A year ago today: Perry lived up to great expectorations

The spitball artist and Hall of Famer dies at 84.

FROM A YEAR AGO

One summer night in 1977, a foul ball gathered steam and smashed into the press box window at Arlington Stadium. It left a huge greasy spot, enough to occlude the vision of most of the inhabitants.

Gaylord Perry of the Rangers threw the pitch and, afterwards, was informed of the residue. Perhaps the baseball had carried a weird, jelly-like substance with it.

“Naw,” Perry said, “it musta have hit some kind of a bug on the way.”

That was plausible. North Texas bugs are tracked by FlightAware and have aisle and window seats. But Perry laughed and the writers laughed and the saga went on. When Perry died Wednesday at age 84, the term “spitball” was in the first paragraph of the obituary.

No pitcher in history has been as closely identified with saliva, slippery elm, petroleum jelly and other gunk as Perry was, primarily because he was the best pitcher who ever loaded up.

Perry’s congealed fingernails allowed him to hang on for win No. 300 when he was 43. But when he was 39, he went 21-6 for San Diego with a 2.76 ERA and became the first to win Cy Young Awards in both leagues.

His first came in 1972 with Cleveland, after the Giants had traded him there for Sam McDowell in a trade they thought was brilliant at the time. Perry was 24-16 that year with a 1.92 ERA and 29 complete games. Five times he won 20 or more games and two other times he won 19. He had 303 complete games and served 5,350 innings, still sixth in MLB history.

He pitched for eight teams and enjoyed showing up at Old Timers Games with a quilt-like uniform that included all the logos. He wound up with 314 wins and a lifetime WHIP of 1.181.

Yet it took Perry three tries to crack the Hall of Fame because he so casually mocked the rules. He turned umpires into frisk-happy traffic cops, and Billy Martin once brought a bloodhound to the ballpark to find Perry’s secret stash of gook in a bag of baseballs. “They had to take the dog to the hospital, he had a heart attack,” Martin groused.

When Martin took the Texas job and found Perry on his staff, he immediately said Perry was being wronged and would never stoop to such lows, but he gave that up the next time they parted ways.

Perry learned the spitter from Bob Shaw, who was traded from Milwaukee to San Francisco in 1964. But as the years went on and as the outcry grew, Perry found that the spitter was really more like a nuclear weapon, that it was just as effective when it sat in the silo. Umpires would search Perry’s cap, belt, jersey and T-shirts and report that all was kosher. In 1974 Perry would write a book called “Me And The Spitter” and admit that he “tried everything on the old apple but salt and pepper and chocolate sauce topping,” but claimed he was a “law-abiding citizen” now.

Occasionally Perry would lampoon the entire process by gathering so much resin that his pitches would come in on a white cloud. Batters would complain and Perry would shrug and say, what the hell? First they complain about the pitches being wet and now….

What’s interesting is the way the game and the public compartmentalized cheating. The spitballers were looked upon as resourceful scamps, with a race car driver’s ethos: if you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying. The fury of the opposing managers added to the spectacle. In 1987, Minnesota’s Joe Niekro was inspected by home plate umpire Steve Palmero, who ordered Niekro to take his hands out of his pocket. He did — and out flew an emery board.

Mike Scott’s alleged scuffballs were the subtext of the entire 1986 NLCS when Houston played the Mets. Don Sutton calmly denied that he was using a foreign substance, reminding one and all that “Vaseline is manufactured in the United States.”

But the times and the tenor were different when the home runs exploded, before and after the turn of the century. While Perry and his colleagues were applauded for getting away with something, Barry Bonds and his generation were scolded, persecuted and eventually denied spots in the Hall of Fame aside contemporaries whose accomplishments they doubled.

Spitballers were part of baseball’s folklore. Steroid users, even before MLB got around to drug testing with serious consequences, were scoundrels, commiting vile heresy. Draw whatever conclusions you like.

Perry and his older brother Jim, who won 215 games and the 1970 Cy Young Award while in Minnesota, got their country strength honestly. They plowed and picked on the farm, where the family worked as tenants in a hamlet called Farm Life, N.C. Catfish Hunter would grow up a few miles away in Hertford. Gaylord earned enough money to buy his folks a new home and then bought another farm, one that he had to sell when things got bad in the late 80s. He pitched every game as if mouths would not be fed if he lost.

His peers weren’t overawed at the way he pitched outside the law. What got their attention was Capsolin. Perry used the analgesic balm to keep his arm hot. It was so successful that the Cleveland trainer called his counterpart in Texas and told him to invest in rubber gloves. Perry’s T-shirts came apart after a few months because of Capsolin’s corrosiveness, and that Rangers’ trainer accidentally got a few drops on his nose and saw a blister come up. Yet Gaylord plowed through three tubes of Capsolin a day. He had hide, not skin.

Perry’s willingness to chase money and victory explained why he might not have been the most convivial teammate. He did not hide his wrath when outfielders botched fly balls, and he did not mind upbraiding his hitters when he was shut out. Perry was with Cleveland when Frank Robinson came aboard as a player-manager, the first Black man to run a dugout. Perry didn’t accept the concept and demanded to be paid one more dollar than Robinson. Cleveland dealt him to Texas before the All-Star break.

The only thing he couldn’t do was hit. Alvin Dark, his San Francisco manager, predicted that man would walk on the moon before Gaylord homered in the big leagues. Dark was correct by a matter of minutes. Perry homered on July 20, 1969 off Claude Osteen of the Dodgers, shortly after Neil Armstrong’s one small step for man.

Perry’s journey eventually took him to Kansas City in 1983, where he was sitting in the dugout when George Brett bashed a home run in Yankee Stadium. Brett’s home run was invalidated when the Yankees convinced the umpires that the bat bore too much pine tar. Amid Brett’s famous tantrum and the attendant furor, Perry sneaked onto the field and grabbed the bat. He was found out and ejected, but maybe he shouldn’t have been. Maybe the bat just naturally sidled up to its natural father, the man who never saw a piece of baseball equipment he couldn’t improve.

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