Great Expectorations
By Steve Wilhelm
May, 2004
Last week Rich Bruso came up to me at work wondering about the legality of a baseball pitcher licking his fingers on the mound. I assume that he brought up the topic because the night before Steve Finley was walked on a 3 balls 2 strikes count because the Umpire ruled that San Diego Padres reliever Akinori Otsuka licked his fingers on the mound. Whatever the reason, Rich seemed to be very concerned about the topic and as I began to explain the history of the spitball to Rich, I perceived that he got more and more excited with the topic. I figure that if I could get that kind of a reaction out of him, imagine the impact if the topic were published in the newsletter.
The spitter was invented by Frank Corridon around 1904 and was made popular by Elmer Stricklett, who pitched for the Dodgers in 1905. A pitcher named Marty O'Toole won 15 games for the Pittsburgh Pirates by actually licking the ball. An interesting story tells of O'Toole getting removed from a game when Philadelphia Phillies first baseman Fred Laderas applied liniment to a ball, causing the pitcher to burn his mouth and tongue.
It was during this happy era that Major League Baseball started getting concerned about the safety of the game. In 1920 the spitball was deemed "dangerous" and therefore was prohibited by Rule 8.02(a)(2), which states that it is illegal to "apply a foreign substance of any kind to the ball.” Since there were existing pitchers using the spitball, each team was allowed two spitball pitchers for the rest of the 1920 season. In 1921, Rule 8.02(a) was amended to prohibit the spitball for everyone except for seventeen pitchers grandfathered in. One of these, Bruleigh Grimes, played until 1934 and used the spitball to win 270 games in his major league career.
But 1934 did not see the end of the spitball. Good old American ingenuity allowed pitchers to come up with clever ways of disguising their use of the spitball. Pitchers would wipe their mouth and then transfer the spit to the ball before a delivery. Realizing that most of the violations involved the hands moving to the mouth, baseball officials amended Rule 8.02(a) again in 1968. Rule 8.02(a)(1) currently states that a "pitcher shall not ... bring his pitching hand in contact with his mouth or lips while in the 18 foot circle surrounding the pitching rubber."
What is fascinating about this is the strange legalese used to determine the penalty for a pitcher putting his hand to his mouth. Nowhere in Rule 8.02 is there any mention of balks or runners on base. The only penalties mentioned are a called ball and ejection. However, rule 8.05 states that a pitcher cannot make an illegal pitch, and that if he does, "with runners on base the penalty is a balk; with no runners on base, it is a ball." That's right, the official interpretation of the rules is that if a pitcher puts his hand to his mouth it is an illegal pitch, even if there was no throwing motion involved. This means that a pitcher can only go to his mouth if he is more than 9 feet from the center of the mound, or if there is no ball in play.
You must be wondering what affect all the rule changes had on the nature of the game. Hall of Fame pitchers Gaylord Perry and Don Sutton have admitted to using the spitball after 1958. Gaylord Perry used to apply Vaseline to his uniform in convenient places so that he could apply a discrete amount to the ball. Since 1968 pitchers have gotten more discrete about how they are altering the ball before pitches, making the number of pitchers using a spitball impossible to determine. They have also gotten better at making alterations appear innocent so that they won't get caught if an Umpire examines a ball.
Now, at this point a really intelligent writer would comment about how human nature affects rule changes, the laws of unintended consequences, and maybe make some comment about whether additional laws make society better or if they just mask existing problems. Since everyone who reads this is supposed to be some sort of genius, and since I’m lazy, I'll let you think about all this and draw your own conclusions.
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