July 12, 2023 • 40 mins
EPISODE 244: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:43) SPECIAL COMMENT: Do the Republican leaders know WHERE their fugitive foreign agent Gal Luft is?
Does Senator Ron Johnson – demanding immunity for Luft so that this multi-national con-man can testify to the House – know Where Gal Luft is? Does Chairman James Comer – still insisting Luft must testify despite the damning revelation that he has been under indictment in this country for 20 months for allegedly bribing a Trump Advisor on behalf of Chinese interests – does Chairman Comer know where Gal Luft is? Does Congresswoman Nancy Mace – still on board the sinking Luft ship and calling him quote “our witness” and promising “we are going to work as hard as we can and deliver as much evidence as we can to the American people so that they can decide whether or not Joe Biden should be in prison” – does Representative Mace know where Gal Luft is?
And if the answer to any of these questions is yes – or the answer to the question “do any of them know how to reach him through intermediaries” is yes – then why have they not communicated to the proper authorities the whereabouts of this FUGITIVE FROM THE AMERICAN JUSTICE SYSTEM AND FOREIGN SPY – and why has the Department of Justice not questioned them about what they know about Gal Luft
What do the Republicans know about Gal Luft and how long have they known it?
ALSO: Jack Smith’s gang goes back to work, the Fani Willis Grand Jury is impaneled in Atlanta, and incredibly the DOJ is defending Trump in the Peter Strzok/Lisa Page lawsuit because it’s not like Trump is trying to end representative government in this country by manipulating the law or anything.
B-Block (17:19) IN SPORTS: We had that rarest of sporting events last night: one in which THE highlight was carried off by…the fans in the stands at the Baseball All-Star Game in Seattle and what they chanted. It is staggering to realize that the telecast of 1980 Game was watched by roughly five times as many fans as watched the one last night – and the population was a third smaller in 1980. There are lots of reasons (the players are not playing to win; the stars don’t show up; gone are the days when 9 of the 10 All Star MVP Awards between 1963 and 1972 went to Hall of Famers). But the real reason the game is now meaningless is that baseball threw away the greatest organic gift it was ever given. For 96 seasons, the owners, players, and fans of the American League HATED the fans of the National League, and vice versa. Happily baseball was good enough to throw that away and reduce the two Leagues to bookkeeping arrangements by introducing Interleague Play so they could sell some New York Subway Series caps. (30:25) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Senator Tommy Tuberville doubles down in defense of White Nationalists, then suddenly reverses and says they are racists, then disappears. Congressman Jim Jordan wants to move the FBI Headquarters to Alabama. And this is the kind of man you want leading the free world: the dark horse Republican presidential candidate who will pay you TWENTY dollars if you will donate ONE dollar to his campaign. How does he do it? Volume! Volume! Volume!
C-Block (35:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: Baseball used to matter so much that local Los Angeles TV sportscasters used to make up crazy conspiracy stories about it, to try to get ratings. Let me tell you of two mind-blowing stunts told by two of my rivals in just my first year doing the sports on the local news in LA nearly 40 years ago: the guy who told his viewers to call a hotel and harass the manager of the All-Star team whom he believed had insulted a local Angels player, and the other guy who insisted that even though the L.A. Dodgers lost the 1985 playoffs they should show up anyway to the World Series and demand to play, because HE and HE ALONE had discovered that the home run that beat them wasn’t a home run at all!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Two
Republican leaders know where the fugitive foreign agent goll Looft is?
(00:28):
Does Senator Ron Johnson demanding immunity for Looft so that
this multinational con man can testify to the House of Representatives?
Does he know where gall Looft is? Does Chairman James
Comber still insistingof must testify despite the damning revelation that
he has been under indictment in this country for twenty
months for allegedly bribing a Trump advisor on behalf of
(00:52):
Chinese interest. Does Chairman Comber know where gall Looft is?
Does Congresswoman Nancy Mace still on board this sinking Loofed
ship and calling him quote our witness and promising we
are going to work as hard as we can and
deliver as much evidence as we can to the American
people so that they can decide whether or not Joe
(01:14):
Biden should be in prison? Does Representative Mace know where
gall Loofed is? Because if the answer to any of
these questions is yes, or if the answer to the
question do any of them know how to reach him
through intermediaries is yes? Then why have they not communicated
(01:36):
to the proper authorities, the whereabouts of this fugitive from
the American justice system. Who is a foreign spy? And
why has the Department of Justice not interviewed them about
what they know about Galllooft and how long they have
known it? Drag Johnson, Comer and Mace in for questioning
and do it now. The Republican hunter Biden's scandal fairytale
(02:01):
has now escalated to the point where it is no
lawnger possible to trust Chairman Comer, Representative Mace, Senator Johnson
and others in their confounded party with access to any
sensitive or secure information about the United States of America. Moreover,
their continuing presence in the House and the Senate today
(02:24):
may endanger the safety and security of this country. They
are figuratively in bed with a foreign spy. Those three
and others are not just publicly following down an endless
trail of deceit, defamation, and international espionage. The discredited quote
missing Biden witness unquote now under indictment on one charge
(02:46):
of bribing a Trump transition team official on behalf of
Chinese interests, on another charge of breaking the Iran embargo,
on four charges of brokering illegal arms deals and of
being a fugitive from justice from this country. That would
be bad enough if they were just doing that, but
Johnson wants immunity for fugitive to testify to Congress. Mace
(03:08):
calls a fugitive hour witness Comer continues to push the
lie that a foreign agent was indicted because he had
quote information on the Bidens. Gall Loof was in fact
indicted first and then made his false claim of Biden
information later. It turns out Looft was indicted under seal
(03:31):
on November one, twenty twenty two. I was mistaken here
yesterday when I said he was indicted in February. February
was when he was finally apprehended and arrested, and it
was April when he became a fugitive by skipping bail.
Apart from the stark reality, gall faces one hundred years
(03:53):
in prison for crimes against the United States of America,
about which he left a trail a mile wide at
one thousand miles long. He is charged with bribing an
advisor to then President elect Trump on behalf of Chinese interest.
He is an Israeli agent. He is an accused gun
runner It's so bad that even the Wall Street Journal
(04:14):
has described Looft as on the lamb and said he
had absconded. Apart from all that, James Comer, Ron Johnson,
Nancy Mace, and the others have jumped fully and irredeemably
into this bottomless pit of con man guilt with him.
Besides all that, there is something subtler and far more dangerous.
(04:38):
Comer still wants him to testify. Mace still wants him
to testify. Johnson wants to give him immunity for his
crimes to testify. Do they know where he is? How
would Comer and Johnson arrange for gall Luft's testimony when
(05:02):
his whereabouts are unknown and he is considered a fugitive
from justice in two countries. Do they know where he is?
If so, why are they not fulfilling their obligations to
the Constitution, their obligations as Americans, their obligations under the law.
If any of them knows where Galllooft is or how
(05:25):
the process to bring him to Washington to testify to
Congress would even begin, and they have not turned this
information over to the authorities, shouldn't the Department of Justice
be examining their conduct, and whether they are in fact
shielding directly or indirectly a fugitive. The Department of Justice
(05:46):
and the FBI must open investigations into Comer Johnson and
Mace today. Their remarks about gall Looft were not made
as protected speech on the House floor or the Senate floor.
They were made as each preened and pranced and pretended
in the lights of television studios. If they have no
knowledge of the whereabouts and are merely being grand standing
(06:09):
Republican amateurs, they can quickly clear themselves and their party
from what is otherwise going to take the shape of
a conspiracy with this alleged criminal gall Loofed and yes,
grand standing Republican amateurs. I appreciate how redundant two of
(06:33):
those three terms are. Also, Jack Smith is back at work.
We have basically no other details. An NBC reporter staked
out the Preddiman Courthouse yesterday in the Washington Jet exhaust
heat and saw Thomas Wyndham enter and Thomas Wyndham is
perhaps Jack Smith's MVP most Valuable prosecutor. The implication is
(06:57):
that since the Smith grand jury hearing testimony about the
Trump led efforts to stop the transfer of power that
would be fake elector schemes and January sixth coup. Since
that grand jury meets there and Wyndham is working with
that grand jury, the implication is that grand jury met yesterday,
but no recognizable witnesses were seen entering or exiting the
(07:18):
buildings of That is literally all we have. We do know.
The Fannie Willis Grand Jury has been impaneled, two of
them actually under the guidance of the fill in judge
Robert McBurnie, and Robert McBurney oversaw the special Fulton County
grand Jury for eight months. Is he the only judge
in Atlanta. Two sets of twenty three grand jury members
(07:42):
were chosen yesterday. One will hear the Trump Georgia Find
Me Votes case and the other won't. McBurnie revealed that
whichever one is the real grand jury and whichever one
is the placebo group, we'll meet secretly two days a
week for two months, and we'll decide what to do
with the evidence produced by the special grand Jury. The
Atlanta Journal Constitution provides this spectaculor aside. Among the one
(08:06):
hundred or so citizens in the pre selection pool yesterday
was quote someone who described himself as an explosion prevention
dispatcher and boom goes the dynamite. By the way, Anna
Bower of Lawfare Media has provided the best explanation yet
(08:29):
of why there was a special Georgia Trump grand jury,
and now there is a I guess not so special
Georgia Crump grand jury. And I'll just read what she
threaded quote long story short. Special grand juries are used
to investigate complex issues of inquiry, like organized crime or
a multi state plot to overturn a presidential election. Under
(08:51):
Georgia laws, special grand juries can't return indictments. They can
only recommend indictments unquote. And we know that this one did,
and we know that it believed it witnessed perjury, and
we just don't know any details. And while justice takes
two small steps forward, the Department of Justice, as always,
(09:11):
continues to frequently pull society backwards towards the gaping maw
of another round of Trump fascism, one that would not
be so easy to escape from as last time. Incredibly,
DOJ lawyers are asking a federal appeals court to block
the order from Judge Amy Berman Jackson that Trump must
be deposed. In the Peters struck Lisa Page lawsuit. It
(09:35):
is the DOJ's position that a president can abuse his power,
meddle with the management structure of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
slander its employees, defame and try to get irs audits
of anybody who works for him as long as he's president,
and you can't sue him and depose him. It's stupid.
(09:59):
It's goddamned stupid. When you step back from the the
last eight years of American pre fascism and you ask
how the hell could we have possibly gotten here, the
answer is nonsense. Like this quote from the DOJ motion
(10:20):
in defense of Trump, that this case involves the deposition
of a former president rather than a sitting president does
not diminish the separation of powers concerns. It is exactly
the same logic and loyalty to the written word instead
of the meaning of the written word that led the
(10:41):
Weimar Republic to let Hitler out of prison nine months
into his five year sentence. Trump lives and dies and
those around him live and die by manipulating the law.
I'm sorry, we must manipulate it back at him. He
(11:04):
is himself elf, a personal, one man cold civil war,
and he must be treated as such at every opportunity,
and this is one of those opportunities, as is this
one the obvious play. Trump waiting until literally thirty minutes
before the deadline to file it Tuesday night to make
(11:25):
his demand that the judge he appointed grant him a
postponement of his Miami Classified Documents trial, probably until after
the twenty twenty four election, because he lives and dies
by manipulating the law. And if he is not elected
president again, he will be in the penitentiary. If he
is elected president, he will manipulate the law. He will
(11:47):
free himself, or he will get the charges dropped, or both.
And before you recoil at the idea of making the
law just this elastic, you know, rule against the clear
and present danger to all of our futures. Now and again,
(12:08):
go anti domestic terrorists, just occasionally before you worry that, well,
that will stretch the law out of shape. And what
happens when the other side gets the duj Just remember
what President Lincoln did during the actual Civil War, the
only other threat in our history as great as Trump.
(12:31):
President Lincoln decided that to keep the country in one piece,
he needed emergency powers, so he granted them to himself.
Then he used them to do a lot of things,
including the suspension of habeas corpus. He used them to
free the slaves, He used them to ignore the Supreme Court.
What the hell are we asking here? We're not suspending anything,
(12:54):
freeing anyone, ignoring any court. Just don't let a judge
with a record of actually presiding over cases like gun
possession and assaulting a prosecutor who has been in charge
of a courtroom for a total of fourteen days in
her life, and who was appointed by Trump rule in
Trump's favor in order to let him get away with
(13:14):
crimes that threaten and continue to threaten representative government in
our country. Also of interest here, if you did not
watch the Baseball All Star Game last night, you got
a lot of company. Forty three years ago, when the
(13:37):
population was one third smaller than it is now, five
times as many people watched the Baseball All Star Game
on TV as did last night. Well, if you did
not watch, that means you missed the worst uniforms in
baseball history. But you also missed a very fast, very
(14:01):
subtle game highlight that was made not by any player,
not by any manager, not by any announcer, but by
the fans in the stands in Seattle chanting something. What
did they chant? They chanted? That's next. This is an
(14:22):
all new edition of Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith Alberman.
This is Sports Center. Wait, check that not anymore. This
(14:47):
is Countdown with Keith Alberman in Sports Okay, fans, what
do these ten players comprise? Shane Bieber, Alex Bregman, Milkie Cabrera,
Robinson Cano, Elias Diaz, Vladimir gar Zero, Junior, Eric Hosmer,
Marianna Rivera, gen Carlos Stanton, Mike Trout. After the Colorado
(15:11):
Rockies catcher Diaz Pinch hit a two run homer off
Felix Bautista in the eighth inning at Seattle to lead
the National League to a three to two win over
the American League in the All Star Game last night.
Those are the Baseball All Star Game most valuable players
since twenty twelve. Two Hall of Famers, a maybe, and
a lot of nos. No knock on Elias Diaz. Unsung
(15:35):
heroes are great, and he told his friends yesterday he
was going to be the All Star MVP, which is
either clairvoyance or annoying over confidence. But this is his
ninth season, he has fifty one career homers, and he's
a two forty eight career hitter. From nineteen sixty three
to nineteen seventy, the All Star MVPs were Johnny Callison
(15:58):
and Juan Mareschal, Willie Mays, Willie Mays again, Willie McCovey,
Joe Morgan, Tony Perez, Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson, and carl Yastremsky.
Eight Hall of Famers out of nine guys, one of
them twice. The National League ends the American League's nine
game winning streak, and the AL is still twenty one
four and one since nineteen ninety seven. And it really
(16:20):
wasn't much of a game. In a moment, I'll tell
you why it will never be much of a game again,
and why the TV audience is about a fifth of
what it was in nineteen eighty. In fact, the highlight
was supplied not by the players, nor camaraderie, nor Elias Diaz,
nor anything else, but by something that usually has no
factor whatsoever in the All Star Games, everything that is
(16:42):
usually too quiet to believe. The crowd in the stands
at Seattle provided the highlight when the impending free agent
and by definition most valuable player. He's two players. He's
a hitter and a pitcher, So how valuable is he
He's worth any other two players combined? Show Hey Otani
soon to be free agent. When he came to the play,
(17:04):
the Seattle crowd, which made a home for Eachiro Suzuki
for fourteen years, started to chant at Otani, come to Seattle,
Come to Seattle. They were my MVPs. I'll drop this
because you already know more about this game than you
need to, But I have to mention the uniforms. The
tradition is over and the players are not wearing their
(17:26):
regular season, regular team uniforms. They were wearing special generic
American League and National League jobs. Players wore genuinely ugly
sick green caps that were the worst in baseball history,
at least since the awful brief rage for those white
topped Baker's caps of the nineteen nineties Mets and Royals
and Orioles. The National Leaguer's pants apparently never showed up
(17:49):
to Seattle for the game, so they seemed to be
wearing black chinos, and the American League shirts seem to
have been cut from discarded creased shark skin suits. More importantly,
even if the uniforms had been great, even if they'd
been the best of all time, what please, is the
point of making sure there is an All Star player
(18:12):
from every team if you can't see what team every
player is from. Thank you, Nancy Faust. If you are
(18:36):
less than fifty years old, I would like to offer
my condolences to you on the fact that you did
not get to see the Baseball All Star Game when
it was at worst the third biggest sporting event of
the year behind the Super Bowl and the World Series
in the time before televised ubiquity and interleague play. It
really was that it was breathtaking to know that you
(18:59):
were watching a field full of Hall of famers, and
that a National League Hall of Fame pitcher like Fergie
Jenkins would be facing an American League Hall of Fame
batter like Mickey Mantle for the only time in their lives,
and that year after year you would see literally dozens
of matchups that would never happen again, and teammates who
would never be teammates again and had never been teammates before,
(19:22):
and players who wouldn't be on national TV again until
sometime next year, to say nothing of a game the
outcome of which actually mattered to every player on the field.
Technology killed off a lot of that. Thirty six million
people watched the nineteen eighty All Star Game. If the
twenty twenty two ratings held, seven and a half million
(19:44):
people watched the One last night. That's largely because today
you can see every player every night everywhere. You are
now your own sports center. But the rest of it,
the rest of it, Baseball threw away out of greed
alone among the All Star Games, just as among the
(20:05):
major sports championships, there was no artifice, no conceit in
the Baseball All Star Game. Just as there were no
regular season games between the American and National League teams
until nineteen ninety seven, there was also no love lost
between the American and National leagues. There were American League
fans and there were National League fans, and although this
(20:28):
was lessening with time, part of being an American League
fan was hating the National League and vice versa. And
this was not the result of some brilliant marketing strategy.
This was organic. My grandfather lived until nineteen eighty six,
and he died hating the American League, in large part
(20:49):
because when he was just a boy, the National League
was all there was in baseball, and then in nineteen
oh one, the American League came along and stole nearly
all the National League stars one hundred and eighty five
guys on opening day American League rosters in the year
nineteen oh one, one hundred and eighty five. One hundred
and eleven of them had played in the National League
(21:11):
the year before, total chaos. National League lineups that had
been intact for a decade were destroyed by the American League,
and though the leagues ended their player war in nineteen
oh three, nobody, nobody forgave or forgot, I mean the
next year, my grandpa's team, the New York Giants, won
(21:33):
the National League pennant, but refused to play in the
World Series against the American League champions because their manager,
John McGraw, hated the president of the American League and
John McGraw still did not believe the American League was
a major league. When the All Star Game began in
nineteen thirty three, John McGraw was brought out of retirement
(21:53):
to manage the National League All Stars, and the rumors
began of off the record bonuses offered to players if
the National League won, or if a National League pitcher
knocked in an American League, battered down with a pitch
during the game, or injured an American League player on
the field. It wasn't just his own demons that drove
Pete Rose to knock over American League catcher Ray Fosse
(22:16):
and fracture Fosse's shoulder in order to score the winning
run in the nineteen seventy All Star Game. That's the
way they played the All Star Game. I mentioned before
that this organic affection for one league and hatred for
the other gave almost every baseball fan a rooting interest
not just in the All Star Game, but in the
(22:37):
World Series, a rooting interest that no longer exists. The
American Leagues and National League don't exist anymore. They have
been reduced to bookkeeping formalities adjusting for growth in population.
The TV audience for the World Series is now about
a quarter of what it was in nineteen eighty, largely
(22:58):
because if your team is not playing, why should you care.
In nineteen eighty he rooted for the Philadelphia Affillies because
you were a National League fan, or maybe you rooted
against the Phillies and for the Kansas City Roads, because yeah,
you were a National League fan, but you were a
Pittsburgh fan or a Mets fan, and you hated the
Phillies and you were watching to watch them lose. When
(23:20):
was the last time you met a National League fan?
One more point and then I'll stop the Hey you kids,
get off my lawning. Here, I could list one thousand
things on the field that could illustrate the history of
a wonderful, vivid, punch throwing enmity between the two baseball
leagues that animated the World Series in the All Star
(23:42):
Game until Baseball killed it off because Baseball could make
an extra thousand dollars selling Subway Series caps or Freeway
Series windshield a visors that came with interleague play. But
actually it's two off the field battles that really emphasized
just how wonderful and wonderfully petty the hatred of American
(24:05):
League for National League used to be. In the winter
of nineteen nineteen, a dispute over a player trade in
the American League that previous season got so heated that
the New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox, and the
Chicago White Sox actually resigned from the American League and
joined the National League. They left the American League, which
(24:28):
only then had five teams, and created a super league
in the National League. Obviously, this was resolved before the
season started and they never took the field this way,
but it happened. Try that bit of trivia on a
Red Sox or Yankee fan, remember when you guys were
in the National League. The second event was forty years later,
(24:50):
and it was far more subtle, but maybe more telling.
In nineteen fifty nine, nineteen fifty nine, fifty six years
after the supposed peace agreement between the two leagues, a
joint committee met and voted to end a rule about
trading players between American League teams and National League teams.
The rule was you couldn't trade players between American League
(25:13):
teams and National League teams. Until nineteen fifty nine, it
was literally illegal within baseball for say, the New York Yankees,
to exchange players with the Los Angeles Dodgers or any
other National League team without first offering to sell those
players that they wanted to trade to every other American
League team for the waiver price ten twenty thousand, fifty
(25:35):
thousand dollars, depending on the year before you could be
traded from one league to the other, every other team
in your league had to say, nah, we don't want them.
So star players were never traded from one league to
the other until nineteen fifty nine. This went on for
(25:56):
fifty six years, and when they finally voted to eliminate
that rule, there were only sixteen teams than eight in
each league, and four of sixteen teams still voted against
the rule. And when they finally approved this interleague trading,
they only made it legal for a limited interleague trading
(26:19):
period around Thanksgiving, and the length of the period that
they all agreed to was twenty six days. Twenty six days,
the other three hundred and thirty nine days no trade
between the leagues. So when did they get rid of
that limitation? Not until nineteen eighty six, And that's why
(26:41):
the Baseball All Star Game is not a big deal anymore.
Still ahead on this all new edition of Countdown. Baseball.
In fact, used to matter so much that local TV
(27:02):
sportscasters used to make stories, I mean big stories, make
them up to try to get ratings and attention. I mean,
I saw one guy in LA when I was there
go on a TV newscast and claim that a home
run that kept the Dodgers out of the World Series
one year, that home run didn't count, and the Dodgers
(27:23):
should show up at the World Series anyway and demand
to play. He said this on live television. The story
next in Things I promised not to tell first time
for the daily roundup of the miss Grants, morons and
Dunning Krueger effects specimens who constitute today's worse persons in
the world. The runner up, Senator Tommy I'm just gonna
(27:43):
keep digging here. Tubberville of Alabama, the former Auburn football coach.
Tubberville is a flat out racist slime who last week
wondered if teachers in inner city schools can read and write,
and he keeps defending white nationalists, and then yesterday suddenly
blurted quote, white nationalists are racists, and somebody quipped on law,
(28:05):
was there a football joke in there somewhere? And I said,
Tubberville's only football jokes were his teams. This is so
bad now that Senator Tuberville's brother, Charles, who is a
rock guitarist, felt compelled to issue this statement about his
own brother quote due to recent statements by him promoting
racial stereotypes, white nationalism, and other various controversial topics. I
(28:28):
feel compelled to distance myself from his ignorant, hateful rants.
Unquote the Tubberville Brothers, everybody the runner up Congressman Jim,
what do you mean my witness is a Chinese spy? Jordan?
Jim has had another brainstorm. The Wall Street Journal reports
(28:49):
Jordan will try to gut funding for the FBI unless
the bureau agrees to build its new headquarters not in
the suburbs of Washington, DC, but in Huntsville. Abavamma, so
it can be closer to Tommy Tuberville. Why not was
so Alaska? Jim, remember with Scilla, Alaska? But our winner
Doug Burgham. Doug is the pair of eyebrows currently serving
(29:13):
as governor of North Dakota, and he is running for
the Republican nomination. A with mine, I'm allowed to mock
eyebrows and b you gotta give him credit. He at
least recognizes that his odds of getting the nomination are
kind of small, small enough that Doug Burgham is willing
to buy the nomination and not just buy it, mind you,
but pay you to donate to his campaign. How does
(29:37):
that work? Volume volume volume. The GOP will give a
spot on its first debate stage to anybody who gets
at least fifty thousand donations of at least one dollar each.
So Doug Burgham says he will give his first fifty
thousand donors a Visa or MasterCard gift card of twenty dollars.
(30:01):
You give him one dollar, he gives you twenty dollars. Volume, volume, volume,
talk about buying votes, Governor Doug Bergham, Hey, Doug, I'll
give you twenty bucks. You got a pro to go,
trim your eyebrows, Today's worst eyebrows and the world here
(30:37):
the number one story on the Countdown now, and things
I promised not to tell. And a personal saga of
how important baseball used to be. I had only been
the local sportscaster on Channel five in Los Angeles for
about six weeks when I saw one of my rivals
do something I could not believe. Nearly thirty eight years
have since passed, and it's even harder for me to
(31:01):
believe it now. In Game five of the nineteen eighty
five National League Championship Series between the LA Dodgers and
the Saint Louis Cardinals winner goes to the World Series.
Ozzy Smith, the famous shortstop of the Cardinals, hit a
home run in the bottom of the ninth inning to
beat the Dodgers three to two. Smith was a switch hitter.
He could bat left handed or right handed, but he
(31:22):
had never hit a home run right handed until then.
The ball hit some brick or concrete behind the foul
pole and Saint Louis bounded back onto the field, and
the Dodger right fielder Mike Marshall picked it up and
threw it back to the infield just cause, like why not.
Two days later, back in Los Angeles, in an infamous
(31:44):
sequence that older Dodger fans still grumble about nightly, the
Dodgers lost that series on another home run by Jack
Clark of Saint Louis. And the night after that, I
was sitting with my new colleagues at Channel five and
we had the rival newscast from Channel nine KHJTV on
one of our TV nitors in the sports office, and
(32:06):
for some reason their sportscaster was on at the start
of their newscast at ten o'clock. I have important breaking news,
he yelled. His name was Scott Saint James and he
was always yelling, but this was different. Careful forensic analysis
of the videotape by the Channel nine Sports department proves
that Ozzy Smith's so called home run against the Dodgers
(32:27):
in Game five was actually not a home run but
a double. Look Saint James shouted, then played the same
videotape every station in America had, showing the same angle
of the same Smith home run, landing fair and beating
the Dodgers and then bouncing back off the wall onto
the field and the Dodger right field are kind of
a half hearted we throwing the ball back into the
(32:48):
infield just cuz that Saint James bellowed was just a double.
Mike Marshall's throw proves it beyond the shadow of a
legal doubt. Channel nine Sports urges the Dodgers to file
lawsuits against Major League Baseball to obtain a restraining order
against this travesty, then urged the Dodgers to report to
Kansas City in order to play in tomorrow night's first
(33:09):
game of the nineteen eighty five World Series as the
rightful representatives of the National League. I don't have a
tape of this, so my version of what this buffoon,
Saint James said, is recreated from memory as faithfully as possible.
It is burned into my memory. And if it's not
(33:32):
one hundred percent accurate word for word, trust me, I
just improved it. Over at Channel five, we laughed. The
phone rang. It was one of the sports producers at
Channel two, friend of all of ours. He was laughing.
On Channel nine, they were not laughing. They did I
think this quote story unquote twice in their newscast that night,
(33:54):
and they continued to ride this idea that the home
run did not count and the Dodgers should sue right
up until the nineteen eighty five World Series, which the
Dodgers did not play in, ended a week later. But
that's not where the story ended, as if the Saint
James thing had cursed the nineteen eighty five World Series,
(34:16):
and nobody ever really knew if he really believed the story,
he was just trying to get eyeballs on a sportscast.
Nobody watched the guys who managed the World Series teams
get to manage their league's team in the All Star
Game the next year, so Dick Houser, manager of the
World champion Kansas City Royals, of nineteen eighty five was
the manager of the nineteen eighty six All Star Game,
(34:38):
played on July fifteenth at the Astrodome in Houston. That year,
the California Angels, whose games were carried on my station
Channel five, had one of their players produced one of
the great rookie seasons of all time. His name was
Wally Joyner. He was this kind of goofy first baseman.
He was a friend of mine, and even though he
was not on the fans All Star ballots, he was
(34:58):
voted in written in as the starting American League All
Star first baseman. He won with write in votes didn't
happen too often. So at the nineteen eighty six All
Star Game, Joyinner is the starting first baseman, and he
comes up in the second inning and he pops up.
But per All Star etiquette, he'll get at least one
more at bat, probably two. All the starters get two
(35:19):
at bats except in the fourth inning, when it's Joiner's
turn to hit again. All Star manager Dick Hauser pinch
hits for Joiner, sends up Don Mattingly of the Yankees
to bat instead of Joiner. Well, this did not go
over well in Southern California. Some of us were wondering
if Wally Joyner was hurt or if there was something
else going on. But over at another of our rival
(35:42):
sports departments at KABC Channel seven, that's not where their sportscaster,
Ted Dawson took it. He went on that night blistering
Dick Hauser for insulting Joiner and insulting the Angels and
Los Angeles and Anaheim and God and the flag. And
he told his viewers to call the hotel in Houston
(36:03):
that Dick House was staying at and ask for his
room and yell at him. I think they put up
a graphic with the hotel phone number. Mind you, by
the time Ted Dawson did this, it would have been
one fifteen in the morning in the Houston hotel. Whatever
Hauser had done, what Dawson did was far worse. We
(36:26):
could not have imagined at the time how far worse.
The next day, the Kansas City Royals announced that Dick
Hauser had been admitted to the hospital after several weeks
of neck pain, and the day after that, through tears,
a spokesman announced that dick Hauser was taking a leave
of absence as manager of the team immediately because he
(36:46):
had a brain tumor. In fact, Dick Hauser would die
about eleven months later at the age of just fifty one.
The nineteen eighty six All Star Game was the last
game Howser ever participated in, and Ted Dawson had told
his viewers to call Hauser up late at night in
a hotel and yet at him over an insult to
(37:06):
a player. I've done a lot of stupid stuff on
TV in my life, a lot of stuff I should
have just left alone. In most cases, I've been able
to apologize or at least make fun of myself or
make it up to the people involved with these two guys.
Saint James was fired the next year, I think, and
then Dawson. And then Dawson got hired in Dallas, and
(37:28):
the next thing we heard in LA was he was
living with some rich older woman who had bought him
a helicopter. Last thing I saw about him was in
twenty seventeen, he retired after several years as the sports
director of station KBZK in Bozeman, Montana. Sometimes life punishes
you first, then you screw up, rather than the other
(37:49):
way around. It dawned on me after Dick Hauser died
that years earlier. In nineteen eighty, the ABC station in
my hometown here in New York needed a new sportscaster,
and they tried out literally every sportscaster on every big
ABC station in the country. One week they had the
guy in from Detroit, the week after that it was
(38:11):
their guy from their station in Syracuse, and one week
it had been Ted Dawson from KABC in Los Angeles,
the guy who would tell his viewers to call up
and use the manager in the middle of the night.
Ted Dawson's on air style was breathless, and I mean
that literally. He shouted at the top of his lungs.
Had he read his script as fast as he could.
(38:34):
I mean, I can't even recreate it without causing myself
a coughing fit. While I happened to be watching the
night of his first audition show on the New York station,
Ted Dawson screamed for about three minutes, finished and panting,
threw it back to the veteran deadpan WABC Channel seven
news anchorman Roger Grimsby. Roger back to you, and they
(38:57):
cut to Grimsby. He was staring to his right towards
where Dawson was sitting wordlessly, turned back to face the camera,
and with no hint of emotion, Roger Grimsmy simply said,
we shall now resume the news. Wow, we shall now
(39:29):
resume the news. I've done all the damage I can
do here. Thank you for listening. Here are the credits.
Most of the music was arranged, produced and performed by
Brian Ray and John Phillips Shanel, who are the Countdown
musical directors. Guitar is bassed and drums by Brian Ray,
all orchestration and keyboards by John Phillips Shanel, produced by
Tko Brothers. Other Beethoven selections have been arranged and performed
(39:50):
by the group No Horns Allowed. Sports Music is the
Olderman theme from ESPN two and it was written by
Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc. Musical comments by
Nancy Fauss. The best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer
today was my friend Kenny Maine. Everything else is pretty
much my fault. Don't forget. Countdown now also available on
YouTube with the cute little animated me. Subscribe there as well,
(40:14):
give yourself options. That's countdown for this The nine hundred
and eighteenth day since Donald Trump's first attempted coup against
the democratically elected government of the United States. Arrest him
again while we still can. The next schedule countdown is
tomorrow bulletins as the news warrants till then, I'm Keith Olberman.
Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with
(40:51):
Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Two
Republican leaders know where the fugitive foreign agent goll Looft is?
(00:28):
Does Senator Ron Johnson demanding immunity for Looft so that
this multinational con man can testify to the House of Representatives?
Does he know where gall Looft is? Does Chairman James
Comber still insistingof must testify despite the damning revelation that
he has been under indictment in this country for twenty
months for allegedly bribing a Trump advisor on behalf of
(00:52):
Chinese interest. Does Chairman Comber know where gall Looft is?
Does Congresswoman Nancy Mace still on board this sinking Loofed
ship and calling him quote our witness and promising we
are going to work as hard as we can and
deliver as much evidence as we can to the American
people so that they can decide whether or not Joe
(01:14):
Biden should be in prison? Does Representative Mace know where
gall Loofed is? Because if the answer to any of
these questions is yes, or if the answer to the
question do any of them know how to reach him
through intermediaries is yes? Then why have they not communicated
(01:36):
to the proper authorities, the whereabouts of this fugitive from
the American justice system. Who is a foreign spy? And
why has the Department of Justice not interviewed them about
what they know about Galllooft and how long they have
known it? Drag Johnson, Comer and Mace in for questioning
and do it now. The Republican hunter Biden's scandal fairytale
(02:01):
has now escalated to the point where it is no
lawnger possible to trust Chairman Comer, Representative Mace, Senator Johnson
and others in their confounded party with access to any
sensitive or secure information about the United States of America. Moreover,
their continuing presence in the House and the Senate today
(02:24):
may endanger the safety and security of this country. They
are figuratively in bed with a foreign spy. Those three
and others are not just publicly following down an endless
trail of deceit, defamation, and international espionage. The discredited quote
missing Biden witness unquote now under indictment on one charge
(02:46):
of bribing a Trump transition team official on behalf of
Chinese interests, on another charge of breaking the Iran embargo,
on four charges of brokering illegal arms deals and of
being a fugitive from justice from this country. That would
be bad enough if they were just doing that, but
Johnson wants immunity for fugitive to testify to Congress. Mace
(03:08):
calls a fugitive hour witness Comer continues to push the
lie that a foreign agent was indicted because he had
quote information on the Bidens. Gall Loof was in fact
indicted first and then made his false claim of Biden
information later. It turns out Looft was indicted under seal
(03:31):
on November one, twenty twenty two. I was mistaken here
yesterday when I said he was indicted in February. February
was when he was finally apprehended and arrested, and it
was April when he became a fugitive by skipping bail.
Apart from the stark reality, gall faces one hundred years
(03:53):
in prison for crimes against the United States of America,
about which he left a trail a mile wide at
one thousand miles long. He is charged with bribing an
advisor to then President elect Trump on behalf of Chinese interest.
He is an Israeli agent. He is an accused gun
runner It's so bad that even the Wall Street Journal
(04:14):
has described Looft as on the lamb and said he
had absconded. Apart from all that, James Comer, Ron Johnson,
Nancy Mace, and the others have jumped fully and irredeemably
into this bottomless pit of con man guilt with him.
Besides all that, there is something subtler and far more dangerous.
(04:38):
Comer still wants him to testify. Mace still wants him
to testify. Johnson wants to give him immunity for his
crimes to testify. Do they know where he is? How
would Comer and Johnson arrange for gall Luft's testimony when
(05:02):
his whereabouts are unknown and he is considered a fugitive
from justice in two countries. Do they know where he is?
If so, why are they not fulfilling their obligations to
the Constitution, their obligations as Americans, their obligations under the law.
If any of them knows where Galllooft is or how
(05:25):
the process to bring him to Washington to testify to
Congress would even begin, and they have not turned this
information over to the authorities, shouldn't the Department of Justice
be examining their conduct, and whether they are in fact
shielding directly or indirectly a fugitive. The Department of Justice
(05:46):
and the FBI must open investigations into Comer Johnson and
Mace today. Their remarks about gall Looft were not made
as protected speech on the House floor or the Senate floor.
They were made as each preened and pranced and pretended
in the lights of television studios. If they have no
knowledge of the whereabouts and are merely being grand standing
(06:09):
Republican amateurs, they can quickly clear themselves and their party
from what is otherwise going to take the shape of
a conspiracy with this alleged criminal gall Loofed and yes,
grand standing Republican amateurs. I appreciate how redundant two of
(06:33):
those three terms are. Also, Jack Smith is back at work.
We have basically no other details. An NBC reporter staked
out the Preddiman Courthouse yesterday in the Washington Jet exhaust
heat and saw Thomas Wyndham enter and Thomas Wyndham is
perhaps Jack Smith's MVP most Valuable prosecutor. The implication is
(06:57):
that since the Smith grand jury hearing testimony about the
Trump led efforts to stop the transfer of power that
would be fake elector schemes and January sixth coup. Since
that grand jury meets there and Wyndham is working with
that grand jury, the implication is that grand jury met yesterday,
but no recognizable witnesses were seen entering or exiting the
(07:18):
buildings of That is literally all we have. We do know.
The Fannie Willis Grand Jury has been impaneled, two of
them actually under the guidance of the fill in judge
Robert McBurnie, and Robert McBurney oversaw the special Fulton County
grand Jury for eight months. Is he the only judge
in Atlanta. Two sets of twenty three grand jury members
(07:42):
were chosen yesterday. One will hear the Trump Georgia Find
Me Votes case and the other won't. McBurnie revealed that
whichever one is the real grand jury and whichever one
is the placebo group, we'll meet secretly two days a
week for two months, and we'll decide what to do
with the evidence produced by the special grand Jury. The
Atlanta Journal Constitution provides this spectaculor aside. Among the one
(08:06):
hundred or so citizens in the pre selection pool yesterday
was quote someone who described himself as an explosion prevention
dispatcher and boom goes the dynamite. By the way, Anna
Bower of Lawfare Media has provided the best explanation yet
(08:29):
of why there was a special Georgia Trump grand jury,
and now there is a I guess not so special
Georgia Crump grand jury. And I'll just read what she
threaded quote long story short. Special grand juries are used
to investigate complex issues of inquiry, like organized crime or
a multi state plot to overturn a presidential election. Under
(08:51):
Georgia laws, special grand juries can't return indictments. They can
only recommend indictments unquote. And we know that this one did,
and we know that it believed it witnessed perjury, and
we just don't know any details. And while justice takes
two small steps forward, the Department of Justice, as always,
(09:11):
continues to frequently pull society backwards towards the gaping maw
of another round of Trump fascism, one that would not
be so easy to escape from as last time. Incredibly,
DOJ lawyers are asking a federal appeals court to block
the order from Judge Amy Berman Jackson that Trump must
be deposed. In the Peters struck Lisa Page lawsuit. It
(09:35):
is the DOJ's position that a president can abuse his power,
meddle with the management structure of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
slander its employees, defame and try to get irs audits
of anybody who works for him as long as he's president,
and you can't sue him and depose him. It's stupid.
(09:59):
It's goddamned stupid. When you step back from the the
last eight years of American pre fascism and you ask
how the hell could we have possibly gotten here, the
answer is nonsense. Like this quote from the DOJ motion
(10:20):
in defense of Trump, that this case involves the deposition
of a former president rather than a sitting president does
not diminish the separation of powers concerns. It is exactly
the same logic and loyalty to the written word instead
of the meaning of the written word that led the
(10:41):
Weimar Republic to let Hitler out of prison nine months
into his five year sentence. Trump lives and dies and
those around him live and die by manipulating the law.
I'm sorry, we must manipulate it back at him. He
(11:04):
is himself elf, a personal, one man cold civil war,
and he must be treated as such at every opportunity,
and this is one of those opportunities, as is this
one the obvious play. Trump waiting until literally thirty minutes
before the deadline to file it Tuesday night to make
(11:25):
his demand that the judge he appointed grant him a
postponement of his Miami Classified Documents trial, probably until after
the twenty twenty four election, because he lives and dies
by manipulating the law. And if he is not elected
president again, he will be in the penitentiary. If he
is elected president, he will manipulate the law. He will
(11:47):
free himself, or he will get the charges dropped, or both.
And before you recoil at the idea of making the
law just this elastic, you know, rule against the clear
and present danger to all of our futures. Now and again,
(12:08):
go anti domestic terrorists, just occasionally before you worry that, well,
that will stretch the law out of shape. And what
happens when the other side gets the duj Just remember
what President Lincoln did during the actual Civil War, the
only other threat in our history as great as Trump.
(12:31):
President Lincoln decided that to keep the country in one piece,
he needed emergency powers, so he granted them to himself.
Then he used them to do a lot of things,
including the suspension of habeas corpus. He used them to
free the slaves, He used them to ignore the Supreme Court.
What the hell are we asking here? We're not suspending anything,
(12:54):
freeing anyone, ignoring any court. Just don't let a judge
with a record of actually presiding over cases like gun
possession and assaulting a prosecutor who has been in charge
of a courtroom for a total of fourteen days in
her life, and who was appointed by Trump rule in
Trump's favor in order to let him get away with
(13:14):
crimes that threaten and continue to threaten representative government in
our country. Also of interest here, if you did not
watch the Baseball All Star Game last night, you got
a lot of company. Forty three years ago, when the
(13:37):
population was one third smaller than it is now, five
times as many people watched the Baseball All Star Game
on TV as did last night. Well, if you did
not watch, that means you missed the worst uniforms in
baseball history. But you also missed a very fast, very
(14:01):
subtle game highlight that was made not by any player,
not by any manager, not by any announcer, but by
the fans in the stands in Seattle chanting something. What
did they chant? They chanted? That's next. This is an
(14:22):
all new edition of Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith Alberman.
This is Sports Center. Wait, check that not anymore. This
(14:47):
is Countdown with Keith Alberman in Sports Okay, fans, what
do these ten players comprise? Shane Bieber, Alex Bregman, Milkie Cabrera,
Robinson Cano, Elias Diaz, Vladimir gar Zero, Junior, Eric Hosmer,
Marianna Rivera, gen Carlos Stanton, Mike Trout. After the Colorado
(15:11):
Rockies catcher Diaz Pinch hit a two run homer off
Felix Bautista in the eighth inning at Seattle to lead
the National League to a three to two win over
the American League in the All Star Game last night.
Those are the Baseball All Star Game most valuable players
since twenty twelve. Two Hall of Famers, a maybe, and
a lot of nos. No knock on Elias Diaz. Unsung
(15:35):
heroes are great, and he told his friends yesterday he
was going to be the All Star MVP, which is
either clairvoyance or annoying over confidence. But this is his
ninth season, he has fifty one career homers, and he's
a two forty eight career hitter. From nineteen sixty three
to nineteen seventy, the All Star MVPs were Johnny Callison
(15:58):
and Juan Mareschal, Willie Mays, Willie Mays again, Willie McCovey,
Joe Morgan, Tony Perez, Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson, and carl Yastremsky.
Eight Hall of Famers out of nine guys, one of
them twice. The National League ends the American League's nine
game winning streak, and the AL is still twenty one
four and one since nineteen ninety seven. And it really
(16:20):
wasn't much of a game. In a moment, I'll tell
you why it will never be much of a game again,
and why the TV audience is about a fifth of
what it was in nineteen eighty. In fact, the highlight
was supplied not by the players, nor camaraderie, nor Elias Diaz,
nor anything else, but by something that usually has no
factor whatsoever in the All Star Games, everything that is
(16:42):
usually too quiet to believe. The crowd in the stands
at Seattle provided the highlight when the impending free agent
and by definition most valuable player. He's two players. He's
a hitter and a pitcher, So how valuable is he
He's worth any other two players combined? Show Hey Otani
soon to be free agent. When he came to the play,
(17:04):
the Seattle crowd, which made a home for Eachiro Suzuki
for fourteen years, started to chant at Otani, come to Seattle,
Come to Seattle. They were my MVPs. I'll drop this
because you already know more about this game than you
need to, But I have to mention the uniforms. The
tradition is over and the players are not wearing their
(17:26):
regular season, regular team uniforms. They were wearing special generic
American League and National League jobs. Players wore genuinely ugly
sick green caps that were the worst in baseball history,
at least since the awful brief rage for those white
topped Baker's caps of the nineteen nineties Mets and Royals
and Orioles. The National Leaguer's pants apparently never showed up
(17:49):
to Seattle for the game, so they seemed to be
wearing black chinos, and the American League shirts seem to
have been cut from discarded creased shark skin suits. More importantly,
even if the uniforms had been great, even if they'd
been the best of all time, what please, is the
point of making sure there is an All Star player
(18:12):
from every team if you can't see what team every
player is from. Thank you, Nancy Faust. If you are
(18:36):
less than fifty years old, I would like to offer
my condolences to you on the fact that you did
not get to see the Baseball All Star Game when
it was at worst the third biggest sporting event of
the year behind the Super Bowl and the World Series
in the time before televised ubiquity and interleague play. It
really was that it was breathtaking to know that you
(18:59):
were watching a field full of Hall of famers, and
that a National League Hall of Fame pitcher like Fergie
Jenkins would be facing an American League Hall of Fame
batter like Mickey Mantle for the only time in their lives,
and that year after year you would see literally dozens
of matchups that would never happen again, and teammates who
would never be teammates again and had never been teammates before,
(19:22):
and players who wouldn't be on national TV again until
sometime next year, to say nothing of a game the
outcome of which actually mattered to every player on the field.
Technology killed off a lot of that. Thirty six million
people watched the nineteen eighty All Star Game. If the
twenty twenty two ratings held, seven and a half million
(19:44):
people watched the One last night. That's largely because today
you can see every player every night everywhere. You are
now your own sports center. But the rest of it,
the rest of it, Baseball threw away out of greed
alone among the All Star Games, just as among the
(20:05):
major sports championships, there was no artifice, no conceit in
the Baseball All Star Game. Just as there were no
regular season games between the American and National League teams
until nineteen ninety seven, there was also no love lost
between the American and National leagues. There were American League
fans and there were National League fans, and although this
(20:28):
was lessening with time, part of being an American League
fan was hating the National League and vice versa. And
this was not the result of some brilliant marketing strategy.
This was organic. My grandfather lived until nineteen eighty six,
and he died hating the American League, in large part
(20:49):
because when he was just a boy, the National League
was all there was in baseball, and then in nineteen
oh one, the American League came along and stole nearly
all the National League stars one hundred and eighty five
guys on opening day American League rosters in the year
nineteen oh one, one hundred and eighty five. One hundred
and eleven of them had played in the National League
(21:11):
the year before, total chaos. National League lineups that had
been intact for a decade were destroyed by the American League,
and though the leagues ended their player war in nineteen
oh three, nobody, nobody forgave or forgot, I mean the
next year, my grandpa's team, the New York Giants, won
(21:33):
the National League pennant, but refused to play in the
World Series against the American League champions because their manager,
John McGraw, hated the president of the American League and
John McGraw still did not believe the American League was
a major league. When the All Star Game began in
nineteen thirty three, John McGraw was brought out of retirement
(21:53):
to manage the National League All Stars, and the rumors
began of off the record bonuses offered to players if
the National League won, or if a National League pitcher
knocked in an American League, battered down with a pitch
during the game, or injured an American League player on
the field. It wasn't just his own demons that drove
Pete Rose to knock over American League catcher Ray Fosse
(22:16):
and fracture Fosse's shoulder in order to score the winning
run in the nineteen seventy All Star Game. That's the
way they played the All Star Game. I mentioned before
that this organic affection for one league and hatred for
the other gave almost every baseball fan a rooting interest
not just in the All Star Game, but in the
(22:37):
World Series, a rooting interest that no longer exists. The
American Leagues and National League don't exist anymore. They have
been reduced to bookkeeping formalities adjusting for growth in population.
The TV audience for the World Series is now about
a quarter of what it was in nineteen eighty, largely
(22:58):
because if your team is not playing, why should you care.
In nineteen eighty he rooted for the Philadelphia Affillies because
you were a National League fan, or maybe you rooted
against the Phillies and for the Kansas City Roads, because yeah,
you were a National League fan, but you were a
Pittsburgh fan or a Mets fan, and you hated the
Phillies and you were watching to watch them lose. When
(23:20):
was the last time you met a National League fan?
One more point and then I'll stop the Hey you kids,
get off my lawning. Here, I could list one thousand
things on the field that could illustrate the history of
a wonderful, vivid, punch throwing enmity between the two baseball
leagues that animated the World Series in the All Star
(23:42):
Game until Baseball killed it off because Baseball could make
an extra thousand dollars selling Subway Series caps or Freeway
Series windshield a visors that came with interleague play. But
actually it's two off the field battles that really emphasized
just how wonderful and wonderfully petty the hatred of American
(24:05):
League for National League used to be. In the winter
of nineteen nineteen, a dispute over a player trade in
the American League that previous season got so heated that
the New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox, and the
Chicago White Sox actually resigned from the American League and
joined the National League. They left the American League, which
(24:28):
only then had five teams, and created a super league
in the National League. Obviously, this was resolved before the
season started and they never took the field this way,
but it happened. Try that bit of trivia on a
Red Sox or Yankee fan, remember when you guys were
in the National League. The second event was forty years later,
(24:50):
and it was far more subtle, but maybe more telling.
In nineteen fifty nine, nineteen fifty nine, fifty six years
after the supposed peace agreement between the two leagues, a
joint committee met and voted to end a rule about
trading players between American League teams and National League teams.
The rule was you couldn't trade players between American League
(25:13):
teams and National League teams. Until nineteen fifty nine, it
was literally illegal within baseball for say, the New York Yankees,
to exchange players with the Los Angeles Dodgers or any
other National League team without first offering to sell those
players that they wanted to trade to every other American
League team for the waiver price ten twenty thousand, fifty
(25:35):
thousand dollars, depending on the year before you could be
traded from one league to the other, every other team
in your league had to say, nah, we don't want them.
So star players were never traded from one league to
the other until nineteen fifty nine. This went on for
(25:56):
fifty six years, and when they finally voted to eliminate
that rule, there were only sixteen teams than eight in
each league, and four of sixteen teams still voted against
the rule. And when they finally approved this interleague trading,
they only made it legal for a limited interleague trading
(26:19):
period around Thanksgiving, and the length of the period that
they all agreed to was twenty six days. Twenty six days,
the other three hundred and thirty nine days no trade
between the leagues. So when did they get rid of
that limitation? Not until nineteen eighty six, And that's why
(26:41):
the Baseball All Star Game is not a big deal anymore.
Still ahead on this all new edition of Countdown. Baseball.
In fact, used to matter so much that local TV
(27:02):
sportscasters used to make stories, I mean big stories, make
them up to try to get ratings and attention. I mean,
I saw one guy in LA when I was there
go on a TV newscast and claim that a home
run that kept the Dodgers out of the World Series
one year, that home run didn't count, and the Dodgers
(27:23):
should show up at the World Series anyway and demand
to play. He said this on live television. The story
next in Things I promised not to tell first time
for the daily roundup of the miss Grants, morons and
Dunning Krueger effects specimens who constitute today's worse persons in
the world. The runner up, Senator Tommy I'm just gonna
(27:43):
keep digging here. Tubberville of Alabama, the former Auburn football coach.
Tubberville is a flat out racist slime who last week
wondered if teachers in inner city schools can read and write,
and he keeps defending white nationalists, and then yesterday suddenly
blurted quote, white nationalists are racists, and somebody quipped on law,
(28:05):
was there a football joke in there somewhere? And I said,
Tubberville's only football jokes were his teams. This is so
bad now that Senator Tuberville's brother, Charles, who is a
rock guitarist, felt compelled to issue this statement about his
own brother quote due to recent statements by him promoting
racial stereotypes, white nationalism, and other various controversial topics. I
(28:28):
feel compelled to distance myself from his ignorant, hateful rants.
Unquote the Tubberville Brothers, everybody the runner up Congressman Jim,
what do you mean my witness is a Chinese spy? Jordan?
Jim has had another brainstorm. The Wall Street Journal reports
(28:49):
Jordan will try to gut funding for the FBI unless
the bureau agrees to build its new headquarters not in
the suburbs of Washington, DC, but in Huntsville. Abavamma, so
it can be closer to Tommy Tuberville. Why not was
so Alaska? Jim, remember with Scilla, Alaska? But our winner
Doug Burgham. Doug is the pair of eyebrows currently serving
(29:13):
as governor of North Dakota, and he is running for
the Republican nomination. A with mine, I'm allowed to mock
eyebrows and b you gotta give him credit. He at
least recognizes that his odds of getting the nomination are
kind of small, small enough that Doug Burgham is willing
to buy the nomination and not just buy it, mind you,
but pay you to donate to his campaign. How does
(29:37):
that work? Volume volume volume. The GOP will give a
spot on its first debate stage to anybody who gets
at least fifty thousand donations of at least one dollar each.
So Doug Burgham says he will give his first fifty
thousand donors a Visa or MasterCard gift card of twenty dollars.
(30:01):
You give him one dollar, he gives you twenty dollars. Volume, volume, volume,
talk about buying votes, Governor Doug Bergham, Hey, Doug, I'll
give you twenty bucks. You got a pro to go,
trim your eyebrows, Today's worst eyebrows and the world here
(30:37):
the number one story on the Countdown now, and things
I promised not to tell. And a personal saga of
how important baseball used to be. I had only been
the local sportscaster on Channel five in Los Angeles for
about six weeks when I saw one of my rivals
do something I could not believe. Nearly thirty eight years
have since passed, and it's even harder for me to
(31:01):
believe it now. In Game five of the nineteen eighty
five National League Championship Series between the LA Dodgers and
the Saint Louis Cardinals winner goes to the World Series.
Ozzy Smith, the famous shortstop of the Cardinals, hit a
home run in the bottom of the ninth inning to
beat the Dodgers three to two. Smith was a switch hitter.
He could bat left handed or right handed, but he
(31:22):
had never hit a home run right handed until then.
The ball hit some brick or concrete behind the foul
pole and Saint Louis bounded back onto the field, and
the Dodger right fielder Mike Marshall picked it up and
threw it back to the infield just cause, like why not.
Two days later, back in Los Angeles, in an infamous
(31:44):
sequence that older Dodger fans still grumble about nightly, the
Dodgers lost that series on another home run by Jack
Clark of Saint Louis. And the night after that, I
was sitting with my new colleagues at Channel five and
we had the rival newscast from Channel nine KHJTV on
one of our TV nitors in the sports office, and
(32:06):
for some reason their sportscaster was on at the start
of their newscast at ten o'clock. I have important breaking news,
he yelled. His name was Scott Saint James and he
was always yelling, but this was different. Careful forensic analysis
of the videotape by the Channel nine Sports department proves
that Ozzy Smith's so called home run against the Dodgers
(32:27):
in Game five was actually not a home run but
a double. Look Saint James shouted, then played the same
videotape every station in America had, showing the same angle
of the same Smith home run, landing fair and beating
the Dodgers and then bouncing back off the wall onto
the field and the Dodger right field are kind of
a half hearted we throwing the ball back into the
(32:48):
infield just cuz that Saint James bellowed was just a double.
Mike Marshall's throw proves it beyond the shadow of a
legal doubt. Channel nine Sports urges the Dodgers to file
lawsuits against Major League Baseball to obtain a restraining order
against this travesty, then urged the Dodgers to report to
Kansas City in order to play in tomorrow night's first
(33:09):
game of the nineteen eighty five World Series as the
rightful representatives of the National League. I don't have a
tape of this, so my version of what this buffoon,
Saint James said, is recreated from memory as faithfully as possible.
It is burned into my memory. And if it's not
(33:32):
one hundred percent accurate word for word, trust me, I
just improved it. Over at Channel five, we laughed. The
phone rang. It was one of the sports producers at
Channel two, friend of all of ours. He was laughing.
On Channel nine, they were not laughing. They did I
think this quote story unquote twice in their newscast that night,
(33:54):
and they continued to ride this idea that the home
run did not count and the Dodgers should sue right
up until the nineteen eighty five World Series, which the
Dodgers did not play in, ended a week later. But
that's not where the story ended, as if the Saint
James thing had cursed the nineteen eighty five World Series,
(34:16):
and nobody ever really knew if he really believed the story,
he was just trying to get eyeballs on a sportscast.
Nobody watched the guys who managed the World Series teams
get to manage their league's team in the All Star
Game the next year, so Dick Houser, manager of the
World champion Kansas City Royals, of nineteen eighty five was
the manager of the nineteen eighty six All Star Game,
(34:38):
played on July fifteenth at the Astrodome in Houston. That year,
the California Angels, whose games were carried on my station
Channel five, had one of their players produced one of
the great rookie seasons of all time. His name was
Wally Joyner. He was this kind of goofy first baseman.
He was a friend of mine, and even though he
was not on the fans All Star ballots, he was
(34:58):
voted in written in as the starting American League All
Star first baseman. He won with write in votes didn't
happen too often. So at the nineteen eighty six All
Star Game, Joyinner is the starting first baseman, and he
comes up in the second inning and he pops up.
But per All Star etiquette, he'll get at least one
more at bat, probably two. All the starters get two
(35:19):
at bats except in the fourth inning, when it's Joiner's
turn to hit again. All Star manager Dick Hauser pinch
hits for Joiner, sends up Don Mattingly of the Yankees
to bat instead of Joiner. Well, this did not go
over well in Southern California. Some of us were wondering
if Wally Joyner was hurt or if there was something
else going on. But over at another of our rival
(35:42):
sports departments at KABC Channel seven, that's not where their sportscaster,
Ted Dawson took it. He went on that night blistering
Dick Hauser for insulting Joiner and insulting the Angels and
Los Angeles and Anaheim and God and the flag. And
he told his viewers to call the hotel in Houston
(36:03):
that Dick House was staying at and ask for his
room and yell at him. I think they put up
a graphic with the hotel phone number. Mind you, by
the time Ted Dawson did this, it would have been
one fifteen in the morning in the Houston hotel. Whatever
Hauser had done, what Dawson did was far worse. We
(36:26):
could not have imagined at the time how far worse.
The next day, the Kansas City Royals announced that Dick
Hauser had been admitted to the hospital after several weeks
of neck pain, and the day after that, through tears,
a spokesman announced that dick Hauser was taking a leave
of absence as manager of the team immediately because he
(36:46):
had a brain tumor. In fact, Dick Hauser would die
about eleven months later at the age of just fifty one.
The nineteen eighty six All Star Game was the last
game Howser ever participated in, and Ted Dawson had told
his viewers to call Hauser up late at night in
a hotel and yet at him over an insult to
(37:06):
a player. I've done a lot of stupid stuff on
TV in my life, a lot of stuff I should
have just left alone. In most cases, I've been able
to apologize or at least make fun of myself or
make it up to the people involved with these two guys.
Saint James was fired the next year, I think, and
then Dawson. And then Dawson got hired in Dallas, and
(37:28):
the next thing we heard in LA was he was
living with some rich older woman who had bought him
a helicopter. Last thing I saw about him was in
twenty seventeen, he retired after several years as the sports
director of station KBZK in Bozeman, Montana. Sometimes life punishes
you first, then you screw up, rather than the other
(37:49):
way around. It dawned on me after Dick Hauser died
that years earlier. In nineteen eighty, the ABC station in
my hometown here in New York needed a new sportscaster,
and they tried out literally every sportscaster on every big
ABC station in the country. One week they had the
guy in from Detroit, the week after that it was
(38:11):
their guy from their station in Syracuse, and one week
it had been Ted Dawson from KABC in Los Angeles,
the guy who would tell his viewers to call up
and use the manager in the middle of the night.
Ted Dawson's on air style was breathless, and I mean
that literally. He shouted at the top of his lungs.
Had he read his script as fast as he could.
(38:34):
I mean, I can't even recreate it without causing myself
a coughing fit. While I happened to be watching the
night of his first audition show on the New York station,
Ted Dawson screamed for about three minutes, finished and panting,
threw it back to the veteran deadpan WABC Channel seven
news anchorman Roger Grimsby. Roger back to you, and they
(38:57):
cut to Grimsby. He was staring to his right towards
where Dawson was sitting wordlessly, turned back to face the camera,
and with no hint of emotion, Roger Grimsmy simply said,
we shall now resume the news. Wow, we shall now
(39:29):
resume the news. I've done all the damage I can
do here. Thank you for listening. Here are the credits.
Most of the music was arranged, produced and performed by
Brian Ray and John Phillips Shanel, who are the Countdown
musical directors. Guitar is bassed and drums by Brian Ray,
all orchestration and keyboards by John Phillips Shanel, produced by
Tko Brothers. Other Beethoven selections have been arranged and performed
(39:50):
by the group No Horns Allowed. Sports Music is the
Olderman theme from ESPN two and it was written by
Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc. Musical comments by
Nancy Fauss. The best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer
today was my friend Kenny Maine. Everything else is pretty
much my fault. Don't forget. Countdown now also available on
YouTube with the cute little animated me. Subscribe there as well,
(40:14):
give yourself options. That's countdown for this The nine hundred
and eighteenth day since Donald Trump's first attempted coup against
the democratically elected government of the United States. Arrest him
again while we still can. The next schedule countdown is
tomorrow bulletins as the news warrants till then, I'm Keith Olberman.
Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with
(40:51):
Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts.
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