Posted on: Friday, June 6, 2003

By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

"Greaseball, greaseball, greaseball, that's all I throw him (Rod Carew), and he still hits them. He's the only player in baseball who consistently hits my grease. He sees the ball so well, I guess he can pick out the dry side."
—Hall of Fame pitcher Gaylord Perry in the "Baseball Almanac."

Welcome, Sammy Sosa, step right up and prepare to take your place among some of the notables in baseball lore.

The Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y.?

Well, you'll probably make it there someday, too.

But for the moment we're talking about the "other" hall — the Hall of Shame — the one baseball doesn't talk about much. Not officially, anyway.

And that's too bad because the cast of characters is no less interesting and the exploits that got them there no less colorful. Guys who played with doctored bats, balls and gloves. Players who all attempted to get an edge but who, like you, also got nabbed.

That's the thing, if baseball was the national pastime, then the game within the game has often been in finding ways to get around, though and over the rules. Your predecessors could have taught Enron a thing or two. Pitcher Gaylord Perry wrote a book, "Me and My Spitter" — and it never kept him out of Cooperstown or a place in fans' hearts.

Officially, baseball is — wink, wink — shocked by such goings-on, of course. But only when some guy's cork-enhanced bat explodes on national TV or the sandpaper and emery boards fall out of a pitcher's glove in front of 30,000 people.

You might be surprised to find out how much company you have. They could assemble an entire wing dedicated to those played with bats improved through carpentry. If he could have hit a curveball, what a career Bob Villa might have had.

As it is we'll be hard-pressed to wedge you in somewhere among Amos Otis, Wilton Guerrero, Albert Belle and Norm Cash, predecessors who played with bats packed with all manner of stuff that Louisville Slugger never imagined.

And, those are just the hitters. The pitchers could have their own wing. Joe Niekro was found to be as well supplied as a manicurist's shop when umpires searched him in 1987. In the 1980s the reputation of Houston's pitching staff was such that they were sometimes greeted on the road by fans rubbing sheets of sandpaper together.

Legend has it Yankees' owner George Steinbrenner once demanded his manager turn in the Angels' Don Sutton for doctoring baseballs until reminded that it was New York's own pitcher that day, Tommy John, who was reputed to have taught Sutton the skill.

Welcome to baseball's Hall of Shame, Sammy, you will be among friends.