Infinite Inning 338: Superman Almost Defunds the Negro Leagues

The baseball content in Action Comics no. 1 has a bad effect on those who appeared, particularly the Yankees, the new Superman film, the nature of the character, and Superman vs. the gamblers in a 1939 issue with a Casey Stengel (Braves) and Ducky Medwick (Cardinals) appearance. Then we revisit a statement of values (the opposite of “Nazi” is “baseball”) and dip into Baseball’s Brief Lives to review the career of player, coach, and manager Billy Hunter, who passed away last week at the age of 97.

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? 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm sure you've seen that. This week, there's a new
Superman movie out from director James Gunn, writer too. It's
gotten a lot of press. I saw it this afternoon.
Despite my totally giving up the theatrical viewing experience for
a home theater, I got out and supported this one
because Superman has always meant a lot to me throughout
my life. As a young lad, I taught myself to

(00:21):
read with comics and would come home from school and
watch the George Reeves TV series. Thus, he's been pretty
much part of my life as long as I've been
a conscious person. The only time that those kinds of
characters have not been a part of my life was
in my late teen years, when I was involved with
a couple of harrowing relationships and I let them go

(00:42):
because they somehow were not able to defeat. They could
defeat all kinds of bad guys on the page, but
they couldn't defeat the pain that I was feeling. And then,
one day alone in Seattle, having just been dumped, I
just happened to walk into a comic bookstore and bought
as many as I could afford to buy. From that

(01:04):
period that I had not been buying, and then I
sat on a bench and just started to read until
I could figure out, with the help of my friends
and my folks, how to get the hell out of
Seattle and back to New Jersey. And it was like
I had come home to something that had been missing me,
and I had been missing it. I know that a

(01:25):
lot of it is trite and trashy, but it's part
of who I am. Most New Superman stories when I
was growing up were pretty bad. Actually, speaking of trite
and trashy, the batting average on all these things as
much higher nowadays. DC had just given up on trying
to make them good or interesting, maybe in the same
way that decades earlier, Whalt Disney, having made Mickey Mouse

(01:47):
his corporate mascot haha, found that he could no longer
allow any characterization that would make him fun to watch.
I think in DC's case, it was less that than lethargy.
At that time, that publicishing company was owned by Kenney,
the parking lot people, and yes, if you've been around
long enough, you might have parked your car at a
Kinney lot outside the old Yankee Stadium. Kinny later bought

(02:10):
Warner Brothers at a time when movie studios were distressed
assets due to the rise of television, and subsequently spun
those two companies off as Warner Communications, which, without going
into the whole history, leads to Time Warner and then
the ill conceived merger with AOL and ultimately further ill
conceived mergers which I won't get into at the moment.

(02:32):
I should disclose that when DC Comics was still headquartered
in New York, I got to be up in their
offices maybe a half dozen times. I was working with
an editor there. I did sell a story momentarily that
was killed. I don't think the editor in question ever
read beyond the first page of my script, did not
like literally my first paragraph, and then said I'll get

(02:55):
back to you on it, and gave the story to
someone else. And I've been an editor for a long
time and now I've been pretty mad at people who
have disappointed me with a story at times. But I've
never done that. I've always done them the courtesy of
actually reading the damn thing to make sure that it
was salvageable. But this guy, before he threw the story away,
would say, yeah, come in on Tuesday at ten o'clock

(03:19):
and we'll go over it together, and then I would
come in Tuesday at ten o'clock and he would not
have come into work that day. And he did that
to me more than once. And that is my only
bitterness where this industry is concerned. But so on one hand,
it was still kind of cool because this is something
I had loved since I was a kid. And I
would go into New York, which for me is a

(03:41):
commitment of about two hours at minimum just to get
up and get there. And then i'd go to their
office and i'd go to the lobby front desk and
say I'm here to see so and so, and they
would buzz me up to their floor or floors, and
they had this waiting room that was themed like a
rooftop in Gotham City, with the pat signals shining and
this kind of crepuscular atmosphere, and I would sit there

(04:03):
and then he would never come for me. But at
least I got to wonder about the hallways a little
bit and look at the decor in that way, and
I would think, how cool is it that I'm here,
and how lame is it that I'm about to be
kicked out because I came for no reason. But I
was talking about the quality of Superman comics. When I
first got into reading them in the nineteen seventies and

(04:25):
up through a reinvention about nineteen eighty six, they weren't
the strongest thing. And I just find it very easy
to believe that the Parking Lot people were not very
motivated to check in on the creative quality of the books,
and that did not change even after the first two
Christopher Reeve movies were great, big hits. Still, between what

(04:46):
good there was then and those two movies, I got
what was essential about the character. He's a stranger here,
but primarily he's one of us. He's a humanist. The
loss of his people in his infancy makes him all
all the more sensitive to losing any of us. Like
Spider Man, he embodies the idea that with great power
comes great responsibility. But unlike Peter Parker, he's not motivated

(05:10):
by guilt, but by the belief that if you have
the ability to help out, you do, and he has
the most ability to help out of anyone, and consciously
or not, he very much exemplifies the Jewish concept of
takun olam, the betterment or perfection or fixing of the world.
In prayer it is to fix it. In the second
Reeve movie, General Zod the Bad Guy, argues that Superman's

(05:33):
weakness is that he cares about humanity, and I suppose
it is a weakness if you're looking to defeat him
or exploit him. But it's also the aspect of the
character that makes him different from other vigilantes who have
been invented in the year since Superman first appeared in
nineteen thirty eight. What's fascinating about superheroes is, and the

(05:57):
James Gunn film tries to address this a little bit,
is that in a way their fascist wish fulfillment. That's
what Batman is. If the justice system doesn't work, I'm
going to go take matters into my own hands. Screw legality.
But what often gets lost about Batman is that, as
Dennie O'Neill once wrote, I think in the seventies, he
has the compassion of a Buddha, but the relentlessness of

(06:20):
a shark, And they play up the ladder while forgetting
the former. Ultimately, Batman is someone who doesn't want to
have what happened to him happened to other people, and
there's a whole continuity to these characters that might span
say Superman on the leftmost side of the spectrum and
Marvel's Punisher on the far right side, which is just
you're a criminal. Okay, I'm going to put a bullet

(06:41):
in your brain. It has always been an explicit part
of Superman's character, except for in one misbegotten Zack Snyder
movie that he does not kill and an our debotched
world that's supposed to make him insufficiently edgy, but it's
actually the center of his appeal. And if you can't
tell a story that includes that, well, one, you shouldn't

(07:01):
be telling a Superman story. It's not for you. And
in fact, you aren't telling a Superman story. It may
look like Superman, but it's not Superman. And hey, all
things aren't for all people. Would you hire a director
who wanted to set a Tarzan film in a sewer?
It might be a good story, it's just not a
Tarzan story, Lord gray Stoke, King of the Sewer, I
wish I could do that. Johnny Weissmuller cry now, except

(07:24):
that he's being sort of drowned at the same time.
One other point about Superman essentials before I get to
the baseball of all this this isn't exactly canon about Superman,
but whereas it's very hard to hurt him, he's not
insensible to pain. I think everything that's been depicted about
the character over the years in a variety of media,
including the gun picture, is consistent with that he's very

(07:47):
hard to damage, but he can be hurt, and thus
when he's knocked down and gets up again, it represents
a truly heroic effort to overcome his own suffering so
he can assuage hours and that quality, combined with his
cacharacterization as someone who tries to see the best in people,
differentiates him from the Christ figure he sometimes depicted as

(08:07):
being both in the Christopher Reeve film when Marlon Brando
talks about giving Earth his only son, and in the
two thousand and six Brian Singer film Superman Returns, which
was not the worst take on the character I've ever seen,
but also far from the best. And it contains a
long sequence in which Kevin Spacey, of all people, as
Lex Luthor, just kicks the hell out of him, and

(08:30):
you're supposed to read that. I think or view it
as being similar to the scourging of the Christ, and
again I'm not indicting the Jesus story, which is its
own thing, anymore than I am a punisher story or
death wish, same kind of fascist gratification. Not that I'm
making a direct comparison between the Life of the Christ

(08:52):
and the films of Charles Bronson or for that matter,
Mel Gibson Lethal Weapon. I'm just trying to say that
Superman is a very imperfect or in apt Jesus metaphor.
Superman is distinct from that. He's not taking on our
suffering because he perseveres in spite of it and eventually
through it. And the point is not to do it
for us or because of us. He does it with

(09:13):
us because he sees the best in the people he meets.
And yeah, Superman would die for you, but he wouldn't
die for your sins because he doesn't believe you've done
anything that deserves that kind of penalty or needs that
kind of remedy, And that even if you are kind
of heinous, if you have the will to better yourself,
you can. That's another message that shows up towards the
end of the Gun Picture. No spoilers necessary, this idea

(09:36):
that Superman would rather you improve yourself than he just
take care of things for you in whatever sense is
very strongly embodied in a book written by Grant Marrison
and drawn by Frank Quitley called All Star Superman from
Oh I don't Know, over ten years ago now, and
there's a scene in it that's been reproduced all over

(09:56):
the place online in which a distraught young woman is
about to take her life by jumping from a high
floor and suddenly Superman is behind her and he tells her,
you're much stronger than you think you are. Trust me,
and she turns and cries into his chest. And I'm
not really doing it justice. It's a banal statement, but
it's elevated because of who is saying it, an authority

(10:19):
on being strong. And if he thinks you're strong, you
must be. Or to put it another way, and I
think someone did somewhere. You may not believe in Superman,
but Superman believes in you again, a theme that's really
drawn out in this new movie, and I recommend it
on that basis. Simultaneously, as the film comes out and
James Gunn reminds people that Superman is an immigrant, it

(10:41):
is worth remembering that he was created by two young
Jewish men from Cleveland, with their first attempt coming when
they were eighteen nineteen years old during the inter war period,
but after Hitler and his gang started running around Europe
and claiming that they were the Superman, little short guy,
brown haired from Austria says only blonde guys from Germany

(11:03):
have the right to rule humanity. You're familiar with the irony.
Superman wasn't a pure reaction to that, and there was
a whole lot of borrowing. There was a lot of
science fiction already out there, like Doc Samson, the pulp
character and Philip Wiley's novel Gladiator, not to mention the
circus strong men who inspired the character's initial look. There

(11:23):
was also the feeling of helplessness induced by the Great Depression.
The idea of just fixing things must have had a
lot of appeal, and we know it did have a
lot of appeal to people. Again, thus there was a
fascist movement in the United States. And even though I'm
saying that there's a spectrum of characters from empathetic to fascistic,

(11:44):
and I decry fascism, particularly as a system of government.
One of the myths about the Nazis is that they
were hyper efficient but that's a pure lie. They were,
if anything, the opposite. But there is a place for
stories as outlets. With so many things. There's a difference
between being entertained by an idea and experiencing it vicariously

(12:07):
through fiction in whatever media, and going out and doing
that thing. If there were real people like say John
Wick or Liam Neeson in the take in movies where
there was one with Bob Odenkirk a couple of years ago,
that wasn't bad that I think they're making a sequel
to characters whose essential function is to simply kill everybody
they see, or going back aways to about five movies,

(12:29):
a cop like Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry, Dirty Harry gets You,
George Floyd and other kinds of injustices of that nature
were he to exist in the real world, I mean.
And similarly, characters who just kill with impunity, were they real,
would be people you wouldn't want in your town because
you might just go to Burger King and they might
blow a bunch of people away, including you, for whatever reason.

(12:53):
As fiction, though, they're fine. It's just that Superman is
a fantasy on the other end of that spectrum, and
to the extent that it inspires it. It's a more
benign fantasy. What I'm trying to point out here is
that it's also difficult to wrench him free of the
contradictions inherent in his creation, some of which spring from
the time of his creation. So, as you know, Superman

(13:16):
first appeared, as I said earlier, in Action Comics number one,
cover dated June nineteen thirty eight. Comic books at that
time packed in a lot of value for a dime.
They were more like omnibus magazines than vehicles for one
story of one character, and thus Action number one was
sixty eight pages and contained not only Superman, but a

(13:36):
bunch of other stuff, some with characters who lasted for
a while and some who flamed out pretty quickly. That's entertainment,
you throw a lot of stuff against the wall. It
also contained some purely factual distractions, including a filler page
on the actors Fred Astaire, Constance Bennett, and the comedy
team of Wheeler and Woolsey. Perhaps by coincidence, perhaps not,

(13:57):
Wolsey was about four months from meeting his end at
the age of fifty. Now, this feature was drawn by
Shelley Moldoff, who was a very young man at that time.
He would turn out to be the longest surviving contributor
to that historic magazine, which is ironic because a lot
of the people he drew in that filler feature, like Wolsey,

(14:18):
came to a sudden stop, either permanently or in their career.
In that first issue, he drew a sports page which
informed readers that lou gerrig last of the famous Yankees
murderer's row of nineteen twenty seven, was still going strong
like Wolsey, not actually true, and that if Babe ruth
By then safely retired, had received all of his walks

(14:40):
in one go, he would have had to walk up
and down the Empire State Building seventy times. Also that
Red's pitcher Lee Grissom was really eager to start both
ends of a double header. Grisom's arm was just about
over at that moment. He had thrown two hundred and
twenty three and two thirds innings in nineteen thirty seven,
going twelve to seventeen, while somehow leading the league shoutouts,

(15:00):
but he was never able to pitch more than one
hundred and fifty three and two thirds innings again and today,
if he's remembered at all, it's because he appears in
a semi famous baseball photo or semi historic baseball photo.
When Crosley Field in Cincinnati was flooded, a story I've
told on this show. He and Red's traveling secretary, John
McDonald rode over the left field wall, across the outfield

(15:24):
and out to where they thought the pitcher's mound was.
And if you look it up, you'll see Grissom sitting
in a boat, waving his hat as he floats about
the infield. I don't know if it was the rowing
that did him in, but I do know at that
moment he surely was not up to starting both ends
of a double header. In short appearing in a Moldoff
fact based cartoon in Action Comics number one, Kiss of Death.
In the second issue, Moldoff hit Lefty Gomez, who coincidentally

(15:47):
or not, would never again pitch two hundred innings after
that year. Muldoff's caption on his drawing of Lefty begins,
Lefty Vernon Gomez maybe a nervous and jumpy person, but
when he's on, well, he wasn't on very often after that.
In subsequent installments, mold Off hit Jimmy Fox, Freddie linstroummel
Ot and somehow in the non sports version of the page,

(16:10):
Leon Trotzky and Walt Disney. At the same time he
did Casey Stangle and Ducky Medwick. The former was managing
the Braves, which went very poorly, and the other was
about to be traded to the Dodgers, and that too
went very poorly, with Medwick being nearly killed by a
pitch and coincidentally or not performing poorly, a story I
told in an earlier episode. I can't give you captions

(16:33):
for that page because I don't know if it's ever
been republished. I don't own a copy of Action Comics
number sixteen September nineteen thirty nine, that's where it appeared,
and I'm a little afraid to look up what it
goes for. But if anyone can afford to buy me one,
or you happen to have one so I can get
a look at that page, please do so. I'd appreciate it.
The Superman story in that issue begins with this legend

(16:53):
friend of the helpless and oppressed. Is Superman, a man
possessing the strength of a dozen Samsons and rending gigantic weights,
vaulting over skyscrapers, racing a bullet, possessing a skin impenetrable
to even steal. Are his physical assets used in his
one man battle against evil and injustice. That story by

(17:15):
creator Siegel and Schuster is about gambling. Superman comes upon
another would be suicide, a man who is wandering about
the woods looking for a good tree to hang himself from.
I've got to save him, whether he wants me to
or not, Superman says, he does so. The man's not
grateful at first. In Heaven's name, who what are you?

(17:36):
Superman replies, someone who thinks life is too precious to
be destroyed, and so that aspect of the character has
been there right from the beginning. Well, this fella had
his reasons. You shouldn't have stopped me from destroying my
worthless life. I'm a thief. I've stolen money from my
trusting employer. Superman tells him to return the money, but

(17:57):
the man can't. I've lost every cent of it. A
gambling tables, Superman does succeed in talking the guy out
of topping himself, but he's still troubled by the problem
of gambling. When as mild managed reporter Clark Kent, he
fails to convince the authorities to crack down on illegal
gambling in Metropolis, he decides to act as Superman. He

(18:17):
busts up a crookedt casino, tearing up its fixed roulette wheel,
then robs the safe and plays robin hood by taking
the casino's winnings and dumping them on and I quote
the impoverished people who do appreciate it. He then scares
a problem gambler straight by threatening him physically, and also
takes on the numbers racket, which, holy moly, was a

(18:38):
big part of organized crime at that time and pretty
dangerous to mess with. Fortunately for Siegel and Schuster, Dutch
Schaltz had been dead for about four years by then.
There's a baseball connection there too. It was the numbers
racket that financed a good chunk of the negro leagues. Finally,
Superman trashes every underground casino he can find and reforms

(18:59):
the police department meant by outing the corrupt commissioner who
had been bribed to look the other way, and tricks
what's left of the gambling mobsters into leaving town. Superman
threatens to hurt or kill people quite a bit in
this story, which wouldn't happen the same way today, when
his humanism is even more centered. How Casey Stengel felt
about all that, I'm not certain. I don't know if

(19:20):
he even ever saw the issue Moldoff hit red Roughing
that November. He only had one two hundred inning season
left after Moldoff got done with him, and at that
point I suppose the authorities intervened and prevented him from
assassinating any more ball players. In the funny books. He
did have a very long career in comics and drew
a ton of Batman pages ghosting for Bob Kane, which

(19:40):
meant he only put the Dynamic duo in danger and
left the guys in the dugout alone. In short, go
see the Superman movie because he's a true icon of
some American values we could stand to be reminded of
just now. But don't make up up and away your
mantra if you're hoping to have a long career playing
ball in the Infinite Inning, Well, hello there, and welcome

(20:37):
back to the show Infinite Inning, number three thirty eight
in an ongoing series. I am Stephen Goldman, York, convivial
and now pretty well rested host on our mission to
better understand the present via a journey to the past,
the time machine being as it so often is baseball.
One other thing about Shelley Moldoff. He was a key
early artist on Hawkman, but I'll be damned if he

(20:58):
had ever looked up what a bird's wings actually looked like.
He was good in other ways, but his wings are
weirdly shapeless, furry things, more like two gray capes coming
out of Hawkman's shoulder blades. You could look it up.
As Casey Stangle would have said, thank you for permitting
me last week off for the July four holiday. No
one filed a complaint with HR or anything, and I

(21:20):
greatly appreciate it, and I thank you for returning this week.
On this episode, I have a couple of things for you. First,
after a break, I want to replay something that I
said in this week's reissue episode. As you know, during
the reissues, I've been doing about ten to twenty minutes
of new material, and since I'm not planning researched baseball

(21:41):
stories for that the way that I do them here,
I'm just talking about whatever's on my mind, and I've
felt free to be a little more extemporaneous and talk
a little bit more about whatever is on my mind
at that time. And this week I was struggling very
hard with well the current political governmental situation. It scares

(22:02):
me a lot, and it feels like the negation I've
said this to you many times before of the values
with which many of us were raised, not necessarily by
our folks, although I'm sure that for many or most
of us, our folks played a big part as well.
But I'm also talking about what we learned as American
citizens as school kids is just absorbing what the place

(22:23):
was about from the culture during our lives. It feels
like that's all gone now and that a certain segment
of our fellow citizens are cheering for that. And so
it seemed to me, given the way I was feeling
and what I was seeing, that it was a good
time to make a good statement of my values or
infinite inning values, and baseball has informed a great deal

(22:45):
of that. Normally I would just let it live over there,
but I wanted to share it with all of you.
And I know from the listenership figures that not everyone
who listens to the new episodes goes back for the
old ones, even if I am doing some new introductions.
After that, I imagine it will be time for one
more break, and then I want to get into the

(23:07):
life of Billy Hunter, a player, coach, and manager who
passed away actually on July fourth, and similarly to the
reissue episodes, he's someone who I wrote about. I gave
him an entry in Baseball's Brief Lives the Infinite Inning Book,
and once again I know that I have more listeners
than I do readers of that book, and so I

(23:27):
thought that it would not be cheating anyone to just
do that passage here on the show as a tribute
to Hunter, because I find him wonderful in that his
major league playing career, which lasted from nineteen fifty three
through nineteen fifty eight on some really important teams, rates
by Baseball Reference as being worth negative one point nine

(23:50):
wins one point nine wins below replacement, and yet there's
still so much to say about him. Very briefly, this
week at Baseball Perspectives, I wrote about a favorite team
of my youth, the nineteen eighty four Tigers. That's the
last time the Tigers won the championship. They seem to
have as good a chance as anyone of winning the
whole thing this year. I also talked about some culture

(24:11):
of that time and some figures, whether Walter Mondale or
Duran Duran or the really sort of unsatisfying, disturbing Nick
Nulty film teachers. As always, I hope you'll check that
out and tell him that, Steve Sancha. For now, though,
the requirements of commerce are sending us pell Mell into
a break. So once again on the other side, a

(24:31):
passage from this week's reissue episode reissue number ten, and
then beyond that, the Billy Hunters story. I had already

(24:59):
planned to reissue this particular episode before Elon Musk had
trained his Twitter ai to spew out Nazi talking points,
and I feel like this is something that I need
to address because there were a lot of people cheering
on the revelation that the opposite of woke is Nazi.

(25:20):
Think about it. What is an antonym for empathy or
sympathy for that matter, Well, unsympathetic. That's a word that's
in everyday conversation. I am unsympathetic, meaning I don't care
about your problems, and no doubt there are times when
that is a called for attitude see. The trap that
I fall into is that you can't generalize about anything.

(25:42):
But I'm thinking of an occasion in which some person takes,
say and I'll do this just to be satirical or
perotic about it. This is an extreme example. Takes the
public position that everyone should be entitled to carry guns
everywhere at all times and in fact shoot anyone who
they disagree with, and then they get shot. Then I
would be unsympathetic. But when you're talking about some sort

(26:05):
of systemic injustice as opposed to tempted fate and found out,
then we're in a problematic area of discourse. Years ago,
on this show, I told a story about a player
who used the N word, and although it was repulsive
to me, I said that word is part of the
story because I felt that the impact of the story
required it. And then I listened to a discussion by

(26:27):
an African American professor of English talking about Huckleberry Finn
and why she did not choose to allow that word,
which is prolific in that book, to be used in
her classroom, even though it is part of the text.
And I realized I was very wrong, And if I
can inarticulately sum up her point of view. We all

(26:48):
know what the word is. It doesn't need saying. We
can simply allude to it. We are all responsible for
cleaning up our own spaces and not making them any
worse than they have to be. And it is such
a low, in, painful and ugly word for so many people,
So why would you want to introduce it into your
own environment, which is probably bad enough as it is

(27:09):
in so many ways. Or to put it another way,
be sensitive to the feelings of those around you, even
or especially when you really feel like you should say
something that's going to cause them pain. Does this occasion
really rise to the threshold of hurting someone else? Now?
I imagine that what I just said rises to the
level of woke for a lot of people, whatever that

(27:31):
word means at this point. But like I said, the
opposite of unsympathetic or unempathetic is woke. That term has
been successfully demonized, and yet so much of this country's foundation,
the thing that made it different, however imperfectly, was situated
in woke. What do you call? We hold these truths

(27:51):
to be self evident, that all men are created equal,
but really basic wokeness. The statement was so broad as
to not disinclude anyone. Abraham Lincoln noticed that in a
letter to one of his close friends, Josh Speed, in
eighteen fifty five, he said, our progress in degeneracy appears

(28:12):
to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation. We
began by declaring that all men are created equal. We
now practically read it as all men are created equal
except Negroes. Soon it will read all men are created
equal except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics. When it comes
to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where
they make no pretense of loving liberty, to Russia, for instance,

(28:35):
where despotism can be taken pure and without the base
alloy of hypocrisy. Well, even back then there would have
been people who said, you're woke, abe, screw those folks.
This is a white Christian man's country. Thing is it isn't,
and it wasn't. And the moment that people who don't
meet that description are here, you have to decide how
much of an asshole you're going to be to keep

(28:56):
it or return it to the way that you think
it should have been in those prelapse Arian times, which
again it never was. If you've listened to the infinite
inning for long enough, you know that the idea that
all people deserve to be treated with equal dignity and
have equal rights under the law, whatever they look like,
whatever their gender, their sexuality, their religion, is key to

(29:18):
the values that I try to express on this program
through the stories I tell. When I started, I was
under the impression that the majority of my fellow Americans,
and thus the majority of my listeners, would, along with me,
hold these truths to be self evident, that all men
are created equal. I don't get bored of saying it.
I hope you don't get bored of listening to it.

(29:40):
I was wrong, and because I was wrong about that,
I never stated it as a set of principles for
which I was consistently arguing and insisting that baseball had
taught us again and again over its long history. So
for the record, I believe that America belongs to all Americans,
and you define Americans as who makes up the population
of America at any give in time. Yes, it was

(30:01):
founded by one group of people, and that group of
people included in it not just white male landholders, but women,
free blacks, Catholics, Christians of all denominations, Jews, Native Americans
who had stuck around the colonized areas, and probably, at
least to some extent, every other flavor of humanity then
on the planet. And yes, it was only white male

(30:21):
landholders and slaveholders in Philadelphia, whether as part of the
Continental Congress that declared independence or the later Constitutional Convention.
But even then the country was so much more than that. Remember,
New York was a port, Boston was a port. New Orleans,
which would be part of the national territory soon enough,
was a port. People were coming in and out all

(30:43):
the time, and some of them stuck. And whereas the
founding fathers didn't specifically include everybody, as Abraham Lincoln pointed out,
they didn't specifically disinclude them either. America was made up
of those who were in America. And to invoke Lincoln
again to the extent that all men are created equals
seemed hypocritical or not true. He said, duh, It's something

(31:06):
we were supposed to work towards. And this is really
important because if America is not an ethnicity but a
set of values, then inclusion requires not a skin color
or a place of origin, but subscribing to those values,
which is a question of education by another rather disturbing coincidence. Yesterday,

(31:27):
as I record these words, the Vice President of the
United States gave a speech in which he disagreed with
this definition of America as being defined by a set
of principles rather than the more traditionally nationalistic idea of
blood and soil, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles,

(31:48):
let's say, of the Declaration of Independence. He said, that's
a definition that is way over inclusive and under inclusive
at the same time. It was over inclusive, he said,
because it would let in anyone who agrees with the principles,
which yeah, and would disinclude some hypothetical person whose ancestor
fought in the revolution or civil war and yet disagreed

(32:10):
with the idea that all men are created equal. He
referred to the idea of America as a system of
beliefs as either I've seen it reported a couple of
different ways. Either a creole nation, which is just pure racism.
Times columnist Jamel Bowie translated it or paraphrased it as mongrel,
or he might have said creedle, which kind of makes

(32:33):
more sense in context. But I don't know. I wouldn't
put anything past that, fella. I've always found paranoia about
the ethnic mix of America and white Americans' fears of
losing their majority very strange, because it seems to me
that if you're worried about maintaining American values, first we
need to agree on what those values are, and then
teach them to everyone, our own children and newcomers powerfully emphatically,

(32:58):
and make being conversion with them at a high level
a condition of gaining citizenship. We can't do anything about
our own rotten historical education system, but we can certainly
help newcomers in that regard. The alternative building walls and
keeping people out doesn't do anything to perpetuate our values.
It degrades them, and it does nothing to teach them

(33:19):
to those who we do let in, or in fact,
to ourselves. We should say all men are created equal.
That means you too, bubb mister newcomer, and anyone you
happen to meet, you should have the expectation of equal
treatment under the law and from everyone around you, and
then we walk the walk further. I believe that society
should be meritocratic, like baseball is today now that the

(33:42):
color line is gone, which means that a person should
advance based on their abilities and performance, not on what
they look like or who their parents were. That said,
I do believe that the history of the United States
has been one of racism applied in certain times and
places to a changing cast of outgroups, whether it's the
Irish hunt undred and fifty years ago, or the Chinese
and Japanese in California during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,

(34:05):
or blacks pretty much everywhere at any time. When you
look at how federal housing authorities this is just one example,
consistently redlined black neighborhoods, helping to amiserate them. I don't
see how that's anything other than systemic racism at work.
I do believe that sometimes fixes are necessary, although that's
a very complicated issue, advantaging one group while not disadvantaging another,

(34:27):
and vice versa. However, in the long run, when you
look at us not as individuals but as a nation,
every one of us is a financial or intellectual actor
for the welfare of this country, and the more of
us who are equipped to contribute, the better the country
will be. And that always requires people being able to
live in a way that they are not in fear

(34:48):
of poverty or dispossession. I do not believe there is
a scientific basis for racism. There are minor variations among
all people, and some have different gifts than others, but
no person or group can and be described as inferior.
I believe that all human beings have value, and once
they are here on the planet, I mean, they should
have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

(35:11):
As an example of refusing to generalize about people, I
do not infer that because Johnny Bench was a better
player than Johnny Roseborow, that whites are superior to blacks.
Nor do I believe that because Roy Campanella was a
better player than Joe Girardi, that blacks are superior to white's.
Either Bench and Campanella were better than the players I

(35:31):
paired them with, but that's all you can read into it,
the same way you wouldn't read anything into comparing two
white players or two black players. Lou Gerig was better
than no Johnny Sturm, who replaced him down the line.
Ricky Henderson was better than Vince Coleman. What does that
tell you that you can extrapolate not a bloody thing

(35:51):
These differences are situational at the individual level, so you
might as well forget about them. Further, on the subject
of generalization, every group you can think of, whether you
collect people on the basis of race, religion, gender, sexuality,
or philatally, you're going to find some exemplars who are
a credit to that group and some who are an

(36:12):
embarrassment to it. Humans are like that me. I love
them all and disdain them all in equal measure until
they show me who they are. But even then, that person,
for good or ill, is only one of the group
in question. The rest of us as the Jefferson airplane
saying we can be together. Or to put all of

(36:32):
that another way, baseball repudiates racism. Baseball repudiates the idea
that we can live together. For what is a twenty
five or twenty six man roster but a melting pot.
I said earlier that the opposite of woke is Nazi,
and the opposite of nazi is baseball. That's all I've
got that, it concludes the excerpt from reissue episode number ten.

(36:54):
I hope you didn't mind that. If you had already
heard it. I hope you were not too bored with it,
and for everyone. I hope you understand that, going back
to day one of this program in twenty seventeen, the
thesis was that you cannot disentangle America as a whole
from its national pastime. We are baseball, Baseball is us,

(37:16):
and that we are also this other thing that we
are living through right now. Like it or not, and
some of you like it, but it's all intertwined, and
you cannot appreciate the game except on the most superficial
level without also understanding that it inherently repudiates a lot
of this nonsense. And then once you're kicking back in nonsense,

(37:39):
you may as well keep going. And folks, I am
exhausted with this. I'm looking right now at a screen
from a press conference earlier today where our president was
asked if sufficient warning had gone out to those children
and families who died in the Texas flooding. The New

(38:00):
York Times today had a photo essay that had pictures
and a paragraph a piece on as many people who
died in that flooding as they could find. A lot
of them were eight year old girls. They were really
from every age group, but there were a lot of children,
whether little girls or high school students, are even college kids.
There have been stories about how that county had been

(38:22):
given funds by the federal government under Obama and Biden
to build a better warning system, but they refused that
money on an ideological basis. But put that aside. Forget fault,
forget blame. Over one hundred and twenty people are dead
at last check. Did they get sufficient warning? Obviously not. Definitionally,

(38:44):
sufficient warning would have meant that they are still alive. Now,
if you gave a damn, if you had some humility,
if you had some empathy, if you cared, then you
could argue back, Look, it's a tragedy. But even if
we had had a perfect warning system, there is just
no time. It happened too quickly. But that's not what
the President said. What he said was, I think everyone

(39:06):
did an incredible job under the circumstances. And I don't
know who you are, But only a bad person would
ask a question like that. Only an evil person would
ask a question like that. Me, I do have questions
about a camp where a bunch of little girls were
parked right on a flooding river. But even if that
had not been the case, or there was no fault,
or blame to be attached there either. I imagine many

(39:29):
family members are asking these kinds of questions that would
amount to hundreds of people if there's at least one
loved one looking back and wishing that some of those
hundred plus people were still here. And so I guess
that's hundreds of people who are now both grieving and
in the President's mind evil. Oh well, you know the

(39:51):
old saying, if this be evil, let us make the
most of it. Who said that originally? Surely not infielder,
manager and coach Billy Hunter, who passed away a Unindependence
Day at the age of ninety seven. We'll perambulate a
bit through his story right after this brief intermission. So

(40:26):
once again, when Billy Hunter passed, I didn't hear a
whole lot of chatter about him, despite the fact that
he had a really fascinating baseball career, and I thought
I would make up for that here to set the stage. Statistically,
he played in six hundred and thirty Major League games
spanning from nineteen fifty three to nineteen fifty eight, and

(40:46):
hit two nineteen with a two sixty four on base
percentage and a two ninety four slugging percentage, which, according
to Baseball Reference, Park and League adjusted, works out to
a fifty three OPS plus. That is to say, he
was forty seven percent worse than the average major league
hitter in his career. He did not offer sufficient compensation

(41:07):
for his bat with his glove, and so once again
Baseball Reference war credits him, if that's the word, with
negative one point nine wins above replacement. Here's the story.
As longtime shortstop Phil Rizzuto began to slip in the
nineteen fifties, the Yankees took their time finding a long
term replacement, Hunter, whom they acquired in a seventeen player

(41:29):
trade with the Baltimore Orioles. And depending on your source,
we might still be waiting for one player to be
named later to be revealed got a shot at the job,
but only for a moment. The Yankees had too many
good infielders to play a pure gloveman, and this gloveman
twice led the American League in errors. He's a showboat,
said an anonymous Yankees coach in March nineteen fifty five,

(41:52):
who makes the easy ones look hard, and vice versa.
Ray Ardniez was a better hitter than Hunter. Mark Bolanger
was a much better hitter. Due to an out of
character hot streak. In May of his rookie year, Hunter
made the ALE All Star Team along with fellow Saint
Louis Brown Satchel Page. Hunter had already stopped hitting. As

(42:13):
of the All Star Game itself, he was averaging two
forty five to eighty three to eighty one. It would
be an exaggeration to say that he didn't make another
hit all year, but it's close. Over the rest of
the season, he hit one eighty nine, two eighteen, two
thirty four in sixty eight games. Casey Stengele once said,

(42:33):
I don't like them fellas who drive in two runs
and let in three, But he also didn't care much
for players who saved two runs but stranded three. Hunter
can go to his left and to his right. He
has a strong arm that leaves hitting, and if Billy
can boost his batting average, he'll have to be considered
as a starter. That was Stengle's spring training assessment. Hunter

(42:54):
couldn't boost his average. Of course, Stanngle's way of coping
was to pinch hit for him early and often. In
nineteen fifty five, Hunter started ninety one games. He finished
only fifty of them. On two occasions, Stangle pinch hit
for him as early as the third inning. In one game,
the Yankees were trailing six to four and Hunter came

(43:15):
up with two men on. In the other, they were
ahead five to nothing and Hunter came up with the
bases loaded. Stangle went to first baseman Eddie Robinson. Both times.
In the former game, Robinson failed to play the runners
and the Yankees went on to lose, but in the latter,
Robinson hit a two run single to turn the game
into a blowout. Overall, the tactic didn't really work, despite

(43:37):
Stangle using three future Hall of famers to hit for Hunter, Rizzuto,
Mickey Mantle, and Eni Slaughter, as well as excellent players
such as Robinson twelve times, Muscourin, Joe Collins, Bob Serve,
Ellie Howard, and Hank Bauer. Hunter pinch hitters averaged one
forty seven with a double, three walks, and nine RBIs

(43:58):
in thirty nine played appearances. After all of that, the
Yankees sent Hunter down to the Denver Bears of the
American Association, and it's tempting to think that if the
pinch hitters had come through just a few more times,
he might have stayed on the roster for the entire season.
The Yankees, in first place since late May, had slumped
in July, and the White Sox passed them at the

(44:19):
end of the month. All of the infielders were slumping,
including Hunter. He went over seventeen with a walk in
the nine games before his demotion. With Jerry Coleman returning
from a broken collarbone, Billy Martin coming back from the Army,
young Bobby Richardson playing well at Denver, and Risuto still
on the roster, the middle infield was where they had
the depth to make a change. Stangle, who had earlier

(44:41):
praised Hunter for having spark and fight, said of the demotion,
it wasn't something I wanted to do. This boy didn't
play bad ball around here. We were in first place
with him playing shortstop, weren't we. About two weeks later,
Hunter broke his legs sliding into second base, ending his season.
Hunter spent fourteen years coaching for the Orioles. He was

(45:04):
the third base coach for almost all of the good
years in team history, nineteen sixty four through nineteen seventy seven.
He turned down opportunities to manage the A's Twins and
the Reds, but accepted the invitation to be the fourth
Rangers manager of nineteen seventy seven, after Eddie Stanky abruptly
resigned just one game into his reign. Hunter was the

(45:27):
Rangers fourth manager in a week when he took over,
and their sixth manager in the six years since the
team had moved from Washington, d c. To Texas. Owner
Brad Corbett offered the job to Harmon Killebrew and Don
Drysdale and waited for them to reject it before hiring
Hunter on the recommendation of general manager Eddie Robinson, the

(45:48):
same Robinson who had repeatedly pinch hit for Hunter almost
a quarter of a century earlier. I think Billy is
the type of guy who will jerk the players up
if they need it, Robinson said. The team, loaded with
veterans on long term contracts, took off under Hunter just
thirty four and thirty five and in fourth place in
the Al West. When Hunter was hired, the Rangers went

(46:10):
sixty and thirty three, that's a six forty five winning
percentage the rest of the way and finished second. We
were a team that was waiting to have some kind
of direction or guidance catcher Jim Sunberg said it was
kind of like a rebellious child who needed some leadership.
He gave it to us. Hunter returned in nineteen seventy eight, and,
despite the team's frenetic roster overhaul during the offseason, had

(46:33):
another strong year by the standards of the nineteen seventies Rangers,
going eighty seven and seventy five. Corbett offered him various
long term contracts, but Hunter preferred to go year to year.
His wife didn't want to relocate from Maryland to Texas,
so he wanted the flexibility to get out if he
needed to. This was used against him when it turned

(46:54):
out that not every player wanted to be In Robinson's words,
jerked up as an old school baseball man with a
disciplinarian mindset who quote seldom showed more personality than a
resin bag. Frank Robinson had nicknamed him Little Hitler during
their Orioles days. Gee Thanks Frank. When Hunter banned the
Rangers from drinking in the team hotel in on team flights,

(47:18):
it aggravated the club's thirty something contingent. In May nineteen
seventy eight, erratic or free spirited, depending on your point
of view. Pitchered doc, Ellis vocally challenged the manager on
a team bus ride. Hunter responded eloquently, telling Ellis to
sit down and shut up. Ellis's response was that Hunter
may be hitler, but he's not going to make a

(47:39):
lampshade out of me. Corbett told Hunter that Ellis would
be traded, but Ellis outlasted Hunter in Arlington, and there
is a bittersweet coda. According to Ellis, he confronted Hunter
at a Ranger's Old Timers event years later, said Ellis,
I scared all the old timers. I said, all right,

(48:00):
you sons of bitches, shut up. I've got something to say.
Go out there and bring in Billy Hunter's ass. They
brought him in there. I said, Man, let me tell
you something. During the time you were my manager, I
was a sixth son of a bitch. I was an alcoholic,
dope fiend. In the process of recovery, I need to

(48:21):
make amends to you. It blew his mind. That came
much too late to save Hunter's job. Corbett said we
had a bitter team and needed a manager who can communicate,
and fired him on the season's penultimate day, when there
were no consequences for Ellis, Sundberg said, maybe because Hunter's

(48:41):
hands were tied, he let Doc get away with it,
and he lost the team then and there. Hunter forswore
all future major league employment. He subsequently spent nearly twenty
years as the baseball coach and athletic director for Towson University.
He turned down all chances to consider his vow and
return to the majors. I felt I had accomplished what

(49:04):
I set out to accomplish, he said in twenty thirteen.
Hunter was developed by the Branch Tricky era Dodgers, but
was traded to the Browns before ever reaching Brooklyn. Everyone
in TRIPAA for the Dodgers knew more about fundamentals than
the Browns. He later told John Eisenberg. That was almost
certainly not hyperbole, and it's easy to imagine Hunter, who

(49:26):
also played on two Yankees' pennant winners and coached an
Orioles team that did everything right, developing the belief that
he knew more about how to play the game than most.
He may even have been right, but acquiring the knowledge
as one test, communicating it to others is a harder
crucible then, as I did with most chapters in the book.

(49:47):
I ended with a couple of quotations. Sometimes I wonder
myself whether I am doing the right thing by sending
them home. Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't stop them.
One thing for sure, One thing for sure, the fans
in the stands are very helpful. That was Billy Hunter,
Oriole's third base coach, nineteen seventy two. And this from

(50:08):
the Dallas Morning News, October two, nineteen seventy eight, right
as he had been fired. Was he sorry he ever
accepted the Rangers job? Yes, was the reply. If you
like what you just heard. There are ninety nine more
stories like that in the book, some of them about
players less well known than Billy Hunter, and some of course,

(50:30):
who are in the Hall of Fame. You can find
them in Baseball's Brief Lives by me and available from
Amazon and other booksellers. I am also available on social media,
and you can find me at Stephen Gooldman dot bskuid
dot social. You can also write us, by which I
mean me. There's me again, I'm such an egotist at
Infinite Inning at gmail dot com. And there's a Facebook group.

(50:51):
Simply go to Facebook search on infinite Inning Bang, you're there.
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(51:14):
hyphenspring dot com. Original soundtrack available gratis at casual Observer
Music dot bandcamp dot com. Finally, should you find yourself
with the proverbial moment to spare, please go to the
podcature of your choice and rate review and subscribe. It
helps the show gain attention. And if your podcastcher doesn't
let you do those things, like I said at the outset,

(51:34):
go watch the Superman movie. I think you'll enjoy it.
Our theme song, which you are hearing now and have
been listening to throughout the episode, was a co composition
of myself and doctor Rick Mooring, who says, if you
find yourself with the proverbial moment to spare, please go
to the podcature of your choice and rate review. Uh oh,
I think the Rick omatic is broken. He's repeating stuff
we've already done. Well, if I can just get my

(51:56):
mom to safetypin this towel around my neck and then
I don't break my legs quote unquote flying off of
the stairs. I'll be back next week with more tails
from inside the Infinite Inning