A WINNING PITCH

“Manager Billy Martin loved Jim and hated Gaylord,” says Brad Kullman, Jim’s son-in-law and author of the 2023 biography of Jim, Winning Pitch. “He wondered how those two boys could have come from the same mother, saying one’s an upstanding citizen and the other’s a cheat.”

Gaylord admitted his transgressions in a 1974 autobiography, Me and The Spitter, written with Cleveland sportswriter Bob Sudyk, in which he revealed learning about loading up the ball a decade earlier from San Francisco Giants teammate Bob Shaw. Perry described throwing the spitter in a game for the first time against the New York Mets in May 1964.

“Why am I telling all this now?” Perry wrote “Because I feel the spitter — the greaser — has been good to me, and I want to be good to it . . . I’m not ashamed of having used it in the past . . . As for the ethics, well, the main ethic of baseball is simple: win. I can’t see what’s wrong with throwing a pitch few other people can master that helped me win.”

If Perry wasn’t throwing a spitter, he wanted batters to think he was. “If I could mess with their heads and their approach, I’d have a better chance of getting them out,” he told Kurkjian after retiring. “And I loved getting them out.”

From the time they had started school (and begun working the fields) the brothers loved baseball, a sport at which their father excelled and encouraged his sons to play, even when their mother, Ruby, thought there were better uses of their time.

“The boys work and go to church,” Evan told Ruby, according to Gaylord in his book. “The least they can do is learn how to play baseball. They need to learn it. It’ll give ’em some fun when they grow up. There’s no telling where ball can take ’em, if they’re good enough.”

Evan had been a star athlete in Martin County growing up, shining on the gridiron and diamond for Williamston High, and he continued pitching for the Farm Life semipro team once he was grown. He threw a variety of pitches, including a vexing knuckleball that locals believed was as good as major leaguer Hoyt Wilhelm’s signature pitch.

The Perrys’ father pitched to his sons in their early games, the barn a back stop and the ball handmade. When they were very little, Jim and Gaylord played with a “stocking ball,” old hosiery rolled tight into a round wad and sewn shut. To better approximate the real thing, the boys would stuff a walnut, rock or hard rubber ball used for “jacks” beneath some yarn and cover it with black tape. For a bat, if they didn’t have a nailed-together hand-me-down that had seen better days, they used a root or branch. Evan’s instruction was basic — keep your eyes on the ball when you’re batting and throw strikes when pitching — and his sons listened closely.

“I remember a neighbor saying, ‘All those Perrys do is play baseball, and their dad is worse,’” Gaylord recalled.

By the time Jim and Gaylord were in their early teens, they were good enough to join Evan on the semipro nine against Edenton or Ahoskie, Tarboro or Hertford. The baseballs were regulation instead of homemade, with each team furnishing two per game. If they were all lost, the contest was over, much to disappointment of enthusiastic spectators, as many as a thousand people surrounding the field.

Gaylord recalled in his autobiography that the fans got vocal during close games. “You’d hear the people yelling, ‘Here’s five dollars for a hit’ or ‘Here’s five dollars for a strikeout,’ or ‘Two live chickens if you bring in a run.’”

If they weren’t playing ball the Perrys — a third child, Carolyn, was born seven years after Gaylord — listened to the radio or played checkers before turning in at night. “It was a simple time with simple pleasures,” Kullman writes in Winning Pitch, “and the Perry children never lamented any luxuries they may have lacked. They simply did not know any different. The family shared the love and support of each other and lived life firmly in the moment.”

Baseball scouts hunting prospects learned the way to Williamston, first to observe Jim and later Gaylord. During the 1955 state championship season, Jim pitched every game for the Green Wave, dominating the opposition, until the playoffs, when a compressed schedule caused the team to need another pitcher. Strong-armed ninth-grader Gaylord was enlisted to take the mound for the first time, his coach assuring him Jim could relieve him should he need help. Including the two wins over Colfax in the final series, the Perrys went a combined 5-0 in the playoffs, each victory a shutout. They allowed only 12 total hits in those five games, and opponents didn’t get a man to third base.

“You owe it to yourself to go over and watch him throw the ball,” the Washington Daily News wrote of Gaylord in 1957. “It’s not only a treat to see such a young boy do such a masterful job, but it’ll be nice several years from now, when he’s burning them up in the majors, to know that you saw him pitch as a high school kid. He’s fabulous.”

While scouts were flocking to northeastern North Carolina to take a close look at Gaylord, Jim already was climbing the rungs of pro ball. After signing with Cleveland in 1956, he was assigned to North Platte, the Indians affiliate in the Nebraska State D League. He struck out 40 batters across his first three starts, and moved up to C League Fargo-Moorhead in 1957 before advancing to Single-A Reading (Pa.) in 1958.

Gaylord joined Jim in the pros in 1958 when he was signed by the San Francisco Giants. Benefiting from a recent rule change that allowed teams to pay players much larger bonuses even if they weren’t going straight to the majors, Gaylord received a whopping $73,500. “He can do it all,” said Giants scout Tim Murchison. “If that boy doesn’t make it, I don’t know what use there is in signing anybody.”

Jim’s devoted work ethic and talent got him to the majors in three years. He was asked to go to Indians’ spring training in 1959 and made the roster for his first major league season, going 12-10, the first of his 11 seasons with a winning record. He shined as a reliever when he came into a game at Yankee Stadium in the ninth inning. After giving up a Tony Kubek double, Jim struck out Mickey Mantle, got Yogi Berra to pop up, then struck out Elston Howard.

Jim left little to chance as a rookie. He kept information on opposing hitters in a small notebook. “Keep it low and pray,” Jim wrote of Ted Williams, who was winding down his legendary career with the Red Sox.

Gaylord made it to the majors for good in 1964 after six minor league seasons, proving his skills for Triple-A Tacoma on his final stop in the farm system. On a team led by centerfielder Willie Mays, Perry became the No. 2 starter after high-kicking star pitcher Juan Marichal. Jim and Gaylord, who had shared a bed growing up until Jim went away to finish high school at Campbell College, stayed in touch with twice-a-week letters on their lives and their craft. Earlier in his major league career, Gaylord bought a short-wave radio so he could listen to more games and try to get a read on hitters he might face.

The younger Perry’s teammates quickly discovered he took the mound with a hard-nosed attitude accompanying his variety of pitches. The slugger Willie Stargell of the Pittsburgh Pirates said Gaylord “pitched angry.” Chris Speier, a rookie shortstop with the Giants in 1971, found out early about Perry’s fire.

“He was a hell of a competitor, a very, very strong-willed guy,” Speier says. “I had teammates say they hated playing behind Gaylord because if you made a mistake, he yelled at you. They said to tread lightly. One time early in the season, I got a double-play ground ball and booted it. He looked at me hard and said, ‘God damn it, kid, catch the f —king ball.’ I ran over to him and said, ‘Listen, old fart, get back on that f—king mound because I’m going to save your ass. Give me another grounder.’ You know what, that established a relationship between him and me.”

From his position, Speier knew when Gaylord was going to throw a doctored pitch. “At shortstop, you can see the signs, and they had a specific one for the spitter,” Speier says. “You just hoped if a grounder was headed for you, some of it would have rubbed off before it got there.”

Dusty Baker — who played 19 seasons and later managed five teams — had 32 plate appearances against Gaylord after joining the Braves as a young outfielder in 1968, batting only .194 against the wily veteran. “I don’t think he threw the spitter against me, but he tricked me. I got the ‘puff’ ball,” Baker says. “He went to the resin bag so hard the ball looked like it was smoking when it came to the plate. Gaylord enjoyed the game. He was a perfectionist, could be hard on people, especially young players, but he made them better.”

Gaylord and Jim each had memorable days on July 20, 1969, when man first walked on the moon. In 1964, Giants manager Alvin Dark, skeptical about his newcomer’s batting skill, had said, “Mark my words, a man will land on the moon before Gaylord Perry hits a home run.” Thirty minutes after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched down on the lunar surface, Gaylord hit his first major league homer off Claude Osteen in a victory over the Dodgers. Jim won two games for the Twins that day, finishing an 18-inning marathon over Seattle that had been suspended because of a curfew the previous night, then throwing a 4-0 shutout in the scheduled game against the Mariners. Jim also produced a key hit in each game.

Teammates on the 1970 American League All-Star team, the Perrys pitched against each other once, on July 3, 1973, when Jim was with Detroit and Gaylord with Cleveland. Evan called Gaylord before the game and said he hoped his boys would each pitch nine shutout innings, then have the game decided by relief pitchers. “No way I’m leaving a game with a shutout going,” Gaylord told his father. The Tigers rallied for a 5-4 win; Gaylord took the loss and Jim got a no-decision.

Jim and Gaylord reprised their Williamston days in 1974 after Jim was traded from Detroit and joined his younger brother on the Indians’ pitching roster. Cleveland finished a distant fourth place in the A.L. East, but the Perrys had good seasons. Jim was 17-12, while Gaylord had his fourth 20-win season, going 21-13. The entire Perry clan — Gaylord and wife Blanche, Jim and wife Daphne, and their children — spent the summer in top floor suites at a Cleveland Holiday Inn. “It was a free-for-all with my cousins,” says Pam Perry Kullman, the middle of Jim’s three children, who was 8 years old at the time.

“Pro athletes didn’t have chefs and mansions back then,” Pam says. “Dad worked in the off season. We had a very nice middle-class life, and my childhood wasn’t that different from other kids. But I knew my dad was special. In first grade at Creek Valley Elementary in Edina, Minnesota, my class took a field trip to our house. We walked over, maybe three blocks, and everybody got to meet my dad.”

Jim’s son, Chris, followed him into professional sports after soaking up atmosphere in big-league clubhouses and diamonds as a child. “I saw how dedicated my dad and his teammates were to their craft,” Chris says. “They worked hard at it.” After going to Ohio State, Chris made it to the PGA Tour, playing nearly 500 tournaments, winning the 1998 B.C. Open and finishing in the top 10 a total of 46 times. Jim’s grandson A.J. Kullman pitched for the University of Cincinnati.

Jim, now 90 years old, splits his time between Sarasota, Florida, and his native North Carolina. He and his wife have had a home on Badin Lake at the Old North State Club for nearly 30 years. Jim thrived in business after his playing career ended with the Oakland A’s in 1975, particularly after becoming involved with a long-distance fiber-optic phone company. “Jim was such a good person and so good with people,” Kullman says. “It really was quite a success story. He was making more in a month than he ever made in a year playing baseball.”

Gaylord’s post-baseball days weren’t as smooth. With fond memories of his youth, in 1973 he purchased a 410-acre farm in Martin County, where he grew tobacco, soybeans and corn. By the mid-1980s, it had turned into a losing proposition because of plummeting prices, forcing him to file for bankruptcy in 1986.

“Small farming is no more,” Gaylord told the News & Observer. “We tried everything possible, but when you put $350 into an acre of corn and get $150 back, it doesn’t take long to say, ‘Hey, we can’t continue.’ I just wish I had the answer for the farmer’s problems.”

On the heels of his financial woes, Gaylord suffered a more tragic blow. His wife, Blanche, whom he married in 1959, was killed in an accident on a Florida highway in 1987 when a driver ran a stop sign and broadsided her car.

In 1991, in his third time on the ballot, Gaylord was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, going into the shrine with Rod Carew and Ferguson Jenkins. He is one of seven North Carolinians to be so honored, along with Luke Appling, Rick Ferrell, Jim “Catfish” Hunter, Buck Leonard, Enos Slaughter and Hoyt Wilhelm. Evan Perry was right — baseball took the boys places.

Two decades earlier, in July 1970, the Perry brothers had been honored by their hometown, some 1,000 people packing the Williamston gym to celebrate their achievements. There were gifts and telegrams, and their high school numbers (16 for Jim, 18 for Gaylord) were retired.

“Just remember,” Gaylord told the crowd, “Happiness is a baseball game.”