Joe Niekro “Do I Look Like a Doctor?”
In 1989, I saw my first R-rated movie — “Major League” — and it delivered in every possible way. Not only was it beyond thrilling to watch the scrappy Cleveland Indians [sic] win the division on a profoundly risky ninth-inning squeeze bunt by a hobbled catcher, but, more importantly, it hit every single comedic note that an eleven year old hoped for. Home runs. F-bombs. Cool haircuts. Near nudity. There were one-liners so enduring that any mid-forties American male can still rattle them off thirty-five years later (“Up your butt, Jobu”; “Just a bit outside”; “Give ‘em the heater.”). For certain men of a certain age, it’s no stretch to suggest that “Major League” is one of the foundational texts of the late twentieth century.
The characters in “Major League” are perfect — platonic archetypes of assorted baseball stereotypes, easily digestible to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the game. There’s Willie Mays Hayes [Wesley Snipes], the flashy speedster with minimal pop in his bat. There’s Jake Taylor [Tom Berenger], the washed-up but wisened catcher who might just have one last season in his knees. There’s Ricky Vaughn [Charlie Sheen], the fireball pitcher who lacks both physical and mental control. And, of course, there’s Eddie Harris [Chelcie Ross], the wily veteran pitcher searching for any angle to stay in the big leagues.
In the film’s opening sequence, while the players are changing in their spring training locker room, the brooding rookie, Vaughn, notices a slimy sheen coating on the chest of aging starter, Harris. Vaughn becomes curious:
VAUGHN
What is that stuff?
HARRIS
(pointing to them in order)
Crisco, Bardahl, Vagisil. Any one of 'em will give you another 2-3 inches drop on your curve ball.
Course if it's cold and I got a shirt on under my jersey, I just rub a little jalapeno inside my nose and get it runnin'. I need to load up the ball a little, I just wipe my nose.
VAUGHN
You put snot on the ball?
HARRIS
At my age, you put anything you can find on it. I haven't got an arm like yours.
Eddie Harris is a composite of multiple prominent junkball pitchers from the 1970s and 80s, notably Gaylord Perry, who applied copious amounts of Vaseline to his face to aid his breaking balls. But, if Perry is the obvious and famous reference, Joe Niekro, younger brother to Hall of Fame knuckle-scuffer Phil Niekro, is the more accurate one. Perry was a Cy Young winner. Niekro was a crafty, innings-eater turned hanger on. No one out-Harris’d Eddie Harris like Joe Niekro.
He was, of course, so much more. Alongside his more famous brother, Joe Niekro is still one of the most accomplished knuckleballer pitchers in the history of the game. For over twenty-two seasons, from 1967 until 1988, Niekro (mostly) confounded hitters and catchers with an erratically moving, zero-spin, slow-pitch thrown from his fingertips. Without being reliant on the sheer explosiveness that his younger peers depended on, Niekro was able to pitch until he was 43 years old. And during that time, he notched 221 wins, tallied over 1,700 strikeouts and maintained a very respectable 3.59 ERA. While he never reached the heights of his more successful brother, Joe Niekro had an exceptional major league career by any standard.
But here’s the thing about Niekro: it was a fairly open secret that he was cheating while doing it. As then Angels’ manager, Gene Mauch, one commented: “Nobody ever suspected Joe Niekro (of scuffing the ball),” he said. "Everybody always knew it.” Niekro cheated by either doctoring the ball or using foreign substances to improve his otherwise tenuous grip. Like Eddie Harris’s chest smear of Vagisil, Niekro would use whatever he could find to get the extra movement on his knuckleball or other off speed pitches. And it wasn’t subtle. Longtime umpire Steve Palermo concurred. “The guy was so blatant. It was like a guy walking down the street carrying a bottle of booze during Prohibition.”
This all came to a head on August 3, 1987, when Niekro was on the road pitching for the Twins against the California Angels. It was a the bottom of the fourth inning in a 2-2 game. After throwing a strike against Brian Downing, home-plate umpire Tim Tschida asked to inspect the ball. Niekro — a man whose job it is to throw the ball accurately — then wildly chucks the ball into the dirt in the first of several blatant moves to conceal what is quickly becoming obvious to everyone. Tschida then asks a petulant Niekro to hand over his glove so he can inspect it for foreign substances. With Twins’ manager Tom Kelly sprinting out from the dugout and screaming like an overmatched defense attorney, Niekro starts cleaning out his pockets. In front of 33,983 in attendance at Angels Stadium — and hundreds of thousands watching at home — Niekro tries to surreptitiously dispose of an emery board hidden in his back pocket by tossing it three feet away from him. In the history of crime, it is perhaps the most feeble attempt ever to distance oneself from culpability. Tschida immediately spots the emery board — as well as the sandpaper glued his hand and touched up to look like flesh — and tosses Niekro from the game. As Mauch commented later: “Those balls weren’t roughed up. Those balls were borderline mutilated.” Major League Baseball summarily suspended him for ten games for the incident.
Some celebrity followed Niekro on account of the sheer audacity of his behavior. During his suspension, he went on Letterman’s “Late Show” carrying an electric sander, a manicure kit and a tub of Vaseline. Even then, Niekro skirted fully admitting he altered the baseballs. With comedic incredulity, Letterman asked “you are telling me that you never doctored the baseball?” To which, Niekro smiled and retorted, “Do I look like a doctor?” He then—while half proclaiming his innocence and presaging OJ’s literary career—went on to show the national audience how one does doctor a baseball. As for the emery board, Niekro had a simple explanation: “being a knuckleball pitcher, I sometimes have to file my nails between innings. So I carry an emery board with me to the mound.”
The question, of course, is “why?” Assuming there’s actual efficacy in doctoring the ball, there is of course, a very easy answer: it allowed him to stay in the big leagues and pitch until he was nearing his mid-forties.
The answer becomes clearer — at least in this author’s view — when you revisit Eddie Harris’s line to Ricky Vaughn when explaining his own cheating: “I don’t have an arm like yours.” Perhaps Harris’s and Niekro’s decision to doctor the baseball isn’t all that dissimilar to choices that all people — athletes, accountants, housewives — make as they enter their forties. What are they willing to doctor to stay young? In some sense, Niekro — despite his graying hair that made him look more like 62 than 42 — was using the emery board and sandpaper to pass as a younger man. It wasn’t his steroids; it was his Propecia. Some face lifts or botox injections or toupees are just as obvious to people in the stands as Niekro’s tossing the emery board out of his pocket. And to some degree, it makes his refusal to fully own his obvious cheating more empathetic. He wasn’t just caught altering the baseball, he was caught trying to alter time.
We all watch people around us become Joe Niekro. Like the major leaguers who knew Joe was playing around with the balls to remain young, we oddly ignore mild transgressions against nature in some sort of communal empathy towards our shared fight against aging. It’s only when it becomes too transgressive — when emery boards go flying or the third face lift becomes too difficult to look at — that we then start doling out suspensions, social or otherwise. When you are Rudy Giuliani with hair paint dripping down your sweaty temples, it’s time for our collective Tim Tschida to start moseying up to the mound.
We all eventually become Joe Niekro on the mound. Once twenty-two and suddenly forty-two. We all have to make decisions about whether we are ready to stop pitching, to stop pretending that our bodies are no different than they were when first emerging from adolescence. We can embrace aging and watch from the stands. Or we can start rubbing Vagisil on our chests like Eddie Harris or hiding sandpaper in our palms like Niekro. My strong suspicion is that a lot of well being for the second-half of our life hinges on that choice. Fortunately, unlike for Niekro, there isn’t a home plate umpire checking us to see what we are hiding.
by Kevin Blake