The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball Blog

The Cheater’s Guide got a nice write-up in the new Sports Illustrated, including a nice note on the “rainbow play” post which now includes a sweet comment by their coach! Wooo!

In the book, I talk about Phil Regan (and particularly his August 18th, 1968 start where umpire Chris Pelekoudas went after him all game) and Jack Hamilton, who was the highest-profile suspected spitballer of the time, but what I thought was particularly interesting was how fate put them together. Before the 1966 season, Phil Regan was traded to the Dodgers from Detroit, and I found a September 3rd, 1966 article (Sportiing News, p3) about his success with the Dodgers which included this:

Some Call It Spitter
Some of the leading hitters in the National League say it’s not a slider, but a spitter, and the best in the business at that.
Regan, always modest, made this rebuttal.
“Not me, my roomie at Syracuse last year, Jack Hamilton, has the best one.”

Regan, like many spit-ballers, cultivated the doubt in hitters’ minds to his best advantage.

Regan doesn’t mind if some of the batters mistake his super slider, which breaks about 15 or 16 inches, for a spitter.
“In fact,” he explained with a grin, “I think it helps if they’re looking for it.”

Tom (”aka the Baseball Zealot“) writes

Hi Derek,

I have a question for your site.

Last week I attended the Big Ten Baseball Tournament. Had a great time even though my Illini were knocked out after 3 games.

Anyway, I noticed that during Penn State games, I noticed something whenever the opposing team was up. Right after the PSU pitcher pitched the ball, a fan in the Penn State section would emit a short, loud, high-pitched whistle. The sound carried VERY well and it was obvious to me that this person was trying to distract the batter and throw off his timing.

Every two or three pitches, this continued throughout the whole tournament. It was rather annoying and I half hoped the umpire would do something about it. I understand the role of the fan is to cheer and hoot and yes, for some fans, boo and heckle. However, it was obvious this unfortunate person was timing their whistle in order to distract the batter (after a while, these whistles started coming during opposing pitchers’ windups).

My question is: Could the umpire crew have done something about this or is this simply out of the realm of their jurisdiction?

The Penn State fans were, for the most part, a great crowd but I wish that person had stayed home.

Love your site,

Tom aka The Baseball Zealot

In MLB, they certainly do. Under Rule 9.01(a)

The league president shall appoint one or more umpires to officiate at each league championship game. The umpires shall be responsible for the conduct of the game in accordance with these official rules and for maintaining discipline and order on the playing field during the game.

and as a matter of tradition, the umpires have broad discretion to throw out spectators who affect the play of the game. Technically it doesn’t cross the line into fan interference as defined in the rules, but umpires can and have historically been able to have fans re-seated or ejected.

There’s no rule I can find that directly and clearly gives umpires the authority, but it’s pretty well implied in 3.18:

The home team shall provide police protection sufficient to preserve order. If a person, or persons, enter the playing field during a game and interfere in any way with the play, the visiting team may refuse to play until the field is cleared.

Technically, no, they’re not entering the playing field. But that “order” part… is it an inherent power?

Take the Mets fan ejected and arrested for trying to blind players. While a whistle’s not as potentially harmful - it’s unlikely a player would suffer deafness as they might blindness - if it was really affecting the play of the game, and stadium personnel didn’t act, an umpire can ask them to, and they will, as in the Mets case.

On the flip side, though, heckling and noisemaking’s a long-tolerated part of the game. The Oakland A’s have drummers, Tampa’s got that one heckler with the loudest voice in Florida, and so on, and generally speaking, you’ll get tossed for annoying people with expensive tickets long before the umpire has to raise an eyebrow.

Back to the question: is there a rule that allows umpires to toss a fan? I can’t speak for college baseball, but at the MLB level there is not, but the umpires can get that done without the express rule. I mean, technically, you can stretch and say that in distracting a pitcher in their delivery the fan’s putting the batter at risk of getting hit, and if it’s a safety issue… well, obviously the ump could act. But I don’t think it’s ever argued that an ump can toss fans if they decide it’s necessary.

On a related note, I wanted to quote this, from an interview with Tom Swodoba as a Frontier League ump, because it cracks me up:

Have you ever ejected a fan? How about ballpark staff?

I have never ejected a fan from a Frontier League game. I have ejected a public address announcer for announcing over the system that “We really got hosed on that call.”.

Hey, cool news - the Cheater’s Guide to Baseball segment I did on NPR’s Day-to-Day, reading from the hidden ball trick chapter and talking about other good stuff, is going to be included on an NPR best-of baseball CD. Woo-hoo! If you missed it, here’s a link to the segment. Makes me want to grin.

In Saturday’s Red Sox-Yankees game, Mike Lowell made that’s pretty clearly a much more egregious plan on the basepaths. From the recap on ESPN:

A night after Lowell took a pitch off his left wrist — one of five hit batsman in the game — he had three hits and four RBIs. He was also involved in a little basepath payback in the fourth when he slammed his right shoulder — and a little bit of his elbow — into Cano in an attempt to break up a double play.

Cano bounced the ball to first as he fell to the dirt, just getting Varitek at first.

“I never had a problem with him before,” Cano said. “Today he threw his elbow.”

But Torre said it was a clean play. Lowell, who spent his first four professional seasons in the Yankees organization, insisted he meant no harm.

“They taught me how to do it,” he said.

If you see the highlight, it’s a little remarkable that Cano made the play at all.

The interesting thing for me is that no matter how you want to interpret the rules, in terms of actual interference in a play on the field, Lowell’s action is far more direct and disruptive than what Alex did… but Lowell doesn’t face the same kind of scrutiny and discussion that Alex’s action did. Lowell’s play is even noted as being, essentially, hard but clean.

Why? Is it because Lowell doesn’t carry Alex’s reputation? Because breaking up a double play is acceptable? Or is it as simple as Cano somehow making the throw to get the out at first?

Frank Jordan wrote:

I have an addendum for the Gaylord Perry section. I once went to a Mariner game and sat in row 1 behind the Mariners bullpen at the Kingdome. Gaylord Perry was pitching that day and was warming up before the game right in front of us. When he got done warming up he sat down in front of us to cool down for a moment before leaving to head into the clubhouse. Left in front of us were two players. I can’t remember their names ( I was 12) but I believe one of them was Terry “Bud” Bulling, and the other was a relief pitcher.

I turned to my friend after Perry left and said, “Man, Perry STINKS.” (His smell, not his performance.)

The catcher turned to me and said, “Oh, so you now know his secret.”

“His secret? How do you mean?”

““Gaylord coats his entire body with Ben-Gay before the game, and when he sweats during the game his entire uniform becomes a big greaseball. He can touch any part of his uniform to throw a greaseball. The umpires can check him all they want, but Ben-Gay isn’t illegal and there’s nothing they can do about it.”

This was in the days before the odorless Sportscreme. It would be even easier to pull off today. (Ben-Gaylord?)

I didn’t encounter anything like this while doing book research, and I did a ton of Gaylord Perry reading writing that part of the book. But I don’t find this particularly implausible - Perry freely admits that he was willing to try anything, no matter how outlandish, in his pursuit of excellence through ball-doctoring.

And even if the catcher was putting him on, it’s still funny.

(Updated: reader Jeffrey Lang-Weir pointed out that there is a definition in 2, which led to this re-write)

Rule 2 defines interference.

INTERFERENCE
(a) Offensive interference is an act by the team at bat which interferes with, obstructs, impedes, hinders or confuses any fielder attempting to make a play. If the umpire declares the batter, batter- runner, or a runner out for interference, all other runners shall return to the last base that was in the judgment of the umpire, legally touched at the time of the interference, unless otherwise provided by these rules.

Rule 7.08 deals with when a runner’s out, and this is what those who would argue that A-Rod should have been called out are referring to:

7.08
Any runner is out when –
[...]
(b) He intentionally interferes with a thrown ball; or hinders a fielder
attempting to make a play on a batted ball;
Rule 7.08(b) Comment: A runner who is adjudged to have hindered a fielder who is attempting to make a play on a batted ball is out whether it was intentional or not.

Now, watching the replay it’s pretty clear that when he runs through, that’s okay: as long as he doesn’t get in the way of the fielder making the play, he’s fine.

The issue is - does yelling at the fielders count as hindering them as they attempt to make a play on the batter?

While what we see enforced in games is is that physically hampering the fielder is illegal (and almost never done) while vocally attempting the same thing is, at least, not enforced, it’s clear from the definition that confusing the fielder is illegal and offensive interference.

As long as it’s not enforced - like foreign substances on uniforms for pitchers - a runner would be dumb not to take advantage of it when it could so clearly help his team.

With two outs, too, what’s the harm? If it doesn’t work, inning over. If it works, huge benefit. There’s no reason for him not to try, and that’s why it’s a smart play on his part. I’m sure - to editorialize for a second - that if this had been Jeter, or if you don’t think Jeter would do that, pick a saavy popular veteran of your choice - that this would hardly be the subject of that much controversy.

Several readers sent this in: A-Rod, while a baserunner, called for a pop-up, orrr maybe he didn’t.

ESPN’s game recap

Rodriguez hit an RBI single with two outs in the ninth that made it 7-5. Jorge Posada followed with a high infield pop and Rodriguez ran hard, cutting between Clark and shortstop John McDonald.

Replays showed Rodriguez shouting something, and Clark backed off at the last second. McDonald was only a few steps behind Clark, but couldn’t make the catch and ball dropped for an RBI single.

“I just said, ‘Hah!’ That’s it,” Rodriguez said. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

also, if he did call for it, that’d be cool, right, because

Rodriguez said three or four times each week, opponents shout at him while he pursues foul pops near their dugout.

Not that he’s saying he did. It’s interesting, we talked about a similar play in a college game just last week.

It’s a nice play if you can get away with it. I’ll update with more quotes as, inevitably, this gets more press. Here, with the Yankees ahead 7-5, his action turned an out into a single on the way to a four-run ninth inning and a final score of 10-5. It didn’t turn out to be the difference maker, but it was directly responsible for giving the Yankees a chance tos core three more runs. That’s a huge swing.

Several readers have emailed, but Dave Steinberg managed to be first, so: check out this MLB.com story on Ryan Freel, who it turns out didn’t catch a ball — it was put in his glove by Reds outfielder Norris Hopper as Freel lay prone on the warning track.

Scary, funny, cunning, and a remarkable bit of clear thinking by Hopper, given the circumstances.

In the book, I talk a little about the hazy line between “what an athlete could achieve normally” and “cheating” in the context of nutritional supplements and other training devices.

I thought of this when I read this Wired article, “Wayne Gretzky-Style ‘Field Sense’ May Be Teachable”

Essentially, it appears that there are ways that you can help teach a player to have a better sense of spatial relationships, specifically in recognizing where a tennis serve will go with almost no information. Read the article - I found it fascinating.

But it raises the old issue: when does this get to the point of being an unfair advantage? We already see tennis prodigies raised by their parents to play (parents take jobs near supercoaches, drive the kids ridiculous distances, pay for tournament entries) that give them a huge head start over a similarly-talented kid growing up in rural Idaho, or Atlanta, who doesn’t have access to the same resources.

If you can teach young baseball kids better pitch recognition skills that make them dramatically better prospects, but the equipment costs $50,000 to use for a year, who does that help, and who does that hurt? Does it also severely unbalance the game in favor of rich countries?

We see some of this already in the construction of batting cages, but other sports - track and field, for instance, was the first to adopt use of hyperbaric chambers designed to allow athletes to sleep in low-oxygen environments without having to hike up a mountain. Now we’re starting to see basketball players use it.

Technically, you could travel up a mountain, sleep, come down for a game or practice or other training, and then go back up every night. It’s possible.

But if the issue is fairness, then equipment and training techniques like those detailed in the article make performance dependent in some respects on monetary resources over individual merit, and that’s not fair.

And if the issue is limiting the use of training techniques, where do you draw the line between teaching pitch recognition, like this, and batting cages? Are pitchers who can get full biomechanical workups early at a distinct advantage over those who don’t?

All these questions and more will have to be confronted in the coming years, and potentially could dramatically affect the way baseball recruits and develops its talent.