Baseball Cheating Scandals That Changed the Rules

There were no rules about licking your fingers.

There were no rules about even spitting on your hand.

So it was kind of the honor system.

And I made no offense to baseball players,

but the honor system doesn't work.

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The best way to turn a mediocre hitter

into a very good hitter is to tell them what's coming.

And really what they wanna know is,

is this pitch gonna move?

Is it a fastball or is it something else?

The 1899 Philadelphia Phillies,

first time that we are aware of

where a guy bought some binoculars,

got a seat out in center field,

zeroed in on the catcher, got the signs,

and then, you know, put a towel over the fence or something.

You can imagine the technology kept getting better.

They used rifle scopes, not the rifle, just the scope.

John McGraw, who was a famous manager up until the 1930s,

he was all for people figuring out how to steal signs.

He thought that was an important part of the game,

but you can't cheat.

Cheating is using electronics,

which at that time meant binoculars.

And what the Astros did apparently

was they signaled it with a trashcan bag.

Scherzer was asked about sign stealing.

He said, You know, as far as I'm concerned

we should just allow everyone to steal signs.

You know, that should be okay.

And it's part of the game,

and my job is to keep you from stealing my signs.

There's probably nothing that everyone thinks is cheating,

but if you handed out a poll to all your friends,

like, I think steroids would get a lot of checks.

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Amphetamines became a pretty big thing in baseball

certainly by the '70s,

and the way the players talked about it was usually like,

I went out drinking all night. I came in.

After one hour sleep, I took a greenie,

and now I was back to normal.

When steroids entered the picture

informally probably in the late '80s, it was different

because there was a sense from the fan

that the game was changing.

Jose Canseco was the first person that was accused,

really credibly accused, of taking steroids.

It was pure muscle, and baseball players were not that big.

Mark McGwire, who was huge,

broke the all-time home run record

for home runs in a season in baseball,

and that was a pretty sacrosanct record

that was pretty important to baseball fans.

And then Barry Bonds a couple years later

broke their record,

and then he ended up breaking the all-time record as well.

So it became this huge story

that baseball had no control over it,

but then Congress started to investigate

and were thinking about taking control.

So I think the two sides were sort of scared

into what ultimately happened, which is a random testing.

But I think there's a sense from most baseball observers

that the game has sort of corrected.

I think baseball has always had cheating.

The kinds of cheating is really based on circumstance.

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Pitchers discovered in the 1890s

and into the early part of the century

that if they added lubrication to the ball

you could actually get it to not spin as much,

and therefore it would drop.

All that stuff was made illegal during the 19-teens,

and then finally in the 1920s.

Gaylord Perry was, I think without question,

the most famous spitball pitcher.

They changed the rules a couple times during his career,

and one of the most important things

is they changed the rule

that you could no longer touch your fingers

to your mouth at all.

And what Perry said is that,

That meant I could no longer use the purest spitball,

which is just saliva.

He said he would put this like really hot balm on his body

and his neck and it would just make him sweat.

It was very unattractive.

I mean, his hair is just dripping wet.

There's a sort of fraternity amongst baseball pitchers,

so they were sharing stuff.

Even, you know, opponents, they would be sharing tubs

of a recipe that somebody had put together,

which is, you know, a little bit of pine tar

and a little bit of Spider Tack

and a little bit of something else.

Well, this stuff is getting more and more sticky,

and this is a product that I believe was first invented

to help weightlifters carry Atlas Stones.

None of this stuff ever changes

because the players are more devious

or more criminal or anything.

It changes 'cause people figure out how to do it.

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It's interesting, the bat and the ball are different

in a lot of ways.

The ball is sort of owned by the league, right?

The league produces a ball and they're all exactly the same.

But the bat, you bring your own.

You want it to be heavy

'cause when it hits the ball it'll go further,

and you want it to be light

because you wanna be able to swing in as hard as you can.

There are people that admitted after their career was over

that they used to pound nails in the bottom of the bat,

like right here.

So pine tar has always been used by batters

and it generally is not considered cheating.

There are rules about pine tar

in terms of how far up the bat it can go.

I think it's like 17 inches or something.

So I don't know, somewhere around here.

People want the batters to have grip.

However, it was a rule,

and there was a very famous play where George Brett,

who used to use a lot of pine tar

'cause he didn't wear batting gloves.

He was a great hitter,

probably one of the last great hitters

that didn't use batting gloves.

He used his bare hands.

He hit a big home run in Yankee Stadium,

but then Billy Martin, who was the manager

of the Yankees at the time, came out of the dugout

and grabbed the bat and made the umpires measure it,

and the umpires ruled that in fact

he had more pine tar on his bat.

It was higher up the bat than he was allowed to have it.

Brett kind of goes crazy.

I mean, it looks like he's gonna kill the ump.

It was like a loophole in the rules that the Yankees found.

The Royals protested the call,

which is something you could do,

and it went up to the league president,

the American League president,

and he overturned the umpires,

which very rarely has ever happened.

So they had to replay the end of the game.

That's an example of how every player that has lived

and loved this game with a different sense of morality,

and I'm not really convinced

that any of them are right or wrong.

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But the other thing people have done

over the years is cork a bat.

That is a generic term,

but really what it means is you drill a hole

into the bottom of the barrel, take the wood out,

and then replace it with something lighter,

styrofoam, rubber balls, cork, and then seal it up again.

And different players over the years

have been caught doing this.

And the only way you can catch someone doing this

is have the bat break

because you can't really look inside of a bat.

There have been games where a bat has broken

and cork has flown out, and that's how you know.

Like, oh my God, Sammy Sosa corks his bat.

And this happened to Sammy Sosa.

It happened to Albert Belle.

Keith Hernandez, who was a longtime player

for the Mets and Cardinals, among other teams,

he expressed the view

that the stuff that the pitcher does should be okay

because they're doing it in front of everyone.

You can see the ball. You can see their fingers.

Whereas what a batter does, he's doing it at home.

He's more of a mad scientist.

I'm Mark Armour. Thank you for watching.

Thank you to GQ for having me.

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