Me and the Spitter: An Autobiographical Confession is a 1974 autobiography by Major League Baseball (MLB) pitcher Gaylord Perry, written with Bob Sudyk, a sportswriter for the Cleveland Press. The book details how Perry cheated at baseball by doctoring the ball. The book covers Perry's early life in rural North Carolina and his early MLB career. After struggling to stay in the majors, Perry learned to throw a spitball, an illegal pitch using various substances such as saliva and Vaseline. Despite admitting to throwing a spitball, Perry was ejected from a game for doctoring the baseball only one time, in 1982, and he was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1991. Background By the 1973 Major League Baseball (MLB) season, Gaylord Perry, a pitcher for the Cleveland Indians, was widely suspected of throwing a spitball, an illegal pitch where the pitcher applies a foreign substance to the ball to change how it moves; the practice had been banned by MLB in 1920. The pitch is difficult to hit because it maintains the speed of a fastball, until the ball drops suddenly as it reaches the batter. After the 1971 season, the San Francisco Giants of the National League traded Perry to Cleveland in the American League, leading to new players and managers experiencing Perry's pitching and insisting that he was cheating. Perry won 24 games in the 1972 season and won the Cy Young Award. In 1973, Bobby Murcer of the New York Yankees publicly criticized Bowie Kuhn, the Commissioner of Baseball, and Joe Cronin, the president of the American League, for lacking the "guts" to enforce Rule 8.02, which banned the spitball; in response, Kuhn fined Murcer $250 (equivalent to $ today). After losing a game to Perry, Billy Martin, the manager of the Detroit Tigers, told reporters that he instructed his pitchers to throw a spitball, leading to Cronin suspending Martin for three games. Publicly, Perry insisted that the pitch was a "hard slider". That season, Perry approached Bob Sudyk, sportswriter for the Cleveland Press, about co-authoring an autobiography. Sudyk said that Perry would have to be willing to discuss the rumors that he threw a spitball, and Perry agreed. Phil Seghi, the general manager of the Indians, tried to dissuade Perry from sharing his secrets, but was unsuccessful. Perry showed Sudyk how he threw spitballs with substances like Vaseline and K-Y Jelly, and a