Posted on 05/11/2013 11:52:16 AM PDT by rickmichaels
Edited on 05/11/2013 11:53:37 AM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
BOSTON (CBS)
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.cbslocal.com ...
I don’t think he is doing anything other than being on a hot streak. Good pitchers go on Great runs from time to time.
I think the Blue Jay fans are just mad because they suck...or Canadian. One or the other.
What? This came up over a week ago. Are these folks just now hearing about it.
Cool...we haven’t had a good spitballer apprehension in years.
Bull Frog and rosin has been the go to for quite awhile now. Also, the humidity in that park in Toronto is supposed to be like zero. Pitchers can’t hang on to the ball.
And a Mickey Mantle bat that just went up for auction was x-rayed and reveled that he corked his bat.
I’m all for jacking the mount back up and loosening the cover on the baseball like it was back before the steroid era.
Of course I won’t get my way and apparently the DH is coming to the NL soon.
Jack Morris apologizes to Buchholz (ESPN, May 10, 2013)
rickmichaels: Why post this stupid old story from 5/2/13 on 5/13/13 when the "scandal" was all over as of 5/10/13?
Calm down. No big deal. It was just an interesting story from a week ago. What’s your problem? Don’t click on threads if you’re going to get bent about them.
Joe Niekro was caught with a nail file in his back pocket. What I never understood was how was he supposed to cheat with that nail file, if you are going to cut or scratch up a ball there are better ways to do it than with a three inch nail file kept in your back pocket. What was he doing, taking it out and cutting up balls right in front of everyone? He might have been doing something to get the complaint, but I bet that nail file was for his fingernails for the knuckler, and he shouldn’t have had it on the mound as a foreign object. Does anyone know how he was supposed to cheat with a nail file in his pocket?
Freegards
I prefer belt buckle
A tack in the glove is fine with me...
Unless Joe Niekro was a master illusionist I can’t see him using a nail file in his back pocket. I can see him using something else on his junk pitches that made them move and cut, and that nail file happened to be in his pocket for his knuckleball pitch for his finger nails.
Freegards
I prefer belt buckleSo did Whitey Ford----after he finally got nailed (sort of) using his wedding ring, which had a tiny rasp in it but enough that, as he once put it, "I had my own tool bench out there."
When Ford couldn't go to his belt buckle, catcher Elston Howard had a trick: he'd scrape a ball against the buckles of his shin guards before returning it to Ford.
Of course, in the old days you could go to the toxic waste dump if you chewed tobacco. That was Lew Burdette's little trick: he'd spit the juice to a certain part of the dirt near the rubber and build himself a little sump puddle. Whenever he went to adjust his shoes (which was half the time, a habit he'd had since he was a Yankee farm hand), he'd scoop up a little of his contraband puddle if he needed an out pitch post haste.
Joan Crawford may or may not have screamed "No! Wire! Hangers!" at her daughter . . . but Mike Flanagan of the Orioles didn't mind them when it came to demonstrating what he could do with a doctored ball if he wanted. He once showed Thomas Boswell a fresh ball, broke open a wire coat hanger, scratched four parallel cuts into the meat of the hide, then held it up. "Any time I need five new pitches," he said, "I got 'em."
The catcher is my favorite, but it’s easy for the plate umpire to pick up unusual flight back to the mound, if the ump pays attention.
In the bigs anything wrong with the ball and a new one is in. Even the batters pay attention and ask the ump to check the ball
I just read a book on how Lorne Michaels started SNL back in 1975 and introduced us to all the Not Ready For Prime Time Players such as Jane Curtin and Dan Ackroyd. Now during that time, it was alleged that Gaylord Perry was doctoring the ball (spitballs) with everything from Gatorade to K-Y jelly. Now interesting tidbit on Gaylord Perry, he was not known for being a very good hitter and one of his managers stated that men would land on the moon before Gaylord ever hit a home run. Strangely enough, Gaylord would actually hit his first major league home run on July 20, 1969, just an hour after men landed on the moon for the first time.
I wonder if anyone ever just put something very dry and slick on their fingers, like spray silicone or boot waterproofing. That way you wouldn’t have to keep putting it on and nothing would be on the ball. I know they use some stuff that dries up with no evidence like hand sanitizer, but you would have to put more on. Anything to let the ball slip off the fingers and be grabbed by your thumb to give forward rotation with a fastball motion.
They used to call the knuckler the ‘dry spitter.’ Here’s an awesome RA Dickey gif, what Hoyt Wilhelm used to call his ‘spinner.’ Looks like bugs bunny throwing his corkscrew. RA threw this one at 80mph. Yes, 80mph. The catcher closes his eyes when he catches it.
Freegards
I wonder if anyone ever just put something very dry and slick on their fingers, like spray silicone or boot waterproofing. That way you wouldn’t have to keep putting it on and nothing would be on the ball. I know they use some stuff that dries up with no evidence like hand sanitizer, but you would have to put more on. Anything to let the ball slip off the fingers and be grabbed by your thumb to give forward rotation with a fastball motion.Apparently, before he went to outright doctoring, Whitey Ford was known to use a kind of stickum for a slightly better grip on his curve ball. He kept it in a hollowed-out deodorant tube on which the label hadn't been changed.
There was a hilarious incident involving that stuff in the Yankee clubhouse one fine day. Yogi Berra, apparently, had a habit of mooching personal products now and then, so Mickey Mantle decided to break that habit for him. He put Ford's stickum tube in a spot where Berra couldn't resist, and Yogi fell for it. Three minutes later, he ran screaming into the trainer's room: he had to have his arms shaved loose after Ford's stickum pinned his inner biceps to his sides.
On the other hand, there was Mudcat Grant. Once upon a time, Grant liked to soap the inside of his uniform jersey and, when the warmth of the afternoon took hold, he'd have himself a little soap foam next to his belt to scoop onto a pitch. He got away with it until the day he inadvertently put too much of the stuff on his gray traveling uniform and the soapy foam was just too obvious to ignore.
They used to call the knuckler the ‘dry spitter.’ Here’s an awesome RA Dickey gif, what Hoyt Wilhelm used to call his ‘spinner.’ Looks like bugs bunny throwing his corkscrew. RA threw this one at 80mph. Yes, 80mph. The catcher closes his eyes when he catches it.They used to call the split-finger fastball the "legal" spitter because of its comparable break. George Bamberger (major league manager, minor league pitcher), who once made his way pitching in the minors with his own spitter (he called it a "Staten Island sinkerball"), once said, "Suppose I had my middle finger amputated? I bet you I'd have one helluva split finger fastball."
Finally, since you just about can't talk about the spitter without talking about the man himself, a Gaylord Perry story: Perry off the field was known as a friendly fellow, including with the umpires---even with those who had him frisked on the mound at regular intervals.
One afternoon, Perry bumped into an umpire who'd had him frisked the night before. They chatted amiable until the talk came around to the umpire's son, who pitched in the Little League, and whose team was getting beaten rather regularly. "Gaylord," the ump said, "you think you could teach my kid how to throw that thing?"
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