An affable Angel Stadium fixture known as Bubba and remembered among players for his spiked blond hair and his decades-long tradition of playing Dumb and Dumber in the clubhouse before day games, Harkins had never, he says, received a single complaint about his performance.
“I said, ‘Billy, you’re firing me over something that’s all over your clubhouse right now,’ ” Harkins tells Sports Illustrated in his first interview since that day.
Harkins shared with SI screenshots of text messages that support his claims, including an exchange with a contact who identified himself as Cole, the hurler who has been at the center of much of the recent controversy around pitch doctoring.
“Hey Bubba, it’s Gerrit Cole,” came a message from Cole’s number in January 2019.
“This is what every great player or average player is taught by teams and coaches to advance and produce quality major league pitchers,” he says.
Pitchers have been doctoring the ball for more than a century, but over the past two or three years, they’ve gotten very good at it, using increasingly tacky versions of what they call “sticky stuff.” What started out as a grip enhancement—sunscreen mixed with league-issued rosin—has become a performance-enhancing substance that can make pitches spin faster and move more.
Percival showed him how to saw off the can’s lid and combine the ingredients, holding a lighter under the bottom to melt the contents before pouring it into a three-ounce tin to reharden.
Harkins, an Anaheim resident since childhood who’d been a teenage batboy for the Angels before dropping out of community college in 1986 to join the team as an assistant clubhouse attendant, had spent almost as much time around sticky stuff as he had around baseball.
“Joba Chamberlain was on the Tigers; that’s how he became familiar with it,” Harkins recalls.
“Like somebody that knows how to make great buttermilk biscuits but doesn’t have anything written down.” He did refine the process, though, buying a “little blowtorch” to replace the lighter.
To back his claims, Harkins has provided to SI additional corroboration—most of which was not included in his suit nor previously made public—in the form of text messages, Venmo transaction records and photos of tracking labels and shipping receipts showing the addresses of the Yankee Stadium visitors clubhouse and the Nationals’ spring training park.
“Bubba it’s Chatwood,” said a text from a phone number associated with Tyler Chatwood, then with the Cubs, in May 2018.
Later a Venmo account labeled with the name Adam Wainwright sent Harkins $300, writing that the money was for “Kale salad and beans.” The Venmo transaction occurred the same day that a text was sent from Wainwright’s number to Harkins saying that he paid him.
“Bubba, it’s Bails!” said a text from Andrew Bailey, then the Giants’ pitching coach, in February 2020.
I didn’t distribute the cans to our pitchers and have not distributed anything since that MLB would deem to be a foreign substance.” Bailey also sent a photo to SI of what he says are the two tins with their lids off, showing them to be unused.
He points out that, until the 2016 collective bargaining agreement, visiting clubbies were responsible for providing and paying for three meals a day for players, plus scores of toiletries, candy, sodas and other locker room amenities.
The Angels were on the road half the time, and he wanted to treat opponents well so the staff at other ballparks would treat them well.
Another NL reliever, who says he does not use anything, scoffs at this argument.
In any event, many pitchers soon graduated beyond Harkins’s mix.
For the next two hours, as attorneys for the Angels and MLB listened, Harkins says he spelled out his sticky stuff history, describing how Percival taught him the recipe and naming many of the pitchers who came to use it.
In 2014 the Yankees’ Michael Pineda was banned 10 games for having a shiny splotch of pine tar on his neck.
Caplin, the league spokesperson says that, before this season, the league sent a memo to teams outlining plans to increase monitoring of pitch doctoring by collecting game-used balls and analyzing spin rates and other metrics.
And while Harkins says only a handful of players have reached out—including Verlander, though Harkins felt it was mostly “to clear his chest that he wasn’t the person that named me” in MLB’s investigation—several others who spoke to SI for this story felt that Harkins had taken an unfair fall.
In April, the Angels and MLB filed a motion asking the trial court to compel Harkins to pay their attorneys’ fees, nearly $160,000—more than twice Harkins’s base salary of $75,000 in his final season with the team.
Four months after the meeting that changed his life, the sports world emerged from quarantine, the 2020 MLB season finally began and Harkins turned on his TV to watch the Opening Day matchup of the Nationals’ Scherzer and Cole, by then with the Yankees.
“It just sickened me to watch the players … grabbing their wrists and thumbing their gloves and hats,” he says.
A person familiar with the league’s plans says that MLB will “imminently” begin empowering umpires to enforce the rules and the league will hand out suspensions to offenders.
He watches baseball with his wife, Paula, and their rescue cat, Angel, from their home less than two miles from Angel Stadium, where he says the Angels refused to let him pick up the contents of his old office.
Alternatively, the league could brew another agreed-upon substance that pitchers could use at will.