Taking On Pine Tar Rule Recalls Sticky Tradition

Major League Baseball has been doing the hokey pokey with pitchers and their sleight of hand for more than 100 years.

Brendan Donnelly, the Angel reliever who was thrown out of a June 14 game for having pine tar on his glove, is merely the latest to be caught red-handed.

The Angels’ response is what’s different. They aren’t trying to dance around the rule, they’re trying to address it, asking Major League Baseball to reconsider whether pine tar should be illegal for pitchers. That invokes years of the tradition.

Take the spitball, for instance. The spitter was a legal pitch through the 1919 season. And its victims sometimes responded in kind. According to Gabriel Schechter, a researcher at the Baseball Hall of Fame and author of “Unhittable! Baseball’s Greatest Pitching Seasons,” teams facing known spitball pitchers sometimes would apply manure to the ball to keep them from licking it.

Addressing a perceived imbalance favoring pitchers over hitters, spitballs were outlawed beginning in 1920. Sort of.

It was deemed unfair to deprive known spitball pitchers of their best pitch, so each team was allowed to register two spitballers to be grandfathered out of the rule.

Bad call. That season, Cleveland’s Ray Chapman was beaned by New York Yankee pitcher Carl Mays and died the next day. Mays, who was not even a member of the grandfathered class, was widely accused of having thrown a spitter.

The last legal spitball pitcher was Burleigh Grimes of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who retired after the 1934 season.

Even so, balls enhanced by foreign substances have remained in the game. Besides spit, sweat began to make the occasional appearance.

According to Schechter, the Yankees’ wily Whitey Ford would reach for the rosin bag -- introduced in the mid-1920s to enable pitchers to get a better grip on the ball -- and squeeze the ball against it, his sweat helping the rosin to stick to the ball. A subsequent rule remedied that, and today pitchers are allowed to apply rosin only to a bare hand.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, it’s not the moisture on a dewy ball that makes for its signature dive, it’s throwing mechanics. Properly placed, moisture enables the index and middle fingers to slide off the ball so that the thumb exerts primary influence, reducing backspin.

In 1955, believing that the rules had evolved to tip the balance unfairly toward batters, Commissioner Ford Frick floated the idea of restoring the spitter, not that it was extinct, or even endangered.

Then-Dodger shortstop Pee Wee Reese asked the New York Times’ Arthur Daley, “Restore the spitter? When did they stop throwing it?”

Frick’s proposal went to an official vote of the rules committee in 1961. It was tough to prove infractions, and the inability to enforce the ban was embarrassing to the league, according to the Society for American Baseball Research, and Frick moved with a substantial group of fellow travelers, including players, managers, umpires and league honchos. The committee, however, voted, 8-1, to retain the dry game.

As if. In 1966 Red Smith wrote, “Anyone who believes the spitball is a thing of the past probably thinks America was dry from 1920 to 1933.... Years after one noble experiment was abandoned as unworkable, baseball still theoretically enforces its own version of Prohibition.”

In a 22-year career, Gaylord Perry, a proficient practitioner, was busted exactly once for throwing a spitter. But he was so good at both its literal and metaphorical spin that in 1971, when a TV reporter asked his 5-year-old daughter, “Does your daddy throw a grease ball?” she replied, “It’s a hard slider.”

Pine tar’s place in pop culture is reflected in the Tar Heels of North Carolina, whose moniker invokes a history of messy pine tree cultivation, and in the presidential campaign of 1988, when a David Letterman list of Top 10 Ways Bush Could Still Blow It included No. 7: “Illegal amounts of pine tar discovered on Barbara.”

That shot referred to a controversy in the National League championship series that year, when Jay Howell of the Dodgers was tossed from Game 3 against the Mets and punished for having pine tar on his glove. (In a delicious karmic convergence, one of the Dodgers that year was catcher Mike Scioscia, current manager of the Angels -- and Donnelly.)

If the dancing motion of a doctored ball throws off a batter’s timing, pine tar on the ball is a good thing if he is able to hit it. Pine tar on the ball reduces friction -- or drag -- in flight.

Said Alan Nathan, professor of physics at the University of Illinois, who conducts research in the physics of baseball, “Anything that ... introduces turbulence in the flow of air [around the ball] allows the air to mix better with the undisturbed air. And that reduces friction.”

Pine tar -- or mud, or scuff marks or anything that alters the smooth surface of the ball, including the stitches -- reduces drag the way dimples reduce drag on a golf ball.

So whatever sentence is imposed on a sticky-fingered pitcher, a hitter might find justice knowing that the laws of nature are written by a higher court.

Ellen Alperstein is an editor with the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service and creator of the former sports-culture column “Who’s on First?” for America West magazine.