Spitballer is the biography of one of baseball’s greatest pitchers. Stan Coveleski was a quiet, modest man, the youngest and most successful of five ball-playing Polish American brothers who worked in the coal mines near their hometown of Shamokin, Pennsylvania. Hoping to escape the mines’ low wages and dangerous working conditions, Coveleski turned to professional baseball. He learned the spitball pitch during a three-year stint in the Minor Leagues after making his Major League debut with the Philadelphia Athletics in 1912.
Coveleski won three games in a single World Series using the now-illegal pitch he altered with saliva to fool opposing hitters. The 1920 season was Coveleski’s best in the Majors; that year, he posted an impressive 24-14 record and led the American League with 133 strikeouts. “Covey,” as he was affectionately known, was even better in the World Series against the Brooklyn Dodgers, when he hurled three game victories, posting a sparkling 0.67 ERA.
But 1920 was also a season of tragedy for both Coveleski and the Indians. On May 28 Covey received the devastating news that his wife of seven years, Mary Shivetts, had died. Then, on August 6, as Coveleski was vying for his nineteenth victory of the season against the New York Yankees, Cleveland shortstop Ray Chapman was hit in the head by a pitch thrown by the Yankees’ Carl Mays and died twelve hours later. Nevertheless, Covey and the Indians persevered to capture the American League pennant and win their first-ever World Series title.
Based on contemporary newspaper accounts and five major interviews Coveleski gave, Spitballer tells Covey’s inspirational story in the context of his time and the rise and decline of the spitball, a tricky and sometimes dangerous pitch to control and one that had an enormous impact on early twentieth-century baseball.