The spitter starts sliding out of baseball
Retelling the 1920 Indians story
By Dave Scott
Baseball has changed the way it introduces reforms. Even the simplest changes are leaked to the press, hinted in “trial balloons” by the commissioner and even tested out in an independent league. If we ever see hardball this season, the experiment with automated ball/strike calls will resume in the Atlantic League, which includes players who aspire to higher things but aren’t there yet and probably never will be.
Things were different in 1920. When American League President Ban Johnson came to Cleveland and announced a coming ban on spitballs, he only included the “What,” not the “Why.” Yes, the pitch would be banned, but 10 AL players would be granted exceptions for the rest of their careers. The Plain Dealer account of his announcement made no mention of Spanish Flu that only a year or two earlier had killed 50 million people worldwide. We also might imagine that some people, particularly women, might not have been so happy at acquiring a baseball souvenir if they also knew it had an ample amount of saliva on one side to make it fly erratically, misleading batters.
Nope, Johnson mentioned none of that, at least not in the newspaper in March of 1920. Why? Perhaps because of the Cheerios factor. That’s a newspaper term often heard and applied on copy desks when judging if a particular passage should be printed or cut. If it makes you gag on breakfast, cut it out. More papers in 1920 were PMs, but I think the same general idea applied no matter what meal we might gag on.
Misleading euphemisms like “shiner” and “emery” apparently were good enough to allay the sanitation concerns of many ballplayers. I could find no record of anyone thinking it more than a coincidence that Frank Corridon, who proudly claimed to have invented the spitball, came down with “grippe” after playing in cold weather and then missed an entire season fighting pneumonia. Gotta be bad luck, right?
Many complaints about the pitch focused on competitive imbalance before sanitary concerns. Charles Comiskey, owner of the Chicago White Sox, was the source of the headline “COMMY HAS SCHEME TO HINDER FREAK HURLERS.”
“Commy” didn’t have the connotation it would later.
Opponents of the spitball noted that these pitches were inhibiting batters in what had become known as the Deadball Era. Anyone who played the game as a child on a rainy day could easily imagine why a ball made soggy with spit might cramp the style of any hitter, even Home Run Baker.
It was only after those competitive-balance arguments came forward that sanitary issues were cited, if at all. Perhaps the sensitivities of the time prevented direct discussion of what was obvious to everyone.
Spitting remains a slippery issue for baseball. I’ve often wondered if modern players see the TV camera’s red light come on as a cue to let the phlegm fly for millions of television viewers. The advertisers must love that.
Back to the state of baseball 100 years ago. In addition to public safety and competitive balance, we must assume leaders of the game also knew any limits on spitting the would cramp the earning power of certain players who had become proficient at loading up the ball. For that reason, the league banned the spitter for the 1920 season but granted certain pitchers exemptions so as not to cramp their earning power. Johnson came to Cleveland to announce that two of the Indians’ stars, Stan Coveleski and Ray Caldwell, would be allowed to continue “doctoring” the ball.
Coveleski went on to win 24 games in 1920. Caldwell won 20.
It worked: 1920 is recognized as the beginning of the Live Ball Era.
Following the 1920 season, baseball made the ban permanent with these major league pitchers exempted. Follow the links to their Baseball Reference pages.
National League:
American League:
Ray Fisher would have been exempted had he not already been banned from the game as a result of a contract dispute.
Sources:
Cleveland Plain Dealer
Baseball Reference
https://sabr.org/latest/pomrenke-shellenback-and-spitter
https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/0218c3e1
https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Spitball
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-pandemic-h1n1.html
Dave Scott was a newspaper writer and editor for 40 years. He is a lifelong baseball fan and a member of the Society for American Baseball Research for decades, although SABR records might indicate I skipped my dues on occasion! DavidAScott@gmail.com
