Burleigh Grimes: Baseball’s Last Legal Spitballer by Joe Niese (review)

The 1920s was one of the most significant periods in the history of professional baseball. The sport transitioned away from the dead-ball era into a time of legendary offensive production, and a new generation of star hitters brought unprecedented popularity to the game. At the same time, over the course of the decade, one dominant pitcher led all of baseball in wins, complete games, and innings pitched, while finishing second in strikeouts. This player was Burleigh Grimes, a fierce competitor who antagonized a panoply of baseball people and ex-wives throughout his long career. Yet Grimes remains a lesser-known figure in the pantheon of Hall of Famers, a situation that Joe Niese seeks to remedy in his detailed and engaging biography.

Burleigh Grimes was born in rural Wisconsin in 1893. His father, a farmer and sometimes day laborer, played for and managed the town baseball team, which competed with others throughout the region. Young Burleigh began by playing on the town’s juvenile team, then in high school, and eventually for his father’s club. He developed a reputation for his competitiveness and also his skill at throwing his specialty pitch: the spitball.

During the early 1900s, when Grimes came of age as a pitcher, the spitter was still legal at every level of amateur and professional baseball. Pitchers were permitted to lubricate their fingers before throwing the ball, resulting in pitches that had less backspin and dropped more unpredictably than conventional fastballs. After experimenting with several different substances, Grimes settled on a natural slippery elm bark that was readily available around his Wisconsin farm. He would use the same slimy lubricant for nearly thirty years on the pitcher’s mound.

In his late teens, Grimes embarked on a professional baseball career, playing for several minor-league teams before being called up by the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1916. He spent the next eighteen years pitching for seven majorleague clubs, including the Pirates, Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants, Chicago Cubs, and the St. Louis Cardinals. As a major leaguer, he amassed 270 victories and pitched 314 complete games, played with thirty-six Hall of Fame teammates, and appeared in four World Series, winning one in 1931 with St. Louis. He also hit over .300 twice in his career and hit 62 doubles, showing some batting skill as well.

Along the way, Grimes antagonized countless players, fans, umpires, managers, and front-office personnel with his style of play and general cantankerousness. He tyrannized friend and foe alike, throwing beanballs at opposing hitters and berating his own team for defensive miscues. Nearly every spring, he held out for contracts that would pay him more money, demanding $25,000 a season even at the height of the Great Depression. He got into fistfights with his managers and altercations with his teammates; and over the course of his life, he married five times, twice ending in contentious divorce proceedings. Grimes’s combative attitude persisted after his playing days ended, as he embarked on a mediocre managing career marred by numerous game ejections, tirades against his young players, and eventual firings. Eventually he found long-term employment as a major-league scout; and by the time he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1964, Grimes had mellowed considerably.

Joe Niese tells the story of Burleigh Grimes in marvelous detail, enriching the bare numbers with anecdotes culled from a wide range of published sources. One of the strongest sections of the book is the opening chapter on Grimes’s upbringing in Clear Lake, Wisconsin. Niese provides tremendous insight into how deeply baseball was woven into the fabric of midwestern farm life at the dawn of the twentieth century, when players traveled to town games by horse and buggy and spent the off-season working as lumberjacks, farmers, or in burgeoning industrial jobs. He also takes pains throughout the book to craft an honest portrayal of Burleigh Grimes as he truly was, warts and all. Niese...