One hasn’t been thrown in decades, the other is so rare in the modern game that I’d challenge you to name more than two current pitchers that throw it. But both have a cult following — and both are an integral part of baseball’s history. And both have been captured in a new book – The Spitball Knuckleball Book by Tom E. Mahl.

Mahl dives into baseball’s history, going back to the late 1800s to trace the roots of these two “freak pitches” and their cousins – the shadow ball, the emery ball, the Vaseline ball, and so on. He profiles those that through it, those that passed it on, and those that made – or at least extended – a career because of it.

One of the first things that I look for in a book such as this is how good of a job it does tying baseball’s history into baseball’s present – and Mahl succeeds at this objective. Mahl makes it glaringly obvious what drove the spitball out of existence – money. More specifically, the money that was being brought in by fans to see players like Babe Ruth and others hit home runs. Quite simply, when the balls were flying out of the yard, people showed up, and far be it from the owners to stand in the way of that by giving pitchers the ability to make the ball that much harder to hit. Certainly an interesting connection to the way we’ve seen the game embraced in recent years.

The layout of the book’s six chapters turned out to be a bit of a spitball from my perspective – in the first chapter, Mahl starts out coming right at the reader with a great bit of topography as to the baseball landscape and the forces that affected the use and legality of the spitball, butthen took a nose dive into the dirt in chapter two by veering into biographies of players that threw the spitter – particularly, the 23 pitchers who were allowed to continue throwing the spitball after it had been deemed illegal prior to the 1920 season.

Tom E. Mahl (photo courtesy Tom E. Mahl)

While this will definitely be a highlight to those readers with an interest in player biographies, it was the part that generally left me uninterested. This isn’t to diminish the contributions or careers of individual players, but I prefer books like these to fly at a bit higher of an altitude and provide a bit more of an overview of the topic while tying together changes from one era to the next, which Mahl does quite well.

Chapters three, four and five continue the player biographies, looking at groups of pitchers that through the spitter even though it was illegal, those who picked up the knucklecurve, otherwise known as the ‘dry spitter,’ and the knuckleballers, those pitchers who adopted what is referred to in French as le papillon – the butterfly.

Chapter six brings the book to a close with an explanation as to how these pitches work and how they are thrown, a chapter that I found quite interesting and wished would have had twice the information that it does. For someone interested in the mechanics of the game and understanding how things work, Mahl could have written a whole book on this topic and I’ve likely have still wanted more. A chapter such as this is like being able to sit in the dugout or stand on the mound with some of the game’s great pitchers and being able to pick their brain and watch them and dissect their deliveries over and over again.

Mahl brings in an impressive collection of pictures of not just the players, but some up-close pictures of the grips they used on numerous versions of these pitches and blends them in throughout the book, with the strongest showing coming in the final chapter. For anyone with an interest in pitching, these pictures are darn near worth the price of admission.

No stranger to the author’s chair, this is Mahl’s first book on baseball after contributing to the Most Wanted series with Espionage’s Most Wanted, as well as his first book, Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States. With a doctorate in diplomatic history from Kent State, Mahl is also no stranger to academic pursuits – and his book is incredibly well researched without straying into the territory of being an overly academic read.

The book is quite sizable – just under two feet across when opened up, and as a hardcover, it packs a considerable amount of weight. While the content certainly merits such a format, it does become a bit heavy after extended periods of reading, and you’d likely benefit from recruiting a table to put the book on as opposed to trying to hold it in your lap.

Overall, The Spitball Knuckleball Book by Tom E. Mahl is a welcomed addition into the library of baseball books that exist, and will certainly make both a wonderful read for fans with an interest in the game’s history, as well a wonderful resource for those who want to dig deeper into the subject of spitballs and knuckleballs.