"Baseball has always had cheating. The kinds of cheating is really based on circumstance." Mark Armour, baseball author and historian, breaks down the evolution of baseball's biggest cheating tactics and scandals. From sign stealing and corked bats to steroids and spider tack, players have learned to game the game forcing the MLB to respond with new rules.
Director: Graham Corrigan
Director of Photography: Rick Galli
Editor: Eric Bigman
Guest: Mark Armour
Producer: Kristen DeVore
Senior Producer: Ashley Gabriel
Coordinating Producer: Sam Dennis
Line Producer: Jen Santos
Production Manager: Andressa Pelachi
Production Coordinator: Kariesha Kidd
Casting Producer: Nicholas Sawyer
Camera Operator: Shay Eberle Gunst
Sound Mixer: Paul Cornett
Production Assistant: Ariel Labasan
Post Production Supervisor: Rachael Knight
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Rob Lombardi
Assistant Editor: Courtney Karwal
Director: Graham Corrigan
Director of Photography: Rick Galli
Editor: Eric Bigman
Guest: Mark Armour
Producer: Kristen DeVore
Senior Producer: Ashley Gabriel
Coordinating Producer: Sam Dennis
Line Producer: Jen Santos
Production Manager: Andressa Pelachi
Production Coordinator: Kariesha Kidd
Casting Producer: Nicholas Sawyer
Camera Operator: Shay Eberle Gunst
Sound Mixer: Paul Cornett
Production Assistant: Ariel Labasan
Post Production Supervisor: Rachael Knight
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Rob Lombardi
Assistant Editor: Courtney Karwal
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00 There were no rules about licking your fingers.
00:03 There were no rules about even spitting on your hand.
00:06 So it was kind of the honor system.
00:07 And I mean no offense to baseball players, but the honor system doesn't work.
00:18 The best way to turn a mediocre hitter into a very good hitter is to tell them what's
00:24 coming.
00:25 And really what they want to know is, is this pitch going to move?
00:29 Is it a fastball or is it something else?
00:32 The 1899 Philadelphia Phillies, first time that we are aware of, where a guy bought some
00:38 binoculars, got a seed out in center field, zeroed in on the catcher, got the signs, and
00:43 then you put a towel over the fence or something.
00:46 You can imagine the technology kept getting better.
00:48 They used rifle scopes.
00:49 Not the rifle, just the scope.
00:51 John McGraw was a famous manager up until the 1930s.
00:56 He was all for people figuring out how to steal signs.
00:58 He thought that was an important part of the game, but you can't cheat.
01:02 Cheating is using electronics, which at that time meant binoculars.
01:06 And what the Astors did, apparently, was they signaled it with a trash can bag.
01:12 Scherzer was asked about sign stealing.
01:15 He said, "You know, as far as I'm concerned, we should just allow everyone to steal signs.
01:19 You know, that should be okay.
01:20 And it's part of the game, and my job is to keep you from stealing my signs."
01:26 There's probably nothing that everyone thinks is cheating.
01:28 But if you handed out a poll to all your friends, I think steroids would get a lot of checks.
01:36 Amphetamines became a pretty big thing in baseball, certainly by the '70s.
01:41 And the way the players talked about it was usually like, "I went out drinking all night.
01:46 I came in after one hour of sleep.
01:49 I took a greenie, and now I was back to normal."
01:53 When steroids entered the picture, informally, probably in the late '80s, it was different
02:00 because there was a sense from the fan that the game was changing.
02:06 Jose Canseco was the first person that was accused, really credibly accused, of taking
02:12 steroids.
02:13 It was pure muscle, and baseball players were not that big.
02:18 Mark McGuire, who was huge, broke the all-time home run record for home runs in a season
02:24 in baseball.
02:25 And that was a pretty sacrosanct record that was pretty important to baseball fans.
02:29 And then Barry Bonds, a couple years later, broke their record.
02:33 And then he ended up breaking the all-time record as well.
02:36 So it became this huge story that baseball had no control over.
02:41 But then Congress started to investigate and were thinking about taking control.
02:46 So I think the two sides were sort of scared into what ultimately happened, which is a
02:54 random testing.
02:55 But I think there's a sense from most baseball observers that the game has sort of corrected.
03:03 I think baseball has always had cheating.
03:06 The kinds of cheating is really based on circumstance.
03:13 Players discovered in the 1890s and into the early part of the century that if they added
03:18 lubrication to the ball, you could actually get it to not spin as much, and therefore
03:24 it would drop.
03:26 All that stuff was made illegal during the 19-teens and then finally in the 1920s.
03:31 Gaylord Perry was, I think without question, the most famous spitball pitcher.
03:37 They changed the rules a couple times during his career.
03:41 One of the most important things is they changed the rule that you could no longer touch your
03:45 fingers to your mouth at all.
03:47 And what Perry said is that that meant I could no longer use the pure spitball, which is
03:52 just saliva.
03:53 He said he would put this really hot bomb on his body, his neck, and it would just make
04:02 him sweat.
04:03 It was very unattractive.
04:04 I mean, his hair is just dripping wet.
04:07 There's a sort of fraternity amongst baseball pitchers.
04:11 So they were sharing stuff, even opponents.
04:14 They would be sharing tubs of a recipe that somebody had put together, which is a little
04:20 bit of pine tar and a little bit of spider taff and a little bit of something else.
04:24 Well, this stuff is getting more and more sticky, and this is a product that I believe
04:29 was first invented to help weightlifters carry atlas stones.
04:34 And none of this stuff ever changes because the players are more devious or more criminal
04:39 or anything.
04:40 It changes because people figure out how to do it.
04:45 It's interesting that the bat and the ball are different in a lot of ways.
04:48 The ball is sort of owned by the league, right?
04:52 The league produces a ball, and they're all exactly the same.
04:55 But the bat, you bring your own.
04:57 You want it to be heavy because when it hits the ball, it'll go further.
05:00 And you want it to be light because you want to be able to swing it as hard as you can.
05:04 There are people that admitted after their career was over that they used to pound nails
05:09 in the bottom of the bat, like right here.
05:13 So pine tar has always been used by batters, and it generally is not considered cheating.
05:18 There are rules about pine tar in terms of how far up the bat it can go.
05:22 I think it's like 17 inches or something, so I don't know, somewhere around here.
05:26 People want the batters to have grip.
05:27 However, it was a rule, and there was a very famous play where George Brett, who used to
05:33 use a lot of pine tar, because he didn't wear batting gloves.
05:36 He was a great hitter, probably one of the last great hitters that didn't use batting
05:39 gloves.
05:40 He used his bare hands.
05:41 He had a big home run in Yankee Stadium, but then Billy Martin, who was the manager of
05:46 the Yankees at the time, came out of the dugout and grabbed the bat and made the umpires measure
05:53 it.
05:54 And the umpires ruled that, in fact, he had more pine tar on his bat.
05:57 It was higher up the bat than he was allowed to have it.
06:00 Brett kind of goes crazy.
06:01 I mean, it looks like he's going to kill the ump.
06:03 It was like a loophole in the rules that the Yankees found.
06:06 The Royals protested the call, which is something you could do, and it went up to the league
06:14 president, the American League president, and he overturned the umpires, which very
06:18 rarely has ever happened.
06:21 So they had to replay the end of the game.
06:24 That's an example of how every player that has lived and loved this game with a different
06:30 sense of morality.
06:31 And I'm not really convinced that any of them are right or wrong.
06:38 But the other thing people have done over the years is cork a bat.
06:43 That is a generic term, but really what it means is you drill a hole into the bottom
06:49 of the barrel, take the wood out, and then replace it with something lighter.
06:55 Styrofoam, rubber balls, cork, and then seal it up again.
07:00 And different players over the years have been caught doing this.
07:03 And the only way you can catch someone doing this is have the bat break, because you can't
07:07 really look inside of a bat.
07:09 There have been games where a bat has broken and cork has flown out, and that's how you
07:16 know, like, "Oh my God, Sammy Sosa corks his bat."
07:19 And this happened to Sammy Sosa, it happened to Albert Bell.
07:23 Keith Hernandez, who is a longtime player for the Mets and Cardinals, among other teams,
07:29 he expressed the view that the stuff that the pitcher does should be okay because they're
07:33 doing it in front of everyone.
07:35 You can see the ball, you can see their fingers.
07:39 Whereas what a batter does, he's kind of, he's doing it at home.
07:43 He's more of a mad scientist.
07:45 I'm Mark Armour.
07:46 Thank you for watching.
07:47 Thank you to GQ for having me.
07:49 (upbeat music)