We sports fans frequently talk about cheating, and whether someone exposed as a cheater should be allowed in his sport's Hall of Fame. One member of the Baseball Hall of Fame not only openly admitted it, but probably wouldn't have gotten good enough to be considered without it.
Gaylord Jackson Perry was born on September 15, 1938 in Williamston, North Carolina. His older brother, Jim Perry, was a lefthanded pitcher in the major leagues from 1959 to 1975. Gaylord threw righthanded, and reached the major leagues with the San Francisco Giants on April 14, 1962, at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. He started, but did not get out of the 3rd inning. Nevertheless, Orlando Cepeda and Felipe Alou each hit 2 home runs, and the Giants beat the Cincinnati Reds, 13-6. (Willie Mays went 0-for-4, although he did draw a walk.)
Perry started out wearing Number 22, but would wear 36 for most of his career. He pitched in 13 games that season, and, while the Giants won the National League Pennant, he was not placed on the World Series roster.
That season, while taking batting practice and not doing well, manager Alvin Dark said, "There'll be a man on the Moon before he hits a home run." Was hit right? Yes, and no. On July 20, 1969, Perry hit a home run, after the Apollo 11 lunar module Eagle landed on the Moon, but before Neil Armstrong did the first Moonwalk.
Back to 1962: Perry wrote in his 1974 memoir Me and the Spitter that he was "the 11th man on an 11-man pitching staff," and that he needed an edge. Giant teammate Bob Shaw taught him how to throw the spitball. He first used it in an actual game in 1964, against the New York Mets, pitching 10 shutout innings. That got him a permanent spot in the Giants' rotation. He went 21-8 in 1966, and 23-13 in 1970, making the All-Star Game both times, finishing 2nd in the voting for the NL Cy Young Award in 1970.
He also wrote in the book that he chewed slippery elm bark to build up his saliva, but eventually stopped throwing the pitch in 1968, after MLB ruled pitchers could no longer touch their fingers to their mouths before touching the baseball. So he looked for other substances, like petroleum jelly, to doctor the baseball. He used various motions and routines to touch different parts of his jersey and body to get hitters to think he was applying a foreign substance, psyching them out, making them think they were facing an "unhittable" pitch.
As it turned out, the only postseason appearance of his career came in 1971, when the Giants won the National League Western Division title. He appeared in 2 games in the NL Championship Series, winning 1 and losing 1, and the Pittsburgh Pirates won.
After that season, the Giants traded Perry and backup infielder Frank Duffy to the Cleveland Indians for pitcher Sam McDowell. It was a rare trade that worked out well for the Indians, and one of many that didn't work out well for the Giants: McDowell's drinking had gotten out of control, and he did very little in San Francisco; while Perry, already 33 years old, got a second wind. For the Indians in 1972, Perry went 24-16, made the All-Star Game, and was awarded the American League's Cy Young Award. He went 21-13 in 1974, and was an All-Star again.
And yet, on June 13, 1975, the Indians traded him to the Texas Rangers, for pitchers Jim Bibby, Jackie Brown and Rick Waits, and the real reason the perennially-cash-poor Indians made the trade: $100,000. Despite winning 15 games for the Rangers in both 1976 and '77, the Rangers traded him to the San Diego Padres, for pitcher Dave Tomlin and $125,000.
At 39, the Rangers may have thought that Perry was on the downside of his career. Not yet: He went 21-6, and, on October 1, struck out Joe Simpson of the Los Angeles Dodgers, making him only the 3rd pitcher, after Walter Johnson and Bob Gibson, to strike out 3,000 batters in his career. He became the 1st Padre to win the Cy Young. That also made him the oldest pitcher to win it, and the 1st to win it in both Leagues. He made the All-Star Game again the next season.
He was probably thinking, "At my age, and with my accomplishments,
I shouldn't have to wear a uniform like this."
In 1980, the Rangers reacquired him, but on August 14, they traded him to the Yankees for pitcher Ken Clay and a player to be named later, who turned out to be Marv Thompson, who never made the major leagues. He pitched 10 games for the Yankees, going 4-4, and helped them win the AL Eastern Division title.
He signed with the Atlanta Braves in 1981, and the Seattle Mariners in 1982. On May 6, at the Kingdome in Seattle, at the age of 43, he pitched a complete game against the Yankees, allowing 3 runs on 9 hits, and the Mariners beat the Yankees, 7-3. It was the 300th win of Perry's career. When that game began, Walter Johnson was the only man with both 300 wins and 3,000 strikeouts.
That was the high point of his season. The low point came on August 23, when, for the 1st time in his career, in his 742nd career game, he was thrown out for having been caught "doctoring" the ball. He was given a 10-game suspension. A year later, having been released by the Mariners and picked up by the Kansas City Royals, he was once again thrown out of a game for an incident involving cheating: He tried to hide George Brett's illegally-pine-tarred bat in that infamous game against the Yankees.
He finished the 1983 season with the Royals, was released, and retired. He finished with 314 wins, 255 losses, a 3.11 ERA, a 117 ERA+, a 1.181 WHIP, and 3,554 strikeouts. In 1991, in his 3rd year of eligibility, despite complaints by many that he wouldn't have gotten as far as he did without cheating, and that he was a player who simply "played a long time and amassed a lot of stats," he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. With Jim's 215 wins and 1,576 strikeouts, the Perry brothers held the records for most career wins and strikeouts by brothers, although they were soon surpassed in both categories by Phil and Joe Niekro. (Jim, who survives Gaylord, was never accused of throwing an illegal pitch.)
When Limestone University, a Christian school in Gaffney, South Carolina, started its baseball program in 1988, in NCAA Division II, Perry was hired as its 1st head coach, serving for 3 years.
In the 1989 film Major League, the character of Eddie Harris, a Southern pitcher who admitted to using foreign substances on the ball as advancing age has robbed him of his fastball, is clearly based on Perry. In 1999, The Sporting News ranked him 97th on their list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players. The Giants retired his Number 36, dedicated a statue of him outside what's now named Oracle Park, invited him to throw out ceremonial first balls, and awarded him World Series rings for their 2010, '12 and '14 seasons even though he was no longer officially in their organization.
He was widowed in 1987, when his wife, the former Blanche Manning was killed in a car accident in Lake Wales, Florida. They had 3 daughters and a son, Jack, who was one of his pitchers at Limestone, and is the only pitcher the school has had to have pitched a no-hitter, doing so twice. Jack died of leukemia in 2017.
Gaylord Perry died today, December 1, 2022, at his home in Gaffney, of natural causes. He was 84 years old. He was a baseball lifer, and a character to the end.
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