Early Spitball Ban

The 1917 movement to ban the spitball

Early Spitball Ban

Though we usually think of 1920 as the year the spitball was banned, there was actually an earlier movement in the minor leagues to ban the pitch.

If you start reading newspapers from 1917, you’ll see signs of the coming ban.

For example, there was a rumor that the old Western League might ban the spitter before the 1918 season:

From Tulsa Daily World, October 26, 1917, page 12

Note here that the purpose of the ban was to raise batting averages, and nothing having to do with “sanitation.”

As the ban movement grew, however, the sanitation argument became more prominent than the batting average argument.

From The Wichita Beacon, November 6, 1917, page 7

I’ll bet that you never thought of the spitball being blamed for games lasting more than an hour and a half.

Anyway, the hype around a potential spitball ban apparently almost spread to the National League as November 1917 rolled on:

From The Evening News (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania), November 10, 1917, page 11

In the end, the American Association was the league that took action. A month after all this talk started, the AA banned the spitter:

From Chicago Tribune, December 18, 1917, page 15

I’m not sure if it’s true that Ed Walsh threw 80 spitballs a game in 1908. However, I do know that the American Association spitball ban likely went unnoticed. After all, this was the headline on the front page:

The dawn of prohibition was probably a little bit more noteworthy than the beginning of the end of the spitball.