Hartford Courant from Hartford, Connecticut • Page 130

r' "7 284 games, and Rod Carew, who batted 28 over 19 seasons, will be Baseball Hall ot Fame with 314-game winner GaylordPerry. chose to live outside the law before a record Shea Stadium crowd of 57,037. The gangly farm boy had a routine curveball and an ordinary fastball. He was the 11th pitcher on an 11-man pitching staff. He had been working on the spitter for a year but wasn't yet certain it would behave itself in a game.

After Gaylord was greeted by two quick Mets hits, catcher Tom Haller came running to the mound. "You don't have much," said Haller. "It's time to start throwing that new pitch you've beenworkin'on." Gaylord suddenly felt a siege of stage fright He was 25 years old. He had spent most of his first six seasons in the minors, and the way he was pitching, it looked like he was headed back there. He thought about his young family and mama and daddy struggling on the farm.

He thought of spitballing teammate Bob Shaw's prophetic words: "We're not high school boys anymore. We've got to provide for our families. Hitters are taking the bread out of our mouths." To Gaylord, son of a sharecropper, bread was always an issue. He and his brother, Jim, already an established major league pitcher, had grown up sleeping in the same bed and sharing the same tub of bath water on Saturday nights. They didn't know indoor plumbing until they went to high school One of the most important moments in family history was the electrification of the Perry tenant farm when Gaylord was 12.

The choice was clear that night in Shea Stadium: Go outside the law or go back down to the farm. With his new spitter splashing in nailer's mit, Gaylord pitched 10 scoreless innings in an 8-6 San Francisco victory. He struck out three of the last four Mets he faced. He finished the season with 12 victories as a starting pitcher, and as a wanted man. The law would be on his trail for the rest of his career.

Those were the good old days for the wet-'em-up boys. Pitchers were allowed to wet their fingers so long as they wiped them dry on their uniforms. It was license to steal. Wetting his first and second fingers and faking the dry moves, he won 21 games in 1966. Scrupulous Gaylord learned to use the rosin bag as a decoy.

He'd bounce the dusty pouch all around his pitching hand, while the wet fingers never felt a touch of dry rosin. Gaylord perfected this deft maneuver with daughter Amy's bean bag. Sometimes, to load up, he'd wet the back of his thumbnail and his first two fingers with a legal lick, then wipe dry only his fingers on his shirt Then, while getting his sign from the catcher, he'd flick those two fingers over the back of his thumb to get the juice he needed for his super pitch. Sucking Thayer's Slippery Elm tablets kept the saliva on high octane. A 1968 rule change "a pitcher shall not bring his pitching hand in contact with his mouth" ended fin-ger-lickin'-good pitching forev- er.

In effect, the spitball era was dead and the greaseball era was born. Gaylord had to switch to a lubricant learn how to hide it and apply it to the balL He worked on six decoys fingers to hat; hair, ear, neck, wrist, and to some part of his uniform before delivery. He practiced before a -mirror for hours all that winter. That first greasy season, he had gobs of goo on his cap, pants, shirt, and underneath the -tongue of his shoe. It was shamefully messy.

After striking out Cincinnati's Pete Rose with his new greaser, Rose yelled, "Hey, Perry, where do you keep your dipstick?" "Whaddaya mean?" Gaylord called back. "How else will you know when your cap needs an oil change?" Professional ballplayers view their sport as a poker game full of Buckers waiting to be taken. While the victimized scream epithets when they get snookered, they alway respect the snookerer. As long as there has been baseball, the cards have been marked, decks have been stacked, and cheaters have won. As umpires became more nosy and managerial complaints increased, however, Gaylord had to become even more resourceful.

The only safe J6 place to store a lubricant was on sweaty, exposed skin, where it could be wiped away in an instant By the time a manager came out of the dugout to complain about his dipsy-doodles, and an umpire walked to the mound to inspect him for slicky substances, Gaylord could easily make himself legal Nothing was ever found because all the moisture he needed to make the ball act strangely was enough to turn a page in this magazine. Ferguson Jenkins, left, who won inducted today into the National SPITTING IMAGES Continued from page 10 before delivery. Secrecy was always a part of his life, because today's teammate becomes tomorrow's nent the moment he is traded. He was suspicious and wary, like most who live outside the law. He trusted but the few he had to trust his team trainer, the clubhouse boy, his catchers, and, last and least of all, me I will always remember that dewy morning in spring training just after the sun cleared the horizon above deserted Hi Cor-bett Field in Tucson, Ariz.

I stood behind Cleveland Indians catcher Ray Fosse, like an umpire, as Gaylord demonstrated the illegal spitter, the grease-ball, and all the rest It was a flying circus. They dipped and dived crazily over the plate one by one as Gaylord identified each UFO. It was like having Willie The Actor" Sutton showing off his burglary tools. Gaylord was a self-made rascal who was shown the spitter at age 10 by hometown hero Slim Gardner down in Farm life, a village just outside William-ston, N.C. Slim and Gaylord's daddy, Evan, starred on the Williamston town team.

Fifteen Gaylord's covert substances were stored, whispered in his ear, "Gaylord, you can tell me. Where do you get it?" "Mr. President," he said, "there are some things you just can't tell the people for their own good." Nixon shook with laughter. If Gaylord had been in charge of the Watergate burglary, Nixon might still be in the White House. "I reckon I tried everything on the old apple but salt and pepper and chocolate sauce top-pin'," he admitted in the book.

We went on to -write, "Of course, I'm reformed now. I'm a pure law-abiding citizen." After a sullied past, he was coming clean. Bowie Kuhn, then commissioner of baseball, could have viewed his confession "not in the best interests of baseball" and banished him from the game forever. Instead, Kuhn said he loved the book. Gaylord's literary admissions, however, had to be handled as elusively as the spitter itself.

He added this caveat "If not my fault if a cloud of suspicion still hangs over my head. Some people have naturally suspicious natures." Gaylord's road to immorality and immortality began May 31, 1964 In the 13th inning of a game that would last 23 innings, Gaylord years later, with the help of his fellow conspiratorsoftheoccult, San Francisco Giants minor league pitching coach Frank Shellenback and teammate Bob Shaw, Gaylord learned how to load the spitter, grip it, and launch it into the strike zone. He took this black art to the highest level, game after game, before the suspicious eyes of 25 opposing players, first and third base coaches, a manager, four umpires, and hidden telescopic cameras like the ones that catch shoplifters. He was the stealth bomber of his day. When Gaylord graduated to the greaseball, frustrated umpires frisked him unmercifully.

But they never could find his oily supply or catch him giving the ball a lube job, even after he told everyone how he did it in our 1974 book. His sleight-of-hand artistry made him one of the most entertaining men on the mound in the last half-century, if not all time. He brought fun and intrigue to the art of pitching, an occupation otherwise monotonously repetitious and, for the most part, only statistically and clinically appreciated. Gaylord was Broadway box office. Everyone wanted to know how he loaded up.

Mystery forever surrounded him. In a reception line during a visit to the White House, President Nixon, wondering where Bob Sudyk is a staff writer for 12 The Courant and Northeast.