Jimmy Vaughan was a spitfire with a spitball. He literally salivated at the chance to climb the pitcher’s mound.
As ace hurler for the General Tire baseball team in the 1920s, Vaughan was Akron’s greatest spitball thrower and its last official practitioner of the forbidden art.
Vaughan threw a pretty good fastball and a mean curve, but his spitter was the pitch that usually baffled batters. He used it about every third toss.
“I chewed slippery elm to increase the amount of saliva,” he explained to Beacon Journal sports scribe Phil Dietrich in the 1950s. “I’d wet the tips of the first two fingers of my right hand, grip the ball where the two seams were nearest and throw it just like my fast one.
“Used the overhand delivery mostly but mixed in sidearm occasionally for a change of pace. It makes the ball fall heavily. Wetting the ball at the same place inning after inning would make it break more sharply as the game went on.”
Although Vaughan stood only 5 feet 8 and weighed 145 pounds, he was a man of great stature in the Akron Industrial League. Kids looked up to him as a sandlot hero.
An easygoing fellow with a Southern accent as thick as molasses, John Byron Vaughan was a native of Eastman, Ga., a little town most famous for producing the Stuckey’s restaurant chain and burlesque star Tempest Storm. He was born in 1892, grew up playing ball and became a pitching prodigy for his hometown team.
Another youth, Dana Fillingim, a future pitcher for the Philadelphia Athletics and Boston Braves, taught Vaughan how to moisten the baseball. With a little spit and polish, Vaughan’s career took off.
At age 22 in 1914, he joined the Macon Peaches, defeating the Braves 6-2 in his first minor-league start and leading the team on offense with a .333 batting average. After two seasons, he moved on to the Montgomery Rebels in Alabama, leaving a streak of spittle across the Deep South.
The right-hander spent three seasons in the Georgia State League and South Atlantic League before moving north with his wife, Joe Lee, in 1917 to find work at one of Akron’s bustling rubber factories.
He landed a job at Firestone, but ruffled corporate feathers when he decided to play ball for General Tire instead of the home team, a nearly treasonous act in the Industrial League.
“That was somewhat embarrassing,” Vaughan admitted.
Rising star
Instead of switching teams, he changed companies, moving to General in 1919. That season, Vaughan compiled a perfect 15-0 record for General Tire manager Ulysses Fitt.
It was one of many accomplishments for the General ace over the next 10 years, including throwing 56 consecutive scoreless innings, tossing two no-hitters and performing “the ironman stunt” on six occasions by pitching (and winning) both games of a doubleheader. He averaged nine strikeouts per game, six hits and one walk while maintaining a 1.75 ERA.
Vaughan padded his income by serving as a hired gun for semipro clubs in other towns. He charged a flat rate of $100 per game while pitching for clubs in Coshocton, Newcomerstown, Dennison, Oil City, Pa., and Scottdale, Pa.
He especially liked to stop in Coshocton because that’s where he purchased his supply of slippery elm to keep the juices flowing.
Baseball leagues outlawed spitballs in the early 1920s, but pitchers who depended on them were grandfathered until retirement. New players weren’t allowed to throw them.
Paul “Pepper” Sheeks, manager of the Firestone Non-Skids, lobbied to get the Akron Industrial League to ban spitballs, hoping to gain an edge over rival General Tire.
Ptooey!
“I made him happy by not putting the ball up to my mouth before each pitch but I continued to use the spitter nevertheless,” Vaughan confided.
He secretly spit into his glove after throwing the ball to the catcher. When the ball returned from home plate, it became properly moistened before the next pitch.
Another trick
Some teams doctored baseballs with acacia gum, making them sticky and resistant to saliva. That’s when Vaughan retaliated with another weapon in his arsenal: the paraffin pitch.
He concealed a smudge of wax on the pant leg of his gray uniform and casually brushed the baseball against it.
“Made the ball sail,” Vaughan said. “I bluffed a spitter and threw the paraffin ball instead.”
In exhibition play, Vaughan went up against such teams as the Brooklyn Dodgers, Cincinnati Reds, Boston Braves and Homestead Grays. St. Louis Browns manager Lee Fohl wanted to sign him to a pro contract in the 1920s, but Vaughan didn’t feel like joining a farm team in Mobile, Ala.
So he stayed in Akron and added to his legend.
Marathon game
In one of the greatest games ever played locally, Vaughan locked horns Aug. 20, 1922, with Firestone Non-Skids southpaw Percy McKinstry at Seiberling Field. More than 4,000 fans were present for the first pitch, but the crowd eventually doubled when news spread that Vaughan and McKinstry were “hooked up in a real sizzler.”
The teams battled for six hours and ended the game at dusk with a 0-0 tie in 20 innings. McKinstry struck out 33 batters, allowing only five hits. Vaughan struck out 24, allowing only seven hits.
Three days later, General and Firestone returned for a tiebreaker. Vaughan outdueled McKinstry 4-0 and captured the Akron Industrial League championship.
Vaughan played for General Tire until the team disbanded in 1929. He continued to work for the company until 1957 when he and his wife retired to Florida to enjoy the remainder of their golden years.
Three years before his death at age 74, Vaughan was inducted into the Summit County Sports Hall of Fame in 1963. McKinstry was enshrined, too. Their 20-inning battle forever sealed their place in local baseball lore.
Vaughan credited the spitball with his career longevity, saying he never had a sore arm during 20 years of pitching.
“They should bring back the spitball,” he told the Beacon Journal in one of his final interviews. “It would be a life saver for the pitchers.”
Mark J. Price will sign copies of his book, The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, from 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday at Perkins Stone Mansion, 550 Copley Road, Akron, during the Summit County Historical Society’s Civil War 150 Commemoration. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.