November 3, 2022 • 50 mins
EPISODE 69: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:45) It's hard to believe a Presidential speech about domestic threats to democracy would have to take a back seat to another story (2:20) But the Department of Justice has given "Use Immunity" to Trump flunky Kash Patel so he can be brought back before the Documents Grand Jury and tell the truth about whether or not he witnessed Trump verbally declassifying all the stolen documents (Spoiler alert: he didn't) (5:40) Patel's testimony suggests DOJ is still on a timeline towards indicting Trump in the first week of January (6:02) There was nothing WRONG with Biden's Democracy-In-Danger speech but it lacked the controlled rage he mastered in his speech in Philadelphia in September. Thus, the advice he asked me for 15 years ago about channeling anger into righteous indignation was either too good or not good enough (7:52) Unless this was some kind of "this is the last time I say it nicely" speech, Biden's call to the better angels of our nature will completely elude those who disagree with him and believe America IS a zero-sum game, like Stewart Rhodes, whose terrifying manifesto for Trump was released (9:30) And there's no use throwing the new facts in the DePape/Pelosis case at the Right Wing. It's case closed for them and any new facts can be dismissed as Cover-ups or Conspiracies (11:55) IN SPORTS: What if they gave a World Series no-hitter and nobody cared?
B-Block (17:45) EVERY DOG HAS ITS DAY: Lia in Staten Island (18:40) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Elon Musk not knowing that +$8 and -$8 are different things fights Captain Obvious from The New York Times and Kyrie Irving and the NBA trying to fight their way out of the antisemitism mess, for the honors (22:15) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: It's 22 years ago now when Roger Clemens of the Yankees threw part of the broken bat of Mike Piazza of the Mets - threw it either AT him or inadvertently NEAR him. I had to do the first interview with Clemens, and then I asked a question that has haunted me for 22 years - what happened to the shattered bat?
C-Block 41:09 THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: The Piazza Bat saga continues through the present day, and includes everybody from John Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox, to Vin Scully, to Jay of Chez Jay restaurant in Santa Monica, California.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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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 I Heart Radio.
It is hard to believe that the President of the
(00:26):
United States could give a speech about the domestic threat
to the continuation of our democracy and it wind up
not being the most important story of the day. But
it's not. But that's because the Department of Justice just
gave Cash Patel use immunity, which gives us tangible evidence
that they are this close to indicting Donald Trump over
(00:49):
his nuclear kleptomania and all the stolen classified documents at
Mari Lago. Patel testified to the Documents Grand Jury last
month and ran the table. He invoked the Fifth Amendment
across the board. Whatever he didn't say, whatever they are
convinced he knows about, is important enough to the prosecution
of Donald Trump to convince Merrick Garland's team to basically
(01:11):
give up on prosecuting Cash Patel. And remember last summer,
Cash Patel boasted about going into the National Archives, stealing
all the documents there that related to Trump' selection conspiracy
with Russia, and then publishing them once a day on
a website. Patel has previously insisted that he knows Trump
(01:32):
orally declassified all the stolen documents, and clearly they asked
him about that in front of the grand jury, and
instead of confirming Trump's far fetched story, he took the
fifth wouldn't answer because in doing so he might incriminate himself.
In short, if I tell you the truth here, you
might be able to prosecute me with it. And they
(01:52):
do not roll the dice in cases like this. They
clearly must believe that he is prepared to testify truthfully
that Trump never declassified anything, and he was just afraid
to say anything before he got the immunity, because after
he went before the grand jury, the report was they
did not ask him only about declassification. There were other
(02:14):
questions about other topics too, So five will get you ten.
That they had asked him if he went through the
classified documents with Trump, or if he helped select the
documents for Trump, if he read these classified documents that
he should not have even known existed, and if he
had answered truthfully to those or similar questions, he would
have gone to jail. And now he can return to
(02:35):
the grand jury and tell the truth and nothing he
answers about can be used to prosecute him. It is
a virtual get out of jail free card. The one
uncertainty here would be the possibility that they asked Pateel,
did you witness Trump orally declassifying these documents? And Patel
says yes, which would not necessarily kill a case against Trump,
(03:01):
but would obviously hamper it, because the willingness to grant
hell Use immunity means this issue of declassification is really
really important to the Department of Justice, even if the
reason why is not clear to any of us peering
in the window. But then again, that same rule applies.
They do not roll the dice in cases like this.
(03:21):
They have to have evidence of some kind that the
Trump declassified everything orally story is provably nonsensical. And if
Patel says yes, he orally declassified these documents, they then
indict him for the only thing they could still indict
him for testifying untruthfully or as we civilians know it,
(03:41):
lying under oath. And it also cannot be a coincidence
that the willingness to go this far with Patel follows
by just five days the news that the Trump documents
team was joined by David Raskin, the prosecutor who helped
to convict Acarious MUSSAUI on nine eleven conspiracy charges and
(04:02):
convicted some of the U S M to SEE bombers.
Raskin is also considered one of the top prosecutors in
the country of espionage. If you will recall we walk
through the timing of all this, the d o J
does not regain full control of all those documents until
December six, and even if they work over the holidays,
(04:22):
the likeliest date of an announcement of a Trump indictment
would be in the middle or the end of the
first week of January. Say that Friday, Friday, January six.
And that is a bigger story than Joe Biden's Democracy
and Danger speech last night. All these years later, I
(04:43):
still cannot believe that then Senator Biden took me to
lunch to ask me for my advice on anything, but
specifically on how to channel anger into righteous indignation after
last night. I don't know if my advice was too
good or nowhere good enough. All of what he said
in Washington last night was true, and no danger was
(05:04):
exactly rated. But the President needed to show the same
kind of controlled rage he seemingly had mastered in his
similar speech in Philadelphia in September. Sadly, I think Mr
Biden is still convinced in his heart of what so
many of us were convinced of in two thousand sixteen
and two thousand seventeen, that if we just calmly and
firmly explained to Trump's cultists that he was morally bankrupt
(05:28):
and emotionally unstable, that enough of them would say, hey,
you're right. I didn't think of that, and the saga
of the Emperor's New Clothes would have played out just
as it did in the story. It took us a
while to realize that those people wanted morally bankrupt and
emotionally unstable, just as they now want people breaking into
democrats homes and trying to assassinate them, or if they
(05:51):
aren't home, zip tying their husbands and torturing them. The
people Joe Biden was pleading with last night are no
longer capable of being reached. I don't know what that
means about the future of this country or what we
do with them, but invoking American history and democracy to
them is meaningless. Biden said. The country is not zero sum,
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where for somebody to succeed, somebody else has to fail.
That's exactly what it is to MAGA and Q and
On and Trump and the fascists and the Republican Party,
and if we don't do something about them, they will
resume trying to do something about the rest of us.
The one positive spin that occurred to me about Biden's
(06:34):
speech was that it might almost be read as a
last warning, a last reasonable comment from a man trying
to be reasonable and trying to cure America's ills peacefully,
un calmly, one last try, one last noble attempt to
bring us together. Biden's speech was contrasted by the release
(07:00):
of the message from Stuart Rhodes, the head of the
Oath Keepers, the one he trying to get to Trump
on January four, days after the blood curdling climax of
the Maga madness at the Capitol. Quote, President Trump, you
can save the Republic by doing your duty as commander
in chief. Biden is an illegitimate Chinese puppet. He is
(07:25):
about to get his hands on the nuclear codes and
command all of our armed forces. You must use the
Insurrection Act and use the power of the Presidency to
stop him, and all US veterans will support you, and
so will the vast majority of military. If you don't,
then Biden Kamala will turn all that power on you,
your family, and all of us. You and your children
(07:46):
will die in prison, and US veterans will die in
combat on US soil fighting against traders who you turned
over all the powers of the presidency too. This is
an American saying this. That is where we were twenty
two months ago. Guess what, It has not gotten better
(08:08):
since then. Somebody asked me yesterday, now that the confirmation
had come that David de Papes is a full fledged
MAGA Trumpist Q and on Pizza Gate cultist, along with
his admission that he did not know Paul Pelosi and
that he planned to torture Nancy Pelosi until she told
him some truth he wanted. What I was asked was
(08:30):
how the right wingers still spreading conspiracy theories about the
assassination attempt slime like Glenn Greenwald and Denish to SUSA
and Tucker Carlson, how they would now be able to
explain all that to the sheep who followed them. And
I said that was easy. They would not explain all
(08:50):
that to the sheep who followed them. They all lied
about it, and the lies satisfied those people who wanted
to be lied to? So why relitigated? If any of
the true facts somehow leak into the right wing echo
system nine one tapes, confessions, police evidence, these things can
(09:10):
be dismissed as a conspiracy, whereas a cover up. Where's
a body double? Where JFK Jr? Where Jesus said so?
The last time it was this bad, the country broke
apart and six of our ancestors died in a civil war.
I would like to think there is a way out
to avoid that, but I don't know what it is.
(09:32):
I do know it is not a speech in which
President still tries to appeal to the patriotism and honesty
of those who would vote for monsters like Carrie Lake
and herschel Walker and Donald Trump, and a president who
will say the democracy is imperiled but will not name
the names of those who imperil it directly or stochastically.
(09:53):
I am all for healing and forgiving, but the first
rule of forgiveness is that the people doing the wrong
thing had to stop doing the wrong thing before you
forgive them. And right now the people doing the wrong
thing I think Trump has gotten away with everything which
is why the cash Betel immunity story was far more
(10:15):
important than President Biden's speech in sports. When I was
(10:36):
a kid and first read of Don Larson's perfect game
in the World Series in nineteen fifty six, I was
actually genuinely angry at my parents for not having me
until nineteen fifty nine. I mean, the thought of such
a thing twenty seven men up, twenty seven men down,
or even a no hitter with a couple of walks
in the World Series, that was enough to have me
(10:59):
dreaming of time travel so I could go back and
see it in person. When my mother told me that
in nineteen fifty six, Don Larson was dating a girl
who lived on their block in the Bronx, I was
rendered speechless. When in nineteen sixty seven, at the age
of eight, I watched as Jim Lonborg of the Red Sox,
(11:20):
a guy I had not known even existed six months earlier,
and I watched as his lost World Series no hit
bid went away with two out in the eighth inning
of Game two. I was almost in tears. In a
Yankees Old Timers day, I got to work alongside the
man who did the play by play of Larsen's perfect
game on Network radio. Bob Wolf. We did the p
(11:43):
A announcing for Old Timers Day. It took twenty minutes.
Even then, when I was thirty nine years old, I
got chills just working with the announcer who announced that game.
Last night, Christian Javier no hit the Philadelphia Phillies for
the first six innings of Game four of the two
World Series for the Houston Astros, and then they took
(12:04):
him out. Throwing a no hitter in the World Series,
you'd only throw ninety seven pitchers. They took him out.
I know it's old fashioned to talk about this. They
took him out of a no hitter in the World Series.
Brian Abreu, Raphael Montero, and Ryan Presley finished up the
no hitter. The Astros won five ZIP to even the
(12:27):
series at two games apiece. And this is how meaningless
baseball has rendered what should have been and would have
been one of its most spectacular accomplishments ever. Long ago,
it ruled that the only no hitters that counted as
no hitters were ones thrown by only one picture. And
how often do you ever see a game of any
kind in which one team uses only one picture? So
(12:50):
that thing last night that was not a no hitter,
it was a nothing of some sort. Still ahead, Elon
Musk analogizes the eight dollar fee for Twitter verification to
(13:12):
spending eight dollars at Starbucks, which only works if the
Starbucks he goes to hands him a cup of coffee
and then hands him eight dollars as payment for drinking
the cup of coffee. Anti Semitism in the NBA, and
the league that always gets these things right gets this
one horribly horribly wrong. The league and Kyrie Irving try
(13:34):
to buy their way out, and for a million dollars
they didn't even get an apology out of Kyrie Irving.
And this will be the last edition of things I
promised not to tell before that World Series ends, even
if it goes seven games and there are three more
combined no hitters. So I have to tell you this
story now. The two thousand World Series. Roger Clemens throwing
(13:54):
Mike Piazza's broken bat at or near Mike Piazza. I
interviewing Roger Clemens. I get a piece of the bat.
Piazza threatens to to me over the piece of the bat.
Pull up a chair for this one. It takes a while.
It's next This is Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith
(14:18):
Olberman still ahead on Countdown, Worse Persons and the NBA's
attempt to buy its way out of the Kyrie Irving
anti Semitism disaster. And before this world series is over,
let me tell you of my twenty two year long
adventure with Roger Clemmens, Mike Piazza and the Mike Piazza
(14:40):
Broken Bat which Clemmens through and about which Mike Piazza
threatened me and threatened the owner of the Boston Red Sox. First,
in each edition of Countdown, we feature a dog and
need whom you can help. Every dog has its day.
This time it's Leah from Staten Island. She is a
sharp pay. You do not see a lot of sharp
pays in trouble. But first her humans underfed her. When
(15:03):
she naturally got they threw her from a still moving
car and drove away. Leah then wandered the streets for
days until Near and Far Animal Rescue collared her took
her in. The full recovery is expected, but it won't
be quick. She's got some profound infections. Near and Far
as doing a rescue for Leah on Cuddley so if
you can donate, you can find her there, or she
(15:24):
will be the pinned tweet on my account for dogs
in need at tom Jumbo Grumbo. Your pledge will be
gratefully welcomed, as will your retweet of Leah's story, and
thank you screwing around with the format. Now the daily
(15:48):
roundup of the misgrants, morons and dunning Krueger effects specimens
who constitute today's worse persons in the world. Our bronze
Elon Musk. Every day you wonder a little bit more
how this guy can find his way through anything more
complicated than a revolving door. The Washington Post is reporting
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he will introduce video behind a paywall on Twitter. Within
a couple of weeks, all users of Twitter will see
an image or some video, but with a message saying
pay one dollar to see more. Congrats, Elmo, you just
invented only fans. And defending his intention to charge eight
dollars a month to verify a user of Twitter, Musk
(16:32):
sent out a meme of somebody smiling at an eight
dollar a cup of Starbucks, but the same person crying
at an eight dollar price for blue check mark doesn't
seem to have occurred. To musk that at Starbucks, the
person who makes the content the coffee gets paid to
make the content the coffee, But on Twitter, the person
who makes the content of the site will now have
(16:56):
to pay to make the content of the site. He's
just not bright, le Bronze. Shane Goldmacher of the New
York Times, The White House announced the president would give
a speech about threats to democracy yesterday morning. It was
in all the newspapers, including the Times, speech about democracy.
They then released excerpts a couple of hours before his speech,
(17:19):
a speech about democracy. As the speech ended, Times national
political reporter Goldmacher put out this update. Two topics that
didn't make Brian Biden's primetime presidential speech, the economy and inflation.
Democracy is clearly what Biden wanted to talk about. No,
the quality of our news media is just fine. We're
not short of smart reporters. Why do you ask? But
(17:42):
our winners, the National Basketball Association Commissioner Adam Silver and
the Brooklyn Nets. The NBA usually gets it right. I mean,
they have a great track record, but in this disaster,
with Kyrie Irving of the Nets and his blatant anti
semitism in public, they have screwed it up royally. First,
Irving supported an nanti Semitic book and film. Then, when
(18:05):
challenged by a reporter, he issued a threat quote, I'm
not going to stand down on anything I believe in.
I'm only going to get stronger because I'm not alone.
I have a whole army around me. The NBA's response
to this, the league and Kyrie Irving will now each
donate five hundred thousand dollars quote towards causes and organizations
(18:25):
that work to eradicate hate and intolerance in our communities,
and Irving will work in some unspecified way with the
Anti Defamation League for the end. They're not clear about
what he's going to do. It's going to be. They
just throughout the name Anti Defamation League five thousand dollars.
It's a charitable donation. Kyrie irving salary is thirty five
(18:48):
million dollars this season. That's a little over one point
four percent of his salary. Find deductible that will show
him Adam silver in the National Basketball I got it.
Let's try to buy our way out of this association today,
these worst persons and the world. Before the World Series ends,
(19:25):
I have to tell this thing I promised not to tell,
because by the time of the next one of these segments,
no matter how long last, the World Series will be over.
So here is our number one story things I promised
not to tell and my favorite topic, me and the
series will be over, which is more than I can
say for this story, which is chronologically and in terms
of storytelling time, the longest one of these I can
(19:48):
not only imagine having told, but ever telling. It started
on the night of October twenty two, two thousand and
it ended well. I'll let you know if and when
it ever ends. I was enjoying the second night of
one of my childhood dreams come true. I was the
host not just of the telecast of the World Series,
(20:08):
but it was an all New York City series, a
Mets versus Yankee series, a Subway series. I had literally
dreamt of it since nineteen sixty seven. The manager of
the Yankees had been the first person I ever interviewed
on TV. Fifteen years earlier. I had worked with him
in TV. He was a friend of mine. I had
just covered the Mets through their playoff run and knew
(20:30):
all of their players. My face had been on an
advertisement in dead Center Field and the Mets Stadium for
the entirety of the year before, and the players all
knew me my name. Where we were that night. Yankee
Stadium was not only where I saw my first baseball game,
but was about seven eighths of a mile from the
hospital in which I had been born, and my first
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home was four subway stops away. The night before this event,
as I hosted the start of the first game of
this Keith of palooza, I was supposed to introduce the
public address an ouncer of Yankee Stadium, Bob Sheppard, whose
voice I had heard nearly every day since I was
eight years old, so he could then introduce the players
(21:11):
and this epic world series would begin. And it dawned
on me in the seconds before I was supposed to
do this that I literally had the power to stop
the two thousand World Series from ever happening if I
just kept talking and never actually said, here is Bob Shepherd. Well,
I could delay it briefly until they cut my mic
off and then fired me on the spot. Anyway, this
(21:33):
was Game two, and now that our pregame show was over,
and I had waved to my mother, who had seen
her first game at Yankee Stadium, just who sixty six
years previously, and she was seated in the family seats
that were just nine rows up from our on field set.
I had crawled into the position I would assume for
the entire game as the dugout reporter. I was hunched
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over on a stool, squeezed between the far end of
the Yankee dugout and our Fox Sports first base camera.
A thin chicken wire fence separated me from the dugout
in self. In fact, it was a formality. I was
more or less in the dugout players, coaches, and that night,
as I settled in, my friend, the Yankee manager all
came over to say hello. Roger Clemens of the Yankees,
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who I had also known since we were both rookies
in Boston Sports in four he lasted. I didn't. Roger
Clemens had struck out the first two Mets hitters. Clemens
was a strange man about whom I had heard a
strange tale of teammates in a college summer baseball league
who were all wearing their wallets in their uniform pants
(22:36):
back pockets during a game, because one of them explained
to a friend of mine, we have this crazy kid
Clemens from Texas on this team, and we don't trust him.
In Boston, I had found him a little nervous, little standoffish,
but doing his best to be professional. But by now
there were rumors swirling around Roger Clemens about amphetamines and
(22:57):
performance enhancing drugs. And you knew not to talk to
him before or after a game unless you had to,
and if you had to, you chose your words very
carefully and then made sure that whatever you did, you
had to start with something mundane, like the score of
the game, and if you could let him bring up
anything controversial or complex, he would then probably do it.
(23:21):
So now, as this game continued, after two batters had
struck out, Lee Missilli, the former Mets star now Yankees coach,
another friend of mine, was on the other side of
a little fence, and as met superstar Mike Piazza stepped
in as the third batter of the game, Massilli leaned
in and said, conspiratorially, let's see if Rog flips him again.
In Midsummer two thousand, Roger Clemmens had beamed Mike Piazza
(23:43):
with a fastball. There was a hospital visit involved. Nobody
was convinced it had not been intentional, or that Clemens
would not do it again, even though it was the
World Series, Massili and I leaned forward. Piazza was a
deeply complicated guy too. During the playoffs, he had walked
up to me and asked me if it was true
I was from New York, and then he quizzed me
about the relative merits of the suburbs, and then wanted
(24:05):
to know if I had really taken up residence in
his favorite southern California hotel. And we talked for fifteen
minutes about that. The next night I saw him smiled,
said alo, and he looked at me like I had
just sworn a vendetta against his family. For a long
time I thought it was me, until about ten years later,
the great Vin Scully said that Piazza was with the Dodgers,
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and when they were both together there in Los Angeles,
Vin had had the identical experience with Piazza. Best friends
on the team bus one day, and then no indication
Piazza remembered even meeting him. The next I mean that
was Ben Scully. Clemmens, as it turned out, did not
throw a baseball at Piazza, but instead pitched him inside
in on his hands, and Piazza tried to stop his
(24:48):
swing that was half self defense, but instead the odd
angle and the force of the pitch shattered Piazza's bat.
The ball veered to the right, describing a circle into
foul territory. The head of the bat shot out towards
Clemens on the mound. A second piece flew briefly into
the in field. Piazza was left holding just the handle.
And it looked as foolish as that sounds. But lost
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in this description is the fact that all happened at once,
and even from our sign angle in the Yankee dug out,
it looked to massili in Me as if Piazza's bat
had simply exploded, like it was a trick device of
some sort. I saw Clemens reach for the baseball. I
thought it was the baseball right in front of him,
and then just as quickly he and I at the
(25:31):
same moment, realized it was not the baseball. Was the
barrel of the bat, which was slightly rounded, just a
little darker than a baseball, but could in the heat
of an instant following a bat explosion, it could be
mistaken for a ball. So far so good. But right then, Clemens,
realizing it was part of a bat and not a ball,
promptly threw that part of the bat at me. Jesus
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mas I said to Missili, why did Clemens throw that
bat barrel at me? The Yankee coach looked incredulously at me.
You didn't throw it you, We threw it at me.
That's what looked like we were lined up perfectly. Roger
Clemens had thrown the barrel of Mike Piazza's bat, say,
a hundred and twenty feet instead of just six or
seven feet, he would have hit either me or Lee
(26:17):
Missilli in the Yankee dugout. As it was, since nobody
knew exactly what was happening, Piazza had started to run
down to first base in case the ball was fair.
He didn't know where the ball was either. For that
initial split second, you really couldn't tell which flying object
was the ball, and also whether the ball was fair
(26:38):
or foul. So Roger Clemens throw certainly looked like it
was aimed at Piazza. As Piazza went down the first baseline,
and as Piazza took umbrage, and there was another split
second of confusion when it looked like Piazza might charge
out to the mound to try to sock Clements for
this and for the Midsummer beating. I said to MISSILEI wait,
did he throw that bat at Piazza? Massilli just shook
(27:02):
his head. I don't think so. When hell knows he's
been here two years, I haven't figured out anything he's
done so far. As the umpires then got involved, Clemens
repeatedly tapped his own chest, and not in a bragging way,
but in a kind of what looked like that's on
me way. Two bat boys collected the three main pieces
of the bat and a bunch of smaller shards, some
(27:24):
of them smaller than a toothpick. The fox play by
play man threw it to me in the dugout well,
I said, I can tell you the Yankee dugout doesn't
know what happened or why. Joe Massili laughed quietly and
then hit me in the arm. While I was on
the air, I postulated that Clemens was looking for a
ball hit back to him. Instead found the piece of
the bat and then discarded that piece of the bat
(27:45):
so we could keep looking for the ball that he
discarded it kind of where Piazza was running, Might have
been deliberate, might have been a coincidence. I do remember
suggesting that if Clemens had really aimed the bat at Piazza,
that from that distance, with the strength and accuracy of
a major league pictcher, he clearly would have hit him
with it. Piazza then promptly grounded out to end the inning,
(28:07):
and as Clements came back towards the Yankee dugout where
Massili and I were, he again stopped to talk to
the umpire, who was Charlie Reliford. Over the noise of
fifty six thousand fans at Yankee Stadium, I couldn't hear
a damn thing, but it sure looked like Clemens was
again saying that was on me. I asked Massili if
he could find out if that's what Clements was doing
and happen an inning later, Massili reported that Clemens indeed
(28:29):
thought for a second it was the ball, and then
he threw it, and then it was on him, and
that it was not intentional and it was not directed
at Piazza. Now I did something kind of stupid. I
suggested to my bosses that I should go ask the
Commissioner Baseball who in a World Series game had the
power to eject any player for any reason, although that
power had not actually been used since ninety four. What
(28:52):
he thought of all this, the producer said, yes, and
I thought me and my big mouth. I now had
to crawl out of that little space between camera and dugout,
and I mean literally crawl all hands and knees to
exit back into the seats via where the groundskeepers kept
all the extra dirt. I knew where in the stands
(29:14):
the commissioner was sitting. I went there. I got to him,
I asked him. He assured me there was no discipline
coming for Clemmons, and they'd look at the tape of
the game again that night or in the morning, but
he really didn't think Clemmons had tried to hit Piazza
with the bat. Well, they would look at the tape,
and they decided both that Clemmons did not try to
hit Piazza with the bat and that he should be
fined fifty thou dollars for I don't know, not trying
(29:37):
to hit him with the bat. So I made it
back to the dugout, reversing my crawl like I was
recreating the movie The Great escape. As it turned out,
Piazza's little squib shot that caused all the trouble with
the exploding bat was about the hardest thing they hit
off Clemmons all night. Over eight innings, he struck out
nine Mets batters, he walked none, he gave up only
(30:00):
two hits, and he only hit one batter. And then, incredibly,
after Men's left the game, the Yankees almost blew a
six nothing lead in the ninth inning, a Met outfielder
named Jay Peyton hit a three run homer off future
Hall of Famer Mariano Rivera, and the Mets had a
chance to tie the game or go ahead off Rivera
in the top of the ninth and then he got
(30:22):
out of it in the final score with six to
five Yankees. And with the game over now it was
Keith interviews Clemens time. I went to the pre arranged
spot at the other end of the Yankee dugout where
another friend of mine, the Yankees PR director, had guaranteed
me he would go and get Clemens and they would
emerge after Clemens left the clubhouse to do what was
a contractually obligated interview with Fox and Me. Apparently, Roger
(30:48):
Clemens started making his way towards me the moment the
Yankees finally won that game. Unfortunately, at that exact moment,
security closed the only runway from the Yankee dug out
to the clubhouse so that a dignitary could use it
as an exit from his seats. The dignitary was Mayor
Rudolph Giuliani, noted front running Yankees fan and ticket freeloader.
(31:13):
And while Fox literally delayed the start of every newscast
on every one of its stations in the country, even
on the West Coast, and Joe Buck and Tim McCarver
kept showing replays again and again and promising my interview
with Roger Clemens, Rudy Giuliani took his goddamn time leaving
the field. His idiot son Andrew grabbed some dirt from
the field. I half expected him to eat it. Instead,
(31:35):
he stuffed it in his jacket pockets. Giuliani now waited
for his entire entourage, one of his wives, some of
his I guess they were friends, assorted political riff raff,
and as my producers screamed in my ear, where is Clemmens,
Giuliani waited until they were all together on the field.
And finally he marched them down into the dugout and
(31:58):
up through the runway. And after all this delay, Clemens
came out and finally I could ask him about throwing
the batch shard at or near Piazza. And at that
moment I remembered what I had learned about Clemens in Boston.
If you started an interview with something controversial, he might
very well walk away. If, on the other hand, you
did the boring game outcome question, he would answer anything
(32:20):
you asked, and he might even bring up anything controversial himself.
But you had to do the stupid game stuff first.
So which was harder work? Roger I asked eight innings
of two hit ball or watching the Mets nearly tied
in the ninth. His answer was not bad, but he
did not bring up the bat. So I asked another
question about what he thought of his performance in that game. Well,
(32:41):
that did it. He started talking about having to overcome
his emotions in the first inning, and now I could say, well,
since you brought up the emotions the bat throwing incident,
did you throw that piece of broken bat at Mike Piazza.
There is a freeze frame from that interview in which
Roger Clemen's eyes are bugged wide open. Well, Glemmen's basically
(33:04):
confirm what the guys in the dugout had told me.
He had told them. You can believe him or not,
but he thought the thing he grabbed was the ball,
and when it wasn't, he threw it away just in
case the ball was somewhere else near him and he
had to have a free hand with which to pick
it up. He explained the chest taps. He was indeed
saying to the umpire Umpire Charlie, as Clemens called him,
accompanying his apologies to the Umps for throwing the bat.
(33:26):
He said he didn't even know where Piazza was at
the point he threw the bat. It was as straight
and nonpartisan, and frankly as informative an interview as I've
ever conducted. Meanwhile, everybody else in that stadium, everybody else
in that city, everybody else in the Tri State area
was convinced of one of only two things. Roger Clemens
(33:48):
had tried to impale Mike Piazza with a shard of
his own bat, or the Mets were cry babies who
could not tell that. Clemments obviously did not try to
impale Mike Piazza with his own bat. There was no
middle ground. I found this out specifically the next day
when the TV sports columnist of the New York Times,
Rich Sandomir, who was a friend of mine, called to
(34:10):
interview me about the interview. Why didn't you ask him
about the bat first? Nobody cared about how he pitched.
He threw a bat at at Piazza. I said, you're
a Met fan, and I explained the theory of not
making Clemens end an interview before he said what you
needed to know. I went through the whole thing I
just recited here. It was amazing to see those few
days how every sports reporter and columnist in New York
(34:33):
self identified as either a Met fan or X Met fan,
or a Yankee fan or X Yankee fan. And you
can still see it today, as this story from twenty
two years ago is recollected by others. They wrote what
they felt as kids, Clemens was the victim. Or Clemmens
tried to kill Mike Piazza like he was a dracula
(34:57):
and they had the wooden steak to go through his heart. Meanwhile,
we learned recently from Joe Torre the Yankee manager, another
one of my friends, that they all hid something from
us that night, the thing about emotions. After the incident
in the first inning, Roger Clemens went back to the
Yankee clubhouse and started to cry. This might have had
(35:18):
something to do with embarrassment or grief. But since he
had noted that he had had to check his emotions,
I always thought, well, he might have been a little
overamped for that game, naturally or otherwise. Alright, So before
I present anything else out of chronological order, let me
go back to the moment. I thank Roger Clements for
(35:39):
the interview and threw it back to Joe Buck and
Tim McCarver in the Fox booth, because this is when
the real trouble started. They were pretty much done for
the night, but I had another two hours to go
in a live postgame show on Fox's cable Sports network.
We had about four minutes until that show started, and
it suddenly occurred to me that although this was not
the most important event in the history of the World Series,
(36:00):
the bat would become part of the iconography of baseball.
I had been at Yankee Stadium often enough over the
years to know the two kids who ran the visiting clubhouse,
and right then they were still packing up the Mets
bats and equipment and the Met dugout. So I ran
over and asked the senior of them what happened to
the pieces of the Piazza bat. The answer to that
(36:24):
question has haunted me for twenty two years. It resulted
in me being threatened with a lawsuit by Mike Piazza.
The owner of the Boston Red Sox said he was
threatened by Piazza over the same bat. And then came
the moment during that World Series that Mike Piazza confronted
me and we talked about restaurants. The rest of this
(36:46):
crazy story after this, So back to our number one
story and the countdown and the saga of the night
in the two thousand World Series and all the nights
since when the bat of Mike Piazza of the Mets shattered,
should you be? And Roger Clemens of the Yankees picked
(37:08):
up the barrel of that bat and tossed it at him,
or just tossed it away having mistaken it for a baseball,
or made up a story that he had mistaken it
for a baseball. And I was in the Yankee dug
out as the reporter, and I was hosting the game
for Fox, and I interviewed Clemens afterwards, and then before
our two hour postgame show on Cable, I went over
to the Met dugout and asked the clubhouse attendant there
(37:30):
what happened to the pieces of Pianza's bat well. The
guy explained that Bobby Valentine, the Mets manager, had asked
that one of the pieces go to a friend of
his in the stands, and he, the clubhouse attendant, had
handed it to the guy. A second piece he believed
was kept by the Yankees. He wasn't sure about that.
The third piece, the handle was where was it? Where
(37:52):
is it? He asked the other attendant. It's here in
the garbage, the kid said. I did a double take
the garbage. Yeah, the kid said, under the dugout bench,
and there it was stuffed in amid all the empty
bag to sunflower seeds and the crushed gatorade cups. I said,
what happens to it? Now? Gets thrown out to clean
out the dugouts first, so I said, look, can I
(38:14):
borrow it? This would make a great prop for our
postgame show? And the attendant says sure, and he pulls
it out of the pile and hands it to me,
just about seven inches of a baseball bat, and all
there is Piazza's uniform number thirty one written in magic
marker on the bottom. Listen. I said, I won't be
able to bring this back to you for like two hours.
We're on for two hours. Will you still be in
(38:34):
the clubhouse? And he said, are you kidding? We have
to be here at eight He and I'll be out
of here in ten minutes. And I said, you want
me to bring it back to you for Game three?
And he says, garbage. You're gonna bring back garbage, Throw
it out, keep it whatever, What do I care? So
I used the bat fragment as a prop in the
show repeatedly, and I stuck it into my shoulder bag,
(38:57):
and I thought, I'm not a scrounger, but this is
a valuable piece of memorabilia and I'd like to keep it.
So I'll either I'll auctioned off for charity and bid
against myself for something, or I'll make a donation to
a baseball charity and I'll keep it. And that was it.
And two days later, as the World Series shifted from
Yankee Stadium to Shasee Stadium. I got a phone call
(39:17):
from one of the PR guys at Fox Sports. Did
you see the paper? And I said, no, not yet.
And he says, Piazza told the guy from Newsday that
you stole his back and he wants it back. And
I said, what if I hadn't asked about it, it it
would be on a garbage scout right now being towed
out to be dumped in the Atlantic Ocean. And he
says maybe, but Piazza told this John Hayman, he's gonna
(39:39):
sue you to get it back. So now I go
to the ballpark with extra excitement on my plate. I'm
waiting for Mike Piazza to tell me he's gonna sue me.
So I go out onto the field and I'm wondering
how long it's gonna be before I run into Piazza.
And like two minutes after I step on the field,
I turned around and he's walking towards me, and he
looks at me and he says, hey, Keith wild One
(39:59):
the other night, huh say listen, when you lived at Shutters,
did you ever eat it ivy at the shore in
Santa Monica? Nothing about the bat we're talking about restaurants
in Santa Monica, California, And I say, well, yeah, but
did you ever eat at Shay Jay's And a big
smile from Piazza, Oh, man, I love Shade Jays. I
love Jay. Give me your number this winter when I'm home,
Let's go eat at Ja Ja's. And I said, I'll
(40:21):
pay for it and I'll order the sand dabs. Now
we're talking about sand dabs, how to prepare sand dabs
at a restaurant. And then he says, hey, sorry, I
gotta go ahead, have a good show. That was it.
He's in the paper threatening to sue me. We see
each other on the field, he starts the conversation. No
mention of suing me, not one word. Next day in
(40:44):
the paper, more Piazza quotes about how he's gonna assume
me for stealing his bat. Next night, Game four, the
World Series, we're just about to go on the air
at the pregame show, and now Piazza comes over again,
coming in from the outfield to the dugout and he says, hey,
this must be really cool to do what you guys
are doing. Have a great show. And by now the
only thing I can think of he does not know
I'm the name Keith ol Room, and he keeps threatening
(41:06):
to sue. So the World Series ends and the Yankees
beat the Mets, and if you look for it, there's
this photo of the traditional postgame awarding of the World
Series Trophy and the Most Valuable Player award at its
commissioner Bud Sealig and Derek Jeter, the Yankees and me,
and just before it happened, George Steinbrenner was the owner
of the Yankees. He's crying and he leans in and
(41:28):
I give him a hug and reassure him. And he
asked me if my mother went to the game, and
I said, you know my mother, she'd never come to
Chase Stadium. She hates it more than you do. And
he says, I love her more than ever before. Now.
So the series ends, and it's not been that greatest series,
but it's been exciting, and it was the dream from
my childhood. And the Yankees have one, and my friends
(41:49):
are happy. And I've not heard another word about this lawsuit,
nothing from Mike Piazza. And I told the Fox people, well,
if I'm not gonna hear anything more from them, it's easy.
I'm going to keep the bat, and I'm gonna donate
twenty dollars to this charity, the Baseball Assistance Team, which
helps X ball players in financial need, because A I'm
not a scrounger. B it's a great cause. See that's
(42:13):
actually much more than the bat handle would be worth
on the open market. And D the acronym for the
Baseball Assistance Team is B a T bat and that's perfect.
It's about Piazza's bat, you get it. And then nothing
for a month, whereupon Fox gets another letter now from
Piazza's agent fellow named Manson, and he threatens to sue again,
(42:35):
and that's the end of it. Never heard from him again.
So now it's the next year, two thousand one, and
I'm back in New York working for CNN doing the news,
and I go to a Mets game and I see
Piazza and I give him a big smile and I
offer my hand and I say, still of those sand
dabs from s J. And he just stares at me
and walks right past me. And I see a cop
I know who works next to the Mets dugout and
(42:57):
the cops says, Mike has been asking him about me.
Is that Keith Alderman, but one who stole my bat.
So now I'm not just keeping the bat. I want
to sue Mike Piazza for being a pain in the ass.
And then eleven happens, and ball players are doing charity things,
(43:18):
and sportscasters and newscasters are doing charity things, and I think, well,
this is the time when the baseball season resumes. I
throw the bad handle in my bag and I go
out to a Mets game and I go up to
Piazza's locker before the game, and I pulled a bat
chart out and I say, take this, Mike, auction it
off for charity. Let's do some good with this. Or
if it's too much trouble, you sign it an I'll
(43:39):
auction it off. We can leave my name out of it,
whatever you want, however you want to do it. And
he looks at me like I've just insulted his mother
and says, no, it's too complicated, and he turns away,
and I think to myself, this is the strangest athlete
I have ever met. And just before the season ends,
I go to another Mets game. Now this time it's
(44:00):
one of his teammates who takes me aside and says,
you know, Piazza never stops talking about you stealing his
bat from the Clemens game last year. He says he
still wants to sue you. Didn't you trying to give
him the bat back in the club house to auction off?
Didn't I see that? And I said, yeah, I did,
and he refused to take it, And the guy laughs
and he says, great player, excellent catcher. I love him.
(44:22):
Strangest player I have ever met. Comes two thousand to
nothing happens. See Piazza at several Mets games. Nothing happens.
Two thousand three, nothing happens. Now. I can't pin the
year down on this. It's one of the Red Sox
Yankees playoff series, either two thousand three or two thousand four.
And I'm leaving the field as they're clearing the media
(44:42):
off just before the game starts, and I'm going out
through the Red Sox dugout, literally at the same spot
where the kid handed me Piazza's bat handle three or
four years earlier, where the trouble all began, and I
see the new owner of the Red Sox team approaching
from the other end of the dugout Keith John Henry,
nice to meet you. Have you got a minute, And
(45:03):
I said, well, yeah, they're they're kicking the meat the
off the field, so and he laughs and he says
I can take care of that. And he yells at
the plane clothes cop and he says he's with me,
and the cop nods and John Henry, the owner of
the Red Sox, and I sit down on the Red
Sox bench before the start of a Red Sox Yankees
playoff game, and there are no other reporters out there,
and I think, Okay, what did I say about the
Red Sox? What is he piste off about? Instead, John
(45:27):
Henry says, can I ask you about Mike Piazza? And
I laugh and I say sure, what about him? And
he says, you have part of his bat from the
World Series with Clemens right, And I said yeah, and
he says, well, tell me the whole story. So I
do what you've just heard, and John Henry says, that's
(45:48):
what I was told, Thank you. I thought it was me.
So that other piece of the bat that was handed
to a friend of Bobby Valentine's during that game, that
friend is a great friend of mine. And after nine eleven.
He said, wouldn't it be great to get Mike Piazza
to sign this and then we can auction it off
for the victims families or the cops or some other charity.
And he gives me the bat and I call him
Mets and they approach Mike and they call me and
(46:09):
they say, Mike loves the idea and I should come
to one of the spring training games and he'll sign it.
So the next March, I go to one of the
Mets spring training games and I go up to him
in the clubhouse and I introduced myself and he looks
at me like I'm from Mars, and I say, well,
I brought the bat, and he says, what bat? And
I explained that we had arranged to have him signed
the bat from the World Series for a nine eleven
charity and he erupts at me, I'm not signing that bat?
(46:32):
Sure for charity? Do you think I was born yesterday?
And now I say something to John Henry, owner of
the Red Sox, like welcome to the club. Did he
threaten to sue you too? And he laughs and says yes,
that's the next part of the story. So while we're
trying to straighten that out. His agent calls me and
asks if I will give them the bat to auction
(46:53):
off for charity. And I say sure, and I go
to another Mets game, and I go to the clubhouse
and I have the bat again. Now Piazza says, no,
I can't take the bat because of pending litigation, but
if I want him to, he'll sign it for me.
All I have to do is come back a couple
of weeks later. So this is what I wanted to
ask you, Keith. Is he the strangest ballplayer you've ever met?
(47:17):
Or is it just me? There's one more part to this.
Flash forward to I still have the Piazza bat handle,
the one I unsuccessfully tried to give back to Piazza.
The middle portion, the one John Henry unsuccessfully tried to
get back to Piazza, has been sold, with the proceeds
(47:37):
going to charity. So where is the third piece, the
barrel of the bat, the part that Clemmens through at
Piazza if you're a Met fan or was unfairly accused
of throwing at Piazza if you're not a Met fan.
And the answer finally arrives in a sports memorabilia auction
catalog that year, while one of the visiting bat boys
was handing the middle part of the bat up to
(47:58):
a friend of Bobby Valentine and John Henry's in the stands,
the barrel, which landed near the Yankee dugout, was ouped
up by the Yankee bat boy, who put it in
the pile of Yankee broken bats. And as it turned out,
right at that point, the Yankees strength and conditioning coach
Jeff Mangold, who was on the bench, said, wait a minute,
that's the pile of broken bats they're gonna throw out.
(48:19):
They shouldn't throw it out. Its history. And he grabs
that part of the Piazza bat and puts it up
in his home office. And now it's fourteen years later
and he wants to auction it off for charity. So
he auctions it off, and I think, well, hell, it
should be alongside the other piece of the bat. My
other piece of the bat, the handle, So I win
the auction. There it is on my wall, complete with
(48:41):
a baseball card showing Roger Clemens about to throw the barrel.
Reasons left to your imagination. Two thirds of the famous bat.
I'll sell it someday I'm sure, but I'll always have
the memories, my memories and John Henry's memories. And if
you're wondering, No, Unlike John Henry and I, that Yankee
strength coach Jeff Mangold never tried to give it back
(49:04):
to Piazza, or get it signed by Piazza or auctioned
off for charity with Piazza, which means that, on top
of everything else, Jeff Mangold is smarter than John Henry
and I put together. I've done all the damage I
(49:30):
can do here. Thank you for listening. Followed this podcast.
If you can tell a friend, tell Mike Piazza. We're
number one among non news outlet news and political podcasts.
But I'd like to be whatever is better than that.
Here are credits. Most of the music, including our theme
from Beethoven's Ninth, was arranged, produced, and performed by Brian
Ray and John Philip Chanelle. They are the Countdown musical directors.
(49:52):
All orchestration and keyboards by John Philip Chanelle. Guitars based
on drums by Brian Ray and produced by t Ko Brothers.
Other Beethoven selections have been arranged and performed by No
horns allowed the sports music is the Olderman theme from
ESPN two, which was written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy
of ESPN, Inc. Musical comments courtesy of Nancy Faust. The
(50:13):
best baseball stadium organist ever and our announcer today was
Tony Kornheiser. Everything else pretty much my fault. Let's countdown
for this the six and sixty seventh day since Donald
Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of
the United States. Arrest him now while we still can.
We'll have a new episode for you tomorrow. Until then
on Keith Alderman. Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck.
(50:41):
Countdown with Keith Olberman is a production of I heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of I Heart Radio.
It is hard to believe that the President of the
(00:26):
United States could give a speech about the domestic threat
to the continuation of our democracy and it wind up
not being the most important story of the day. But
it's not. But that's because the Department of Justice just
gave Cash Patel use immunity, which gives us tangible evidence
that they are this close to indicting Donald Trump over
(00:49):
his nuclear kleptomania and all the stolen classified documents at
Mari Lago. Patel testified to the Documents Grand Jury last
month and ran the table. He invoked the Fifth Amendment
across the board. Whatever he didn't say, whatever they are
convinced he knows about, is important enough to the prosecution
of Donald Trump to convince Merrick Garland's team to basically
(01:11):
give up on prosecuting Cash Patel. And remember last summer,
Cash Patel boasted about going into the National Archives, stealing
all the documents there that related to Trump' selection conspiracy
with Russia, and then publishing them once a day on
a website. Patel has previously insisted that he knows Trump
(01:32):
orally declassified all the stolen documents, and clearly they asked
him about that in front of the grand jury, and
instead of confirming Trump's far fetched story, he took the
fifth wouldn't answer because in doing so he might incriminate himself.
In short, if I tell you the truth here, you
might be able to prosecute me with it. And they
(01:52):
do not roll the dice in cases like this. They
clearly must believe that he is prepared to testify truthfully
that Trump never declassified anything, and he was just afraid
to say anything before he got the immunity, because after
he went before the grand jury, the report was they
did not ask him only about declassification. There were other
(02:14):
questions about other topics too, So five will get you ten.
That they had asked him if he went through the
classified documents with Trump, or if he helped select the
documents for Trump, if he read these classified documents that
he should not have even known existed, and if he
had answered truthfully to those or similar questions, he would
have gone to jail. And now he can return to
(02:35):
the grand jury and tell the truth and nothing he
answers about can be used to prosecute him. It is
a virtual get out of jail free card. The one
uncertainty here would be the possibility that they asked Pateel,
did you witness Trump orally declassifying these documents? And Patel
says yes, which would not necessarily kill a case against Trump,
(03:01):
but would obviously hamper it, because the willingness to grant
hell Use immunity means this issue of declassification is really
really important to the Department of Justice, even if the
reason why is not clear to any of us peering
in the window. But then again, that same rule applies.
They do not roll the dice in cases like this.
(03:21):
They have to have evidence of some kind that the
Trump declassified everything orally story is provably nonsensical. And if
Patel says yes, he orally declassified these documents, they then
indict him for the only thing they could still indict
him for testifying untruthfully or as we civilians know it,
(03:41):
lying under oath. And it also cannot be a coincidence
that the willingness to go this far with Patel follows
by just five days the news that the Trump documents
team was joined by David Raskin, the prosecutor who helped
to convict Acarious MUSSAUI on nine eleven conspiracy charges and
(04:02):
convicted some of the U S M to SEE bombers.
Raskin is also considered one of the top prosecutors in
the country of espionage. If you will recall we walk
through the timing of all this, the d o J
does not regain full control of all those documents until
December six, and even if they work over the holidays,
(04:22):
the likeliest date of an announcement of a Trump indictment
would be in the middle or the end of the
first week of January. Say that Friday, Friday, January six.
And that is a bigger story than Joe Biden's Democracy
and Danger speech last night. All these years later, I
(04:43):
still cannot believe that then Senator Biden took me to
lunch to ask me for my advice on anything, but
specifically on how to channel anger into righteous indignation after
last night. I don't know if my advice was too
good or nowhere good enough. All of what he said
in Washington last night was true, and no danger was
(05:04):
exactly rated. But the President needed to show the same
kind of controlled rage he seemingly had mastered in his
similar speech in Philadelphia in September. Sadly, I think Mr
Biden is still convinced in his heart of what so
many of us were convinced of in two thousand sixteen
and two thousand seventeen, that if we just calmly and
firmly explained to Trump's cultists that he was morally bankrupt
(05:28):
and emotionally unstable, that enough of them would say, hey,
you're right. I didn't think of that, and the saga
of the Emperor's New Clothes would have played out just
as it did in the story. It took us a
while to realize that those people wanted morally bankrupt and
emotionally unstable, just as they now want people breaking into
democrats homes and trying to assassinate them, or if they
(05:51):
aren't home, zip tying their husbands and torturing them. The
people Joe Biden was pleading with last night are no
longer capable of being reached. I don't know what that
means about the future of this country or what we
do with them, but invoking American history and democracy to
them is meaningless. Biden said. The country is not zero sum,
(06:14):
where for somebody to succeed, somebody else has to fail.
That's exactly what it is to MAGA and Q and
On and Trump and the fascists and the Republican Party,
and if we don't do something about them, they will
resume trying to do something about the rest of us.
The one positive spin that occurred to me about Biden's
(06:34):
speech was that it might almost be read as a
last warning, a last reasonable comment from a man trying
to be reasonable and trying to cure America's ills peacefully,
un calmly, one last try, one last noble attempt to
bring us together. Biden's speech was contrasted by the release
(07:00):
of the message from Stuart Rhodes, the head of the
Oath Keepers, the one he trying to get to Trump
on January four, days after the blood curdling climax of
the Maga madness at the Capitol. Quote, President Trump, you
can save the Republic by doing your duty as commander
in chief. Biden is an illegitimate Chinese puppet. He is
(07:25):
about to get his hands on the nuclear codes and
command all of our armed forces. You must use the
Insurrection Act and use the power of the Presidency to
stop him, and all US veterans will support you, and
so will the vast majority of military. If you don't,
then Biden Kamala will turn all that power on you,
your family, and all of us. You and your children
(07:46):
will die in prison, and US veterans will die in
combat on US soil fighting against traders who you turned
over all the powers of the presidency too. This is
an American saying this. That is where we were twenty
two months ago. Guess what, It has not gotten better
(08:08):
since then. Somebody asked me yesterday, now that the confirmation
had come that David de Papes is a full fledged
MAGA Trumpist Q and on Pizza Gate cultist, along with
his admission that he did not know Paul Pelosi and
that he planned to torture Nancy Pelosi until she told
him some truth he wanted. What I was asked was
(08:30):
how the right wingers still spreading conspiracy theories about the
assassination attempt slime like Glenn Greenwald and Denish to SUSA
and Tucker Carlson, how they would now be able to
explain all that to the sheep who followed them. And
I said that was easy. They would not explain all
(08:50):
that to the sheep who followed them. They all lied
about it, and the lies satisfied those people who wanted
to be lied to? So why relitigated? If any of
the true facts somehow leak into the right wing echo
system nine one tapes, confessions, police evidence, these things can
(09:10):
be dismissed as a conspiracy, whereas a cover up. Where's
a body double? Where JFK Jr? Where Jesus said so?
The last time it was this bad, the country broke
apart and six of our ancestors died in a civil war.
I would like to think there is a way out
to avoid that, but I don't know what it is.
(09:32):
I do know it is not a speech in which
President still tries to appeal to the patriotism and honesty
of those who would vote for monsters like Carrie Lake
and herschel Walker and Donald Trump, and a president who
will say the democracy is imperiled but will not name
the names of those who imperil it directly or stochastically.
(09:53):
I am all for healing and forgiving, but the first
rule of forgiveness is that the people doing the wrong
thing had to stop doing the wrong thing before you
forgive them. And right now the people doing the wrong
thing I think Trump has gotten away with everything which
is why the cash Betel immunity story was far more
(10:15):
important than President Biden's speech in sports. When I was
(10:36):
a kid and first read of Don Larson's perfect game
in the World Series in nineteen fifty six, I was
actually genuinely angry at my parents for not having me
until nineteen fifty nine. I mean, the thought of such
a thing twenty seven men up, twenty seven men down,
or even a no hitter with a couple of walks
in the World Series, that was enough to have me
(10:59):
dreaming of time travel so I could go back and
see it in person. When my mother told me that
in nineteen fifty six, Don Larson was dating a girl
who lived on their block in the Bronx, I was
rendered speechless. When in nineteen sixty seven, at the age
of eight, I watched as Jim Lonborg of the Red Sox,
(11:20):
a guy I had not known even existed six months earlier,
and I watched as his lost World Series no hit
bid went away with two out in the eighth inning
of Game two. I was almost in tears. In a
Yankees Old Timers day, I got to work alongside the
man who did the play by play of Larsen's perfect
game on Network radio. Bob Wolf. We did the p
(11:43):
A announcing for Old Timers Day. It took twenty minutes.
Even then, when I was thirty nine years old, I
got chills just working with the announcer who announced that game.
Last night, Christian Javier no hit the Philadelphia Phillies for
the first six innings of Game four of the two
World Series for the Houston Astros, and then they took
(12:04):
him out. Throwing a no hitter in the World Series,
you'd only throw ninety seven pitchers. They took him out.
I know it's old fashioned to talk about this. They
took him out of a no hitter in the World Series.
Brian Abreu, Raphael Montero, and Ryan Presley finished up the
no hitter. The Astros won five ZIP to even the
(12:27):
series at two games apiece. And this is how meaningless
baseball has rendered what should have been and would have
been one of its most spectacular accomplishments ever. Long ago,
it ruled that the only no hitters that counted as
no hitters were ones thrown by only one picture. And
how often do you ever see a game of any
kind in which one team uses only one picture? So
(12:50):
that thing last night that was not a no hitter,
it was a nothing of some sort. Still ahead, Elon
Musk analogizes the eight dollar fee for Twitter verification to
(13:12):
spending eight dollars at Starbucks, which only works if the
Starbucks he goes to hands him a cup of coffee
and then hands him eight dollars as payment for drinking
the cup of coffee. Anti Semitism in the NBA, and
the league that always gets these things right gets this
one horribly horribly wrong. The league and Kyrie Irving try
(13:34):
to buy their way out, and for a million dollars
they didn't even get an apology out of Kyrie Irving.
And this will be the last edition of things I
promised not to tell before that World Series ends, even
if it goes seven games and there are three more
combined no hitters. So I have to tell you this
story now. The two thousand World Series. Roger Clemens throwing
(13:54):
Mike Piazza's broken bat at or near Mike Piazza. I
interviewing Roger Clemens. I get a piece of the bat.
Piazza threatens to to me over the piece of the bat.
Pull up a chair for this one. It takes a while.
It's next This is Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith
(14:18):
Olberman still ahead on Countdown, Worse Persons and the NBA's
attempt to buy its way out of the Kyrie Irving
anti Semitism disaster. And before this world series is over,
let me tell you of my twenty two year long
adventure with Roger Clemmens, Mike Piazza and the Mike Piazza
(14:40):
Broken Bat which Clemmens through and about which Mike Piazza
threatened me and threatened the owner of the Boston Red Sox. First,
in each edition of Countdown, we feature a dog and
need whom you can help. Every dog has its day.
This time it's Leah from Staten Island. She is a
sharp pay. You do not see a lot of sharp
pays in trouble. But first her humans underfed her. When
(15:03):
she naturally got they threw her from a still moving
car and drove away. Leah then wandered the streets for
days until Near and Far Animal Rescue collared her took
her in. The full recovery is expected, but it won't
be quick. She's got some profound infections. Near and Far
as doing a rescue for Leah on Cuddley so if
you can donate, you can find her there, or she
(15:24):
will be the pinned tweet on my account for dogs
in need at tom Jumbo Grumbo. Your pledge will be
gratefully welcomed, as will your retweet of Leah's story, and
thank you screwing around with the format. Now the daily
(15:48):
roundup of the misgrants, morons and dunning Krueger effects specimens
who constitute today's worse persons in the world. Our bronze
Elon Musk. Every day you wonder a little bit more
how this guy can find his way through anything more
complicated than a revolving door. The Washington Post is reporting
(16:08):
he will introduce video behind a paywall on Twitter. Within
a couple of weeks, all users of Twitter will see
an image or some video, but with a message saying
pay one dollar to see more. Congrats, Elmo, you just
invented only fans. And defending his intention to charge eight
dollars a month to verify a user of Twitter, Musk
(16:32):
sent out a meme of somebody smiling at an eight
dollar a cup of Starbucks, but the same person crying
at an eight dollar price for blue check mark doesn't
seem to have occurred. To musk that at Starbucks, the
person who makes the content the coffee gets paid to
make the content the coffee, But on Twitter, the person
who makes the content of the site will now have
(16:56):
to pay to make the content of the site. He's
just not bright, le Bronze. Shane Goldmacher of the New
York Times, The White House announced the president would give
a speech about threats to democracy yesterday morning. It was
in all the newspapers, including the Times, speech about democracy.
They then released excerpts a couple of hours before his speech,
(17:19):
a speech about democracy. As the speech ended, Times national
political reporter Goldmacher put out this update. Two topics that
didn't make Brian Biden's primetime presidential speech, the economy and inflation.
Democracy is clearly what Biden wanted to talk about. No,
the quality of our news media is just fine. We're
not short of smart reporters. Why do you ask? But
(17:42):
our winners, the National Basketball Association Commissioner Adam Silver and
the Brooklyn Nets. The NBA usually gets it right. I mean,
they have a great track record, but in this disaster,
with Kyrie Irving of the Nets and his blatant anti
semitism in public, they have screwed it up royally. First,
Irving supported an nanti Semitic book and film. Then, when
(18:05):
challenged by a reporter, he issued a threat quote, I'm
not going to stand down on anything I believe in.
I'm only going to get stronger because I'm not alone.
I have a whole army around me. The NBA's response
to this, the league and Kyrie Irving will now each
donate five hundred thousand dollars quote towards causes and organizations
(18:25):
that work to eradicate hate and intolerance in our communities,
and Irving will work in some unspecified way with the
Anti Defamation League for the end. They're not clear about
what he's going to do. It's going to be. They
just throughout the name Anti Defamation League five thousand dollars.
It's a charitable donation. Kyrie irving salary is thirty five
(18:48):
million dollars this season. That's a little over one point
four percent of his salary. Find deductible that will show
him Adam silver in the National Basketball I got it.
Let's try to buy our way out of this association today,
these worst persons and the world. Before the World Series ends,
(19:25):
I have to tell this thing I promised not to tell,
because by the time of the next one of these segments,
no matter how long last, the World Series will be over.
So here is our number one story things I promised
not to tell and my favorite topic, me and the
series will be over, which is more than I can
say for this story, which is chronologically and in terms
of storytelling time, the longest one of these I can
(19:48):
not only imagine having told, but ever telling. It started
on the night of October twenty two, two thousand and
it ended well. I'll let you know if and when
it ever ends. I was enjoying the second night of
one of my childhood dreams come true. I was the
host not just of the telecast of the World Series,
(20:08):
but it was an all New York City series, a
Mets versus Yankee series, a Subway series. I had literally
dreamt of it since nineteen sixty seven. The manager of
the Yankees had been the first person I ever interviewed
on TV. Fifteen years earlier. I had worked with him
in TV. He was a friend of mine. I had
just covered the Mets through their playoff run and knew
(20:30):
all of their players. My face had been on an
advertisement in dead Center Field and the Mets Stadium for
the entirety of the year before, and the players all
knew me my name. Where we were that night. Yankee
Stadium was not only where I saw my first baseball game,
but was about seven eighths of a mile from the
hospital in which I had been born, and my first
(20:50):
home was four subway stops away. The night before this event,
as I hosted the start of the first game of
this Keith of palooza, I was supposed to introduce the
public address an ouncer of Yankee Stadium, Bob Sheppard, whose
voice I had heard nearly every day since I was
eight years old, so he could then introduce the players
(21:11):
and this epic world series would begin. And it dawned
on me in the seconds before I was supposed to
do this that I literally had the power to stop
the two thousand World Series from ever happening if I
just kept talking and never actually said, here is Bob Shepherd. Well,
I could delay it briefly until they cut my mic
off and then fired me on the spot. Anyway, this
(21:33):
was Game two, and now that our pregame show was over,
and I had waved to my mother, who had seen
her first game at Yankee Stadium, just who sixty six
years previously, and she was seated in the family seats
that were just nine rows up from our on field set.
I had crawled into the position I would assume for
the entire game as the dugout reporter. I was hunched
(21:54):
over on a stool, squeezed between the far end of
the Yankee dugout and our Fox Sports first base camera.
A thin chicken wire fence separated me from the dugout
in self. In fact, it was a formality. I was
more or less in the dugout players, coaches, and that night,
as I settled in, my friend, the Yankee manager all
came over to say hello. Roger Clemens of the Yankees,
(22:16):
who I had also known since we were both rookies
in Boston Sports in four he lasted. I didn't. Roger
Clemens had struck out the first two Mets hitters. Clemens
was a strange man about whom I had heard a
strange tale of teammates in a college summer baseball league
who were all wearing their wallets in their uniform pants
(22:36):
back pockets during a game, because one of them explained
to a friend of mine, we have this crazy kid
Clemens from Texas on this team, and we don't trust him.
In Boston, I had found him a little nervous, little standoffish,
but doing his best to be professional. But by now
there were rumors swirling around Roger Clemens about amphetamines and
(22:57):
performance enhancing drugs. And you knew not to talk to
him before or after a game unless you had to,
and if you had to, you chose your words very
carefully and then made sure that whatever you did, you
had to start with something mundane, like the score of
the game, and if you could let him bring up
anything controversial or complex, he would then probably do it.
(23:21):
So now, as this game continued, after two batters had
struck out, Lee Missilli, the former Mets star now Yankees coach,
another friend of mine, was on the other side of
a little fence, and as met superstar Mike Piazza stepped
in as the third batter of the game, Massilli leaned
in and said, conspiratorially, let's see if Rog flips him again.
In Midsummer two thousand, Roger Clemmens had beamed Mike Piazza
(23:43):
with a fastball. There was a hospital visit involved. Nobody
was convinced it had not been intentional, or that Clemens
would not do it again, even though it was the
World Series, Massili and I leaned forward. Piazza was a
deeply complicated guy too. During the playoffs, he had walked
up to me and asked me if it was true
I was from New York, and then he quizzed me
about the relative merits of the suburbs, and then wanted
(24:05):
to know if I had really taken up residence in
his favorite southern California hotel. And we talked for fifteen
minutes about that. The next night I saw him smiled,
said alo, and he looked at me like I had
just sworn a vendetta against his family. For a long
time I thought it was me, until about ten years later,
the great Vin Scully said that Piazza was with the Dodgers,
(24:26):
and when they were both together there in Los Angeles,
Vin had had the identical experience with Piazza. Best friends
on the team bus one day, and then no indication
Piazza remembered even meeting him. The next I mean that
was Ben Scully. Clemmens, as it turned out, did not
throw a baseball at Piazza, but instead pitched him inside
in on his hands, and Piazza tried to stop his
(24:48):
swing that was half self defense, but instead the odd
angle and the force of the pitch shattered Piazza's bat.
The ball veered to the right, describing a circle into
foul territory. The head of the bat shot out towards
Clemens on the mound. A second piece flew briefly into
the in field. Piazza was left holding just the handle.
And it looked as foolish as that sounds. But lost
(25:10):
in this description is the fact that all happened at once,
and even from our sign angle in the Yankee dug out,
it looked to massili in Me as if Piazza's bat
had simply exploded, like it was a trick device of
some sort. I saw Clemens reach for the baseball. I
thought it was the baseball right in front of him,
and then just as quickly he and I at the
(25:31):
same moment, realized it was not the baseball. Was the
barrel of the bat, which was slightly rounded, just a
little darker than a baseball, but could in the heat
of an instant following a bat explosion, it could be
mistaken for a ball. So far so good. But right then, Clemens,
realizing it was part of a bat and not a ball,
promptly threw that part of the bat at me. Jesus
(25:55):
mas I said to Missili, why did Clemens throw that
bat barrel at me? The Yankee coach looked incredulously at me.
You didn't throw it you, We threw it at me.
That's what looked like we were lined up perfectly. Roger
Clemens had thrown the barrel of Mike Piazza's bat, say,
a hundred and twenty feet instead of just six or
seven feet, he would have hit either me or Lee
(26:17):
Missilli in the Yankee dugout. As it was, since nobody
knew exactly what was happening, Piazza had started to run
down to first base in case the ball was fair.
He didn't know where the ball was either. For that
initial split second, you really couldn't tell which flying object
was the ball, and also whether the ball was fair
(26:38):
or foul. So Roger Clemens throw certainly looked like it
was aimed at Piazza. As Piazza went down the first baseline,
and as Piazza took umbrage, and there was another split
second of confusion when it looked like Piazza might charge
out to the mound to try to sock Clements for
this and for the Midsummer beating. I said to MISSILEI wait,
did he throw that bat at Piazza? Massilli just shook
(27:02):
his head. I don't think so. When hell knows he's
been here two years, I haven't figured out anything he's
done so far. As the umpires then got involved, Clemens
repeatedly tapped his own chest, and not in a bragging way,
but in a kind of what looked like that's on
me way. Two bat boys collected the three main pieces
of the bat and a bunch of smaller shards, some
(27:24):
of them smaller than a toothpick. The fox play by
play man threw it to me in the dugout well,
I said, I can tell you the Yankee dugout doesn't
know what happened or why. Joe Massili laughed quietly and
then hit me in the arm. While I was on
the air, I postulated that Clemens was looking for a
ball hit back to him. Instead found the piece of
the bat and then discarded that piece of the bat
(27:45):
so we could keep looking for the ball that he
discarded it kind of where Piazza was running, Might have
been deliberate, might have been a coincidence. I do remember
suggesting that if Clemens had really aimed the bat at Piazza,
that from that distance, with the strength and accuracy of
a major league pictcher, he clearly would have hit him
with it. Piazza then promptly grounded out to end the inning,
(28:07):
and as Clements came back towards the Yankee dugout where
Massili and I were, he again stopped to talk to
the umpire, who was Charlie Reliford. Over the noise of
fifty six thousand fans at Yankee Stadium, I couldn't hear
a damn thing, but it sure looked like Clemens was
again saying that was on me. I asked Massili if
he could find out if that's what Clements was doing
and happen an inning later, Massili reported that Clemens indeed
(28:29):
thought for a second it was the ball, and then
he threw it, and then it was on him, and
that it was not intentional and it was not directed
at Piazza. Now I did something kind of stupid. I
suggested to my bosses that I should go ask the
Commissioner Baseball who in a World Series game had the
power to eject any player for any reason, although that
power had not actually been used since ninety four. What
(28:52):
he thought of all this, the producer said, yes, and
I thought me and my big mouth. I now had
to crawl out of that little space between camera and dugout,
and I mean literally crawl all hands and knees to
exit back into the seats via where the groundskeepers kept
all the extra dirt. I knew where in the stands
(29:14):
the commissioner was sitting. I went there. I got to him,
I asked him. He assured me there was no discipline
coming for Clemmons, and they'd look at the tape of
the game again that night or in the morning, but
he really didn't think Clemmons had tried to hit Piazza
with the bat. Well, they would look at the tape,
and they decided both that Clemmons did not try to
hit Piazza with the bat and that he should be
fined fifty thou dollars for I don't know, not trying
(29:37):
to hit him with the bat. So I made it
back to the dugout, reversing my crawl like I was
recreating the movie The Great escape. As it turned out,
Piazza's little squib shot that caused all the trouble with
the exploding bat was about the hardest thing they hit
off Clemmons all night. Over eight innings, he struck out
nine Mets batters, he walked none, he gave up only
(30:00):
two hits, and he only hit one batter. And then, incredibly,
after Men's left the game, the Yankees almost blew a
six nothing lead in the ninth inning, a Met outfielder
named Jay Peyton hit a three run homer off future
Hall of Famer Mariano Rivera, and the Mets had a
chance to tie the game or go ahead off Rivera
in the top of the ninth and then he got
(30:22):
out of it in the final score with six to
five Yankees. And with the game over now it was
Keith interviews Clemens time. I went to the pre arranged
spot at the other end of the Yankee dugout where
another friend of mine, the Yankees PR director, had guaranteed
me he would go and get Clemens and they would
emerge after Clemens left the clubhouse to do what was
a contractually obligated interview with Fox and Me. Apparently, Roger
(30:48):
Clemens started making his way towards me the moment the
Yankees finally won that game. Unfortunately, at that exact moment,
security closed the only runway from the Yankee dug out
to the clubhouse so that a dignitary could use it
as an exit from his seats. The dignitary was Mayor
Rudolph Giuliani, noted front running Yankees fan and ticket freeloader.
(31:13):
And while Fox literally delayed the start of every newscast
on every one of its stations in the country, even
on the West Coast, and Joe Buck and Tim McCarver
kept showing replays again and again and promising my interview
with Roger Clemens, Rudy Giuliani took his goddamn time leaving
the field. His idiot son Andrew grabbed some dirt from
the field. I half expected him to eat it. Instead,
(31:35):
he stuffed it in his jacket pockets. Giuliani now waited
for his entire entourage, one of his wives, some of
his I guess they were friends, assorted political riff raff,
and as my producers screamed in my ear, where is Clemmens,
Giuliani waited until they were all together on the field.
And finally he marched them down into the dugout and
(31:58):
up through the runway. And after all this delay, Clemens
came out and finally I could ask him about throwing
the batch shard at or near Piazza. And at that
moment I remembered what I had learned about Clemens in Boston.
If you started an interview with something controversial, he might
very well walk away. If, on the other hand, you
did the boring game outcome question, he would answer anything
(32:20):
you asked, and he might even bring up anything controversial himself.
But you had to do the stupid game stuff first.
So which was harder work? Roger I asked eight innings
of two hit ball or watching the Mets nearly tied
in the ninth. His answer was not bad, but he
did not bring up the bat. So I asked another
question about what he thought of his performance in that game. Well,
(32:41):
that did it. He started talking about having to overcome
his emotions in the first inning, and now I could say, well,
since you brought up the emotions the bat throwing incident,
did you throw that piece of broken bat at Mike Piazza.
There is a freeze frame from that interview in which
Roger Clemen's eyes are bugged wide open. Well, Glemmen's basically
(33:04):
confirm what the guys in the dugout had told me.
He had told them. You can believe him or not,
but he thought the thing he grabbed was the ball,
and when it wasn't, he threw it away just in
case the ball was somewhere else near him and he
had to have a free hand with which to pick
it up. He explained the chest taps. He was indeed
saying to the umpire Umpire Charlie, as Clemens called him,
accompanying his apologies to the Umps for throwing the bat.
(33:26):
He said he didn't even know where Piazza was at
the point he threw the bat. It was as straight
and nonpartisan, and frankly as informative an interview as I've
ever conducted. Meanwhile, everybody else in that stadium, everybody else
in that city, everybody else in the Tri State area
was convinced of one of only two things. Roger Clemens
(33:48):
had tried to impale Mike Piazza with a shard of
his own bat, or the Mets were cry babies who
could not tell that. Clemments obviously did not try to
impale Mike Piazza with his own bat. There was no
middle ground. I found this out specifically the next day
when the TV sports columnist of the New York Times,
Rich Sandomir, who was a friend of mine, called to
(34:10):
interview me about the interview. Why didn't you ask him
about the bat first? Nobody cared about how he pitched.
He threw a bat at at Piazza. I said, you're
a Met fan, and I explained the theory of not
making Clemens end an interview before he said what you
needed to know. I went through the whole thing I
just recited here. It was amazing to see those few
days how every sports reporter and columnist in New York
(34:33):
self identified as either a Met fan or X Met fan,
or a Yankee fan or X Yankee fan. And you
can still see it today, as this story from twenty
two years ago is recollected by others. They wrote what
they felt as kids, Clemens was the victim. Or Clemmens
tried to kill Mike Piazza like he was a dracula
(34:57):
and they had the wooden steak to go through his heart. Meanwhile,
we learned recently from Joe Torre the Yankee manager, another
one of my friends, that they all hid something from
us that night, the thing about emotions. After the incident
in the first inning, Roger Clemens went back to the
Yankee clubhouse and started to cry. This might have had
(35:18):
something to do with embarrassment or grief. But since he
had noted that he had had to check his emotions,
I always thought, well, he might have been a little
overamped for that game, naturally or otherwise. Alright, So before
I present anything else out of chronological order, let me
go back to the moment. I thank Roger Clements for
(35:39):
the interview and threw it back to Joe Buck and
Tim McCarver in the Fox booth, because this is when
the real trouble started. They were pretty much done for
the night, but I had another two hours to go
in a live postgame show on Fox's cable Sports network.
We had about four minutes until that show started, and
it suddenly occurred to me that although this was not
the most important event in the history of the World Series,
(36:00):
the bat would become part of the iconography of baseball.
I had been at Yankee Stadium often enough over the
years to know the two kids who ran the visiting clubhouse,
and right then they were still packing up the Mets
bats and equipment and the Met dugout. So I ran
over and asked the senior of them what happened to
the pieces of the Piazza bat. The answer to that
(36:24):
question has haunted me for twenty two years. It resulted
in me being threatened with a lawsuit by Mike Piazza.
The owner of the Boston Red Sox said he was
threatened by Piazza over the same bat. And then came
the moment during that World Series that Mike Piazza confronted
me and we talked about restaurants. The rest of this
(36:46):
crazy story after this, So back to our number one
story and the countdown and the saga of the night
in the two thousand World Series and all the nights
since when the bat of Mike Piazza of the Mets shattered,
should you be? And Roger Clemens of the Yankees picked
(37:08):
up the barrel of that bat and tossed it at him,
or just tossed it away having mistaken it for a baseball,
or made up a story that he had mistaken it
for a baseball. And I was in the Yankee dug
out as the reporter, and I was hosting the game
for Fox, and I interviewed Clemens afterwards, and then before
our two hour postgame show on Cable, I went over
to the Met dugout and asked the clubhouse attendant there
(37:30):
what happened to the pieces of Pianza's bat well. The
guy explained that Bobby Valentine, the Mets manager, had asked
that one of the pieces go to a friend of
his in the stands, and he, the clubhouse attendant, had
handed it to the guy. A second piece he believed
was kept by the Yankees. He wasn't sure about that.
The third piece, the handle was where was it? Where
(37:52):
is it? He asked the other attendant. It's here in
the garbage, the kid said. I did a double take
the garbage. Yeah, the kid said, under the dugout bench,
and there it was stuffed in amid all the empty
bag to sunflower seeds and the crushed gatorade cups. I said,
what happens to it? Now? Gets thrown out to clean
out the dugouts first, so I said, look, can I
(38:14):
borrow it? This would make a great prop for our
postgame show? And the attendant says sure, and he pulls
it out of the pile and hands it to me,
just about seven inches of a baseball bat, and all
there is Piazza's uniform number thirty one written in magic
marker on the bottom. Listen. I said, I won't be
able to bring this back to you for like two hours.
We're on for two hours. Will you still be in
(38:34):
the clubhouse? And he said, are you kidding? We have
to be here at eight He and I'll be out
of here in ten minutes. And I said, you want
me to bring it back to you for Game three?
And he says, garbage. You're gonna bring back garbage, Throw
it out, keep it whatever, What do I care? So
I used the bat fragment as a prop in the
show repeatedly, and I stuck it into my shoulder bag,
(38:57):
and I thought, I'm not a scrounger, but this is
a valuable piece of memorabilia and I'd like to keep it.
So I'll either I'll auctioned off for charity and bid
against myself for something, or I'll make a donation to
a baseball charity and I'll keep it. And that was it.
And two days later, as the World Series shifted from
Yankee Stadium to Shasee Stadium. I got a phone call
(39:17):
from one of the PR guys at Fox Sports. Did
you see the paper? And I said, no, not yet.
And he says, Piazza told the guy from Newsday that
you stole his back and he wants it back. And
I said, what if I hadn't asked about it, it it
would be on a garbage scout right now being towed
out to be dumped in the Atlantic Ocean. And he
says maybe, but Piazza told this John Hayman, he's gonna
(39:39):
sue you to get it back. So now I go
to the ballpark with extra excitement on my plate. I'm
waiting for Mike Piazza to tell me he's gonna sue me.
So I go out onto the field and I'm wondering
how long it's gonna be before I run into Piazza.
And like two minutes after I step on the field,
I turned around and he's walking towards me, and he
looks at me and he says, hey, Keith wild One
(39:59):
the other night, huh say listen, when you lived at Shutters,
did you ever eat it ivy at the shore in
Santa Monica? Nothing about the bat we're talking about restaurants
in Santa Monica, California, And I say, well, yeah, but
did you ever eat at Shay Jay's And a big
smile from Piazza, Oh, man, I love Shade Jays. I
love Jay. Give me your number this winter when I'm home,
Let's go eat at Ja Ja's. And I said, I'll
(40:21):
pay for it and I'll order the sand dabs. Now
we're talking about sand dabs, how to prepare sand dabs
at a restaurant. And then he says, hey, sorry, I
gotta go ahead, have a good show. That was it.
He's in the paper threatening to sue me. We see
each other on the field, he starts the conversation. No
mention of suing me, not one word. Next day in
(40:44):
the paper, more Piazza quotes about how he's gonna assume
me for stealing his bat. Next night, Game four, the
World Series, we're just about to go on the air
at the pregame show, and now Piazza comes over again,
coming in from the outfield to the dugout and he says, hey,
this must be really cool to do what you guys
are doing. Have a great show. And by now the
only thing I can think of he does not know
I'm the name Keith ol Room, and he keeps threatening
(41:06):
to sue. So the World Series ends and the Yankees
beat the Mets, and if you look for it, there's
this photo of the traditional postgame awarding of the World
Series Trophy and the Most Valuable Player award at its
commissioner Bud Sealig and Derek Jeter, the Yankees and me,
and just before it happened, George Steinbrenner was the owner
of the Yankees. He's crying and he leans in and
(41:28):
I give him a hug and reassure him. And he
asked me if my mother went to the game, and
I said, you know my mother, she'd never come to
Chase Stadium. She hates it more than you do. And
he says, I love her more than ever before. Now.
So the series ends, and it's not been that greatest series,
but it's been exciting, and it was the dream from
my childhood. And the Yankees have one, and my friends
(41:49):
are happy. And I've not heard another word about this lawsuit,
nothing from Mike Piazza. And I told the Fox people, well,
if I'm not gonna hear anything more from them, it's easy.
I'm going to keep the bat, and I'm gonna donate
twenty dollars to this charity, the Baseball Assistance Team, which
helps X ball players in financial need, because A I'm
not a scrounger. B it's a great cause. See that's
(42:13):
actually much more than the bat handle would be worth
on the open market. And D the acronym for the
Baseball Assistance Team is B a T bat and that's perfect.
It's about Piazza's bat, you get it. And then nothing
for a month, whereupon Fox gets another letter now from
Piazza's agent fellow named Manson, and he threatens to sue again,
(42:35):
and that's the end of it. Never heard from him again.
So now it's the next year, two thousand one, and
I'm back in New York working for CNN doing the news,
and I go to a Mets game and I see
Piazza and I give him a big smile and I
offer my hand and I say, still of those sand
dabs from s J. And he just stares at me
and walks right past me. And I see a cop
I know who works next to the Mets dugout and
(42:57):
the cops says, Mike has been asking him about me.
Is that Keith Alderman, but one who stole my bat.
So now I'm not just keeping the bat. I want
to sue Mike Piazza for being a pain in the ass.
And then eleven happens, and ball players are doing charity things,
(43:18):
and sportscasters and newscasters are doing charity things, and I think, well,
this is the time when the baseball season resumes. I
throw the bad handle in my bag and I go
out to a Mets game and I go up to
Piazza's locker before the game, and I pulled a bat
chart out and I say, take this, Mike, auction it
off for charity. Let's do some good with this. Or
if it's too much trouble, you sign it an I'll
(43:39):
auction it off. We can leave my name out of it,
whatever you want, however you want to do it. And
he looks at me like I've just insulted his mother
and says, no, it's too complicated, and he turns away,
and I think to myself, this is the strangest athlete
I have ever met. And just before the season ends,
I go to another Mets game. Now this time it's
(44:00):
one of his teammates who takes me aside and says,
you know, Piazza never stops talking about you stealing his
bat from the Clemens game last year. He says he
still wants to sue you. Didn't you trying to give
him the bat back in the club house to auction off?
Didn't I see that? And I said, yeah, I did,
and he refused to take it, And the guy laughs
and he says, great player, excellent catcher. I love him.
(44:22):
Strangest player I have ever met. Comes two thousand to
nothing happens. See Piazza at several Mets games. Nothing happens.
Two thousand three, nothing happens. Now. I can't pin the
year down on this. It's one of the Red Sox
Yankees playoff series, either two thousand three or two thousand four.
And I'm leaving the field as they're clearing the media
(44:42):
off just before the game starts, and I'm going out
through the Red Sox dugout, literally at the same spot
where the kid handed me Piazza's bat handle three or
four years earlier, where the trouble all began, and I
see the new owner of the Red Sox team approaching
from the other end of the dugout Keith John Henry,
nice to meet you. Have you got a minute, And
(45:03):
I said, well, yeah, they're they're kicking the meat the
off the field, so and he laughs and he says
I can take care of that. And he yells at
the plane clothes cop and he says he's with me,
and the cop nods and John Henry, the owner of
the Red Sox, and I sit down on the Red
Sox bench before the start of a Red Sox Yankees
playoff game, and there are no other reporters out there,
and I think, Okay, what did I say about the
Red Sox? What is he piste off about? Instead, John
(45:27):
Henry says, can I ask you about Mike Piazza? And
I laugh and I say sure, what about him? And
he says, you have part of his bat from the
World Series with Clemens right, And I said yeah, and
he says, well, tell me the whole story. So I
do what you've just heard, and John Henry says, that's
(45:48):
what I was told, Thank you. I thought it was me.
So that other piece of the bat that was handed
to a friend of Bobby Valentine's during that game, that
friend is a great friend of mine. And after nine eleven.
He said, wouldn't it be great to get Mike Piazza
to sign this and then we can auction it off
for the victims families or the cops or some other charity.
And he gives me the bat and I call him
Mets and they approach Mike and they call me and
(46:09):
they say, Mike loves the idea and I should come
to one of the spring training games and he'll sign it.
So the next March, I go to one of the
Mets spring training games and I go up to him
in the clubhouse and I introduced myself and he looks
at me like I'm from Mars, and I say, well,
I brought the bat, and he says, what bat? And
I explained that we had arranged to have him signed
the bat from the World Series for a nine eleven
charity and he erupts at me, I'm not signing that bat?
(46:32):
Sure for charity? Do you think I was born yesterday?
And now I say something to John Henry, owner of
the Red Sox, like welcome to the club. Did he
threaten to sue you too? And he laughs and says yes,
that's the next part of the story. So while we're
trying to straighten that out. His agent calls me and
asks if I will give them the bat to auction
(46:53):
off for charity. And I say sure, and I go
to another Mets game, and I go to the clubhouse
and I have the bat again. Now Piazza says, no,
I can't take the bat because of pending litigation, but
if I want him to, he'll sign it for me.
All I have to do is come back a couple
of weeks later. So this is what I wanted to
ask you, Keith. Is he the strangest ballplayer you've ever met?
(47:17):
Or is it just me? There's one more part to this.
Flash forward to I still have the Piazza bat handle,
the one I unsuccessfully tried to give back to Piazza.
The middle portion, the one John Henry unsuccessfully tried to
get back to Piazza, has been sold, with the proceeds
(47:37):
going to charity. So where is the third piece, the
barrel of the bat, the part that Clemmens through at
Piazza if you're a Met fan or was unfairly accused
of throwing at Piazza if you're not a Met fan.
And the answer finally arrives in a sports memorabilia auction
catalog that year, while one of the visiting bat boys
was handing the middle part of the bat up to
(47:58):
a friend of Bobby Valentine and John Henry's in the stands,
the barrel, which landed near the Yankee dugout, was ouped
up by the Yankee bat boy, who put it in
the pile of Yankee broken bats. And as it turned out,
right at that point, the Yankees strength and conditioning coach
Jeff Mangold, who was on the bench, said, wait a minute,
that's the pile of broken bats they're gonna throw out.
(48:19):
They shouldn't throw it out. Its history. And he grabs
that part of the Piazza bat and puts it up
in his home office. And now it's fourteen years later
and he wants to auction it off for charity. So
he auctions it off, and I think, well, hell, it
should be alongside the other piece of the bat. My
other piece of the bat, the handle, So I win
the auction. There it is on my wall, complete with
(48:41):
a baseball card showing Roger Clemens about to throw the barrel.
Reasons left to your imagination. Two thirds of the famous bat.
I'll sell it someday I'm sure, but I'll always have
the memories, my memories and John Henry's memories. And if
you're wondering, No, Unlike John Henry and I, that Yankee
strength coach Jeff Mangold never tried to give it back
(49:04):
to Piazza, or get it signed by Piazza or auctioned
off for charity with Piazza, which means that, on top
of everything else, Jeff Mangold is smarter than John Henry
and I put together. I've done all the damage I
(49:30):
can do here. Thank you for listening. Followed this podcast.
If you can tell a friend, tell Mike Piazza. We're
number one among non news outlet news and political podcasts.
But I'd like to be whatever is better than that.
Here are credits. Most of the music, including our theme
from Beethoven's Ninth, was arranged, produced, and performed by Brian
Ray and John Philip Chanelle. They are the Countdown musical directors.
(49:52):
All orchestration and keyboards by John Philip Chanelle. Guitars based
on drums by Brian Ray and produced by t Ko Brothers.
Other Beethoven selections have been arranged and performed by No
horns allowed the sports music is the Olderman theme from
ESPN two, which was written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy
of ESPN, Inc. Musical comments courtesy of Nancy Faust. The
(50:13):
best baseball stadium organist ever and our announcer today was
Tony Kornheiser. Everything else pretty much my fault. Let's countdown
for this the six and sixty seventh day since Donald
Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of
the United States. Arrest him now while we still can.
We'll have a new episode for you tomorrow. Until then
on Keith Alderman. Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck.
(50:41):
Countdown with Keith Olberman is a production of I heart Radio.
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Host
Keith Olbermann
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