The Cy Young–winning pitcher who flaunted his spitballs

Pitcher Gaylord Perry was one of the most audacious rule-breakers in American sports history. His critics— including batters baffled by his unnaturally plunging spitball—called him a cheater. And Major League Baseball tightened rules against the spitball (a catchall term for enhancing a pitch’s spin with a foreign substance) in the middle of his career, in 1973. But the imposing 6-foot-4 pitcher relished his reputation for trickery. He even published a 1974 memoir, Me and the Spitter, describing how he slicked the ball with saliva, Vaseline, fish-line oil, and other lubricants. “I tried everything on the old apple,” Perry wrote, “but salt and pepper and chocolate sauce.”

Perry was born to peanut farmer parents in Williamston, N.C., said The Washington Post. There he “worked in the fields” after school with his older brother, Jim, who also went on to become a CyYoung Award–winning pitcher. Gaylord made his MLB debut in 1962 and was “mediocre at best” in his first two seasons. But then a San Francisco Giants teammate, Bob Shaw, taught him the spitter, and by 1966 he was a star.

Perry pitched for eight teams in his 22 seasons, said The New York Times, winning 314 games. “For all the furor over his doctoring the baseball,” he actually had plenty of nonspitter pitches in his arsenal, including “curves, sliders, sinkers, changeups, forkballs, and an outstanding fastball, including a split-fingered one.” He was ejected just once for throwing a spitter, in his penultimate season.

But Perry used the fear of the spitball to psych out batters, sometimes noticeably rubbing his uniform or cap only to throw a different pitch. His reputation “was a great weapon of mine,” Perry said. “They thought I did it all the time.”