Gaylord Perry

August 16, 1980. A Saturday night at Yankee Stadium, and the pitcher on the mound for the New York Yankees was 41 years old, already owned two Cy Young Awards from two different leagues, and had spent nearly two decades making American League and National League hitters alike wonder exactly what he'd put on the baseball. Gaylord Perry's Yankees career lasted exactly one summer. It's still one of the strangest, most star-studded footnotes in the encyclopedia.

A Trade Deadline Rental With a Cooperstown Resume

By August 1980, Perry had already won 24 games and the AL Cy Young for a fifth-place Cleveland team in 1972, then done it again in the National League with San Diego in 1978, becoming the first pitcher in history to win the award in both leagues. He'd thrown a no-hitter against Bob Gibson. He'd written a memoir confessing, cheerfully, to doctoring baseballs with just about everything except salt and pepper and chocolate sauce. What he hadn't done, in eighteen full big-league seasons split between the Giants, Indians, Rangers, and Padres, was pitch in the Bronx.

That changed on August 14, 1980, when the Yankees sent pitcher Ken Clay and a player to be named later (minor leaguer Marv Thompson, who never appeared in a big-league game) to Texas for Perry. The Yankees were locked in an AL East race and wanted a durable veteran to round out a rotation behind Ron Guidry and Tommy John. Perry, at that point 6-9 with a 3.43 ERA in 24 starts for the Rangers, fit the job description. He was two years from his 300th win. He wasn't, by August of 1980, anyone's idea of an ace anymore. He was a name -- and a reputation that walked in ahead of him.

Yankees Career

Perry made his Yankees debut two days after the trade, starting against the defending American League champion Baltimore Orioles. The reputation preceded him everywhere he went by 1980, and the Bronx was no exception -- Pinstripe Alley later reported that the club had even trained a camera on him during one home start, hoping to catch on film what umpires around the league had spent eighteen years failing to prove in person. Nobody ever did. In more than 5,100 career innings, Perry was ejected for doctoring a baseball exactly once, and it happened two years later in a different uniform entirely.

The results were unremarkable -- a 4-4 record and a 4.44 ERA across ten appearances, eight of them starts, down the stretch of a pennant race. The 1980 Yankees won the AL East anyway, finishing 103-59, three games ahead of Baltimore. Perry didn't pitch in the ALCS. Kansas City swept New York in three straight, George Brett's three-run homer off Rich Gossage in Game 3 closing the door, and manager Dick Howser was pushed out six weeks later, on November 21, despite the 103 wins. Perry became a free agent on October 23, 1980, and the Yankees didn't bring him back. His entire tenure in pinstripes had lasted ten games and ten weeks.

The Spitter, the Legend, and a Strange Bit of Symmetry

Perry's reputation was never really about any single pitch. He'd learned the spitball from a bullpen mate with the Giants in the 1960s, then spent the rest of his career letting hitters believe he was still throwing it whether he was or not -- touching his cap, his belt, his collar, making a slow show of it on the mound before firing a perfectly legal fastball. It worked because nobody could ever prove otherwise, and because Perry, unlike most players accused of cheating, seemed to enjoy the accusation as much as the pitch itself.

Two years after he left the Bronx, that same reputation and that same right arm caught up with baseball history in an odd way. Pitching for Seattle on May 6, 1982, Perry threw a complete game to become the 15th pitcher in major-league history to reach 300 career wins -- the first to do it since Early Wynn in 1963. The team he beat for win number 300 was the Yankees, the same club that had rented him for a single summer two Augusts earlier.

A Farm Kid Who Outlasted Everyone

Perry was born in Williamston, North Carolina, in 1938, the son of a tenant farmer who grew tobacco, peanuts, corn, and soybeans. His older brother Jim Perry made the majors too, and won his own Cy Young Award with Minnesota in 1970 -- the Perrys remain the only brothers in baseball history to each win one, and they were briefly teammates in Cleveland in 1974 and 1975. Gaylord outlasted almost everyone: 22 seasons, eight teams, a Bronx stopover so brief it barely registers next to the rest of it. He retired in 1983 with 314 wins, a 3.11 ERA, and a Hall of Fame case nobody could keep off a ballot even while half the league insisted he'd been getting away with something for two decades. He went home to North Carolina afterward and ran a farm, several hundred acres of it, the same crops his father had grown before any scout ever noticed the arm.

Perry's plaque in Cooperstown doesn't mention the Yankees at all, and it barely needs to -- ten games in the Bronx were a rounding error against 22 seasons and 314 wins everywhere else. But for one hot stretch of August and September in 1980, the most notorious alleged cheat in baseball wore pinstripes, and nobody, not even the guy with a camera on him, ever caught him doing anything but pitching.