the other hand (to name the three most prominent figures in the ongoing issue), seem to be greedy, inelegant brutes. How much skill does it take to jam a needle in your ass?
And speaking of ass, we finally come to the subject I most want to address in terms of this card. The photo, which on first glance appears to be a great action shot of a crafty gray-haired veteran in the midst of a wily offering sure to reduce the batter to a frustrated obscenity-laden tirade, on closer look appears in fact to offer the secret to the hurler’s long-running and otherwise somewhat difficult-to-explain success. Please look closely, and without the prejudical knowledge of both baseball pitching mechanics and the usual placement of body appendages. Do you see what I see? That Gaylord Perry was able, with some exertion showing plainly on his well-lined face, to excrete, from his anus, a third hand.
This would explain a lot, wouldn’t it? I mean, of all the many entertaining instances of a player getting caught red-handed (Joe Niekro trying to toss away a file as an umpire approached him on the mound, cork exploding from Sammy Sosa’s bat, etc.), the most notorious rule-stretcher of them all, Gaylord Perry, who even entitled his 1974 mid-career autobiography Me and the Spitter, eluded authorities for his first 21 years in the majors, not earning his first suspension for rule-bending until his second-to-last go-round in 1982. Everyone agreed he made baseballs do ungodly things. But how?
Probably this card shows nothing but the fact that he had a way of keeping his right arm close to his side in the middle of his delivery to add to his prodigious arsenal of deceptions. But maybe it shows, like those rare photos of Bigfoot or Nessie, something more monstrous and wondrous. I mean, maybe, just maybe, we are glimpsing Gaylord Perry’s uncanny assball.
Perry would dip a ball in the bucket of water and then throw a pitch. Jones would take an exagerated swing and miss. Roberts would completely miss the ball.
The umpire, Harry Wendlestat I belive, got into the act. He went out to the mound and checked Perry for illegal substances. He checked under his cap, his glove, his uniform, anywhere he could. He even moved the bucket of water several times as he moved around the mound.
And during a Cy Young award winning season. Players weren't quite the tightasses back then that they've become today.
The recent 25th anniversary of the Brett pinetar incident also features Gaylord in a telling bit part: as all hell was breaking loose he was calmly sizing up the situation and realizing from his vast experience that the best thing to do in such a moment is to tamper with and/or make disappear the evidence. So with chaos ruling he snatched his teammate's controversial bat from the umpire's hands and made off with it. It may have been his last notable act in the big leagues.
Son, this world is rough
And if a man's gonna make it, he's gotta be tough
And I knew I wouldn't be there to help you along.
So I gave you that name and I said goodbye
I knew you'd have to get tough or die
And it's the name that helped to make you strong.
Now you just fought one hell of a fight
And I know you hate me, and you got the right
To kill me now, and I wouldn't blame you if you do.
But you ought to thank me, before I die,
For the gravel in your guts and the spit in your eye
Cause I'm the son-of-a-bitch that named you "Dick Butkus."
7 : Nice connection. Come to think of it, from what I've heard, I think Dick Pole was a somewhat ornery fellow, too. And perhaps there was some of the Boy Named Sue logic behind gameshow host Peter Marshall changing his own last name but letting his son go through life with the old country name of Peter LaCock.
As for the unusual name of the player in question here: according to Wikipedia Gaylord was named for a family friend who "died while having a tooth pulled."
I think I learned from Bill James' Historical Abstract that the name is pronounced "Gaylerd."
"Pebbly Jack" Glasscock would have been a different thing altogether.
Yet I'm incensed about McGwire, Bonds, Clemens, and the rest, who did their cheating out of view (except for their expanding size and enormous heads). Gaylord (that's a funny name, hee-hee-hee) did it right in front of us and still got away with it.
Vaseline? Expectoration? Maybe it was actually Super Blue Stuff: http://tinyurl.com/5v8vb4
5 8 Perhaps it's time for the All-Sport All-Time Name Team? Although someone has already beat us to it:
http://tinyurl.com/vrta7
and
http://tinyurl.com/ufl7f
The umps made him stop.
12 : Those are some good lists. Interestingly, Randy Johnson made neither top ten.
14 : That's a good question. I could be way off, but my guess is the ban came about for a couple reasons: a desire to pump up those offenses, and a concern about the safety of the pitch. I'm basing the latter reason pretty heavily on the description of Henry Wiggen throwing a spitball in The Southpaw: everyone, including Wiggen, seemed aghast that he would risk braining a batter with the slippery, unpredicatble pitch. I don't know if that fictional account is based at all on fact.
If I were less lazy, I would go get my Roger Angell and quote his thoughts on the spitter "slipping under the turnstile like a dilatory schoolboy."
I believe the reasons given were sanitary (?) and fairness based. Much as I'd love it, I don't think there's any fair way to do it. If we were to legalize it, you know guys would be putting all manner of substances on the ball. And, if some is good, more would be better-you'd have balls covered from top to bottom in Vaseline.
Derek Zumsteg's book on cheating is a good read, BTW.
I have always had a small fondness for spitballers, or emery ballers, or whatever-there's something cool about loading one up, two on , two out, and throwing it by somebody to get a strikeout.
I'm not sure a spitter can be thrown hard enough to really hurt somebody, do you?
19 : In Light's Cultural Encyclopedia there's a quote from Stengel, an advocate of legalization, in which he claims that the pitch is safer than the knuckleball. The quote seems to imply an ongoing discussion about its safety, while also dismissing those concerns. I tend to agree with you and Casey though. But it is alarming to think of all the gunk that would start showing up on baseballs if the spitter was made legal.
For that matter, I feel the same way about the Coors humidor.
Also, I think the banning of the spitball had a lot to do with the ball. They did not change the ball in pre-1920 days anywhere close to what we do now. A study many years ago said an average ball lasted for seven pitches. It wouldn't surprise me if that figure was about five pitches now.
I sort of like the idea that in baseball "cheating" isn't really a crime unless you're caught. I'm OK with guys trying to cut the ball, stealing signs, stealing bases, etc. PEDs are a different story because they're part of training and not the game itself.
I noticed this when adding the link to Perry's post to the sidebar. I think Perry could hold his own in a showdown of colorful-characterness with any of these guys. A funny tidbit, which sounds as if it may be a tall tale, is that after he (or perhaps someone else, according to various versions of the story) proclaimed early in his career that they'd put a man on the moon before he hit a home run, Perry hit his first roundtripper moments after Neil Armstrong took the great leap for mankind.
Wait, what?! I never knew that, but it does explain my vague recollection of seeing Pete LaCock appear as a game show contestant in the late '70s. I'd like to say it was on the Squares, but I've been unable to verify, as it seems there are still a few nuggets of pop culture trivia which remain too miniscule for detection. I suppose that's a good thing. Still, what a bizarre memory to have dredged up....
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