"YOU’VE GOT TO CHEAT"
By Dick Meister
What’s been largely ignored in the furor over baseball players’ illegal use
of steroids is the crucial fact that cheating of one kind or another has
always been an important part of the game. It wouldn’t be baseball as we
know it without cheating.
Listen to Rogers Hornsby, the late Hall of Fame member who played and
managed Major League teams for a half-century: “You’ve got to cheat. I
cheated, or watched someone on my team cheat, in practically every game.”
This is not to say that illegal steroid use should be excused or tolerated.
But it is to say that many – if not all – of the players who turned to
steroids undoubtedly saw that as just another way to gain an advantage for
themselves and their teams. It was just another form of the cheating that’s
part of the game.
Consider last year’s World Series, won four games to one by the St. Louis
Cardinals over the Detroit Tigers. It might have been 4-zip if Detroit’s
Kenny Rogers had not illicitly smeared a bit of pine tar on his pitching
hand to help the Tigers to their lone series victory. Pine tar is one of
those “illegal substances” that baseball’s rule book bans, but that some
pitchers nevertheless use to make the ball twist and turn in baffling ways
as it heads toward the batter.
Surely the best of those cheaters was Hall of Fame pitcher Gaylord Perry,
who peeled off a sweat-sodden Seattle Mariners jersey after winning his
300th game to bring the world, watching on television, this vital message,
printed across a brilliant yellow T-shirt in bold black letters: “Old Age
and Treachery Will Overcome Youth and Skill.”
The 43-year-old Perry had admittedly won many of those 300 games – if not
all of them – by throwing balls doctored with saliva, Vaseline, suntan
lotion, baby oil, fishing-line wax and who knows what other illegal
substances.
Rubbing the ball with sandpaper or an emery board can also do the trick. So
can scraping or cutting it with a sharpened belt buckle or maybe a thumb
tack hidden inside a pitcher’s glove. Many pitchers have tried those illegal
variations – and more – though few have been as candid about their
indiscretions as Gaylord Perry.
Batters also have tricks. You might remember the fuss a few years back over
the alleged corking of bats by slugger Sammy Sosa and others. Slipping a
little cork or sawdust into a partly hollowed out bat to make it lighter,
and thus capable of driving a ball farther, has been done for years by an
undetermined but significant number of players.
One of the most creative was former New York Yankee Craig Nettles. He was
found out when his bat shattered in a game against Detroit and out onto the
diamond skipped a half-dozen of those lively little Super Balls kids had
such fun bouncing around.
There’s also that hitters little trick of rubbing out the rear chalk line in
the batter’s box so they can get a little farther away from the pitcher, one
of the many petty infractions of the rules that are so common, some of them
merely attempts to deceive umpires or opposing players.
Don’t forget, either, the constant attempts of teams to decode the hand and
finger signals – signs – used by managers and coaches to direct their
players and by catchers to tell pitchers what kind of a pitch they want and
where they want it pitched,
Stealing signs is an art. Watch first and third base coaches especially,
bending at the waist to tell batters that a curveball is coming, for
instance, standing upright to signal a fastball, or shouting out code words
to tip off a pitch.
Some teams have gone so far as to station plain-clothes coaches with
binoculars or telescopes in the stands, in centerfield scoreboards or on
neighboring rooftops to pick up catchers’ signs and relay them via
walkie-talkies or other means.
The team owners who have been playing innocent throughout the steroid
scandal are hardly above cheating. Think, for example, of how they order
groundskeepers to soak basepaths with water before home games to slow down
swift opponents or to allow the infield grass to grow tall and thus slow
down ground balls so that aging home team fielders can more easily reach
them.
Owners also have been known to temporarily move outfield fences back to make
it harder for visiting sluggers to reach them or, in one creative instance,
simply put higher distance numbers on them to make the fences seem harder to
reach.
Winning is of course a very serious matter to baseball’s team owners and
players alike, and if cheating can help them win, cheating is what many will
do – even if it involves steroids.
As for myself, a former semi-professional baseball player in California,
Oregon and Western Canada, I never cheated unless I had to.
Copyright © 2007 Dick Meister