Perry, Ejected

August 23, 1982, the Kingdome, Mariners against the Red Sox. Gaylord Perry was forty-three and in his twenty-first season, with a long reputation for doctoring baseballs and, until this night, no ejection for it. In the fifth, home-plate umpire Dave Phillips checked a ball, said he found a slippery foreign substance, and warned Perry. Phillips said he was not a chemist and did not know what the substance was.

In the seventh, with Rick Miller batting and runners on first and third, Miller swung and missed a 1–0 pitch. Phillips ejected Perry without asking for the ball. He said the flight was enough, and that the rule allowed him to judge an illegal pitch that way. Perry said he had thrown a hard forkball, that Phillips had no evidence, and that if anything had been on the earlier ball the umpire had put it there. He also said the trouble had started in the first inning, over two pitches to Carl Yastrzemski.

American League president Lee MacPhail suspended Perry for ten days and fined him $250. The penalty was stayed while Perry appealed, then upheld. Perry never said, that night, whether the pitch was doctored. The ejection rests on an umpire's reading of a baseball he did not keep.