September 6, 2025 • 47 mins
First a catcher and an umpire supposedly participate in a physically impossible act, a computer program vexes the host and leads to a discussion of one possibly beneficial use of AI, and the Yankees acquire a very good hitter because everyone else is in the Army. Will it happen again in a darker way?
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?
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?
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Allow me to confess right off the top here that
I'm a bit nervous about this week's episode, not because
of the subject matter, because oh I don't know my
junior high school math teacher is listening, but because you
think you know a program. You'll work with a program
for years, and then all at once it starts acting
up and you reboot, because that's what everyone tells you
(00:22):
to do. First, reboot the computer. Something's gone wrong somewhere.
You learn from all the millions of times you've watched
Star Wars that maybe there's some carbon scoring in there
interfering with it, playing the hologram from General Kenobi. But no,
my daw, as we say in the industry, my digital
audio workstation, as if I feel part of an industry community,
(00:46):
my recorder, for want of a better word. When I
was doing this week's reissue episode, I got through ninety
eight percent of it no problem, and then at the
end I was papering over the old Twitter address and
so on, and I was just about to say, well,
thank you very much for listening. I'll see you this
week with episode three forty three, as roughly I've been
(01:07):
saying with most of the reissue episodes, and it just
kept crashing, and when I brought it back and tried
to reopen the folder, it killed my whole computer, froze
everything dead, over and over and over. You cannot imagine
my level of frustration. And in the end I somehow
got it open, and no matter what I did, it
(01:30):
would not let me finish the show. If I eliminated
the part where I tried to finish it, I could
still mix down the episode and put it up, as
I eventually did, because discretion was the better part of
valor at that point, or I'd still be there. And
the aspect of it that really vexes me, beyond the
(01:50):
fact that by the time I'm done with one of
these shows, I'm done. I'm spent. I need to finish
and get the thing out to you. But beyond that,
it was nothing that I haven't done now with the
infinite inning over three hundred and sixty times. I know
on a prior episode I've told you about the Battle
of Jutland has nothing to do with baseball. It was
(02:12):
between the British and the Germans, two nationalities which largely
do not play baseball. But I told the story anyway
because it's a good story, and famously, when these two
fleets did battle in a major way for basically the
only time in the First World War, these ships were
way too expensive to risk, so you just kept them
home and admired them. But in this battle, the British
(02:33):
rapidly found out that their ships had a design flaw.
Are you ready for my second Star Wars reference of
the show. They had an unshielded exhaust port essentially, except
the port was actually from the deck to the magazine,
and if a spark happened to land on the deck,
and battles do tend to produce sparks and other fiery
flaming objects, if it went down a shaft essentially from
(02:56):
the deck to where all the ammunition was kept, the
ship popped like a balloon, a fiery balloon, filled with
shrapnel and unfortunately containing well the crew. So the two
fleets sally forth. They meet in the North Sea, they
exchange fire and British ships just start blowing up, and
one of the two guys in charge on the British side,
(03:17):
I don't remember if it was Baby or Jellico, I
think it was Beatty, turned to someone and said, there
seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today. Now,
of course I bring that up as an analogy for
my recording situation here doing something totally unprecedented and unexpected
at the same time. You can never think of the
Battle of Jutland too often, because it's just a great
(03:40):
example of things not going the way that they're supposed to,
the way that they're planned, the unexpected happening. If you're
like me and this sort of trivia is stuck in
your head pretty much twenty four to seven, then it
comes to mind, oh roughly once a week somewhere in
a baseball season, because you will be watching a given
game and perhaps the home team is up six to
(04:03):
one in the seventh inning, and so they bring in
a reliever, and that normally reliable reliever cannot get anybody out.
So the manager trudges out to the mound and calls
on someone even more reliable, who also can't get any outs.
By now it's six to four. Manager, by now wearing
out a path between the dugout and the mound, calls
on the closer, and the closer walks the base is loaded.
(04:26):
I watched Edwin Diaz do something very similar just tonight,
although he ended up getting away with it. And as
all of this is happening, all of this unexpected failure,
I imagine that the manager is thinking, I say, this
seems to be something wrong with our bloody bullpen today,
and he probably is just not in those words anyway
(04:47):
to use what I expect as an archaic expression, one
that I learned from Gilbert and Sullivan. I am all
at sixes and sevens with this episode, because with practically
every word that I say, I expect the digital acts
to fall. And since again I am not working off
of notes, primarily, when something's gone, it's gone, I can't
(05:08):
really recreate the moment. We talk a lot in our
society nowadays about AI, and I do find aspects of
it disturbing and upsetting my work. My Casey stengelbook in particular,
is among the works that some of these companies have
hoovered up without compensation to train their machines. And if
you've ever written a book, then you know that, oh lord,
(05:30):
do you deserve compensation for any use of that material
because you sweated it. So I'm definitely opposed to aspects
of AI which repurpose other people's work, and I'm certainly
opposed to people who use it to write things that
they're not capable of writing, or to avoid learning how,
or to create art that they're not capable of drawing
(05:50):
or painting, or again avoiding doing the hard work of
learning how. And it is a lot of hard work,
and it may never pay off, which is just another
way of saying, find what you are suited for. Don't
just hand it off to R two D two third
star Wars reference to do the work for you, cause again,
then you're a free writer and you don't know and
(06:12):
in fact or incapable of the things you're presenting yourself
as capable of doing. But I do find AI useful
in the sense that you can do a more sophisticated
search with it. And what I mean by that is
when I do my reading for this show or for
other projects, I may not remember everything perfectly, particularly here
(06:32):
in my old age. And this came up just today. Actually,
I was talking to a friend about the French Resistance,
as one does. It's something that I've been thinking about lately,
and I'm actually going to bring up in passing an
aspect of what I've been thinking about later in the program.
One night last week I read small parts of about
a half dozen different books and took some notes, but
(06:55):
I didn't take, as it turns out, perfect notes for
this conversation with a friend that I I didn't know
I was going to have. I wanted to mention to
him one minor figure in this much larger story, but
I couldn't remember his name, so I reached for the
book that I thought I had seen it in, but
it turned out not to be there, And after repeating
(07:15):
the process several times in failure and being in danger
of blowing an actual deadline that I had to be
working on, I turned to Google's AI, which hilariously usually
just turns to Google itself. So maybe having this between
you and the search is actually an inefficiency. But in
any case, I said, there's a guy involved with the
(07:37):
French Resistance. I believe he was at this fight and
he did this thing. Can you remind me of the name?
And it did instantly, And maybe I should still feel
bad about using it that way. I'm not sure. It
doesn't seem too different to me from a regular search.
But the reason I bring this up is how often
have you done a regular search on the subject of
(07:57):
why is this program acting this way? Or why is
my computer behaving this way? And the answers are all
over the place and generally not useful, and it would
be handy if one thing that, hey, I could do
is give you a little bit more of an intuitive,
interactive tool for diagnostics. I mean, some of you are
(08:19):
computer savvy, far more computer savvy than me. I don't
feel like I'm totally ignorant, but I'm certainly not a
mechanic or a programmer, So it would be good to
be able to say, Hey, why is my computer being
an asshole right now? And get a useful answer back.
R two, Can you look for Star Wars reference? It's
not even on my mind today. R two, Can you
(08:39):
look under the hood of my digital audio workstation and
tell me why it won't let me finish the episode?
Because right now, the alternative, as far as I know,
is a regular flavor Google search, which is spectacularly unlikely
to be successful and most often will direct you to
Reddit and some group that may or may not have
(09:00):
discussed it five or ten years ago and at previous
iteration of your program to which the answer no longer applies.
Nothing against Reddit, there are some aspects of it. I
kind of like when I have insomnia, which is a
fairly regular occurrence in my life. Reddit can be my friend.
So enough of the old boy complaining. Just know that
if this episode ends up being about eleven minutes long,
(09:20):
it's because the master controller decided that I'd had enough,
put me on the game grid, and ended the show.
You'll know that it's taken over when I start to fade,
drifting down and away into the digital haze, Down and away, going, going, gone,
and after all is silence? Just kidding, although possibly not so.
(09:44):
One quick baseball story, very quick, before we continue our
journey together. I thought about making this a long discussion
of crime and punishment, but it really doesn't deserve this.
There's a line from the foundational umpire Bill Klem that's
in almost every book of baseball quotations. I'm going to
hit you with a totally unrelated line later from a
(10:05):
different guy as sports writer, which also shows up not
just in books of baseball quotations, but in books of
great insults. I wouldn't say that it is I wouldn't
say that it's like at the level of Oscar Wild,
but perhaps I'm jaded. The Clem story, such as it is,
is that a player threw his bat in the air
while protesting a called strike. It is sometimes said to
(10:27):
be the catcher Al Lopez. In response to this, Clem
supposedly said, young man, if that bat comes down, you're
out of the game. I happened to be looking at
that line unintentionally. It was just thrust upon me, and
for the first time I really thought about it and
thought that's impossible. First of all, by now we've all
(10:47):
seen a lot of bat tosses. They don't go that
high in the air. And back then bats were heavy.
Guys were using forty ounce bats. That's a pretty good heave.
If on the off chance it was one of buzz
Arlit's bats or Babe Ruth in a strange year, that
sucker might have been fifty ounces. To get it up
that high, you'd have to wait for a friend to
come assist you. Or maybe you run up to the
(11:09):
second deck and drop it and then pretend you'd thrown
it up. Maybe I have that backwards. Maybe you position
someone in the upper deck, you throw it upwards, they
catch it and they throw it up to the next guy,
and it's kind of a relay. Twenty feet is three
Arron judges standing on each other's shoulders, with nearly enough
inches left over for the one at the top to
hold up a Kenner Early Bird Special First Edition Han
(11:32):
Solo action figure, which was very undersized compared to the
rest of the action figure line. And yes, that was
yet another Star Wars reference. You have my sincere contrite. Apologies.
And then here's another thing. What planet are we even
on in this story? Gravity is not so slow to
act on a falling baseball bat, even with an apogee
(11:55):
of twenty feet. I'm sure you can work this out
mathematically if you know anything about physics. It's not going
to be up there long enough for Bill Clem to
speak a twelve word sentence, even if he really rushes it.
Young man with the bat comes down your levey game?
What was that?
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Bill?
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Oh? Never mind? Al Lopez had a really long career
between catching more games than any player had ever caught
to that point in history and then having a long
Hall of Fame career as a manager. Similarly, Bill Clem
had a long career. He essentially started in Constantinople umpiring
(12:29):
at the Hippodrome, and lasted until nineteen forty one. Having
said that their careers only overlapped so much such that
Clem only ran Lopez twice, once in nineteen thirty one
once in nineteen thirty five, both times when Lopez's Dodgers
visited the Braves. On both occasions, Lopez was on defense
(12:50):
and was arguing balls and strikes thrown by his own pitcher,
so it seems unlikely he would have heaved a bat
unless he grabbed the bat of the player at the plate,
who might have grabbed it back in a tug of
war ensuit which Lopez then won, or perhaps grabbed it
and ran away and then threw it twenty feet in
the air. In the nineteen thirty five case, it was
(13:10):
Wally Berger's bat. I don't know how heavy Wally Berger's
bat was. Let's say thirty six ounces. How many foot
pounds of force does it take to throw a thirty
six ounce bat twenty feet in the air, and then
we apply the gravitational constant. Let me just get out
my calculator here. I might have missed something, But according
to retro sheet, actually the only time that Bill Klem
(13:32):
ejected a player for throwing a bat happened on August fifth,
nineteen ten, when he tossed, pardon the expression, Jimmy seckerd
the Cub's great. And I didn't look up the game
stories for that because it seemed fruitless, and also because
I don't have a strong reason to believe that gravity
was dramatically different in nineteen ten than it was twenty
five years later in nineteen thirty five. And I still
(13:54):
don't think you can get out a twelve word sentence
like that before the bat would fall down. Now, I
did check both of that Al Lopez ejections, and there's
nothing about bat heaving in there, but I will say
that he earned the latter one, the one with Wally
Berger at the plate. And as Lopez told or confessed
the story, he had been complaining about Clem's calls, and
(14:14):
finally Clem said, that will be enough out of you,
young man, and so Lopez stopped, but Clem didn't. He
just went right on warning him, and Lopez got sick
of it and finally said, you know, if you don't
shut up, you'll miss some more calls. Well, that brought
out the thumb Alas. They're both gone now, but both
reside in the Hall of Fame, so I'm sure they
(14:37):
occasionally have a good laugh about it in whatever valhalla
they now share. You know who's not invited to those conversations,
Jimmy Sheckard, who's still out there in some blasted gray landscape,
tossing bats in the air over and over again and
trying to get them to stay up there long enough
for him to recite a long passage of Shakespeare, sometimes
(14:58):
while drinking a glass of water. And the more he
tosses the bat of Tantalus, the heavier it gets, and
the faster it falls. That's what happens when you abuse
a guy like Bill Clem. I guess, And what do
you call that act?
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Well, we call it the Infinite Inning. Well, hello there,
(15:51):
and welcome back to the show, Infinite Inning number three
forty three. I am and remain your convivial host for
this journey to the past, on a mission to better
understand the present. And they call me Steven Goldman. Sometimes
when I go.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
To doctor's offices, which I do all too often, and
they say name please at the front desk, I say,
they call me Stephen Goldman. Sometimes they even laugh. Maybe
next time I'll say. Strangers call me Steven Goldman, but
my friends call me Sparky I'm reaching the he's embarrassing
stage of life. I realize that I have a very
(16:27):
good friend, and unfortunately I haven't spoken to him for
a number of years for various reasons. He remains a
beloved friend, nevertheless. But he was a bit older than
me and also had a practiced eccentricity that was probably
about seventy five percent performative, and he'd often invite me
out to lunch or dinner, and no matter where we went,
(16:47):
whether it was McDonald's or a five star Michelin star restaurant,
he'd say, what's good here when the waiter or waitress
came over, And he did it so consistently, so persistently
that it was just something you sort of had to
get through, and yet it wasn't embarrassing. I found it
endearing somehow, because he was so committed to doing it,
(17:10):
and it was always good natured. Like I've been to
restaurants with people who are on some fundamental level angry,
and you would spend the entire meal nervous that a
spoon would drop because they were going to go off
on somebody. I feel like this is a universal enough
thing that you might have had someone like this in
your life, and for me, at one point many years ago,
(17:33):
that person actually turned to me and said, have you
been quietly hyperventilating throughout this entire meal. It was roughly
at that moment that I realized I needed to stop
putting myself in that situation. I hope as we embark
on episode three forty three that you are well, and
if you're not, please let me know very briefly before
we move on. This week at Baseball Perspectives, I wrote
(17:55):
a column which makes reference to the infinite inning because
the subject of communicable disease has come up so often here.
We've talked about Christy Matthewson, We've talked about Bill Delancey.
I made Bill Delancey the reissue episode this week because
of that column, because he suffered so badly from tuberculosis.
(18:17):
And this was inspired, of course, by current events, which
is that the state of Florida is going to supposedly
end vaccine mandates in the state, and the old and
the young in particular are going to suffer very badly
for that. And it is really in the name of
superstition or primitivism, rowing us backwards to a time before
(18:37):
Christy Mathewson, was a baby. That is when the communicability
of some of these illnesses truly became understood from eighteen
eighty two on no excuses. And yet there are some
people who still don't get it, or they have a
weirdly eugenical point of view, which is to say that
a virus or a bacteria is a test, and if
(18:59):
you fail that test, you did not deserve to survive
or pass on your genes, which doesn't explain anything again
about the kid who's too young to pass on his
genes but simply has an immature immune system, or the
older person who has given their genes. They're done with that.
They're just enjoying the ride down and they don't deserve
to have it truncated because someone didn't get a measle shot.
(19:22):
Today's second act concerns a now obscure first baseman who
is actually a very good hitter and was similarly inspired
by well, some of the same current events and some
of the same people. This is not in the medical department,
but in another area. You might see this story as
being symptomatic. Pardon the expression of a kind of hysteria.
(19:43):
I'm not sure that it is. I leave it up
to you, and so it is time to break for
a quick recess, or recess for a quick break. And
on the other side we will journey to the depths
of World War two. But things were starting to turn
around at exactly the time that our story begins. So
keep the faith and keep them flying until we get back. Okay,
(20:28):
this conversation we're about to have involves, as I said,
obscure first baseman. Obscure. Although he had some big seasons
in pinstripes. Sometimes being a Yankee doesn't prevent you from
being forgotten. It's inspired, as I said before the break,
by the timely and currently political. It begins with remembering
(20:49):
a guy that neither I nor I presume anyone listening
ever saw Yankees number five for a few years, Nick Etton. Yes,
that was Joe DiMaggio's number, but he was in the
Army at the time, and the Yankees weren't precious about
those things back then. Etton was part of the long
struggle the Yankees had to find a regular first baseman
(21:10):
after the sudden end of Lou Garrigg's career, following Babe Dgren,
who just happened to have been on the premises at
the time, they tried second baseman Joe Gordon because he
had a prospect in theory, chasing him off of the keystone,
but that hurt them more than it helped, and they
unwound the move that wrung in the brief Johnny's Stm
Era Sturm was turned to again in desperation. He had
(21:32):
one good month in his whole career, which lasted just
through the nineteen forty one season. It wasn't just that
he hit about as poorly as any first baseman has
in Yankees' history over a full season, but that the
war came along and took him away next. In a
move that was half a favor between the Yankees farm
director and the manager of the Braves, George Weiss and
(21:56):
Casey Stangle, respectively, and half a response to act will need,
the Yankee sent and outfield prospect Tommy Holmes, a singles
hitter who in peacetime would have been blocked by the
great Yankees outfield of Charlie Keller, Joe DiMaggio and Tommy Henrik,
and in return they picked up a veteran first baseman
who had once been a prospect of theirs, but who
(22:17):
had been blocked by the Iron Horse. His name was
Buddy Hassett, and Hasset, in his own way, is as
useful to remember as the Battle of Jutland, because he's
kind of an archetype. He was the rare three hundred
hitter who couldn't hit. Sometimes I worry that this also
describes current Padres first baseman Luisa Rise. Now. Hassett was
(22:38):
a good fielder, but he rarely walked and rarely hit
home runs. Now, a first baseman who can scoop throws
and hit a soft three ten is better than having
nothing at all, and that kind of describes Johnny Sturm.
But the years that Hasset hit to eighty five or
to ninety five were not that valuable. In nineteen forty
two he hit to eighty four, where with a three
(23:00):
to twenty five on base percentage, a three sixty four
slugging percentage, five home runs, thirty two walks. That was
his age thirty season, and it ended in a pathetic way.
Actually it started in a pathetic way. The Yankees gave
the opening day job to a rookie named Ed Levy,
who they thought or hoped was Jewish. He wasn't, and
also he couldn't hit. He went five for forty one
(23:24):
over the first thirteen games. Joe McCarthy, the manager, and
At Barrow, the general manager, were done with him forever,
and that was how Hassett got his job back now.
The Yankees won the Al Pennant in nineteen forty two
and played an absolutely loaded Cardinals team in the World Series.
The Cardinals had a lot of young players, were crazy deep,
(23:44):
and as yet hadn't been too affected by the war.
Being a relatively light hitter for a first baseman, Hassett
was asked to sacrifice a lot more than you would
expect of a post dead ball first baseman. He led
the Yankees that year in sacrifices with eleven edging shortstop
Phil Rizzuto and pitcher Timey Bonham, each of whom had ten.
(24:04):
Game three of the World Series, bottom of the first inning,
Risuto leads off and bunts down the third baseline for
a hit. Manager McCarthy puts on the bunt sign, and
as so often happens, Hassett got his thumb in the
way of a pitch or vice versa, and that was
it for him in the World Series, And as it
turned out, the rest of his major league career because
he enlisted in the Navy and was gone for three years.
(24:27):
He didn't only play ball in the service, by the way,
he served on a carrier that saw action in the Pacific,
And so the Yankees once again needed a first baseman.
In January nineteen forty three, as the Battle of Stalingrad
was grinding thousands to death but crucially ending on a
positive note for overall humanity, the Phillies, in one of
the final deals to be orchestrated by outgoing owners or
(24:51):
soon to be outgoing owners, Jerry and may NuGen and
how often have we talked about them on the program,
sent first baseman Nick Etton to New York in return
for Levy al Gedtle and ten thousand dollars. I should
have said al Gettle is a pitcher, reported his fifteen
thousand dollars at the time. The Yankees get their first basement,
commented the New York Herald Tribune, without giving up anyone
(25:13):
they wanted to keep. Eton was the eighth first baseman,
al after lou Or pH post Horse. After the Phillies
were sold, the trade was half unwound. We'll get back
to this in a moment. Levy and Gettle were returned
to sender after the new owner, Bill Cox, claimed they
had never been delivered. Maybe they were holding out, maybe
they just didn't want to be Phillies. In March, the
(25:36):
Yankees sent two different players to resolve the dispute, extremely
veteran catcher Tom Padden and pitching prospect alger Hauser in
their places. That's al Gerhauser, not alger Hauser, and not
alger Hiss, who was about to go to Yalta. Cox
tried to get Eten back to the commissioner said, huh huh,
I imagine the Nugents kept the ten grand Etten's comment
(25:57):
on going from the Phillies to the Yankees, Chris comes
early this year. I mean it was January. That's pretty
early for Christmas. The trade was made on January twenty second.
By coincidence, that is a date that has been on
my mind a bit. As I said, I've been reading
up on a certain period in history, and these things
are totally unrelated. But I can't help making these connections
(26:18):
when I see them. That Nick Etton was acquired by
the Yankees on January twenty second, and January twenty second
also happens to be the day that the Nazis began
a major roundup and deportation of Jews from the city
of Marseilles in the south of France, which was a
very important city because after the Germans invaded, that was
about as far as a refugee could go and still
(26:41):
be in France and yet be far away in theory
from the Germans. Getting out of France was nigh impossible,
particularly when governments like Portugal and the United States, which
had people still in France, whether as part of private
organizations devoted to refugees or the consulates. We're giving people
exit visas, and their government said, no, stop it, we
(27:03):
don't want those people. And besides, you might upset that
nice mister Hitler. And they actually pulled those diplomats out
and sometimes punished them by deportation. I mean that they
were sent to Auschwitzen. Well, you know the rest. It's
weekly ironic that ed Levy was included in the At
and Trade that same day, but that doesn't work even
as a week irony, first because who cares, it's irrelevant.
(27:24):
And second, he wasn't even Jewish. He just had a
Jewish surname. It was his stepfather's name. His birth name
was Whitner. I don't mean to bring these things up,
like I said, I just can't escape it. Eton of
German heritage, actually was from Chicago, and he had been
a very good amateur athlete, a good enough athlete to
get a scholarship to play at Villanova. He had been
(27:45):
pirate's property when he was still a teen, but he
never got a chance to play. He could always hit,
but he was an outfielder then, and he was bad
at it because he had below average speed. He was
finally convinced to shift to first base. He never became
Keith Hernandez. He was a below average first baseman two.
He first came up with the A's after hitting three
seventy with a four to seventy two on base in
(28:06):
a five eighteen slugging percentage with Savannah of the Sally League.
He got a cup of coffee. Then in nineteen thirty nine,
he was the Athletics opening day first baseman, but didn't
hit and was sent down to Baltimore of the International
League in June. He hit two ninety nine, three eighty six,
four ninety and one hundred and five games there, with
fourteen home runs and a bunch of walks. That's who
(28:28):
he was at his best exactly that season. When I
look at his stats, he reminds me of the musical question,
what if Nick Johnson had been healthy for a few seasons. Indeed,
if you scroll down on Aton's Baseball Reference page and
perus his similarity scores, Edden turns up as his fourth
most comparable player. His number one is Yuli Guriel, which
(28:49):
strikes me as totally wrong. Johnson is much closer. Edden
spent all of nineteen forty with Baltimore. Despite being sent
back to the A's by Judge Landis for having been
option too many times, he stayed on, hit well and
subsequently was pedaled to the Phillies. He was twenty seven
and he was finally going to get a real chance
(29:09):
to play, and he killed it, hitting three to eleven
with a four h five on base percentage and a
four to fifty four slugging percentage. This is not in
the Baker Bowl. This is in Shi Park, a real stadium.
He hit fourteen home runs, he drew eighty two walks
that computed to a one forty seven OPS plus, and
that should have established him. But in Phillies. Year two,
(29:31):
he got slumpy, dropping to two sixty four three point
fifty seven three seventy five with only eight home runs. Now,
it wasn't good, but it also wasn't as bad as
it looked. Between seasons, the National League dropped from four
point two runs per game to three point nine and
the league ops declined from six eighty eight to six
(29:51):
point eighty one. Eight qualified hitters averaged three hundred or more,
with and we just talked about this last week Ernie
Lombardi winning the title at three thirty, albeit with relatively
few at bats. In nineteen forty one, thirteen National League
hitters had averaged three hundred or more, with Pete Reser
winning the batting title at three forty three. Offense was
(30:15):
just down. A further complication for Adden was, as I
said a moment ago, he was in no way Doug
Menkowitz Minky is another player who shows up among his
comps and probably shouldn't. And his league leading nineteen errors
at first base, Eden's non menkowitzes looked worse when they
weren't compensated for with a bunch of runs. As with
(30:35):
so many players, his best position was probably DHD but
of course that didn't exist.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
Then.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
One of the best lines about him, which came later,
was spoken by long long time New York Daily News
Yankees beat writer Joe Trimble. And this is the one
I referred to earlier as being not just in baseball books,
but books about insults. Watching a play in which Eton
dove for a ball and his glove came off his hand,
but somehow the ball went into the glove anyway, Trimble said,
(31:04):
Nick Etton's glove fields better with Nick Atton out of it.
Another time, when Etton signed for a salary like eighteen thousand,
five hundred, Trimble wrote, the five hundred is for his fielding.
And so Eton became a target for a familiar organization,
the BFOP the booing fans of Philadelphia. Also, the Yankees
were offering the Phillies cash money, and thus the Nugents
(31:26):
were happy to get rid of them. They had no choice, really.
The National League was pressuring them to sell out or
just give up, and selling Eton was part of their
raising enough money to keep the team. Here's how bad
things were for the Phillies at that time. As of
the last day of January, to date, the club has
not re signed Hans Loebert as manager, although Jerry NuGen
(31:49):
said no one else is being considered. It has not
selected a definite training site and has mailed no contracts
to players. They were out of business. Nine days later,
the National League owners teamed up to buy out the
club from under them. As for the Yankees, well, they
knew that Aton had three dependents and thought he wasn't
likely to be called up, and he wasn't. But they
(32:10):
were wrong about the possibility because they had to worry
about it a lot each spring training. Will the government
let nick Etton come to camp? We won't know until
he gets here. If I could just jump ahead for
a moment to the post war years. In nineteen forty eight,
when Atton was thirty four and had just left the
major leagues the year before, he played for the Oakland Oaks,
(32:31):
champions of the Pacific Coast League. This team was referred
to as the Nine Old Men. He was one of
the nine which both invoked the recalcitrant Supreme Court inherited
by Franklin Roosevelt in nineteen thirty three. That's how the
press referred to them as the Nine Old Men, but
also the fact that the Oaks lineup was all veterans
except for the twenty year old Billy Martin, And yeah
(32:52):
it was a Casey Stengle team, but we won't dwell
on that at this time. Edton played one hundred and
sixty four games that year and hit three thirteen with
forty three home runs. The guy could really really hit.
He just really really couldn't do it consistently. Here's what
the Yankees got. I wouldn't say Bizarro number five was
an all time Yankees great at first base, but for
(33:15):
three years he was pretty good. Given the wartime manpower shortage.
He was more of a lefty line drive hitter than
a fly ball hitter, so he wasn't launching balls over
the short porch and right with any regularity, but he
did well enough under the conditions. In nineteen forty three,
he played every day and hit two seventy one with
(33:35):
a three to fifty five on base and a four
to twenty slugging percentage, including thirty five doubles, fourteen home runs,
seventy six walks, and one hundred and seven runs batted in.
His averages worked out to a one twenty five ops plus.
You know how many times in seven years with the
Yankees Tino Martinez had a one twenty five ops plus.
I'll grant you twice. In nineteen ninety seven, when he
(33:58):
hit forty four home runs, he was at one forty three,
and the next year, nineteen ninety eight, he was at
one twenty four. So close enough. He was also a
better glove than Ett and was. I'm not trying to
denigrate old Constantino so much as to establish a point
of comparison. His Yankees average was one thirteen in nineteen
forty four, the year that war requirements led to about
(34:19):
half a season of a dead baseball, Nick hit two
ninety three, three ninety nine, four sixty six with a
league leading twenty two home runs and also led the
league with ninety seven walks. That was a one forty
four ops plus if you're keeping track at home. Finally,
well sort of finally, in nineteen forty five, when the
war was finally dragging to a bloody close, he hit
(34:41):
two eighty seven, three eighty seven, four thirty seven with
eighteen home runs and a league leading one hundred and
eleven RBIs. So in total for those three seasons, if
I may recite just a few more numbers, I know
how Much You Love It. He hit two eighty three,
three eighty one, four forty one in four hundred and
sixty games, foraging a one to thirty five ops plus
(35:02):
or about three point seven wins above replacement per season.
On the downside, he got into just one World Series
in nineteen forty three, and although the Yankees won, he
went only two for nineteen with a walk and then
alas we also must discuss nineteen forty six, the boys
came back. Hooray, that was good, and the teams were
obligated by law to give them all a shot. In
spring training, the Yankees pitted Eton against Stirham and Hassett
(35:26):
ghosts of a war just passed, and a former prospect,
Steve bud Suschack, who was already twenty seven, but he
had more than earned his shot. He had left the
miners after his age twenty three season. He went into
the army. He served three years, and he saw a
ton of combat as part of the liberation of Europe
and the defeat of fascism. Thank you, Steve, wherever you are.
(35:48):
All three were Uncle Sam's uniform, but before they went
into the service they had moved up to the majors
almost entirely on fielding skill, wrote the New York Star
Ledger earlier in the nineteen forty six season. Sturman Hassett
are much better fielders than nick Etton of the Yanks
will ever be. They have class and speed around the
initial sack, but the Yankees prefer to keep etten. He
(36:11):
is a distance clouder, which makes up for his deficiencies
at first in the view of the Yank operators. The
third player the Ledger was referring to was not I
believe in camp with them at that time. That was
Johnny McCarthy, who had played with the Dodgers, Giants, and Braves.
Wasn't very much of a hitter, but was thought to
be a good fielder. He was magical out there with
the glove, said the Ledger, but something more was demanded,
(36:34):
something which he lacks. Well. Eton won the job, but
he couldn't keep it. Let's take one last quick break
for this episode, and we'll come back to wrap the
Nick Etton story, including the why of it. Why is
this relevant now? Well, not to put it too simply,
(37:08):
but Eton didn't hit. It was a season of a
lot of turmoil for the Yankees. Larry McPhail was back
from the War iiO and had taken over as the
owner's frontman and was moving players in and out, and
also drove McCarthy out of town. After roughly fifteen years
in the job. He just couldn't stand the stress of
dealing with the guy and basically had a breakdown, and
starting around mid season roughly Eton started sitting for Sue Shock,
(37:31):
who was actually great in a small sample, although his
real on field glory days would come from nineteen fifty
one to fifty three with the Tigers, when he hit
two sixty eight three point fifteen four ninety two in
a part time role for them. He had a lot
of physical problems and really couldn't play every day, but
in those years he did make the most of it
when he did get onto the field. Tommy Henrick, normally
(37:53):
a right fielder, also got some chances. He was a
very good hitter, obviously, and he hit quite well while
playing first in fact that one year, better than he
did while playing the outfield. The following spring, the Yankee
sold Etton back to the Phillies once again took him
back to the return window, but he never did play
for the Yankees. Again. They had acquired a long ago
(38:13):
prospect who had been blocked by Garrick, George McQuinn, a
five time All Star. He was something of an ettenstyle hitter,
but with a much better glove, and they were fine
with that for about a year and a half. They
sent Etton to Newark and then eventually moved him to
Oakland and that Stengele team that I mentioned, they had
a relationship with the owner of the Oaks, even though
(38:34):
the Pacific Coast League was independent. That's how Stengle got there,
That's how Etton got there too. These were all manipulations
or machinations. I don't mean to make them sound sinister.
This was the invisible or rather visible hand of Yankees
farm director and future general manager George Weiss. He was
just taking care of people and players that were in
his orbit. And that's what he did, George Weiss, for
(38:55):
Casey and Etton. So the reason I was thinking about
this today is that this afternoon, September fifth, as I
speak to you, the administration's foot soldiers in its war
against human beings who happened not to have been born
here Ice raided a battery plant near Savannah Georgia co
owned by Hyundai and LG, and they arrested four hundred
(39:16):
and seventy five people who were or are South Korean citizens.
No one has claimed that I'm aware of that they
were part of a fentanyl smuggling ring or were part
of the Trinidad de Agua gang. Stephen Schrank, a Special
Agent in charge of Homeland security investigations for Georgia, said
the raid was intended to ensure I quote, a level
(39:37):
playing field for businesses that comply with the law. They
do seem to have grabbed a couple of South Korean
nationals who were here on business visas doing meetings. It
seems to me that we have been going around the
world insisting that businesses build here, and in this case
they did. They're still working on this battery plant, which
is part of an eight billion dollar development in the
(39:58):
state of Georgia. If you've ever been involved with technological
industrial developments like this, and I personally have not, but
I'm close to people who have, you want it to
be set up precisely to your specifications, or your batteries
won't work. Batteries are extremely finicky things, as everyone who
has oh accidentally burned down their house because they bought
an e bike with a cheap lithium ion battery. Can
(40:21):
tell you. I can't say for sure that these companies
were not trying to cheat the United States in some way,
but at a distance, it seems far more likely to
me that they were trying to get their factory up
in the way that they needed it to and then
the bulk of the jobs would go to Americans. Now,
even if they did break the rules, and I'm sure
they did in some sense, as people who are trying
(40:43):
to do business with us, it would have been very
simple for the same authorities, rather than coming in with
guns and handcuffs, to transmit a message to the people
in charge saying, you're breaking the rules, anyone who shouldn't
be here, get them out. They have a week to
get to the airport, cyonaras. So long, farewell, goodbye. Problem solved,
Fewer hard feelings, fewer people hurt or frightened, no expense
(41:07):
to the taxpayers. But you know, it's not about the law,
it's not about the rules. It's about power and intimidation
and xenophobia. These are Asians, not white Americans, And that's
as much justification as these people need to start throwing
their weight around, And so I started to wonder what
baseball would look like after some hypothetical future day when
(41:30):
they felt even more empowered, and these same people in
authority started telling baseball teams that they could no longer
employ people who weren't born here. Every team would lose
key players, and some of the game's biggest stars would
be gone. What would baseball look like then? And it
would look a lot like Nick Etton's World of Baseball.
(41:50):
In preparing this episode, I noticed an article in an
old liberty magazine by NBC sports guide Bill Stern. I
mentioned him last week in that he hosted a fairly
useless radio show. The article was titled Who's Who in
Baseball forty four, and the sub had read, who's the
next batter? Brother? You'll have to ask the draft board.
(42:11):
Here's a preview of the dizziest of all big League
baseball seasons. So let's go back to that year's Yankees,
when Etten was one of their best players. No Demagio,
no Keller, no Henrick. Instead you had Johnny Lindell, a
converted pitcher who it turned out, could hit. It also
turned out he could drink, so his career didn't last
that long. Bud Metheni and former Phillies one time All
(42:32):
Star hirsh Martin. Paul Wayner forty one was briefly on
that team, and the top reliever was milkman Jim Turner
forty and about ten seconds away from becoming one of
the better pitching coaches in team history. The second baseman
was great. He was Snuffy Sternweiss, who had one of
his two consecutive eight win seasons. His nineteen forty four
(42:52):
and forty five were very similar, and so I should
just squish him together between the two. Here come more numbers,
but not Star Wars references. He hit three fourteen, three
eighty seven, four sixty eight, led the league both years
in triples and stolen bases and hits and runs scored.
He was a monster, and in peacetime he hit two
forty seven, three point fifty one three twenty three. So
(43:14):
you see how diluted things became. Now all teams had
guys who either hadn't left yet, like the Red Sox
with Bobby Door or the Cardinals with Stan muzil Or
had returned. But on the whole you saw a token
few that you were used to, and a great many strangers.
The Dodgers had this fantastic team right before the war.
Bill James called it an almost perfect team. They won
(43:37):
one hundred games in both nineteen forty one and nineteen
forty two. But by nineteen forty four, with everyone gone,
or almost everyone, they were losing ninety eight year with
how Hee Shultz at first base and a sixteen year
old Tommy Brown who just passed this year rest in
peace at shortstop, an old racist outfielder Ben Chapman throwing
knucklers out of the bullpen. And again there were some
(44:00):
familiar players, some of them pretty good. Auggie Gallon and
Dixie Walker, another racist southfielder, had good years. And there
was old Paul Wayner crossing a bridge or two from
the Bronx that same year. It was the opposite order. Actually,
the Dodgers let him go and he went to the Yankees.
But what about those teams who didn't have a lot
of depth before the war, who didn't have any stars
to lose? They patched as best they could with nine
(44:23):
guys named IRV. It was this way. It had to
be this way because our values demanded it. The democracies
were threatened. Our democracy was threatened, and so we as
a people went to war. Did everyone agree with that? No,
but a majority of people did, or it wouldn't have happened.
(44:45):
If the kind of purge that I've been hypothesizing about
were to take place today, would it happen because the
vast majority of US agreed with it and felt that
the nation had to be purged a people named Guerrero
and Soda. I don't think so. It would happen despite
the majority, not because of it. And if that's the case,
(45:06):
then what are we even doing here? To put it
another way? Talking you and I now eighty years later,
in retrospect, it seems inevitable that the United States would
both go to war and fight on the side that
we did choose and win. But none of that was automatic,
none of it was certain. And if the majority of
(45:27):
US were, for whatever reason sympathetic to the Germans and
Japanese and Italians, none of it would have worked the
same way, including no Pearl Harbor, because whoever the president
was at that time, they wouldn't have tried to rein
in Japanese expansion in the Pacific. He or she would
have just joined in with him, but we felt differently,
and so it happened the way that it did. And
(45:49):
I firmly believe we feel differently now, or I mean
that our values are still aligned with those values, but
the people in charge aren't acting that way, and allowed
minority isn't acting that way, and so there's a disconnecting democracy.
And I wish I knew how we plugged the thing
back in again. In the meantime, enjoy show, Hey Otani
(46:11):
until you Can't Leap and Lizards. We made it to
the end in the program only crashed three times. I
think I need a computer doctor. Should you wish to
doctor my social media? No, that doesn't really work, but
we'll stay with it. Please follow me I at Blue
Sky at Stephen Gooldman dot bsky dot social. You can
(46:33):
also write us, by which I mean me at Infinite
Inning at gmail dot com. And there's a Facebook group.
Simply go to Facebook search on Infinite Inning. Bang, you're there.
I threw out a picture of Casey and his Oaks uniform.
Why not I like that stylized? Oh, I have the
cap and everything. Should you wish to support the show,
and I very much hope you do. Please visit Patreon
dot com. Slash the infinite inning here of a rudimentary
(46:56):
kind available at the hyphen Infinite hyphen Inning dot creator,
hi in Spring dot com. Original soundtrack available at Casualobserver
Music dot bandcamp dot com. Finally, should you find yourself
with the proverbial moments to spare, please go to the
podcature of your choice and rate, review and subscribe. It
helps the show gain attention. And if your podcatcher doesn't
let you do those things, you should still be sure
(47:18):
to brush your teeth after every meal, but gently, oh
so gently, those gums are delicate. 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 remembers that Daniel Webster once said our country,
our whole country, and nothing but our country. But you
know I've always appreciated my toast with a little jam
(47:41):
on it. Well, if I can just figure out why,
whenever I'm looking for a blueberry muffin to go with
Rick's toast, the only thing that's available is rhubarb pie.
I'll be back next week with more tales from inside
the infinite inning,
Allow me to confess right off the top here that
I'm a bit nervous about this week's episode, not because
of the subject matter, because oh I don't know my
junior high school math teacher is listening, but because you
think you know a program. You'll work with a program
for years, and then all at once it starts acting
up and you reboot, because that's what everyone tells you
(00:22):
to do. First, reboot the computer. Something's gone wrong somewhere.
You learn from all the millions of times you've watched
Star Wars that maybe there's some carbon scoring in there
interfering with it, playing the hologram from General Kenobi. But no,
my daw, as we say in the industry, my digital
audio workstation, as if I feel part of an industry community,
(00:46):
my recorder, for want of a better word. When I
was doing this week's reissue episode, I got through ninety
eight percent of it no problem, and then at the
end I was papering over the old Twitter address and
so on, and I was just about to say, well,
thank you very much for listening. I'll see you this
week with episode three forty three, as roughly I've been
(01:07):
saying with most of the reissue episodes, and it just
kept crashing, and when I brought it back and tried
to reopen the folder, it killed my whole computer, froze
everything dead, over and over and over. You cannot imagine
my level of frustration. And in the end I somehow
got it open, and no matter what I did, it
(01:30):
would not let me finish the show. If I eliminated
the part where I tried to finish it, I could
still mix down the episode and put it up, as
I eventually did, because discretion was the better part of
valor at that point, or I'd still be there. And
the aspect of it that really vexes me, beyond the
(01:50):
fact that by the time I'm done with one of
these shows, I'm done. I'm spent. I need to finish
and get the thing out to you. But beyond that,
it was nothing that I haven't done now with the
infinite inning over three hundred and sixty times. I know
on a prior episode I've told you about the Battle
of Jutland has nothing to do with baseball. It was
(02:12):
between the British and the Germans, two nationalities which largely
do not play baseball. But I told the story anyway
because it's a good story, and famously, when these two
fleets did battle in a major way for basically the
only time in the First World War, these ships were
way too expensive to risk, so you just kept them
home and admired them. But in this battle, the British
(02:33):
rapidly found out that their ships had a design flaw.
Are you ready for my second Star Wars reference of
the show. They had an unshielded exhaust port essentially, except
the port was actually from the deck to the magazine,
and if a spark happened to land on the deck,
and battles do tend to produce sparks and other fiery
flaming objects, if it went down a shaft essentially from
(02:56):
the deck to where all the ammunition was kept, the
ship popped like a balloon, a fiery balloon, filled with
shrapnel and unfortunately containing well the crew. So the two
fleets sally forth. They meet in the North Sea, they
exchange fire and British ships just start blowing up, and
one of the two guys in charge on the British side,
(03:17):
I don't remember if it was Baby or Jellico, I
think it was Beatty, turned to someone and said, there
seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today. Now,
of course I bring that up as an analogy for
my recording situation here doing something totally unprecedented and unexpected
at the same time. You can never think of the
Battle of Jutland too often, because it's just a great
(03:40):
example of things not going the way that they're supposed to,
the way that they're planned, the unexpected happening. If you're
like me and this sort of trivia is stuck in
your head pretty much twenty four to seven, then it
comes to mind, oh roughly once a week somewhere in
a baseball season, because you will be watching a given
game and perhaps the home team is up six to
(04:03):
one in the seventh inning, and so they bring in
a reliever, and that normally reliable reliever cannot get anybody out.
So the manager trudges out to the mound and calls
on someone even more reliable, who also can't get any outs.
By now it's six to four. Manager, by now wearing
out a path between the dugout and the mound, calls
on the closer, and the closer walks the base is loaded.
(04:26):
I watched Edwin Diaz do something very similar just tonight,
although he ended up getting away with it. And as
all of this is happening, all of this unexpected failure,
I imagine that the manager is thinking, I say, this
seems to be something wrong with our bloody bullpen today,
and he probably is just not in those words anyway
(04:47):
to use what I expect as an archaic expression, one
that I learned from Gilbert and Sullivan. I am all
at sixes and sevens with this episode, because with practically
every word that I say, I expect the digital acts
to fall. And since again I am not working off
of notes, primarily, when something's gone, it's gone, I can't
(05:08):
really recreate the moment. We talk a lot in our
society nowadays about AI, and I do find aspects of
it disturbing and upsetting my work. My Casey stengelbook in particular,
is among the works that some of these companies have
hoovered up without compensation to train their machines. And if
you've ever written a book, then you know that, oh lord,
(05:30):
do you deserve compensation for any use of that material
because you sweated it. So I'm definitely opposed to aspects
of AI which repurpose other people's work, and I'm certainly
opposed to people who use it to write things that
they're not capable of writing, or to avoid learning how,
or to create art that they're not capable of drawing
(05:50):
or painting, or again avoiding doing the hard work of
learning how. And it is a lot of hard work,
and it may never pay off, which is just another
way of saying, find what you are suited for. Don't
just hand it off to R two D two third
star Wars reference to do the work for you, cause again,
then you're a free writer and you don't know and
(06:12):
in fact or incapable of the things you're presenting yourself
as capable of doing. But I do find AI useful
in the sense that you can do a more sophisticated
search with it. And what I mean by that is
when I do my reading for this show or for
other projects, I may not remember everything perfectly, particularly here
(06:32):
in my old age. And this came up just today. Actually,
I was talking to a friend about the French Resistance,
as one does. It's something that I've been thinking about lately,
and I'm actually going to bring up in passing an
aspect of what I've been thinking about later in the program.
One night last week I read small parts of about
a half dozen different books and took some notes, but
(06:55):
I didn't take, as it turns out, perfect notes for
this conversation with a friend that I I didn't know
I was going to have. I wanted to mention to
him one minor figure in this much larger story, but
I couldn't remember his name, so I reached for the
book that I thought I had seen it in, but
it turned out not to be there, And after repeating
(07:15):
the process several times in failure and being in danger
of blowing an actual deadline that I had to be
working on, I turned to Google's AI, which hilariously usually
just turns to Google itself. So maybe having this between
you and the search is actually an inefficiency. But in
any case, I said, there's a guy involved with the
(07:37):
French Resistance. I believe he was at this fight and
he did this thing. Can you remind me of the name?
And it did instantly, And maybe I should still feel
bad about using it that way. I'm not sure. It
doesn't seem too different to me from a regular search.
But the reason I bring this up is how often
have you done a regular search on the subject of
(07:57):
why is this program acting this way? Or why is
my computer behaving this way? And the answers are all
over the place and generally not useful, and it would
be handy if one thing that, hey, I could do
is give you a little bit more of an intuitive,
interactive tool for diagnostics. I mean, some of you are
(08:19):
computer savvy, far more computer savvy than me. I don't
feel like I'm totally ignorant, but I'm certainly not a
mechanic or a programmer, So it would be good to
be able to say, Hey, why is my computer being
an asshole right now? And get a useful answer back.
R two, Can you look for Star Wars reference? It's
not even on my mind today. R two, Can you
(08:39):
look under the hood of my digital audio workstation and
tell me why it won't let me finish the episode?
Because right now, the alternative, as far as I know,
is a regular flavor Google search, which is spectacularly unlikely
to be successful and most often will direct you to
Reddit and some group that may or may not have
(09:00):
discussed it five or ten years ago and at previous
iteration of your program to which the answer no longer applies.
Nothing against Reddit, there are some aspects of it. I
kind of like when I have insomnia, which is a
fairly regular occurrence in my life. Reddit can be my friend.
So enough of the old boy complaining. Just know that
if this episode ends up being about eleven minutes long,
(09:20):
it's because the master controller decided that I'd had enough,
put me on the game grid, and ended the show.
You'll know that it's taken over when I start to fade,
drifting down and away into the digital haze, Down and away, going, going, gone,
and after all is silence? Just kidding, although possibly not so.
(09:44):
One quick baseball story, very quick, before we continue our
journey together. I thought about making this a long discussion
of crime and punishment, but it really doesn't deserve this.
There's a line from the foundational umpire Bill Klem that's
in almost every book of baseball quotations. I'm going to
hit you with a totally unrelated line later from a
(10:05):
different guy as sports writer, which also shows up not
just in books of baseball quotations, but in books of
great insults. I wouldn't say that it is I wouldn't
say that it's like at the level of Oscar Wild,
but perhaps I'm jaded. The Clem story, such as it is,
is that a player threw his bat in the air
while protesting a called strike. It is sometimes said to
(10:27):
be the catcher Al Lopez. In response to this, Clem
supposedly said, young man, if that bat comes down, you're
out of the game. I happened to be looking at
that line unintentionally. It was just thrust upon me, and
for the first time I really thought about it and
thought that's impossible. First of all, by now we've all
(10:47):
seen a lot of bat tosses. They don't go that
high in the air. And back then bats were heavy.
Guys were using forty ounce bats. That's a pretty good heave.
If on the off chance it was one of buzz
Arlit's bats or Babe Ruth in a strange year, that
sucker might have been fifty ounces. To get it up
that high, you'd have to wait for a friend to
come assist you. Or maybe you run up to the
(11:09):
second deck and drop it and then pretend you'd thrown
it up. Maybe I have that backwards. Maybe you position
someone in the upper deck, you throw it upwards, they
catch it and they throw it up to the next guy,
and it's kind of a relay. Twenty feet is three
Arron judges standing on each other's shoulders, with nearly enough
inches left over for the one at the top to
hold up a Kenner Early Bird Special First Edition Han
(11:32):
Solo action figure, which was very undersized compared to the
rest of the action figure line. And yes, that was
yet another Star Wars reference. You have my sincere contrite. Apologies.
And then here's another thing. What planet are we even
on in this story? Gravity is not so slow to
act on a falling baseball bat, even with an apogee
(11:55):
of twenty feet. I'm sure you can work this out
mathematically if you know anything about physics. It's not going
to be up there long enough for Bill Clem to
speak a twelve word sentence, even if he really rushes it.
Young man with the bat comes down your levey game?
What was that?
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Bill?
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Oh? Never mind? Al Lopez had a really long career
between catching more games than any player had ever caught
to that point in history and then having a long
Hall of Fame career as a manager. Similarly, Bill Clem
had a long career. He essentially started in Constantinople umpiring
(12:29):
at the Hippodrome, and lasted until nineteen forty one. Having
said that their careers only overlapped so much such that
Clem only ran Lopez twice, once in nineteen thirty one
once in nineteen thirty five, both times when Lopez's Dodgers
visited the Braves. On both occasions, Lopez was on defense
(12:50):
and was arguing balls and strikes thrown by his own pitcher,
so it seems unlikely he would have heaved a bat
unless he grabbed the bat of the player at the plate,
who might have grabbed it back in a tug of
war ensuit which Lopez then won, or perhaps grabbed it
and ran away and then threw it twenty feet in
the air. In the nineteen thirty five case, it was
(13:10):
Wally Berger's bat. I don't know how heavy Wally Berger's
bat was. Let's say thirty six ounces. How many foot
pounds of force does it take to throw a thirty
six ounce bat twenty feet in the air, and then
we apply the gravitational constant. Let me just get out
my calculator here. I might have missed something, But according
to retro sheet, actually the only time that Bill Klem
(13:32):
ejected a player for throwing a bat happened on August fifth,
nineteen ten, when he tossed, pardon the expression, Jimmy seckerd
the Cub's great. And I didn't look up the game
stories for that because it seemed fruitless, and also because
I don't have a strong reason to believe that gravity
was dramatically different in nineteen ten than it was twenty
five years later in nineteen thirty five. And I still
(13:54):
don't think you can get out a twelve word sentence
like that before the bat would fall down. Now, I
did check both of that Al Lopez ejections, and there's
nothing about bat heaving in there, but I will say
that he earned the latter one, the one with Wally
Berger at the plate. And as Lopez told or confessed
the story, he had been complaining about Clem's calls, and
(14:14):
finally Clem said, that will be enough out of you,
young man, and so Lopez stopped, but Clem didn't. He
just went right on warning him, and Lopez got sick
of it and finally said, you know, if you don't
shut up, you'll miss some more calls. Well, that brought
out the thumb Alas. They're both gone now, but both
reside in the Hall of Fame, so I'm sure they
(14:37):
occasionally have a good laugh about it in whatever valhalla
they now share. You know who's not invited to those conversations,
Jimmy Sheckard, who's still out there in some blasted gray landscape,
tossing bats in the air over and over again and
trying to get them to stay up there long enough
for him to recite a long passage of Shakespeare, sometimes
(14:58):
while drinking a glass of water. And the more he
tosses the bat of Tantalus, the heavier it gets, and
the faster it falls. That's what happens when you abuse
a guy like Bill Clem. I guess, And what do
you call that act?
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Well, we call it the Infinite Inning. Well, hello there,
(15:51):
and welcome back to the show, Infinite Inning number three
forty three. I am and remain your convivial host for
this journey to the past, on a mission to better
understand the present. And they call me Steven Goldman. Sometimes
when I go.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
To doctor's offices, which I do all too often, and
they say name please at the front desk, I say,
they call me Stephen Goldman. Sometimes they even laugh. Maybe
next time I'll say. Strangers call me Steven Goldman, but
my friends call me Sparky I'm reaching the he's embarrassing
stage of life. I realize that I have a very
(16:27):
good friend, and unfortunately I haven't spoken to him for
a number of years for various reasons. He remains a
beloved friend, nevertheless. But he was a bit older than
me and also had a practiced eccentricity that was probably
about seventy five percent performative, and he'd often invite me
out to lunch or dinner, and no matter where we went,
(16:47):
whether it was McDonald's or a five star Michelin star restaurant,
he'd say, what's good here when the waiter or waitress
came over, And he did it so consistently, so persistently
that it was just something you sort of had to
get through, and yet it wasn't embarrassing. I found it
endearing somehow, because he was so committed to doing it,
(17:10):
and it was always good natured. Like I've been to
restaurants with people who are on some fundamental level angry,
and you would spend the entire meal nervous that a
spoon would drop because they were going to go off
on somebody. I feel like this is a universal enough
thing that you might have had someone like this in
your life, and for me, at one point many years ago,
(17:33):
that person actually turned to me and said, have you
been quietly hyperventilating throughout this entire meal. It was roughly
at that moment that I realized I needed to stop
putting myself in that situation. I hope as we embark
on episode three forty three that you are well, and
if you're not, please let me know very briefly before
we move on. This week at Baseball Perspectives, I wrote
(17:55):
a column which makes reference to the infinite inning because
the subject of communicable disease has come up so often here.
We've talked about Christy Matthewson, We've talked about Bill Delancey.
I made Bill Delancey the reissue episode this week because
of that column, because he suffered so badly from tuberculosis.
(18:17):
And this was inspired, of course, by current events, which
is that the state of Florida is going to supposedly
end vaccine mandates in the state, and the old and
the young in particular are going to suffer very badly
for that. And it is really in the name of
superstition or primitivism, rowing us backwards to a time before
(18:37):
Christy Mathewson, was a baby. That is when the communicability
of some of these illnesses truly became understood from eighteen
eighty two on no excuses. And yet there are some
people who still don't get it, or they have a
weirdly eugenical point of view, which is to say that
a virus or a bacteria is a test, and if
(18:59):
you fail that test, you did not deserve to survive
or pass on your genes, which doesn't explain anything again
about the kid who's too young to pass on his
genes but simply has an immature immune system, or the
older person who has given their genes. They're done with that.
They're just enjoying the ride down and they don't deserve
to have it truncated because someone didn't get a measle shot.
(19:22):
Today's second act concerns a now obscure first baseman who
is actually a very good hitter and was similarly inspired
by well, some of the same current events and some
of the same people. This is not in the medical department,
but in another area. You might see this story as
being symptomatic. Pardon the expression of a kind of hysteria.
(19:43):
I'm not sure that it is. I leave it up
to you, and so it is time to break for
a quick recess, or recess for a quick break. And
on the other side we will journey to the depths
of World War two. But things were starting to turn
around at exactly the time that our story begins. So
keep the faith and keep them flying until we get back. Okay,
(20:28):
this conversation we're about to have involves, as I said,
obscure first baseman. Obscure. Although he had some big seasons
in pinstripes. Sometimes being a Yankee doesn't prevent you from
being forgotten. It's inspired, as I said before the break,
by the timely and currently political. It begins with remembering
(20:49):
a guy that neither I nor I presume anyone listening
ever saw Yankees number five for a few years, Nick Etton. Yes,
that was Joe DiMaggio's number, but he was in the
Army at the time, and the Yankees weren't precious about
those things back then. Etton was part of the long
struggle the Yankees had to find a regular first baseman
(21:10):
after the sudden end of Lou Garrigg's career, following Babe Dgren,
who just happened to have been on the premises at
the time, they tried second baseman Joe Gordon because he
had a prospect in theory, chasing him off of the keystone,
but that hurt them more than it helped, and they
unwound the move that wrung in the brief Johnny's Stm
Era Sturm was turned to again in desperation. He had
(21:32):
one good month in his whole career, which lasted just
through the nineteen forty one season. It wasn't just that
he hit about as poorly as any first baseman has
in Yankees' history over a full season, but that the
war came along and took him away next. In a
move that was half a favor between the Yankees farm
director and the manager of the Braves, George Weiss and
(21:56):
Casey Stangle, respectively, and half a response to act will need,
the Yankee sent and outfield prospect Tommy Holmes, a singles
hitter who in peacetime would have been blocked by the
great Yankees outfield of Charlie Keller, Joe DiMaggio and Tommy Henrik,
and in return they picked up a veteran first baseman
who had once been a prospect of theirs, but who
(22:17):
had been blocked by the Iron Horse. His name was
Buddy Hassett, and Hasset, in his own way, is as
useful to remember as the Battle of Jutland, because he's
kind of an archetype. He was the rare three hundred
hitter who couldn't hit. Sometimes I worry that this also
describes current Padres first baseman Luisa Rise. Now. Hassett was
(22:38):
a good fielder, but he rarely walked and rarely hit
home runs. Now, a first baseman who can scoop throws
and hit a soft three ten is better than having
nothing at all, and that kind of describes Johnny Sturm.
But the years that Hasset hit to eighty five or
to ninety five were not that valuable. In nineteen forty
two he hit to eighty four, where with a three
(23:00):
to twenty five on base percentage, a three sixty four
slugging percentage, five home runs, thirty two walks. That was
his age thirty season, and it ended in a pathetic way.
Actually it started in a pathetic way. The Yankees gave
the opening day job to a rookie named Ed Levy,
who they thought or hoped was Jewish. He wasn't, and
also he couldn't hit. He went five for forty one
(23:24):
over the first thirteen games. Joe McCarthy, the manager, and
At Barrow, the general manager, were done with him forever,
and that was how Hassett got his job back now.
The Yankees won the Al Pennant in nineteen forty two
and played an absolutely loaded Cardinals team in the World Series.
The Cardinals had a lot of young players, were crazy deep,
(23:44):
and as yet hadn't been too affected by the war.
Being a relatively light hitter for a first baseman, Hassett
was asked to sacrifice a lot more than you would
expect of a post dead ball first baseman. He led
the Yankees that year in sacrifices with eleven edging shortstop
Phil Rizzuto and pitcher Timey Bonham, each of whom had ten.
(24:04):
Game three of the World Series, bottom of the first inning,
Risuto leads off and bunts down the third baseline for
a hit. Manager McCarthy puts on the bunt sign, and
as so often happens, Hassett got his thumb in the
way of a pitch or vice versa, and that was
it for him in the World Series, And as it
turned out, the rest of his major league career because
he enlisted in the Navy and was gone for three years.
(24:27):
He didn't only play ball in the service, by the way,
he served on a carrier that saw action in the Pacific,
And so the Yankees once again needed a first baseman.
In January nineteen forty three, as the Battle of Stalingrad
was grinding thousands to death but crucially ending on a
positive note for overall humanity, the Phillies, in one of
the final deals to be orchestrated by outgoing owners or
(24:51):
soon to be outgoing owners, Jerry and may NuGen and
how often have we talked about them on the program,
sent first baseman Nick Etton to New York in return
for Levy al Gedtle and ten thousand dollars. I should
have said al Gettle is a pitcher, reported his fifteen
thousand dollars at the time. The Yankees get their first basement,
commented the New York Herald Tribune, without giving up anyone
(25:13):
they wanted to keep. Eton was the eighth first baseman,
al after lou Or pH post Horse. After the Phillies
were sold, the trade was half unwound. We'll get back
to this in a moment. Levy and Gettle were returned
to sender after the new owner, Bill Cox, claimed they
had never been delivered. Maybe they were holding out, maybe
they just didn't want to be Phillies. In March, the
(25:36):
Yankees sent two different players to resolve the dispute, extremely
veteran catcher Tom Padden and pitching prospect alger Hauser in
their places. That's al Gerhauser, not alger Hauser, and not
alger Hiss, who was about to go to Yalta. Cox
tried to get Eten back to the commissioner said, huh huh,
I imagine the Nugents kept the ten grand Etten's comment
(25:57):
on going from the Phillies to the Yankees, Chris comes
early this year. I mean it was January. That's pretty
early for Christmas. The trade was made on January twenty second.
By coincidence, that is a date that has been on
my mind a bit. As I said, I've been reading
up on a certain period in history, and these things
are totally unrelated. But I can't help making these connections
(26:18):
when I see them. That Nick Etton was acquired by
the Yankees on January twenty second, and January twenty second
also happens to be the day that the Nazis began
a major roundup and deportation of Jews from the city
of Marseilles in the south of France, which was a
very important city because after the Germans invaded, that was
about as far as a refugee could go and still
(26:41):
be in France and yet be far away in theory
from the Germans. Getting out of France was nigh impossible,
particularly when governments like Portugal and the United States, which
had people still in France, whether as part of private
organizations devoted to refugees or the consulates. We're giving people
exit visas, and their government said, no, stop it, we
(27:03):
don't want those people. And besides, you might upset that
nice mister Hitler. And they actually pulled those diplomats out
and sometimes punished them by deportation. I mean that they
were sent to Auschwitzen. Well, you know the rest. It's
weekly ironic that ed Levy was included in the At
and Trade that same day, but that doesn't work even
as a week irony, first because who cares, it's irrelevant.
(27:24):
And second, he wasn't even Jewish. He just had a
Jewish surname. It was his stepfather's name. His birth name
was Whitner. I don't mean to bring these things up,
like I said, I just can't escape it. Eton of
German heritage, actually was from Chicago, and he had been
a very good amateur athlete, a good enough athlete to
get a scholarship to play at Villanova. He had been
(27:45):
pirate's property when he was still a teen, but he
never got a chance to play. He could always hit,
but he was an outfielder then, and he was bad
at it because he had below average speed. He was
finally convinced to shift to first base. He never became
Keith Hernandez. He was a below average first baseman two.
He first came up with the A's after hitting three
seventy with a four to seventy two on base in
(28:06):
a five eighteen slugging percentage with Savannah of the Sally League.
He got a cup of coffee. Then in nineteen thirty nine,
he was the Athletics opening day first baseman, but didn't
hit and was sent down to Baltimore of the International
League in June. He hit two ninety nine, three eighty six,
four ninety and one hundred and five games there, with
fourteen home runs and a bunch of walks. That's who
(28:28):
he was at his best exactly that season. When I
look at his stats, he reminds me of the musical question,
what if Nick Johnson had been healthy for a few seasons. Indeed,
if you scroll down on Aton's Baseball Reference page and
perus his similarity scores, Edden turns up as his fourth
most comparable player. His number one is Yuli Guriel, which
(28:49):
strikes me as totally wrong. Johnson is much closer. Edden
spent all of nineteen forty with Baltimore. Despite being sent
back to the A's by Judge Landis for having been
option too many times, he stayed on, hit well and
subsequently was pedaled to the Phillies. He was twenty seven
and he was finally going to get a real chance
(29:09):
to play, and he killed it, hitting three to eleven
with a four h five on base percentage and a
four to fifty four slugging percentage. This is not in
the Baker Bowl. This is in Shi Park, a real stadium.
He hit fourteen home runs, he drew eighty two walks
that computed to a one forty seven OPS plus, and
that should have established him. But in Phillies. Year two,
(29:31):
he got slumpy, dropping to two sixty four three point
fifty seven three seventy five with only eight home runs. Now,
it wasn't good, but it also wasn't as bad as
it looked. Between seasons, the National League dropped from four
point two runs per game to three point nine and
the league ops declined from six eighty eight to six
(29:51):
point eighty one. Eight qualified hitters averaged three hundred or more,
with and we just talked about this last week Ernie
Lombardi winning the title at three thirty, albeit with relatively
few at bats. In nineteen forty one, thirteen National League
hitters had averaged three hundred or more, with Pete Reser
winning the batting title at three forty three. Offense was
(30:15):
just down. A further complication for Adden was, as I
said a moment ago, he was in no way Doug
Menkowitz Minky is another player who shows up among his
comps and probably shouldn't. And his league leading nineteen errors
at first base, Eden's non menkowitzes looked worse when they
weren't compensated for with a bunch of runs. As with
(30:35):
so many players, his best position was probably DHD but
of course that didn't exist.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
Then.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
One of the best lines about him, which came later,
was spoken by long long time New York Daily News
Yankees beat writer Joe Trimble. And this is the one
I referred to earlier as being not just in baseball books,
but books about insults. Watching a play in which Eton
dove for a ball and his glove came off his hand,
but somehow the ball went into the glove anyway, Trimble said,
(31:04):
Nick Etton's glove fields better with Nick Atton out of it.
Another time, when Etton signed for a salary like eighteen thousand,
five hundred, Trimble wrote, the five hundred is for his fielding.
And so Eton became a target for a familiar organization,
the BFOP the booing fans of Philadelphia. Also, the Yankees
were offering the Phillies cash money, and thus the Nugents
(31:26):
were happy to get rid of them. They had no choice, really.
The National League was pressuring them to sell out or
just give up, and selling Eton was part of their
raising enough money to keep the team. Here's how bad
things were for the Phillies at that time. As of
the last day of January, to date, the club has
not re signed Hans Loebert as manager, although Jerry NuGen
(31:49):
said no one else is being considered. It has not
selected a definite training site and has mailed no contracts
to players. They were out of business. Nine days later,
the National League owners teamed up to buy out the
club from under them. As for the Yankees, well, they
knew that Aton had three dependents and thought he wasn't
likely to be called up, and he wasn't. But they
(32:10):
were wrong about the possibility because they had to worry
about it a lot each spring training. Will the government
let nick Etton come to camp? We won't know until
he gets here. If I could just jump ahead for
a moment to the post war years. In nineteen forty eight,
when Atton was thirty four and had just left the
major leagues the year before, he played for the Oakland Oaks,
(32:31):
champions of the Pacific Coast League. This team was referred
to as the Nine Old Men. He was one of
the nine which both invoked the recalcitrant Supreme Court inherited
by Franklin Roosevelt in nineteen thirty three. That's how the
press referred to them as the Nine Old Men, but
also the fact that the Oaks lineup was all veterans
except for the twenty year old Billy Martin, And yeah
(32:52):
it was a Casey Stengle team, but we won't dwell
on that at this time. Edton played one hundred and
sixty four games that year and hit three thirteen with
forty three home runs. The guy could really really hit.
He just really really couldn't do it consistently. Here's what
the Yankees got. I wouldn't say Bizarro number five was
an all time Yankees great at first base, but for
(33:15):
three years he was pretty good. Given the wartime manpower shortage.
He was more of a lefty line drive hitter than
a fly ball hitter, so he wasn't launching balls over
the short porch and right with any regularity, but he
did well enough under the conditions. In nineteen forty three,
he played every day and hit two seventy one with
(33:35):
a three to fifty five on base and a four
to twenty slugging percentage, including thirty five doubles, fourteen home runs,
seventy six walks, and one hundred and seven runs batted in.
His averages worked out to a one twenty five ops plus.
You know how many times in seven years with the
Yankees Tino Martinez had a one twenty five ops plus.
I'll grant you twice. In nineteen ninety seven, when he
(33:58):
hit forty four home runs, he was at one forty three,
and the next year, nineteen ninety eight, he was at
one twenty four. So close enough. He was also a
better glove than Ett and was. I'm not trying to
denigrate old Constantino so much as to establish a point
of comparison. His Yankees average was one thirteen in nineteen
forty four, the year that war requirements led to about
(34:19):
half a season of a dead baseball, Nick hit two
ninety three, three ninety nine, four sixty six with a
league leading twenty two home runs and also led the
league with ninety seven walks. That was a one forty
four ops plus if you're keeping track at home. Finally,
well sort of finally, in nineteen forty five, when the
war was finally dragging to a bloody close, he hit
(34:41):
two eighty seven, three eighty seven, four thirty seven with
eighteen home runs and a league leading one hundred and
eleven RBIs. So in total for those three seasons, if
I may recite just a few more numbers, I know
how Much You Love It. He hit two eighty three,
three eighty one, four forty one in four hundred and
sixty games, foraging a one to thirty five ops plus
(35:02):
or about three point seven wins above replacement per season.
On the downside, he got into just one World Series
in nineteen forty three, and although the Yankees won, he
went only two for nineteen with a walk and then
alas we also must discuss nineteen forty six, the boys
came back. Hooray, that was good, and the teams were
obligated by law to give them all a shot. In
spring training, the Yankees pitted Eton against Stirham and Hassett
(35:26):
ghosts of a war just passed, and a former prospect,
Steve bud Suschack, who was already twenty seven, but he
had more than earned his shot. He had left the
miners after his age twenty three season. He went into
the army. He served three years, and he saw a
ton of combat as part of the liberation of Europe
and the defeat of fascism. Thank you, Steve, wherever you are.
(35:48):
All three were Uncle Sam's uniform, but before they went
into the service they had moved up to the majors
almost entirely on fielding skill, wrote the New York Star
Ledger earlier in the nineteen forty six season. Sturman Hassett
are much better fielders than nick Etton of the Yanks
will ever be. They have class and speed around the
initial sack, but the Yankees prefer to keep etten. He
(36:11):
is a distance clouder, which makes up for his deficiencies
at first in the view of the Yank operators. The
third player the Ledger was referring to was not I
believe in camp with them at that time. That was
Johnny McCarthy, who had played with the Dodgers, Giants, and Braves.
Wasn't very much of a hitter, but was thought to
be a good fielder. He was magical out there with
the glove, said the Ledger, but something more was demanded,
(36:34):
something which he lacks. Well. Eton won the job, but
he couldn't keep it. Let's take one last quick break
for this episode, and we'll come back to wrap the
Nick Etton story, including the why of it. Why is
this relevant now? Well, not to put it too simply,
(37:08):
but Eton didn't hit. It was a season of a
lot of turmoil for the Yankees. Larry McPhail was back
from the War iiO and had taken over as the
owner's frontman and was moving players in and out, and
also drove McCarthy out of town. After roughly fifteen years
in the job. He just couldn't stand the stress of
dealing with the guy and basically had a breakdown, and
starting around mid season roughly Eton started sitting for Sue Shock,
(37:31):
who was actually great in a small sample, although his
real on field glory days would come from nineteen fifty
one to fifty three with the Tigers, when he hit
two sixty eight three point fifteen four ninety two in
a part time role for them. He had a lot
of physical problems and really couldn't play every day, but
in those years he did make the most of it
when he did get onto the field. Tommy Henrick, normally
(37:53):
a right fielder, also got some chances. He was a
very good hitter, obviously, and he hit quite well while
playing first in fact that one year, better than he
did while playing the outfield. The following spring, the Yankee
sold Etton back to the Phillies once again took him
back to the return window, but he never did play
for the Yankees. Again. They had acquired a long ago
(38:13):
prospect who had been blocked by Garrick, George McQuinn, a
five time All Star. He was something of an ettenstyle hitter,
but with a much better glove, and they were fine
with that for about a year and a half. They
sent Etton to Newark and then eventually moved him to
Oakland and that Stengele team that I mentioned, they had
a relationship with the owner of the Oaks, even though
(38:34):
the Pacific Coast League was independent. That's how Stengle got there,
That's how Etton got there too. These were all manipulations
or machinations. I don't mean to make them sound sinister.
This was the invisible or rather visible hand of Yankees
farm director and future general manager George Weiss. He was
just taking care of people and players that were in
his orbit. And that's what he did, George Weiss, for
(38:55):
Casey and Etton. So the reason I was thinking about
this today is that this afternoon, September fifth, as I
speak to you, the administration's foot soldiers in its war
against human beings who happened not to have been born
here Ice raided a battery plant near Savannah Georgia co
owned by Hyundai and LG, and they arrested four hundred
(39:16):
and seventy five people who were or are South Korean citizens.
No one has claimed that I'm aware of that they
were part of a fentanyl smuggling ring or were part
of the Trinidad de Agua gang. Stephen Schrank, a Special
Agent in charge of Homeland security investigations for Georgia, said
the raid was intended to ensure I quote, a level
(39:37):
playing field for businesses that comply with the law. They
do seem to have grabbed a couple of South Korean
nationals who were here on business visas doing meetings. It
seems to me that we have been going around the
world insisting that businesses build here, and in this case
they did. They're still working on this battery plant, which
is part of an eight billion dollar development in the
(39:58):
state of Georgia. If you've ever been involved with technological
industrial developments like this, and I personally have not, but
I'm close to people who have, you want it to
be set up precisely to your specifications, or your batteries
won't work. Batteries are extremely finicky things, as everyone who
has oh accidentally burned down their house because they bought
an e bike with a cheap lithium ion battery. Can
(40:21):
tell you. I can't say for sure that these companies
were not trying to cheat the United States in some way,
but at a distance, it seems far more likely to
me that they were trying to get their factory up
in the way that they needed it to and then
the bulk of the jobs would go to Americans. Now,
even if they did break the rules, and I'm sure
they did in some sense, as people who are trying
(40:43):
to do business with us, it would have been very
simple for the same authorities, rather than coming in with
guns and handcuffs, to transmit a message to the people
in charge saying, you're breaking the rules, anyone who shouldn't
be here, get them out. They have a week to
get to the airport, cyonaras. So long, farewell, goodbye. Problem solved,
Fewer hard feelings, fewer people hurt or frightened, no expense
(41:07):
to the taxpayers. But you know, it's not about the law,
it's not about the rules. It's about power and intimidation
and xenophobia. These are Asians, not white Americans, And that's
as much justification as these people need to start throwing
their weight around, And so I started to wonder what
baseball would look like after some hypothetical future day when
(41:30):
they felt even more empowered, and these same people in
authority started telling baseball teams that they could no longer
employ people who weren't born here. Every team would lose
key players, and some of the game's biggest stars would
be gone. What would baseball look like then? And it
would look a lot like Nick Etton's World of Baseball.
(41:50):
In preparing this episode, I noticed an article in an
old liberty magazine by NBC sports guide Bill Stern. I
mentioned him last week in that he hosted a fairly
useless radio show. The article was titled Who's Who in
Baseball forty four, and the sub had read, who's the
next batter? Brother? You'll have to ask the draft board.
(42:11):
Here's a preview of the dizziest of all big League
baseball seasons. So let's go back to that year's Yankees,
when Etten was one of their best players. No Demagio,
no Keller, no Henrick. Instead you had Johnny Lindell, a
converted pitcher who it turned out, could hit. It also
turned out he could drink, so his career didn't last
that long. Bud Metheni and former Phillies one time All
(42:32):
Star hirsh Martin. Paul Wayner forty one was briefly on
that team, and the top reliever was milkman Jim Turner
forty and about ten seconds away from becoming one of
the better pitching coaches in team history. The second baseman
was great. He was Snuffy Sternweiss, who had one of
his two consecutive eight win seasons. His nineteen forty four
(42:52):
and forty five were very similar, and so I should
just squish him together between the two. Here come more numbers,
but not Star Wars references. He hit three fourteen, three
eighty seven, four sixty eight, led the league both years
in triples and stolen bases and hits and runs scored.
He was a monster, and in peacetime he hit two
forty seven, three point fifty one three twenty three. So
(43:14):
you see how diluted things became. Now all teams had
guys who either hadn't left yet, like the Red Sox
with Bobby Door or the Cardinals with Stan muzil Or
had returned. But on the whole you saw a token
few that you were used to, and a great many strangers.
The Dodgers had this fantastic team right before the war.
Bill James called it an almost perfect team. They won
(43:37):
one hundred games in both nineteen forty one and nineteen
forty two. But by nineteen forty four, with everyone gone,
or almost everyone, they were losing ninety eight year with
how Hee Shultz at first base and a sixteen year
old Tommy Brown who just passed this year rest in
peace at shortstop, an old racist outfielder Ben Chapman throwing
knucklers out of the bullpen. And again there were some
(44:00):
familiar players, some of them pretty good. Auggie Gallon and
Dixie Walker, another racist southfielder, had good years. And there
was old Paul Wayner crossing a bridge or two from
the Bronx that same year. It was the opposite order. Actually,
the Dodgers let him go and he went to the Yankees.
But what about those teams who didn't have a lot
of depth before the war, who didn't have any stars
to lose? They patched as best they could with nine
(44:23):
guys named IRV. It was this way. It had to
be this way because our values demanded it. The democracies
were threatened. Our democracy was threatened, and so we as
a people went to war. Did everyone agree with that? No,
but a majority of people did, or it wouldn't have happened.
(44:45):
If the kind of purge that I've been hypothesizing about
were to take place today, would it happen because the
vast majority of US agreed with it and felt that
the nation had to be purged a people named Guerrero
and Soda. I don't think so. It would happen despite
the majority, not because of it. And if that's the case,
(45:06):
then what are we even doing here? To put it
another way? Talking you and I now eighty years later,
in retrospect, it seems inevitable that the United States would
both go to war and fight on the side that
we did choose and win. But none of that was automatic,
none of it was certain. And if the majority of
(45:27):
US were, for whatever reason sympathetic to the Germans and
Japanese and Italians, none of it would have worked the
same way, including no Pearl Harbor, because whoever the president
was at that time, they wouldn't have tried to rein
in Japanese expansion in the Pacific. He or she would
have just joined in with him, but we felt differently,
and so it happened the way that it did. And
(45:49):
I firmly believe we feel differently now, or I mean
that our values are still aligned with those values, but
the people in charge aren't acting that way, and allowed
minority isn't acting that way, and so there's a disconnecting democracy.
And I wish I knew how we plugged the thing
back in again. In the meantime, enjoy show, Hey Otani
(46:11):
until you Can't Leap and Lizards. We made it to
the end in the program only crashed three times. I
think I need a computer doctor. Should you wish to
doctor my social media? No, that doesn't really work, but
we'll stay with it. Please follow me I at Blue
Sky at Stephen Gooldman dot bsky dot social. You can
(46:33):
also write us, by which I mean me at Infinite
Inning at gmail dot com. And there's a Facebook group.
Simply go to Facebook search on Infinite Inning. Bang, you're there.
I threw out a picture of Casey and his Oaks uniform.
Why not I like that stylized? Oh, I have the
cap and everything. Should you wish to support the show,
and I very much hope you do. Please visit Patreon
dot com. Slash the infinite inning here of a rudimentary
(46:56):
kind available at the hyphen Infinite hyphen Inning dot creator,
hi in Spring dot com. Original soundtrack available at Casualobserver
Music dot bandcamp dot com. Finally, should you find yourself
with the proverbial moments to spare, please go to the
podcature of your choice and rate, review and subscribe. It
helps the show gain attention. And if your podcatcher doesn't
let you do those things, you should still be sure
(47:18):
to brush your teeth after every meal, but gently, oh
so gently, those gums are delicate. 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 remembers that Daniel Webster once said our country,
our whole country, and nothing but our country. But you
know I've always appreciated my toast with a little jam
(47:41):
on it. Well, if I can just figure out why,
whenever I'm looking for a blueberry muffin to go with
Rick's toast, the only thing that's available is rhubarb pie.
I'll be back next week with more tales from inside
the infinite inning,
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