Spitter: Baseball’s Notorious Gaylord Perry by David Vaught (review)

Reviewed by: Spitter: Baseball's Notorious Gaylord Perry by David Vaught Mark Armour David Vaught. Spitter: Baseball's Notorious Gaylord Perry. College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2023. 457 pp. Cloth, $38.00. Gaylord Perry was one of the best pitchers of the 1960s and 1970s, an extraordinarily durable hurler whose statistics (690 starts, 303 complete games, 314 wins, 53 shutouts) seem impossible to a modern fan. He was most famous, then and now, as the foremost practitioner of the "spitball" in the century after the pitch became illegal in 1920. To stay ahead of rule makers, umpires, and opponents, Perry spent most of his career devising, and then constantly improving, a detailed series of movements on the mound while preparing to deliver the baseball. When he pitched, he became his very own game within the game, as tens of thousands of observers, most importantly the batter, tried [End Page 134] to figure out if the upcoming pitch would be dry or wet, a choice that would have a profound effect on how it would travel. In his fascinating new book, David Vaught properly places the spitball—a word used to describe a pitched ball that has been lubricated, not necessarily with saliva—at the center of the baseball story. It is the pitch that made a struggling pitcher a star, that put the star at odds with the baseball establishment for many years, and that kept him in the game well beyond a pitcher's usual duration. While it is certainly possible that Perry could have had a career without the pitch, it seems unlikely, and at any rate he would have been less effective and less interesting. Perry grew up in or around Williamston, North Carolina, part of a tight-knit community of hard-working tenant farmers who lived at the mercy of the weather and the cyclical prices of their crops, mainly tobacco. Jim Perry, Gaylord's older brother by three years, enjoyed his own seventeen-year big league pitching career, but once he got into baseball generally left farming and his native region behind. Gaylord remained tied to his homeland and worked on farms, for better or worse, every off-season and after his career was over. The two Perry brothers were always linked as ballplayers, but they were never close, and they were often estranged. The biggest challenge for Vaught, and for the reader, is that Perry is not always an easy guy to like. Midcareer, Perry (with considerable help from Bob Sudyk) authored a memoir (Me and The Spitter: An Autobiographical Confession, New York: Saturday Review Press, 1974) in which Perry regales the reader with the devilish tale of a lovable country bumpkin staying one step ahead of the law. It's an awfully fun read, but the unvarnished version of the man deftly presented by Vaught is harder to warm up to. Vaught's book is about the man as much as it is about the ballplayer, so there is a lot of material on rural North Carolina, tobacco farming, and the local social politics, especially as it pertained to race. Perry lived around Black people his entire life; actual friendship between races in Williamston had its limits. Perry was an extremely dedicated, hard-working, often ruthless competitor who spent countless hours in the off-season on his craft to become and remain a great pitcher. But a baseball pitcher performs and is often judged apart from his teammates. Perry, a man who relied on a secret pitch that he was reluctant to discuss with anyone, was especially susceptible to thinking of himself as a solo artist. When he was breaking in with teammates like Willie Mays and Willie McCovey, he was appropriately grateful for their considerable help. But when he played on mediocre teams, which he did for most of his career, Perry could be disdainful of his teammates, especially defenders behind him. [End Page 135] One of the more fascinating episodes of Perry's baseball career came in late 1974 when the Cleveland Indians named Frank Robinson as the first Black manager in either the American or National Leagues. Perry was the best player on the Indians, the only star, and...

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