The Infinite Inning

The Infinite Inning

The Infinite Inning is a journey to the past to understand the present using baseball as our time machine. America's brighter mirror, baseball reflects, anticipates, and even mocks the stories we tell ourselves about our world today. Baseball Prospectus's Steven Goldman shares his obsessions: history from inside and outside of the game, politics, stats, and Casey Stengel quotations. Along the way, we'll try to solve the puzzle that is the Infinite Inning: How do you find the joy in life when you can’t get anybody out?

Episodes

Infinite Inning Reissue 9 (079): Cubs in the Stands, Giants on the Breadline, and Lou Reed in New York

July 2, 2025 • 59 mins
In new remarks for this week’s baseball, history, and politics reissue, we apply Lou Reed’s classic 1989 album New York to this week’s events in Washington and elsewhere, a discussion which also affords us a momentary visit to that year’s Yankees trying to make some absurd trades (and the Mets actually consummating one of the worst). The flashback segment revisits Hack Wilson’s trip into the stands to thrash a misbehaving milkman a...
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Infinite Inning 337: Yankees and Cubs Have Wants and Desires

June 28, 2025 • 49 mins
Infinite Inning 337: Yankees and Cubs Have Wants and Desires Babe Ruth asks for a small favor from Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert—well, 100,000 small favors—and is rebuked in the papers, suggesting a modern problem is actually an old one as well. Then a Cubs great goes to California and finds that prohibition is no impediment to his drinking, a tale which leads to stories of another drinker and a murderer who shared his last name.  

Th...
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Infinite Inning Reissue 8 (050): Everyone Rejects Roy, Even the Yankees, But Everyone Takes the Money

June 25, 2025 • 45 mins
In new remarks for this week’s baseball, history, and politics reissue, we consider the heat dome hovering over half the country and wonder what it means for baseball. Then we revisit the offensively potent but frequently discarded outfielder Roy Cullenbine and take a visit to interwar Washington for a mostly non-baseball story of political corruption.

The Infinite Inning is a journey to the past to understand the present using bas...
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Infinite Inning 336: The St. Louis Cardinals, a Trade, and a Kidnapping

June 21, 2025 • 38 mins
Emotional trades happen, and the Cardinals—anticipating the exile of Rafael Devers from Boston—made one with a future Hall of Famer (who eventually wound up in Boston). Then a Cardinals pitcher is kidnapped—or was he?—and the host questions whether he once witnessed an example of the same on the mean streets of New Jersey.  

The Infinite Inning is a journey to the past to understand the present using baseball as our time machine. Am...
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Infinite Inning Reissue 7 (023) The Red Sox vs. Niccolo Machiavelli, the Mets vs. Vietnam, A’s Fans vs. the President

June 18, 2025 • 37 mins
In new remarks for this week’s baseball, history, and politics reissue, notes from the 1500s on kings and princes vs. the mob and what that might tell us about the Rafael Devers trade. Then we revisit two acts of resistance: Tom Seaver and John Lennon have an indirect team-up to remind us of our own power, and the wrong president shows up at the World Series.

The Infinite Inning is a journey to the past to understand the present usi...
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Infinite Inning 335: The Yankees-Iran Nuclear Arms Agreement

June 14, 2025 • 51 mins
A 1980s designated hitter is traded to the National League, a fish-needs-a-bicycle baseball moment reminiscent of recent US diplomacy, and a 20-game winner who pitched as Theodore Roosevelt charged up San Juan Hill throws it all away in favor of good diction.

The Infinite Inning is a journey to the past to understand the present using baseball as our time machine. America's brighter mirror, baseball reflects, anticipates, and even ...
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Infinite Inning Reissue 6 (064): The Dodgers Say No to America First

June 11, 2025 • 60 mins
In new remarks for this week’s baseball and history reprise, we argue about bunts, kites, and kings—why would anyone wish for any of them? Kites are okay, of course, but the other two are problematic. We then revisit the Brooklyn Dodgers with Jackie Robinson asked to comment on a fallen Hall of Famer who had once been his teammate, then jump back to the days before World War II, when the America First Committee wanted to take over ...
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Infinite Inning 334: The Cleveland Indians (and Other Parties) Send Mixed Messages

June 7, 2025 • 39 mins
There are very few general managers in the Hall of Fame, but that doesn’t mean your local team executive doesn’t know what he’s doing—it’s just that there are only so many obvious choices to make in any baseball season whether your name sounds something like “Ranch Bickey” or “Cryin’ Rashman.” Then, following a quick stop with Babe Ruth and a close-mouthed Lou Gehrig, we visit Cleveland Indians camp in 1938 for a manager who was to...
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Infinite Inning Reissue 5 (173): Lou Gehrig Dreams of Smiting Nazis for the Yankees

June 4, 2025 • 75 mins
In early February 2021 it seemed as if the danger of internally-inflicted fascism might be over, and so we looked at an occasion when Lou Gehrig was confronted with the same kind of movement and had a visceral reaction. Plus a lighter tale of a semi-pro pitcher who injured himself in an unusual way. We also revisit some of Twins executive Kevin Goldstein’s comments on the Colorado Rockies from this episode. In this episode’s new in...
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Infinite Inning 333: Leadership, Dodgers Style

May 31, 2025 • 52 mins
We take another trip around a past sun with the Brooklyn Dodgers, wondering about the origins of Uncle Robbie’s pronounced facial scar and then question a couple of old stories involving his lack of education: Were umpires really policing his spelling? Then, after a brief pause to ponder the nature of unrequited love, we rejoin the pennant-winning 1941 Dodgers for a future Hall of Fame shortstop with the yips and the unfairly derid...
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Infinite Inning Reissue 4 (044): Cookie Says Just the Tip

May 28, 2025 • 41 mins
We return to the program’s first year for two of our more fun baseball profiles, both featuring Brooklyn Dodgers—one from the 19th century, one from the 1940s, and both a little uncomfortable. In a new introduction, we explore different modes of parenting and a form of relationship for which we lack the right word. 

The Infinite Inning is a journey to the past to understand the present using baseball as our time machine. Baseball, A...
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Infinite Inning 332: Women at the Park and Dictators in the Dugout

May 24, 2025 • 66 mins
Infinite Inning 332: Women at the Park and Dictators in the Dugout The Chicago Cubs push hard on Ladies Day promotions, but a few object claiming that women don’t know the game of baseball Then baseball managers as autocrats compared to the real thing, and why confusing one for the other is a very dangerous idea, featuring Ossie Vitt and the Crybaby Cleveland team, Stengel vs. Spahn, McGraw vs. Groh, Buchanan vs. emancipation, and ...
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Infinite Inning Reissue 3 (013): Derek Jeter, Joe Biden, and the Dumbest Conspiracy

May 21, 2025 • 37 mins
Before we revisit episode 13 and it’s discussion of the O’Connell-Dolan scandal, starring a player and a coach lately sprung off the banned list by Rob Manfred, we have a new introduction discussing Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis, the death of Franklin Roosevelt, Derek Jeter’s refusal to move off of shortstop, and we give one more encore to the most perceptive thing Grantland Rice every wrote.

The Infinite Inning is a journey to the p...
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Infinite Inning 331: Runners Down in the Lanes

May 17, 2025 • 58 mins
The secret to managers’ success is revealed and dispensed with, in a hypothetical version of 1976, George Steinbrenner gifts Reggie Jackson with a plane, Hal Chase isn’t off the list because he was never on the list, a pre-Orioles pitcher becomes ill indeed, and baserunners are obstructed in 1928 and 2025, with differing outcomes suggesting the ways baseball can be like a sloppily-written document.

(Snare Drum Buzz Roll, then Tada ...
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Infinite Inning Reissue 2 (006): Go Home, Snooks!

May 14, 2025 • 31 mins
In this return to one of this baseball podcast’s earliest episodes, we discover two utility infielders, the Yankees’ Wayne Tolleson and, well, nobody’s Snooks Dowd (he was a Tigers, A’s, and Dodgers reject) who weren’t where they were supposed to be—or maybe they were exactly where they were supposed to be, but those in authority had a different opinion. This episode features a new introduction reflecting on how these lost players ...
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Infinite Inning 330: The Great Boston Red Sox Depression

May 10, 2025 • 55 mins
A pope who supposedly wanted baseball but caved to the Nazis instead, an amateur pitcher who cost a team a pennant, the Perdicaris incident, a Pirates manager is fired and the way his predecessor resigned, and the 2025 Colorado Rockies versus the 1932 Boston Red Sox and both in the hands of the President of the United States.  

The Infinite Inning is a journey to the past to understand the present using baseball as our time machine...
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Infinite Inning Reissue 1 (146): The Rulebreakers & The .399 Loser

May 8, 2025 • 67 mins
For the show’s first reissue, we return to an episode from almost precisely five years ago which compares players who wouldn’t follow rules and inspired their clubs not to follow rules back, a subject framed by our once and possibly future public health crisis. We then turn to one of the great baseball stories, the misbegotten career of Don Padgett, who Branch Rickey tried to squeeze into a catcher’s mask. This episode features a n...
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Infinite Inning: 328 Some of Us Just Have a Type

May 3, 2025 • 63 mins
We consider the legacy of the great Venezuelan players who have graced the game going back to Alex Carrasquel in 1939, constructing an all-star team of players from that beleaguered nation. What can any one of them tell us about Venezuelans as a whole? Hint: it’s the same thing that a highway serial killer can tell us about your best friend’s gramma. Then we return to the strange, inebriated world of Shufflin’ Phil Douglas. Did he ...
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Infinite Inning 327: Moon, Sheriff, Dutch, and the Mighty Quinn

April 26, 2025 • 53 mins
We begin with two players who would have been crowded off of modern rosters, and also couldn’t have made the 1970s Oakland A’s due to the owner’s insistence on carrying two pinch-runners at once. Then we travel to Philadelphia and visit two pitchers seemingly on parallel tracks, one who might pitch forever as the other confronts a life-threatening illness.

The Infinite Inning is a journey to the past to understand the present using ...
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Infinite Inning 326: The Cult of Pennant Park

April 19, 2025 • 47 mins
We visit the high-flying world of Florida real estate speculation 100 years ago with the volatile manager of the New York Giants John J. McGraw. When the bubble burst, would it be a case of murder?

The Infinite Inning is a journey to the past to understand the present using baseball as our time machine. America's brighter mirror, baseball reflects, anticipates, and even mocks the stories we tell ourselves about our world today. Bas...
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