By Bill Borst, founder of the St. Louis Browns Historical Society and Browns Fan Club
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Baseball is much more than a funny game as Joe Garagiola quipped many years ago.
It is a refreshingly human game that brings to the forefront all the best and the worst facets of human nature.
We all know about the recent scandals with steroids and performance-enhancing drugs but even that is part and parcel of man’s human nature.
This flows from the very nature of the game. They keep score. There are winners and losers. Everyone wants to be a winner.
Conversely, no one wants to lose. But some teams do–just ask the old St. Louis Browns players, survivors from the 1962 Mets and the 1988 Baltimore Orioles, the linear descendants of the Browns.
We have it in our nature to bleed every chance we can to ensure a victory.
Players are no different. When skill is lacking, sometimes players will opt for guile. That’s why they have umpires.
We have it in our nature to bleed every chance we can to ensure a victory.
When skill is lacking, sometimes players will opt for guile. That’s why they have umpires.
Years ago I interviewed an author, Martin Quigley, who had made a study of the physics of the curve ball and other pitches of that era that broke, dipped, dropped or made some unpredictable movement.
His book was entitled The Crooked Pitch — a double entendre he used because many of these pitches were also patently illegal from a rules’ standpoint because they had been doctored that is, foreign substances had been added surreptitiously to cause the pitch to behave in a funny manner.
These crooked pitches included the shine, mud, coffee and the most infamous–the spit ball.
These pitches were outlawed for all but a select list of current pitchers who were grandfathered in.
This all happened in the wake of the death of Ray Chapman, who in August of 1920 became the first and so far onlymajor league player to be liked during a game.
A Carl Mays side-winding fastball struck him in the temple, breaking his neck in the process. After lingering for several hours he died the next morning.*
So dirty was the ball that Mays was using that Chapman could not see it.
Since then Major League baseball has done everything to stop this practice.
Early modern pitchers from the 50s-70s like Preacher Roe, and Gaylord Perry became notorious for teasing the public with does he or doesn’t he types of questions.
The doubt just added to their unpredictability.
In a book a few years ago, Derek Zumsteg documented just how players have cheated over the years.
When he was a player, Hall of Fame manager, John McGraw used to grab the belt of a tagging runner at third base, trying to impede his ability score.
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