So it's not as many prying eyes as you have today from the cameras. I don't even know if the game was on - was televised. But he was desperate and willing to kind of cross over into the dark arts of the game. And Rick Honeycutt had never really done this before. And he got the brilliant idea to put a thumbtack in his glove and see if he could just scratch the ball in the strategic location and get the ball to have a little more movement and maybe change his luck a little bit. And so before a late season start in Kansas City, he absentmindedly passed a bulletin board and he saw a thumbtack.

He couldn't get anybody out, it felt like. But the second half of the season was just a fiasco. When Rick Honeycutt was a young pitcher for the Seattle Mariners in 1980, he had made the All-Star team. I was a little bit embarrassed to ask him about sort of the worst moment of his career, but he took it in good humor. And now he's been the pitching coach of the Dodgers for a long time. So I was a little embarrassed talking to Rick Honeycutt, who was the longtime pitcher for - mostly for Oakland and some other teams. But sometimes when they get caught and it's a big public thing, they really have no - nowhere to hide. TYLER KEPNER: A lot of guys still don't want to sort of admit to, you know, their trickery on the mound. Pitchers have been doctoring baseballs for a long time, and the stories are endless. Well, if I have a favorite chapter, it's the one about the spitball (laughter) - spitters. His new book is 'K: A History Of Baseball In Ten Pitches.' He writes about fastballs, screwballs and knuckle balls as well as the shady pitches - spitballs, grease balls and baseballs doctored with sandpaper, thumbtacks or even the sharp edges of a catcher's shin guard. Kepner's also a student of the game's history, and he has a new book about the countless ways pitchers have learned to make the ball dance and dart on its way to the plate. He notes, for example, that for the first time ever last year there were more strikeouts than hits in the majors, which he thinks is connected to the widely shared complaint that the game moves too slowly and takes too long. And our guest, New York Times national baseball writer Tyler Kepner, keeps track of that. It's a comforting tradition for a lot of us, but big-league baseball evolves over time. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross, who's off this week.

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