October 18, 2023 • 42 mins
SERIES 2 EPISODE 56: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:44) SPECIAL COMMENT: Trump may have a new problem in his civil fraud trial in New York. As the folks at Meidas Touch sleuthed, he has re-posted a piece by the loathsome Laura Loomer that appears to give an address for New York State Attorney General Letitia James. This isn't specifically covered under the gag order imposed against Trump by Judge Arthur Engoron, but it underscores the point that it should be.
And it further underscores that both Judge Engoron and Judge Tanya Chutkan should try to expand their gag orders to include any such threats or stochastic invasions of the lives of the primary figures in ALL the legal cases against Trump. His only skill is finding where the line is, and how it moves. The judiciary needs to be proactive against him, not meek. And unfortunately Judge Chutkan's written version of HER gag order is devoid of any reference to which sanctions she'll impose when Trump finally violates it.
There is, naturally, a connection to the lies and the world of delusion of Trump and his supporters, and the nightmare at the Gaza City hospital yesterday. Technology will probably - sooner or later - tell us whether Israel or Hamas did this, and then lied about it and successfully blamed the other. It may even tell us about the small chance the location of the carnage might have been inadvertent. But what this horror really tells us is where the Trump Lies lead and end, and how we must fight them because the imaginary world requires absolute fealty and ultimately the willingness to kill rather than admit you are wrong.
You know it's been a bad day when Jim Jordan's wipeout in the Speaker voice, and what Elise Stefanik said about him that she THOUGHT would help, turns out to be the humorous relief.
B-Block (22:12) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Who could have seen this coming? Britain's Conservatives expel member accused of sexual harassment and exposure. His name is Peter Bone. The Washington Post does a Jim Jordan profile without mentioning January 6th or the subpoena he skipped. And a professor at my alma mater says something so inhuman and stupid about the Middle East that supporters of BOTH Israel and Hamas should be offended - and he should be fired.
C-Block (27:20) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: It was the first item I checked on my bucket list. I was 10. The day I saw my first World Series game turns out to probably have been the day baseball's dominant role in American culture peaked. Plus: it was Vietnam Moratorium Day.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Trump
has docked a second figure in his New York fraud trial.
(00:26):
And I start here because the Nightmare in Gaza is
actually just the story of the Trump Delusion, only writ larger,
and only for the fact that Gaza is a few
decades later in the narrative. I will get to Gaza presently.
The Midas touch people. I believe it was who caught this.
First Monday night, Trump reposted a substack piece by the
(00:48):
appalling Laura Lumer, which, with typical imbecility, asserts Trump can't
be wrong because New York Attorney General Letitia James allegedly
had unauthorized or hazardous restorations done at a residence here
in New York City. And of course Lumer reproduced a
city document that supposedly supports that claim, and she just
(01:11):
happened to not blank out the street address for what
may be the Attorney General's home, and Trump just happened
to repost that piece and repost that address. And oh look,
Judge Arthur anger On didn't specifically gag Trump and forbid
him from posting anything about Letitia James or himself. The
judge or anybody else, just about members of the judge's
(01:32):
courtroom staff. After Trump had posted an innocuous selfie that
the court clerk had taken with Chuck Schumer, and Trump
insisted that made her Schumer's girlfriend, and thus Schumer was
running the case, and thus it had to be dismissed immediately.
And then, of course Trump also attacked anger On, And
just when Judge anger On should be broadening the gag
(01:53):
order on Trump in the New York fraud case, it
turns out to be too woefully narrow to protect the
Attorney General against doxing. And now it looks like another
judge and another gag order are falling into the same trap.
To little fanfare, Judge Chutkin released the written version of
her Trump gag order, and it barely limps onto a
(02:17):
third page, and it is unspecific, and in particular, it
emphasizes only what Trump can do, like Trump can attack
Mike Pence, Trump can insist this is political persecution, and
Trump can insist he's not gonna be able to get
a fair trial in Washington. Not once does it make
any references to the sanctions the judge warned him against
(02:40):
when she issued her gag order against him in court
on Monday afternoon. We are left to guess if she
would find him or find him for the first couple
of offenses and then move on to permanently or temporarily
revoking his bail and putting him behind bars, or if
she jumped to that bail revocation first, or if she
has some other idea, or if somehow she is not
(03:01):
even seriously considering doing to him what would be done
to any defendant who had attacked every principle in a case,
and just in case he might miss somebody had threatened
while the entire universe with if you go after me,
I'm coming after you. Neither Judge Chuckkin nor Judge Angron
seems to be a shrinking violet. And I hope I
(03:24):
am not impugning either of them, because I am confident
they think they are just bending over backwards to respect
the office of President of the United States, even if
this creature who once held it is provably and objectively
dedicated to the overthrow of the courts and of representative
government in this nation. But both Judge Chuckkin and Judge
(03:47):
Andngern are on the cusp of becoming the worst thing
I can think to call someone. In these years of
our democracy's existential crisis, they are both on the cusp
of becoming judicial versions of Chuck Todd. I state this
so so often it exhausts me. And yet I wonder
(04:07):
if somehow I have not stated it often enough. Trump's
only true genius is his ability to find the line,
whatever it is, wherever it is, whatever it's about. He
can find the line and dance right along the line,
so that whoever would act against him self edits self,
doubts self, hesitates, self, delays, self, overthinks self, both sides it.
(04:39):
Trump's guilt is truly greater than the sum of his
crimes in doxing Letitia James. He has not defied anger
On's gag order in this machine gun spray of threats.
In the insurrection case, he has not defied Chutkin's gag order,
not yet anyway, And Chutkins suddenly seems hesitant to even
tell him or us what the penalty will be when
(05:01):
he does. And yet, cumulatively, is there any question Trump
has violated what each judge has told him to do
and not to do. Is there any need to ever
tell a sane man to not try to whip up
public hatred against the prosecutors or the judges or the
witnesses solely to somehow get that public to interfere with
(05:22):
that prosecution. Is there any doubt that Trump is threatening
and attacking these figures of the legal establishment solely for
the inevitable day when they act violently, or he summons
them explicitly to act violently in order to stop his prosecution.
Is there any question that the outcome Trump wants in
(05:45):
each of these cases is another January sixth, only with
Jack Smith or Letitia James or somebody else as the
sole victims of the respective mobs. We are running out
of time for the judges to continue to bend over backwards.
They should be, in fact bending in the opposite direction.
(06:08):
And if you begin to think we cannot exceed the
law or the constitution and still preserve both, firstly, each
is done every day by conservative judges and conservative governors
and conservative police. Secondly, this nation still exists because in
(06:30):
the grimmest and grandest of forms, President Lincoln exceeded the
law and the constitution to preserve both. The nation survived
and the Constitution survived. And if we do not test
the elasticity of both in some small ways. Right now,
regarding Trump, we will, as we did in eighteen sixty one,
find those among us who are willing to test its
(06:51):
elasticity on Trump's behalf at the point of a knife
and the barrel of a gun. And no, I am
not asking Judge Chutkin to suspend habeas corpus and lock
Trump away this afternoon without charge or bail. Delightful of
prospect as that might be, But I now think our
(07:14):
survival as a nation with a representative government may depend
on some imaginative and creative interpretations of extant law by
that judge or by Angron in New York to broaden
what their gag order applies to one of them, presumably
Chutkin should suggest that the Federal Insurrection trial can only
(07:37):
proceed fairly and safely if Trump is prohibited from any
attacks on any legal institutions in this country and the
principles in any case being conducted against him. Under a
proactive and justifiable gag order, Trump would be before Judge
Chutkin today for having docks Attorney General James two nights
(08:00):
ago in New York, because otherwise, if you let him
commit crimes twenty six through fifty in the jurisdiction where
there are only crimes one through twenty five. He will.
It is how he has survived until this age without
having already been sent to prison. It is his only
(08:23):
true skill. And because of what else happened yesterday, I
today have significantly less faith that this nation will do
what is necessary to stop Donald Trump before it is
too late. Because the other thing that happened yesterday underscores
how far delusion and denial have overtaken twenty first century mankind.
(08:47):
Because the gases strip and our marrilago of the mind
are closer than they might at first appear. It is
an extraordinary feeling of helplessness somehow overshadows the elemental horror
on the ground, because the debate over what actually happened
(09:11):
there yesterday illuminates for you and I where America also
is as a society. Three hundred dead at a hospital
in Gaza, or five hundred or one thousand, and we
know this much and only this much. Whoever made it
happen not only committed a war crime, but created an
(09:34):
alternative world in which they did not do it. They
are the victims of it, and both sides, the actual
perpetrators and the actual victims, have convinced their own supporters
that they are being lied about. Each has video, each
has witnesses, each has evidence, and one side has manufactured
(09:56):
all of it and slandered the other and killed truth
as surely as it killed the people at the hospital,
And thus the real truth. Here there are human beings
out a place dedicated to saving human beings dead because
of hatred and dogma and religion and political ambition and
(10:18):
institutionalized lying. That real truth is secondary to not merely
the fog of war, but to the deliberate fog of war,
and the truth that, for nearly everyone interpreting this horror,
what you think happened still depends on which side you
think is right. Thus reality becomes a litmus test, not
(10:41):
of a series of facts, not of a bunch of evidence.
It becomes a litmus test of your political correctness within
your own world, or your region, or your religion or
your group. And so we are left not only with
this nightmare, but the realization that the zenith of the
governmental lie, the zenith so far is merely a more physical,
(11:03):
more tangible version of the destabilization of reality that has
been poisoning this country for forty years. That is the
new essence of one of our two leading political parties
that is being exploited at this moment by its leading
candidate for the presidential nomination. In the desperation and the
horror in Gaza City, we can for a moment step
(11:26):
away from ourselves and see our crisis from a detached
point of view. Whatever you and I know to be
true about January sixth, about Trump, about Russian election interference,
many of our neighbors just as assuredly know to be
true that Trump won, that he is being persecuted, that
(11:50):
January sixth was a false flag. And then come the
splinter groups with secondary and tertiary versions of the disease,
who believe things like Pizzagate, or believe in herds of
body doubles, or of former leaders coming back from the
dead for no apparent reason other than to change their
political affiliations. I always think at times like these of
(12:13):
two of the nightmares within the nightmare of our invasion
of Iraq twenty years ago, when our government did what
either Hamas or Israel is doing right now. It used
all of its influence to sell its own people a
heinous lie about a connection to nine to eleven in
order to get them to support, in some cases enact
further violence in the form of war. And as the
(12:37):
madness of the culture of Iraq became front of mind
here twenty years ago, we discovered that some huge percentage
of Iraqis believed that Sadam Hussein owned and war or
had had implanted under the skin in one arm a
magic stone that protected him from death. Or maybe they
(13:02):
didn't believe that, and we were just being told that
would Hamas have done that to its own people yesterday,
given the juxtaposition of weapons of war and a densely
packed urban population. Unintentionally? Certainly, yes, anybody can harm their
own side by accident in any conflict deliberately. The Israelis
(13:23):
claim they have a list as long as your arm
of Hamas sacrificing its own people deliberately. Could Israel have
done this? Again? Unintentionally? A target missed easily. Surgical air
strikes are fiction. Could Israel have done this deliberately? At
least twenty one emergency hospitals and a medical college were bombed,
(13:47):
and in one group of two hundred and ninety eight
medical doctors. Two hundred and seventy of them were killed
or maimed in the bombings. This was in Nagasaki and Hiroshiba.
We did that for reasons. We could defend then, and
we still defend now. We defend mostly by the magic
wand of a simple assertion that was to be met
(14:09):
with the same kind of unquestioning belief playing out in
Gaza today. On both sides. Well, we had to. We
were defending ourselves, which is what the Japanese originally believed,
just as fervently and just as religiously. The irony is
that the wired world, even in the Gaza strip, is
(14:32):
so inescapable that we will probably be able to figure
out maybe an hour's days, maybe in a year, who
committed this and then lied about it. There will be
time stamped satellite imagery of rockets being launched or not
being launched. There will be video of missiles leaving the
(14:54):
ground or leaving an airplane, but not both. The revelations
will not convince the ones who want to believe, even
if what they believe is proved to be a lie,
just as no revelation will convince the ones who want
to believe in this country I don't know how we
fix this. I don't know how we fix this because
(15:18):
now it is also being wrapped up in religion, which
is itself a fantasy. And don't start. Religion is a fantasy,
not because of the faith nor the spirituality. Those are
truly intangible things about which every human on this planet
could believe something different, and we could all still live
together in peace and probably more productively than we do now,
(15:41):
provided that we all agreed not to try to convince
anybody else that their belief in the same intangible things
is provably wrong compared to our own. The faith is
not the added problem here. It's the fact that you
can stuff any prerequisites and hatreds and prophecies and magic
stones and catch phrases like Jesus this sent Trump into
(16:07):
your religion and pretend that the result is sacro sanct
That's the magnifying problem. We will figure out the Gaza
hospital in all probability. How we will figure out the
mutually exclusive beliefs abroad in our land, which will in
(16:29):
large part decide the future of representative government in our land.
How we will figure that out. I don't have any idea,
by the way, on the third big news story of
the day. It is of some small comfort, I suppose,
(16:49):
some small victory for reality over brainless belief in a
reality that may or may not be real. That when
Jim Jordan lost, his response this time was not that
they should go on storm the Capitol and overturn the election.
Can't imagine how Jim Jordan didn't get elected speaker when
(17:12):
idiots like a least Stephanic got up and said this,
and we're stupid enough to think this was going to
help him.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Jim is the voice of the American people who have
felt voiceless for far too long. Whether on the wrestling
matt or in the committee room, Jim Jordan is strategic, scrappy, tough,
and principled wrestling matt.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
You say, well, at least Stephanic is the child of
the biggest wholesale plywood distributors in the entire Schenectady water
Volite Metroplex. The name Stephanic means plywood. Also of interest here,
I'll circle back to the Middle East, and unhappily, I
(17:57):
will have to invoke my alma mater, where a professor
has said something so cold, so startling, so inhuman, that
it does not matter whether you support Israel or Hamas,
you will be offended to the depths of your soul
and this professor should lose his job. That's next. This
(18:20):
is Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith Olberman still ahead
(18:48):
on an all new edition of Countdown October fifteenth, nineteen
sixty nine, before the exact anniversary of that date slides
too far into the distance. Let me tell you about
that day. My first sort of adult suit, my dad
and I dodging the moratorium date protesters in the time
I'm square subway station and the first World Series game
(19:09):
I ever got to go to. The first item I
crossed off my bucket list. I was ten, and it
was thirty years before anybody called it a bucket list.
Things I promised not to tell. Coming up first time
for the daily roundup of the miss Grants, morons and
Dunning Kruger effects specimens who constitute today's worst persons in
the world. The Bronze the British Conservative Party, now celebrating
(19:33):
nearly one whole year without having thrown out its own
prime minister out of office, and now being able to
claim it's only had five different prime ministers in the
last seven years. The party has in essence suspended and
expelled Member of Parliament Peter Bone. Just a year ago
(19:55):
they made Peter Bone Deputy Leader of the House, seven
years after Peter Bone was accused of bullying a female
staffer and exposed his genitals near her face. This allegedly
happened in twenty twelve, and just as importantly, his name
is Peter Bone. How the hell do you not see
(20:17):
this coming? The runner up the Washington Post. You're wondering
how and why it has seemed to have fallen apart
in the last few months. Here is an answer. Yesterday
the Post did one of those what to Know about
Jim Jordan, the Republican House Speaker nominee, deals by Marissa
Ayati and Megan Vazquez, and not once in the peace
(20:39):
does it ever mention that Jordan talked to Trump for
ten minutes the morning of January sixth and voted to
not ratify and blew off the subpoena from the January
sixth committee left all those little details out. It mentions
that Trump gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, though,
but the winner, Professor Russell Rickford of the history department
(21:01):
at my alma mater Cornell University, and we're going to
kill the music for this because his words have now
been condemned by the university's president and many other aspects
of Cornell. But it's not enough. On the fifteenth, Professor
Rickford told a crowd on the Cornell campus that while
he abhorred violence and they abhorred violence, the Hamas attack
(21:21):
on Israel was quote exhilarating unquote end quote energizing unquote,
and he personally was exhilarated. I cannot imagine what is
wrong with Russell Rickford. This transcends the actual attack, It
transcends the war, It transcends the Israeli response. It transcends
(21:42):
what happened before and what has happened since. It transcends
who you think is right and who you think is wrong.
Russell Rickford is wrong to respond to the Hamas terrorism,
to respond to, perhaps to the hundreds of the dead
at the hospital in Gaza yesterday, by claiming to be exhilarated,
(22:03):
to be exhilarating by mass death is to lack not
just intelligence, but humanity. I'm not one of those dewey
eyed sing the song alumni. I went to the homecoming
once it was, in fact to cover a pretty good
football game that year, and the year was nineteen seventy nine.
(22:23):
But neither have I ever before been ashamed of my
alma mater. I am now Professor Rickford has no place there,
not because of who he supports in this, nor who
he condemns in this, but because he could be exhilarated
by mass death. Russell Rickford, get him the hell out
(22:45):
of Cornell, today's worst person in the world. I flashed
back to this the other night as I switched away
from the baseball playoffs, and I wondered where the teams
with the top records had gone, and what the point
of the regular season, the playoffs and the World Series is?
(23:08):
And I flashed back to a time when you didn't
have to ask that question or any variant of it.
It was the World Series and everything else stopped for
it in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle
of the week, even though by then football was already
the most popular sport. There was nothing football, or any
other sport or anything else in American culture had to
(23:30):
offer that was comparable to the World Series. The number
one story on the Countdown now, and it's my favorite topic.
Me and things I promised not to tell. I was
ten years old, and I'm not sure that this was
the last week that baseball was more important than nearly
everything else in this country. But if not, the chronology
is pretty close by legend. In my hometown, Miss Barton
(23:54):
had been standing on Farragut Parkway when they decided to
put the school there in nineteen oh five, so they
just built it around her. In fact, she had only
been at the head of her homeroom since nineteen forty two,
but for US seventh graders of the year nineteen sixty nine,
the year nineteen forty two might as well have been
a date from the reign of Julius Caesar. Miss Barton
(24:18):
was friendly, but formidable, and what if any connection she
had to the world outside school eluded us In retrospect,
it took a good deal of courage for me to
have handed her the note my mother had scribbled asking
her permission for me to miss school on October fifteenth,
nineteen sixty nine. She read it, and she looked up
(24:39):
at me with unalloyed shock, and I knew my plans
were doomed. And then she smiled broadly and warmly. It
was not the last time any of us sought, but
it probably was the first time we had seen her smile.
You're going to the World Series? Have you got an
extra ticket? They were all like that. Madelinski, the science
(25:06):
teacher who looked like nothing less than a proto Nathan Lane,
had not only accepted my carrying a transistor radio and
an earphone into class, but he had periodically called on
me during science class for the score. Mister bub the
hard assed, phized teacher who once fended off twenty seven
(25:26):
kids who tried to force him into the showers on
the last day of school, suggested that when I went
to Game four, I should bring a movie camera with
me and we could watch the highlights instead of Jim
whenever the film got back from the developers. The social
studies teacher, my favorite missus Rice, the first love of
(25:47):
my life, out did them all. She moved my chair
up next to the blackboard and turned a corner of
that blackboard into a makeshift scoreboard. Every half inning, and
in those days, you could cram a lot of half
innings into your average seventh grade social studies class, not
just like one or two half innings. I would add
(26:08):
a digit to the line score Baltimore zero zero three,
Mets zero zero zero. My dad got somewhere two tickets
for Game four. It turned out to be the Tom
Seaver game. It ended in JC Martin's bunt thrown away
down the first baseline by relief fitcher Pete Rickard of Baltimore,
(26:30):
with pinch runner Rod Gasbar of the Mets scoring the
winning run in the tenth. I got to know all
those guys. I sent Rod Gasbar some previously unseen photos
of him crossing the plate. He sent one back, autographed,
inscribed Keith, thanks for attending Game four of the nineteen
sixty nine World Series, Please drive home safely. My dad
(26:52):
and I in fact took the train in from Westchester.
I think we went first, at his insistence, to Barney's,
which was then exclusively a men's clothing store in Union Square.
That's where I got my first adult dial suit with
a tailor and everything, and then up to Times Square
to change trains, where we were nearly run over by
(27:13):
the Moratorium Day protesters. That was Moratorium Day, the first
big nationwide protest against the Vietnam War, October fifteenth, nineteen
sixty nine. We changed trains and then out to Chase
Stadium by the number seven. The seats on that perfect
crystal day were in distant left field, but I had
(27:33):
brought my binoculars, really my dad's, and they brought me
into the game. I could see the Commissioner of Baseball clearly,
and stand Musials sitting next to him, and sitting next
to the Mets dugout, and I could see the sweat
on Tom Sever's face as he delivered strike after strike,
and the emotion I had when I got home that night,
(27:53):
a temporary Mets fan because the Orioles always beat up
my Yankees, that emotion was simple. Whatever else would happen
in my life, I had done it. I had been
to a World Series game. I was the envy of
my classmates for months. The previous school year, they had
(28:16):
herded us all into the vast cobwebby auditorium at the
top of the school to watch Richard Nixon's first inauguration.
Several times. They had done the same thing for Gemini
and the Pollo space launches, but those had tangible, albeit
to us, vague connections, to you know, actual school work.
(28:38):
The World Series, however, was apparently more important than school work.
It was more important than school. I don't remember anything
else that adults would admit was more important than school.
All these years later, and hearing those words world and
series still sends a chill through me as reflexively as
the loudest Pavlovian bell. I could not have known then
(29:02):
I was part of the last generation to be so indoctrinated.
I assumed it had always been that way, and it
always would be, and it no longer is. The twenty
twenty two World Series was the third worst rated in
television history, not quite as bad as twenty twenty one,
which itself was not quite as bad as twenty twenty.
(29:24):
There's a myriad of causes. I have about five hundred
and seventeen more television and streaming channels to choose from
than I did in October nineteen sixty nine. I mean,
we didn't even have the color TV yet in October
nineteen sixty nine, at least not an our house. I
have at least five times more TV channels than I
did in October two thousand and one. And similarly, baseball
(29:47):
no longer dwarfs the sports landscape, even just for the
World Series. The de nationalizing of baseball was symbolized by
the presence of two geographically homogeneous teams, formerly a boon
to ratings, now curse. This was the two thousand World Series,
(30:08):
the Mets and the Yankees, the dream of every New
York sports fan, and nobody cared outside of New York
the beginning of the end. Yet the underlying cost of
baseball's malaise is that, like me, the owners just assumed
it would always be the way it was in nineteen
sixty nine. I had an excuse for believing that I
(30:29):
was ten. Their excuse that mentally they're all ten is insufficient.
All but a few of the owners have failed to
understand television in any way other than as a revenue source.
They have never recognized its function as merchandising, even as
a mechanism for proselytizing. They didn't know about Miss Barton
(30:50):
and mister Madolinsky and missus Rice, and they did not
care about them. They didn't know about the kids with
their cheesy white plastic earplugs and their scratchy transistor radios.
They didn't cultivate the tradition they had been given by
their forebearers. In the first half of the twenty century,
they let the World Series become less important than schools,
and less important than the NBA, and less important than
(31:16):
Taylor Swift. That's what they needed. They needed to get
Taylor Swift to go with Travis Kelcey to that playoff game.
It takes a certain foresight to say to a television executive, No,
we can't play the whole World Series at night because
the kids won't be able to watch. We can't bend
(31:36):
to society and prime time and the other sports and demographics,
because to do that is to lessen the obligation to
watch the World Series. We have to play some day games.
Here's some of the money back. It would take a
certain foresight and reproductive organs the size of I don't know,
(32:01):
fill in the analogy yourself, as by well everything. Baseball
owners don't have them or the foresight to plan for
the twelve inning of a game, let alone twelve years
from now. They did not write off the few million
less NBC would have paid them as seed money for this. Instead,
it's the World Series that has gone to seed, sometimes
(32:23):
being reduced to being the symbolic filler between Fox's next
two promos for this year's implausible sitcom as I've discussed
here previously, Baseball's owners never noticed that the separation and
isolation of the two leagues had assured that while the
audience might be divided among the fans of sixteen, then twenty,
then twenty four, then twenty six different teams, it also
(32:46):
meant that nearly all of them also divided into two groups,
American League fans and National League fans, so that even
if their quote own team unquote was not in the
World Series, they still had a rooting interest in the
World Series and a reason to watch to see their
league win or is, in my case, as an American
League fan when I was ten years old, to see
(33:08):
their league lose because it was the Baltimore Orioles and
they beat the crap out of my Yankees. I was
not rooting for the Mets in the nineteen sixty nine
World Series. I was rooting against the hated Baltimore Orioles.
TV usually takes the sole blame when this subject is introduced,
but I know from my own experience when the executives
who make the nuts and bolts decisions about televising Baseball
(33:33):
seeing them actually do it, that they have done everything
but beg the owners to return daylight to the series,
and not just when the games have to start at
five pm Pacific for the sake of the East Coast audience.
One of my bosses, Dick Eversoll, the head of NBC Sports,
sat there rejiggering the first pitch times for one series. No, no,
(33:58):
tell buddy, he has to start Wednesday at eight thirty seven,
not eight o seven. He knows that we've got a
sitcom premiering on Wednesday. He told me about offering to
split the difference in the revenue lost because of a
late afternoon start on a Saturday. I told buddy, think
of the future. He kept saying, think of the money.
(34:20):
It isn't just the sizzle, of course, there are now
severe problems with the stake as well. In Bob Costas's
memorable phrase, as my friend put it, the wild card
has indeed turned the series into the MLB Finals. The
viewers were way ahead of the cognacenti on this celebration
of mediocrity. Amid all the explanations for the ever plummeting ratings,
(34:40):
the simplest one inevitably gets bypassed. If you're scoring at home,
or even if you're just by yourself. This just isn't
very good baseball played by not really that good baseball teams.
Five hundred foot homers and no hitters with multiple pitchers
in them and seventeen strikeout games. They are impressive, but
(35:02):
if they happen every night, they take on the false
of the plot twists in pro wrestling, and in a
sports world full to overflowing with last second touchdowns, buzzer
beaters from the popcorn stand, all offense, all the time,
is no longer enough to hide the fact that to
be watchable baseball has to be a balance of hitting
(35:22):
and pitching. In one year, the number of World Series
starting pitchers who lasted seven innings or more dropped from
nine to none. One day, all the runs in the world.
Next day, a no hitter, same two teams, same two lineups.
(35:43):
In the old days, the pretenders, one dimensional teams like
last year's Phillies, were eliminated in the slow but fair
crucible of the regular season. If the best team in
baseball occasionally had a bad week and undeservedly lost the
World Series, that merely served to create endless spodder for
the off season, something for people to talk about until March. Now,
(36:03):
the candidates were best team in twenty twenty two. That
was the Braves, the Dodgers, even the Mets. They can
be eliminated almost by chance at two levels, even before
they stagger into a sometimes anti climactic World Series. There
are now two nightmare scenarios for the television ratings. If
(36:23):
they had continued to decline at the rate they did
in the ten years after nineteen ninety one, ratings for
the World Series of twenty twenty five would be about
a tenth of what they were in nineteen ninety one.
The collapse slowed, however, great news twenty twenty two ratings
were one quarter what they had been in nineteen ninety one.
(36:46):
That they weren't one tenth is the good news. It
is no coincidence that the three worst rated World Series
of all times have all occurred since twenty twenty. The
regular season has already been neutered. Even the teams given
new free stadiums are beginning to fail. The owners know this,
(37:10):
and they floated obvious solution. They added more wildcard teams.
Throughout the eighteen eighties, the nascent World Series it was
called the World Championship Series. It was the World Series
was mismanaged completely from an instant attention grabber in eighteen
(37:31):
eighty four where the winners of the American Association and
the National League said, hey, we should have a series
to determine which of us is best. From that explosive
big bang berth, it was turned into an endless traveling
freak show by eighteen eighty seven. In eighteen eighty seven,
they played best eight out of fifteen, and they kept
(37:53):
playing it in different cities. It wasn't just the two
cities of the two teams in a Detroit and Saint Louis.
The eighteen eighty seven World Series was played in ten
different cities, and the danumont of labor wars and over
expansion came in eighteen ninety. The eighteen ninety World Series
pitted the Louisville Cyclones, who had risen from worst to
(38:14):
first in the American Association, which was a major League,
against the Brooklyn Bridegrooms, who had won the American Association
pennant the year before eighteen eighty nine, and then the
franchise just jumped into the National League for eighteen ninety
and won that pennant. There were storylines of plenty, but
so full of rancor and devoid of talent. Was the
(38:36):
eighteen ninety World Series that, even though the host, Brooklyn Bridegrooms,
entered Game seven leading Louisville three games to two, game
three had been a tie, they needed just two more
wins for the title. The crowd, the crowd for that game,
Game seven of the World Series in Brooklyn, three hundred fans.
(39:00):
Louisville then tied the series in that game three wins
apiece and a tie, and they need a decisive eighth
game and the rest of the series, and they never
played it. They abandoned the World Series tied three and
three and one quote there is scarcely enough interest in
(39:20):
the series, noted a writer for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin,
to induce the people to read the scores. The most
frightening part about that quote that's from eighteen ninety. I
(39:41):
felt that way the last three Octobers during the World Series.
The world has made itself over a thousand times. Since
that sobering revolt by the board against the boring baseball's
resiliency reminds us that the World Series broadcast might still
inspire another generation wearing not transistor earplugs but buds hooked
(40:03):
up to a live stream or like that unhappy eighteen
ninety classic, the whole thing could wind up getting canceled,
And this time it'll be canceled by TV executives. I've
(40:31):
done all the damage I can do here. Thank you
for listening. Countdown has come to you from the Vin
Scully Studios at the Elderman Broadcasting Empire in New York.
The music you heard was for the most part, arranged, produced,
and performed by Countdown musical directors Brian Ray and John
Phillip Shanel. Brian Ray handled the guitars, bass and drums.
John Phillip Shaneil did the orchestration and keyboards, and it
(40:51):
was produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including other Beethoven music,
was arranged and performed by No Horns Allowed. The sports
music is courtesy of ESPN, Inc. And it was written
by Mitch Warren Davis. We call the Olderman theme from
ESPN two. Our satirical and pithy musical comments are by
Nancy Faust, the best baseball stadium organist ever, and I
(41:12):
our announcer today is my friend Stevie van Zant. Everything
else was pretty much my fault. That's countdown for this
the one thousand and sixteenth day since Donald Trump's first
attempted coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.
Convict him now while we still can. The next scheduled
countdown is tomorrow. Bulletins has the news warrants till then.
(41:34):
I'm Keith Olremman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and
good luck. Countdown with Keith Olreman is a production of iHeartRadio.
(41:58):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get at your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Trump
has docked a second figure in his New York fraud trial.
(00:26):
And I start here because the Nightmare in Gaza is
actually just the story of the Trump Delusion, only writ larger,
and only for the fact that Gaza is a few
decades later in the narrative. I will get to Gaza presently.
The Midas touch people. I believe it was who caught this.
First Monday night, Trump reposted a substack piece by the
(00:48):
appalling Laura Lumer, which, with typical imbecility, asserts Trump can't
be wrong because New York Attorney General Letitia James allegedly
had unauthorized or hazardous restorations done at a residence here
in New York City. And of course Lumer reproduced a
city document that supposedly supports that claim, and she just
(01:11):
happened to not blank out the street address for what
may be the Attorney General's home, and Trump just happened
to repost that piece and repost that address. And oh look,
Judge Arthur anger On didn't specifically gag Trump and forbid
him from posting anything about Letitia James or himself. The
judge or anybody else, just about members of the judge's
(01:32):
courtroom staff. After Trump had posted an innocuous selfie that
the court clerk had taken with Chuck Schumer, and Trump
insisted that made her Schumer's girlfriend, and thus Schumer was
running the case, and thus it had to be dismissed immediately.
And then, of course Trump also attacked anger On, And
just when Judge anger On should be broadening the gag
(01:53):
order on Trump in the New York fraud case, it
turns out to be too woefully narrow to protect the
Attorney General against doxing. And now it looks like another
judge and another gag order are falling into the same trap.
To little fanfare, Judge Chutkin released the written version of
her Trump gag order, and it barely limps onto a
(02:17):
third page, and it is unspecific, and in particular, it
emphasizes only what Trump can do, like Trump can attack
Mike Pence, Trump can insist this is political persecution, and
Trump can insist he's not gonna be able to get
a fair trial in Washington. Not once does it make
any references to the sanctions the judge warned him against
(02:40):
when she issued her gag order against him in court
on Monday afternoon. We are left to guess if she
would find him or find him for the first couple
of offenses and then move on to permanently or temporarily
revoking his bail and putting him behind bars, or if
she jumped to that bail revocation first, or if she
has some other idea, or if somehow she is not
(03:01):
even seriously considering doing to him what would be done
to any defendant who had attacked every principle in a case,
and just in case he might miss somebody had threatened
while the entire universe with if you go after me,
I'm coming after you. Neither Judge Chuckkin nor Judge Angron
seems to be a shrinking violet. And I hope I
(03:24):
am not impugning either of them, because I am confident
they think they are just bending over backwards to respect
the office of President of the United States, even if
this creature who once held it is provably and objectively
dedicated to the overthrow of the courts and of representative
government in this nation. But both Judge Chuckkin and Judge
(03:47):
Andngern are on the cusp of becoming the worst thing
I can think to call someone. In these years of
our democracy's existential crisis, they are both on the cusp
of becoming judicial versions of Chuck Todd. I state this
so so often it exhausts me. And yet I wonder
(04:07):
if somehow I have not stated it often enough. Trump's
only true genius is his ability to find the line,
whatever it is, wherever it is, whatever it's about. He
can find the line and dance right along the line,
so that whoever would act against him self edits self,
doubts self, hesitates, self, delays, self, overthinks self, both sides it.
(04:39):
Trump's guilt is truly greater than the sum of his
crimes in doxing Letitia James. He has not defied anger
On's gag order in this machine gun spray of threats.
In the insurrection case, he has not defied Chutkin's gag order,
not yet anyway, And Chutkins suddenly seems hesitant to even
tell him or us what the penalty will be when
(05:01):
he does. And yet, cumulatively, is there any question Trump
has violated what each judge has told him to do
and not to do. Is there any need to ever
tell a sane man to not try to whip up
public hatred against the prosecutors or the judges or the
witnesses solely to somehow get that public to interfere with
(05:22):
that prosecution. Is there any doubt that Trump is threatening
and attacking these figures of the legal establishment solely for
the inevitable day when they act violently, or he summons
them explicitly to act violently in order to stop his prosecution.
Is there any question that the outcome Trump wants in
(05:45):
each of these cases is another January sixth, only with
Jack Smith or Letitia James or somebody else as the
sole victims of the respective mobs. We are running out
of time for the judges to continue to bend over backwards.
They should be, in fact bending in the opposite direction.
(06:08):
And if you begin to think we cannot exceed the
law or the constitution and still preserve both, firstly, each
is done every day by conservative judges and conservative governors
and conservative police. Secondly, this nation still exists because in
(06:30):
the grimmest and grandest of forms, President Lincoln exceeded the
law and the constitution to preserve both. The nation survived
and the Constitution survived. And if we do not test
the elasticity of both in some small ways. Right now,
regarding Trump, we will, as we did in eighteen sixty one,
find those among us who are willing to test its
(06:51):
elasticity on Trump's behalf at the point of a knife
and the barrel of a gun. And no, I am
not asking Judge Chutkin to suspend habeas corpus and lock
Trump away this afternoon without charge or bail. Delightful of
prospect as that might be, But I now think our
(07:14):
survival as a nation with a representative government may depend
on some imaginative and creative interpretations of extant law by
that judge or by Angron in New York to broaden
what their gag order applies to one of them, presumably
Chutkin should suggest that the Federal Insurrection trial can only
(07:37):
proceed fairly and safely if Trump is prohibited from any
attacks on any legal institutions in this country and the
principles in any case being conducted against him. Under a
proactive and justifiable gag order, Trump would be before Judge
Chutkin today for having docks Attorney General James two nights
(08:00):
ago in New York, because otherwise, if you let him
commit crimes twenty six through fifty in the jurisdiction where
there are only crimes one through twenty five. He will.
It is how he has survived until this age without
having already been sent to prison. It is his only
(08:23):
true skill. And because of what else happened yesterday, I
today have significantly less faith that this nation will do
what is necessary to stop Donald Trump before it is
too late. Because the other thing that happened yesterday underscores
how far delusion and denial have overtaken twenty first century mankind.
(08:47):
Because the gases strip and our marrilago of the mind
are closer than they might at first appear. It is
an extraordinary feeling of helplessness somehow overshadows the elemental horror
on the ground, because the debate over what actually happened
(09:11):
there yesterday illuminates for you and I where America also
is as a society. Three hundred dead at a hospital
in Gaza, or five hundred or one thousand, and we
know this much and only this much. Whoever made it
happen not only committed a war crime, but created an
(09:34):
alternative world in which they did not do it. They
are the victims of it, and both sides, the actual
perpetrators and the actual victims, have convinced their own supporters
that they are being lied about. Each has video, each
has witnesses, each has evidence, and one side has manufactured
(09:56):
all of it and slandered the other and killed truth
as surely as it killed the people at the hospital,
And thus the real truth. Here there are human beings
out a place dedicated to saving human beings dead because
of hatred and dogma and religion and political ambition and
(10:18):
institutionalized lying. That real truth is secondary to not merely
the fog of war, but to the deliberate fog of war,
and the truth that, for nearly everyone interpreting this horror,
what you think happened still depends on which side you
think is right. Thus reality becomes a litmus test, not
(10:41):
of a series of facts, not of a bunch of evidence.
It becomes a litmus test of your political correctness within
your own world, or your region, or your religion or
your group. And so we are left not only with
this nightmare, but the realization that the zenith of the
governmental lie, the zenith so far is merely a more physical,
(11:03):
more tangible version of the destabilization of reality that has
been poisoning this country for forty years. That is the
new essence of one of our two leading political parties
that is being exploited at this moment by its leading
candidate for the presidential nomination. In the desperation and the
horror in Gaza City, we can for a moment step
(11:26):
away from ourselves and see our crisis from a detached
point of view. Whatever you and I know to be
true about January sixth, about Trump, about Russian election interference,
many of our neighbors just as assuredly know to be
true that Trump won, that he is being persecuted, that
(11:50):
January sixth was a false flag. And then come the
splinter groups with secondary and tertiary versions of the disease,
who believe things like Pizzagate, or believe in herds of
body doubles, or of former leaders coming back from the
dead for no apparent reason other than to change their
political affiliations. I always think at times like these of
(12:13):
two of the nightmares within the nightmare of our invasion
of Iraq twenty years ago, when our government did what
either Hamas or Israel is doing right now. It used
all of its influence to sell its own people a
heinous lie about a connection to nine to eleven in
order to get them to support, in some cases enact
further violence in the form of war. And as the
(12:37):
madness of the culture of Iraq became front of mind
here twenty years ago, we discovered that some huge percentage
of Iraqis believed that Sadam Hussein owned and war or
had had implanted under the skin in one arm a
magic stone that protected him from death. Or maybe they
(13:02):
didn't believe that, and we were just being told that
would Hamas have done that to its own people yesterday,
given the juxtaposition of weapons of war and a densely
packed urban population. Unintentionally? Certainly, yes, anybody can harm their
own side by accident in any conflict deliberately. The Israelis
(13:23):
claim they have a list as long as your arm
of Hamas sacrificing its own people deliberately. Could Israel have
done this? Again? Unintentionally? A target missed easily. Surgical air
strikes are fiction. Could Israel have done this deliberately? At
least twenty one emergency hospitals and a medical college were bombed,
(13:47):
and in one group of two hundred and ninety eight
medical doctors. Two hundred and seventy of them were killed
or maimed in the bombings. This was in Nagasaki and Hiroshiba.
We did that for reasons. We could defend then, and
we still defend now. We defend mostly by the magic
wand of a simple assertion that was to be met
(14:09):
with the same kind of unquestioning belief playing out in
Gaza today. On both sides. Well, we had to. We
were defending ourselves, which is what the Japanese originally believed,
just as fervently and just as religiously. The irony is
that the wired world, even in the Gaza strip, is
(14:32):
so inescapable that we will probably be able to figure
out maybe an hour's days, maybe in a year, who
committed this and then lied about it. There will be
time stamped satellite imagery of rockets being launched or not
being launched. There will be video of missiles leaving the
(14:54):
ground or leaving an airplane, but not both. The revelations
will not convince the ones who want to believe, even
if what they believe is proved to be a lie,
just as no revelation will convince the ones who want
to believe in this country I don't know how we
fix this. I don't know how we fix this because
(15:18):
now it is also being wrapped up in religion, which
is itself a fantasy. And don't start. Religion is a fantasy,
not because of the faith nor the spirituality. Those are
truly intangible things about which every human on this planet
could believe something different, and we could all still live
together in peace and probably more productively than we do now,
(15:41):
provided that we all agreed not to try to convince
anybody else that their belief in the same intangible things
is provably wrong compared to our own. The faith is
not the added problem here. It's the fact that you
can stuff any prerequisites and hatreds and prophecies and magic
stones and catch phrases like Jesus this sent Trump into
(16:07):
your religion and pretend that the result is sacro sanct
That's the magnifying problem. We will figure out the Gaza
hospital in all probability. How we will figure out the
mutually exclusive beliefs abroad in our land, which will in
(16:29):
large part decide the future of representative government in our land.
How we will figure that out. I don't have any idea,
by the way, on the third big news story of
the day. It is of some small comfort, I suppose,
(16:49):
some small victory for reality over brainless belief in a
reality that may or may not be real. That when
Jim Jordan lost, his response this time was not that
they should go on storm the Capitol and overturn the election.
Can't imagine how Jim Jordan didn't get elected speaker when
(17:12):
idiots like a least Stephanic got up and said this,
and we're stupid enough to think this was going to
help him.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Jim is the voice of the American people who have
felt voiceless for far too long. Whether on the wrestling
matt or in the committee room, Jim Jordan is strategic, scrappy, tough,
and principled wrestling matt.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
You say, well, at least Stephanic is the child of
the biggest wholesale plywood distributors in the entire Schenectady water
Volite Metroplex. The name Stephanic means plywood. Also of interest here,
I'll circle back to the Middle East, and unhappily, I
(17:57):
will have to invoke my alma mater, where a professor
has said something so cold, so startling, so inhuman, that
it does not matter whether you support Israel or Hamas,
you will be offended to the depths of your soul
and this professor should lose his job. That's next. This
(18:20):
is Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith Olberman still ahead
(18:48):
on an all new edition of Countdown October fifteenth, nineteen
sixty nine, before the exact anniversary of that date slides
too far into the distance. Let me tell you about
that day. My first sort of adult suit, my dad
and I dodging the moratorium date protesters in the time
I'm square subway station and the first World Series game
(19:09):
I ever got to go to. The first item I
crossed off my bucket list. I was ten, and it
was thirty years before anybody called it a bucket list.
Things I promised not to tell. Coming up first time
for the daily roundup of the miss Grants, morons and
Dunning Kruger effects specimens who constitute today's worst persons in
the world. The Bronze the British Conservative Party, now celebrating
(19:33):
nearly one whole year without having thrown out its own
prime minister out of office, and now being able to
claim it's only had five different prime ministers in the
last seven years. The party has in essence suspended and
expelled Member of Parliament Peter Bone. Just a year ago
(19:55):
they made Peter Bone Deputy Leader of the House, seven
years after Peter Bone was accused of bullying a female
staffer and exposed his genitals near her face. This allegedly
happened in twenty twelve, and just as importantly, his name
is Peter Bone. How the hell do you not see
(20:17):
this coming? The runner up the Washington Post. You're wondering
how and why it has seemed to have fallen apart
in the last few months. Here is an answer. Yesterday
the Post did one of those what to Know about
Jim Jordan, the Republican House Speaker nominee, deals by Marissa
Ayati and Megan Vazquez, and not once in the peace
(20:39):
does it ever mention that Jordan talked to Trump for
ten minutes the morning of January sixth and voted to
not ratify and blew off the subpoena from the January
sixth committee left all those little details out. It mentions
that Trump gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, though,
but the winner, Professor Russell Rickford of the history department
(21:01):
at my alma mater Cornell University, and we're going to
kill the music for this because his words have now
been condemned by the university's president and many other aspects
of Cornell. But it's not enough. On the fifteenth, Professor
Rickford told a crowd on the Cornell campus that while
he abhorred violence and they abhorred violence, the Hamas attack
(21:21):
on Israel was quote exhilarating unquote end quote energizing unquote,
and he personally was exhilarated. I cannot imagine what is
wrong with Russell Rickford. This transcends the actual attack, It
transcends the war, It transcends the Israeli response. It transcends
(21:42):
what happened before and what has happened since. It transcends
who you think is right and who you think is wrong.
Russell Rickford is wrong to respond to the Hamas terrorism,
to respond to, perhaps to the hundreds of the dead
at the hospital in Gaza yesterday, by claiming to be exhilarated,
(22:03):
to be exhilarating by mass death is to lack not
just intelligence, but humanity. I'm not one of those dewey
eyed sing the song alumni. I went to the homecoming
once it was, in fact to cover a pretty good
football game that year, and the year was nineteen seventy nine.
(22:23):
But neither have I ever before been ashamed of my
alma mater. I am now Professor Rickford has no place there,
not because of who he supports in this, nor who
he condemns in this, but because he could be exhilarated
by mass death. Russell Rickford, get him the hell out
(22:45):
of Cornell, today's worst person in the world. I flashed
back to this the other night as I switched away
from the baseball playoffs, and I wondered where the teams
with the top records had gone, and what the point
of the regular season, the playoffs and the World Series is?
(23:08):
And I flashed back to a time when you didn't
have to ask that question or any variant of it.
It was the World Series and everything else stopped for
it in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle
of the week, even though by then football was already
the most popular sport. There was nothing football, or any
other sport or anything else in American culture had to
(23:30):
offer that was comparable to the World Series. The number
one story on the Countdown now, and it's my favorite topic.
Me and things I promised not to tell. I was
ten years old, and I'm not sure that this was
the last week that baseball was more important than nearly
everything else in this country. But if not, the chronology
is pretty close by legend. In my hometown, Miss Barton
(23:54):
had been standing on Farragut Parkway when they decided to
put the school there in nineteen oh five, so they
just built it around her. In fact, she had only
been at the head of her homeroom since nineteen forty two,
but for US seventh graders of the year nineteen sixty nine,
the year nineteen forty two might as well have been
a date from the reign of Julius Caesar. Miss Barton
(24:18):
was friendly, but formidable, and what if any connection she
had to the world outside school eluded us In retrospect,
it took a good deal of courage for me to
have handed her the note my mother had scribbled asking
her permission for me to miss school on October fifteenth,
nineteen sixty nine. She read it, and she looked up
(24:39):
at me with unalloyed shock, and I knew my plans
were doomed. And then she smiled broadly and warmly. It
was not the last time any of us sought, but
it probably was the first time we had seen her smile.
You're going to the World Series? Have you got an
extra ticket? They were all like that. Madelinski, the science
(25:06):
teacher who looked like nothing less than a proto Nathan Lane,
had not only accepted my carrying a transistor radio and
an earphone into class, but he had periodically called on
me during science class for the score. Mister bub the
hard assed, phized teacher who once fended off twenty seven
(25:26):
kids who tried to force him into the showers on
the last day of school, suggested that when I went
to Game four, I should bring a movie camera with
me and we could watch the highlights instead of Jim
whenever the film got back from the developers. The social
studies teacher, my favorite missus Rice, the first love of
(25:47):
my life, out did them all. She moved my chair
up next to the blackboard and turned a corner of
that blackboard into a makeshift scoreboard. Every half inning, and
in those days, you could cram a lot of half
innings into your average seventh grade social studies class, not
just like one or two half innings. I would add
(26:08):
a digit to the line score Baltimore zero zero three,
Mets zero zero zero. My dad got somewhere two tickets
for Game four. It turned out to be the Tom
Seaver game. It ended in JC Martin's bunt thrown away
down the first baseline by relief fitcher Pete Rickard of Baltimore,
(26:30):
with pinch runner Rod Gasbar of the Mets scoring the
winning run in the tenth. I got to know all
those guys. I sent Rod Gasbar some previously unseen photos
of him crossing the plate. He sent one back, autographed,
inscribed Keith, thanks for attending Game four of the nineteen
sixty nine World Series, Please drive home safely. My dad
(26:52):
and I in fact took the train in from Westchester.
I think we went first, at his insistence, to Barney's,
which was then exclusively a men's clothing store in Union Square.
That's where I got my first adult dial suit with
a tailor and everything, and then up to Times Square
to change trains, where we were nearly run over by
(27:13):
the Moratorium Day protesters. That was Moratorium Day, the first
big nationwide protest against the Vietnam War, October fifteenth, nineteen
sixty nine. We changed trains and then out to Chase
Stadium by the number seven. The seats on that perfect
crystal day were in distant left field, but I had
(27:33):
brought my binoculars, really my dad's, and they brought me
into the game. I could see the Commissioner of Baseball clearly,
and stand Musials sitting next to him, and sitting next
to the Mets dugout, and I could see the sweat
on Tom Sever's face as he delivered strike after strike,
and the emotion I had when I got home that night,
(27:53):
a temporary Mets fan because the Orioles always beat up
my Yankees, that emotion was simple. Whatever else would happen
in my life, I had done it. I had been
to a World Series game. I was the envy of
my classmates for months. The previous school year, they had
(28:16):
herded us all into the vast cobwebby auditorium at the
top of the school to watch Richard Nixon's first inauguration.
Several times. They had done the same thing for Gemini
and the Pollo space launches, but those had tangible, albeit
to us, vague connections, to you know, actual school work.
(28:38):
The World Series, however, was apparently more important than school work.
It was more important than school. I don't remember anything
else that adults would admit was more important than school.
All these years later, and hearing those words world and
series still sends a chill through me as reflexively as
the loudest Pavlovian bell. I could not have known then
(29:02):
I was part of the last generation to be so indoctrinated.
I assumed it had always been that way, and it
always would be, and it no longer is. The twenty
twenty two World Series was the third worst rated in
television history, not quite as bad as twenty twenty one,
which itself was not quite as bad as twenty twenty.
(29:24):
There's a myriad of causes. I have about five hundred
and seventeen more television and streaming channels to choose from
than I did in October nineteen sixty nine. I mean,
we didn't even have the color TV yet in October
nineteen sixty nine, at least not an our house. I
have at least five times more TV channels than I
did in October two thousand and one. And similarly, baseball
(29:47):
no longer dwarfs the sports landscape, even just for the
World Series. The de nationalizing of baseball was symbolized by
the presence of two geographically homogeneous teams, formerly a boon
to ratings, now curse. This was the two thousand World Series,
(30:08):
the Mets and the Yankees, the dream of every New
York sports fan, and nobody cared outside of New York
the beginning of the end. Yet the underlying cost of
baseball's malaise is that, like me, the owners just assumed
it would always be the way it was in nineteen
sixty nine. I had an excuse for believing that I
(30:29):
was ten. Their excuse that mentally they're all ten is insufficient.
All but a few of the owners have failed to
understand television in any way other than as a revenue source.
They have never recognized its function as merchandising, even as
a mechanism for proselytizing. They didn't know about Miss Barton
(30:50):
and mister Madolinsky and missus Rice, and they did not
care about them. They didn't know about the kids with
their cheesy white plastic earplugs and their scratchy transistor radios.
They didn't cultivate the tradition they had been given by
their forebearers. In the first half of the twenty century,
they let the World Series become less important than schools,
and less important than the NBA, and less important than
(31:16):
Taylor Swift. That's what they needed. They needed to get
Taylor Swift to go with Travis Kelcey to that playoff game.
It takes a certain foresight to say to a television executive, No,
we can't play the whole World Series at night because
the kids won't be able to watch. We can't bend
(31:36):
to society and prime time and the other sports and demographics,
because to do that is to lessen the obligation to
watch the World Series. We have to play some day games.
Here's some of the money back. It would take a
certain foresight and reproductive organs the size of I don't know,
(32:01):
fill in the analogy yourself, as by well everything. Baseball
owners don't have them or the foresight to plan for
the twelve inning of a game, let alone twelve years
from now. They did not write off the few million
less NBC would have paid them as seed money for this. Instead,
it's the World Series that has gone to seed, sometimes
(32:23):
being reduced to being the symbolic filler between Fox's next
two promos for this year's implausible sitcom as I've discussed
here previously, Baseball's owners never noticed that the separation and
isolation of the two leagues had assured that while the
audience might be divided among the fans of sixteen, then twenty,
then twenty four, then twenty six different teams, it also
(32:46):
meant that nearly all of them also divided into two groups,
American League fans and National League fans, so that even
if their quote own team unquote was not in the
World Series, they still had a rooting interest in the
World Series and a reason to watch to see their
league win or is, in my case, as an American
League fan when I was ten years old, to see
(33:08):
their league lose because it was the Baltimore Orioles and
they beat the crap out of my Yankees. I was
not rooting for the Mets in the nineteen sixty nine
World Series. I was rooting against the hated Baltimore Orioles.
TV usually takes the sole blame when this subject is introduced,
but I know from my own experience when the executives
who make the nuts and bolts decisions about televising Baseball
(33:33):
seeing them actually do it, that they have done everything
but beg the owners to return daylight to the series,
and not just when the games have to start at
five pm Pacific for the sake of the East Coast audience.
One of my bosses, Dick Eversoll, the head of NBC Sports,
sat there rejiggering the first pitch times for one series. No, no,
(33:58):
tell buddy, he has to start Wednesday at eight thirty seven,
not eight o seven. He knows that we've got a
sitcom premiering on Wednesday. He told me about offering to
split the difference in the revenue lost because of a
late afternoon start on a Saturday. I told buddy, think
of the future. He kept saying, think of the money.
(34:20):
It isn't just the sizzle, of course, there are now
severe problems with the stake as well. In Bob Costas's
memorable phrase, as my friend put it, the wild card
has indeed turned the series into the MLB Finals. The
viewers were way ahead of the cognacenti on this celebration
of mediocrity. Amid all the explanations for the ever plummeting ratings,
(34:40):
the simplest one inevitably gets bypassed. If you're scoring at home,
or even if you're just by yourself. This just isn't
very good baseball played by not really that good baseball teams.
Five hundred foot homers and no hitters with multiple pitchers
in them and seventeen strikeout games. They are impressive, but
(35:02):
if they happen every night, they take on the false
of the plot twists in pro wrestling, and in a
sports world full to overflowing with last second touchdowns, buzzer
beaters from the popcorn stand, all offense, all the time,
is no longer enough to hide the fact that to
be watchable baseball has to be a balance of hitting
(35:22):
and pitching. In one year, the number of World Series
starting pitchers who lasted seven innings or more dropped from
nine to none. One day, all the runs in the world.
Next day, a no hitter, same two teams, same two lineups.
(35:43):
In the old days, the pretenders, one dimensional teams like
last year's Phillies, were eliminated in the slow but fair
crucible of the regular season. If the best team in
baseball occasionally had a bad week and undeservedly lost the
World Series, that merely served to create endless spodder for
the off season, something for people to talk about until March. Now,
(36:03):
the candidates were best team in twenty twenty two. That
was the Braves, the Dodgers, even the Mets. They can
be eliminated almost by chance at two levels, even before
they stagger into a sometimes anti climactic World Series. There
are now two nightmare scenarios for the television ratings. If
(36:23):
they had continued to decline at the rate they did
in the ten years after nineteen ninety one, ratings for
the World Series of twenty twenty five would be about
a tenth of what they were in nineteen ninety one.
The collapse slowed, however, great news twenty twenty two ratings
were one quarter what they had been in nineteen ninety one.
(36:46):
That they weren't one tenth is the good news. It
is no coincidence that the three worst rated World Series
of all times have all occurred since twenty twenty. The
regular season has already been neutered. Even the teams given
new free stadiums are beginning to fail. The owners know this,
(37:10):
and they floated obvious solution. They added more wildcard teams.
Throughout the eighteen eighties, the nascent World Series it was
called the World Championship Series. It was the World Series
was mismanaged completely from an instant attention grabber in eighteen
(37:31):
eighty four where the winners of the American Association and
the National League said, hey, we should have a series
to determine which of us is best. From that explosive
big bang berth, it was turned into an endless traveling
freak show by eighteen eighty seven. In eighteen eighty seven,
they played best eight out of fifteen, and they kept
(37:53):
playing it in different cities. It wasn't just the two
cities of the two teams in a Detroit and Saint Louis.
The eighteen eighty seven World Series was played in ten
different cities, and the danumont of labor wars and over
expansion came in eighteen ninety. The eighteen ninety World Series
pitted the Louisville Cyclones, who had risen from worst to
(38:14):
first in the American Association, which was a major League,
against the Brooklyn Bridegrooms, who had won the American Association
pennant the year before eighteen eighty nine, and then the
franchise just jumped into the National League for eighteen ninety
and won that pennant. There were storylines of plenty, but
so full of rancor and devoid of talent. Was the
(38:36):
eighteen ninety World Series that, even though the host, Brooklyn Bridegrooms,
entered Game seven leading Louisville three games to two, game
three had been a tie, they needed just two more
wins for the title. The crowd, the crowd for that game,
Game seven of the World Series in Brooklyn, three hundred fans.
(39:00):
Louisville then tied the series in that game three wins
apiece and a tie, and they need a decisive eighth
game and the rest of the series, and they never
played it. They abandoned the World Series tied three and
three and one quote there is scarcely enough interest in
(39:20):
the series, noted a writer for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin,
to induce the people to read the scores. The most
frightening part about that quote that's from eighteen ninety. I
(39:41):
felt that way the last three Octobers during the World Series.
The world has made itself over a thousand times. Since
that sobering revolt by the board against the boring baseball's
resiliency reminds us that the World Series broadcast might still
inspire another generation wearing not transistor earplugs but buds hooked
(40:03):
up to a live stream or like that unhappy eighteen
ninety classic, the whole thing could wind up getting canceled,
And this time it'll be canceled by TV executives. I've
(40:31):
done all the damage I can do here. Thank you
for listening. Countdown has come to you from the Vin
Scully Studios at the Elderman Broadcasting Empire in New York.
The music you heard was for the most part, arranged, produced,
and performed by Countdown musical directors Brian Ray and John
Phillip Shanel. Brian Ray handled the guitars, bass and drums.
John Phillip Shaneil did the orchestration and keyboards, and it
(40:51):
was produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including other Beethoven music,
was arranged and performed by No Horns Allowed. The sports
music is courtesy of ESPN, Inc. And it was written
by Mitch Warren Davis. We call the Olderman theme from
ESPN two. Our satirical and pithy musical comments are by
Nancy Faust, the best baseball stadium organist ever, and I
(41:12):
our announcer today is my friend Stevie van Zant. Everything
else was pretty much my fault. That's countdown for this
the one thousand and sixteenth day since Donald Trump's first
attempted coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.
Convict him now while we still can. The next scheduled
countdown is tomorrow. Bulletins has the news warrants till then.
(41:34):
I'm Keith Olremman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and
good luck. Countdown with Keith Olreman is a production of iHeartRadio.
(41:58):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get at your podcasts.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.