Preacher Roe, the folksy left-hander from the Ozarks who became a star pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers, featuring superb control and a spitball he belatedly confessed to throwing, died Nov. 9 in West Plains, Mo. He was 92.

The cause was complications of colon cancer, his son Thomas said.

In the late 1940s and early ’50s, when the Dodgers teams that became known as the Boys of Summer largely dominated the National League, Roe emerged as one of baseball’s leading pitchers.

Roe led the league in winning percentage in 1949, when he was 15-6 for a mark of .714, and in 1951, when he was 22-3 for .880.

He won 44 games and lost only eight between 1951 and 1953. He pitched for three Dodger pennant winners and was an All-Star every season from 1949 to 1952.

‘A master of his craft’

“The Preach was a master of his craft,” Carl Erskine, who teamed with Roe and Don Newcombe as the top starting pitchers for the Dodgers in the decade after World War II, once told the columnist Arthur Daley of The New York Times. “He was a smart control pitcher with a phenomenal sense of timing.”

“I try to keep the hitters off balance, never giving them a decent pitch,” Roe said. “I’m always aiming for the corners, never throwing the same pitch twice or what the hitter is expecting.”

It was in the summer of 1955, a year after he retired, that Roe admitted to throwing spitters, describing his technique in an article in Sports Illustrated, “The Outlawed Spitball Was My Money Pitch.” Roe told of wiping his left hand across his brow and spitting on his thumb with juice from his bubble gum, using the base of his hand as a shield. While ostensibly hitching his belt, he then transferred moisture to his index and middle fingers, gripped the baseball on a smooth spot and threw with a fastball motion, getting a sharp downward break.

Roe received $2,000 for the article but said he did not do it for the money. He maintained that he hoped to see the spitter legalized and wanted to relate how it was not necessarily a dangerous, hard-to-control delivery.

“It never bothered me none, throwing a spitter,” he said. “If no one is going to help the pitcher in this game, he’s got to help himself.”

Elwin Charles Roe was born on Feb. 26, 1916, in Ash Flat, Ark., and grew up in Viola, Ark., population 160. As Roe told it to Cynthia Wilber in “The Love of the Game” (Morrow, 1992), he gained his nickname at age 3. When an uncle who had never seen the boy before asked him his name, he replied “preacher” because he was fond of a Methodist minister and his wife who took him on horse-and-buggy rides.

In addition to his son Thomas, of West Plains, Roe is survived by his son Elwin Jr., of Pineville, Mo., eight grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.