Here was a man that just turned into a Highlander right before your eyes, ready to deliver the next pitch. Ray walked it off and suffered no significant injuries and just three starts later, went on to throw a no-hitter against his old team, the Yankees.
Just Spitballin’ Here
Ray not only survived the lightning game, but he continued to pitch in the Big Leagues for years after, even becoming one of the final players to be grandfathered into the league’s new spitballing ban.
In yet another show of how absurd this generation was for the sport, by the time 1920 rolled around, the league had decided to put an end to the spitball. It was a technique used by many pitchers at the time to get a little extra action or leverage with the ball by rubbing their saliva on the thing. But, it was still 1920s baseball, so they couldn’t be fully reasonable, so they put together a list of players who would be grandfathered in and be allowed to continue throwing the pitch because, well, it was kind of their thing.
Ray was on that list, and boy, can you imagine what his spitball was like? Heavy globs of whatever last night’s poison was and that morning’s hangover remedy became mixed together to make the ball dart around with the same physics of the Tic Tac UFOs marauding off of our coastal waters.
Baseball simply made no sense at this time. I mean, just around the same point when Ray was finishing games after getting struck by lightning, Yankees player Ping Bodie was battling an ostrich in a pasta-eating contest. It was this beautiful mash-up of America itself trying to figure out who or what the hell it was while a bunch of young men attempted to do the same. Ray was the ideal fool to be thrown into the middle of all of that, and he lived up to just about every possible stereotype or trope about both the sport, and the players, that came to personify that absurd moment in time.
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