The No Mas Top Ten Greasiest Greasers

Having taken a hard line on steroids (MUCH more of a hard line in track and field than in baseball, but whatever) I know that this makes me a hypocrite, but I just don’t give that much of a shit about pitchers doctoring balls on the mound. I know it’s cheating, and cheating is cheating, but when I think of pitchers doctoring the ball, I immediately think of Gaylord Perry in the old Padres uniform, and I just start laughing. Combine that with the fact that suddenly, in one of the most remarkable career salvations I’ve literally EVER seen, Kenny Rogers seems like the coolest motherfucker on earth, and his little pine-tar-on-the-hand (or as he calls it “dirt”) incident last night just makes me dig him more. He's a cheater, he's a greaser... he's a gambler.

With that in mind, here’s the No Mas list of baseball’s all-time greatest Ball Doctors, in descending order:

10. Nels Potter – On July 20, 1944, pitching for the Browns against the Yankees, he became the first pitcher ever to earn himself a suspension from baseball for throwing the spitter. The umpire warned him about wetting his fingers. He did it anyway. Damn the torpedos. He got tossed and hit with a ten-game suspension.

9. Lew Burdette – Never admitted, but was widely known to have thrown one of the greatest spitters of all time. He would say to anyone who brought it up, “no, I never throw a spitter, but since you brought it up let me show you how to throw one.”

8. Brian Moehler – Caught with sandpaper taped to his thumb while pitching for the Devil Rays in 1999. Claimed it was dirt. What shall now be known as The Kenny Rogers Defense.

7. Kevin Gross – August 10, 1987, a day before the teenage Large’s 17th birthday, and Large and Large’s mom are at the Vet for a Phils-Cubs showdown. Kevin Gross on the mound for the Fightins. Around the fourth inning, the ump walks out to the mound and says something to Gross, and Gross responds by throwing his hands out as if to say, “who, me?” When he does that, he also throws something onto the infield grass. It's so obvious that even up in the 300 level, my mom and I are saying, “what did he just throw on the grass?” It was a move worthy of some cranked-out hick on Cops trying to ditch his meth stash. In this case, the stash was sandpaper, and K. Gross rode the pines for a ten-day stint.

6. Don Sutton – Suspended ten games in 1978 for ball-defacement. A known sandpaper artist. Once left a note in his glove for umpires – “you’re getting warm but it’s not here.”

5. Rick Honeycutt – This is a good one. He taped a thumbtack to his finger to cut the ball while pitching for the Mariners against the Royals in 1980. Willie Wilson saw the tack from second base and alerted umpires. Meanwhile, Honeycutt, who later claimed he didn't even know what to do with the tack in the first place, had managed to use it primarily to accidentally cut open his forehead while wiping away sweat. Gaylord Perry, he weren't. He got a ten-game vacation and a fine.

4. Preacher Roe – Everybody knew that wily Brooklyn Bum Preacher Roe threw a wicked spitball, and after he retired, he came clean about it in a 1955 SI article titled, “The Outlawed Spitball Was My Money Pitch.”

3. Whitey Ford – Whitey was known to cut the ball with his wedding ring, which seems like a perfectly good use for an otherwise useless piece of jewelry. He also loved to doctor the ball with mud, and a substance he called gunk, which was equal parts resin, turpentine and baby oil, and which Yogi Berra once legendarily mistook for deodorant.

2. Joe Niekro – Second only to The (Gay)Lord as the game’s most notorious ball doctor. When he was caught with an emery board AND a piece of sandpaper on the mound in a 1987 game, he claimed that as a knuckleballer he needed the emery board to keep his nails filed, and that he used the sandpaper for small blisters. He was awarded a ten-game bench sentence to better pursue his manacurial vigilance.

1. Gaylord Perry – The Thrilla, the Killa, the King of Them All. Perry is proof that no one really cares about ball-doctoring, because he never even pretended that he didn’t throw a spitter, and holms is in the Hall anyway. He was known as Gaylord the Greaser, he approached Vaseline about an endorsement deal, and he titled his autobiography “Me and the Spitter.” Over the years he was searched countless times on the mound but never nailed for ball-doctoring until his 20th season, 1982, when he was ejected while on the mound for the Mariners. He was one of the truly great characters of the game, the first pitcher ever to win the Cy Young award in both leagues, and one funny, and funny-looking, son-of-a-bitch. Look at him, the freakin James Bond of slippery baseballs. God bless the Gaylord, a true No Mas Hall-of-Famer.