12:42 AM ET  02.11 | The evolutionary branch of pitching that extends from Burleigh Grimes through Roger Clemens, and his current trouble, originated eighty-eight years ago today, when baseball banned the spitball. The spitter was an ingenious, albeit unsavory, invention, an exercise in physics that capitalized on the structure of a baseball to affect its trajectory as it hurled through the air. The pitch was introduced to the major leagues in 1902 and was popularized by Elmer Stricklett, who is often credited, incorrectly, with its invention. As best can be discerned, Stricklett learned the pitch in the minors from teammate George Hildebrand, who in turn had learned it from teammate Frank Corridon. So devastating were the properties of the spitball that Jack Chesbro and Ed Walsh, the first two major league stars who relied heavily upon it, remain to this day the game's only 40-game winners. There are actually two types of spitters, one that breaks sideways as a result of a lubricant being applied to one side of the ball and another that, in the vernacular of today, could only be described as filthy-- a pitch that squirts out under pressure from slippery fingertips, devoid of backward rotation, which, in turn, causes it to drop precipitously just before it reaches home plate. In sum, it's a hitter's nightmare. Before 1920, when it was formally banned, the legality and ethics of the spitball had always been in question, but the rule against defacing the ball was weak (a $5 fine) and almost never enforced. Furthermore, balls were kept in play until they'd been beaten like pinatas, making it difficult to ascertain the origins of scrapes and stains. It was an atmosphere in which an assortment of hurlers thrived on the margins of respectability with saliva, slippery elm, emery boards, and the deception of magicians, which enabled the best to avoid being detected by hitters and umpires alike. With a quirkiness that seems unique to baseball among the major team sports, seventeen so-called bonafide spitball pitchers were identified in 1920 and permitted to keep the pitch in their arsenals until the end of their careers, while all others were forbidden to use it. The last of the breed was Burleigh Grimes, a Hall of Famer who used the threat of the pitch as much as the pitch itself to keep batters off-balance. When he retired in 1934, Grimes took the technical legality of the spitball with him, a fact that hardly deterred a legion of cheating successors. The most notable among them was Hall of Famer Gaylord Perry, a spitballing Houdini, whose bizarre series of rituals that he performed before every pitch both intimated a wet one was coming, and distracted umpires from the source of his lubricant. The departure of Grimes and his special dispensation created a vacuum in which a legal pitch with the properties of the spitter was non-existant. But as we know, nature abhors a vacuum, and it was filled for decades by inventive pitchers and coaches who felt a need that ultimately gave birth to the invention of the split finger fast ball, the "dry spitter," first perfected by Bruce Sutter in 1974. An offspring of the fork ball, which is detectable to the batter because it tumbles rather than spins, the splitter looks like a fast ball coming out of the pitcher's hand but behaves like a spitball. It's both filthy and legal. It is both sad and ironic to see one of the greatest practitioners of the splitter, Roger Clemens, charged with cheating in the most passive way imaginable-- relying on injectibles to enhance performance, an intervention that in and of itself requires no effort. The jury is still out on Clemens, as it should be until he's had his due process, but his circumstance is a reminder that we love sport when athletes prevail the old fashioned way: by earning it. The hidden cost of short cuts and cons, such as steroids and illegal pitches, is that their reliance on expediency stifles genuine progress. When the spitball was outlawed it spawned the split finger fastball, a creation that relies solely on the athlete, not artifice. It took forty years to get from the end of the spitter to the mastery of the splitter, for evolution and its rewards are anything but expedient-- they're just wondrous.