As part of
Pacific Standard's cheaters' week, Tomas Rios looks at some of the strange tales of
cheating in baseball:
Circa 1880s: Future Hall of Fame pitcher James Francis “Pud”
Galvin becomes baseball’s first confirmed user of performance-enhancing
drugs. His cocktail of choice was the Brown-Séquard elixir, a concoction
of testicles harvested from dogs, guinea pigs, and, maybe, monkeys. The
harvester was Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, an elderly physiologist
and neurologist who claimed hypodermic injections of his
elixir-prolonged human life. Galvin was praised for his forward-thinking
ways in an 1889 edition of the Washington Post and died at the age of 45.
another favorite:
1936-Present: Three consecutive generations of the Bossard
family have presided over Comiskey Park, home stadium of the Chicago
White Sox. Emil Bossard came first in 1935 and used his encyclopaedic
knowledge of the stadium to begin what would become the family business.
His greatest hits include using scoreboard signals to tip off the visiting team’s pitches and moving the stadium’s portable outfield fences back to stifle opposing home run hitters.
Next up was Gene, who supposedly invented the frozen baseball trick
and routinely water-logged the infield to aid the team’s groundball
pitchers: a tactic that earned Comiskey Park the nickname “Bossard’s
Swamp.” Stories of tilted foul lines and grass cut to manipulate the
speed of ground balls also abound. Current White Sox groundskeeper Roger
Bossard says there are 17 tricks of the trade,
but won’t reveal all of them. Many of those dirty tricks were invented
by the Bossard family: the greatest cheaters in sports history.
There are some other good ones, including Albert Bell getting caught corking his bats, and the strange break-in to try to steal back the evidence. Good times.
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