September 27, 2025 • 52 mins
Collapsing teams this September inspire a visit with a Twins journeyman who has a huge day at the plate, keeping an unexpected contender in first place for a little longer (though the magic leaves when Elvis does), and then reveals the way he’s tried to take charge of his destiny, Rod Carew wonders if he’s been accepted, and three old guys living near Cincinnati go to jail for “contumely.”
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):
Let me say off the top, so that no one
feels that the admission was not worth the price, that
this is going to be a slightly shorter show than normal.
Usually I endeavor to give you at least forty five
minutes to an hour. However, my voice is acting a
little bit funny, and to be completely honest with you,
this week got away from me just a little bit.
(00:21):
And I think part of it is that the Pennant
Races or whatever it is we call them now, the
birth Races as I sort of saw them called on
MLB dot Com earlier. Today, we're taking up a lot
of my time. It's easier for me to walk away
from a mid June game than it is for me
to walk away from a late September game, especially one
(00:42):
that has implications for the postseason. And so the clock
just kept winding and unwinding, and like the Mets and
the Tigers, I found myself playing from behind, not once
but continuously. I said on Blue Sky, I think about
Wednesday that I had reached a point in the week
on which I reach every week in which I realize
I'm going to be okay schedule wise, so long as
(01:05):
today actually becomes yesterday. I need an eight day week,
and I look forward to whenever it is that I
can figure out how to stop feeling that way. I
also feel a bit down about the general trajectory of
the country. I wanted to share this story with you
for a couple of years now, ever since I first
read it. It's not a baseball story, but an American story.
(01:27):
I was going to say that that's the same thing.
But it's not accurate to say that all baseball stories
are American stories, but not all American stories are baseball stories.
The reason should be obvious. Sho hey Otani Martin Dihigo
on Mareschal Baseball Baby an American game, but it's not
only ours. I read about what I'm going to share
(01:48):
with you in a fantastic book by Adam Hawkschild, American Midnight,
The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracies Forgotten Crisis.
As I've had the book out this week, I can
looking at the cover and thinking, American Midnight, you were
a bit premature. That was the American quarter to eleven.
We're living through American Midnight now, Powell. But of course
(02:10):
the book is nearly four years old now and cannot
be expected to update itself. It's about the government crackdown
on civil rights during and after the First World War.
This is the black Sox time. A lot of enemies
lists got cleared by the government back then. Not that
the government was always wrong to be worried about German sympathizers.
(02:30):
It wasn't just German sympathizers, by the way, it was
labor sympathizers, anarchists, communist sympathizers, really, anyone who wasn't straight
and narrow with the then definition of Americanism. People of color, unfortunately.
But there was some sabotage. There was a little island
that used to sit near the New Jersey side of
the Hudson River that was used as an AMMO dump
(02:52):
during the war. Someone lit a match and literally blew
it off the map. True story. So there was a
real war in a real crisis, but there was necessarily
a real crisis of disloyalty. But what always happens when
we get into that mindset is that the disloyalty idea
becomes pretextual for a lot of reactionaries to just clear
(03:12):
the decks of people that they don't like. It was
illegal to say I don't think we should be in
this war, which people said constantly after the fact, but
you were not allowed to say it in nineteen seventeen
and nineteen eighteen. I don't want my son to be drafted.
You couldn't say that or anything of that nature. It
would be indictable for undermining the war effort. You could,
(03:34):
and some people did go to jail for that kind
of talk. And that book has an example of this
sort of overreach, which I think about continuously, particularly nowadays,
when we all have conversations online that we tell ourselves
our private but really aren't. And not just because you
(03:54):
could be sending intimate pictures between yourself and your significant
other and no they didn't share them, but someone got
in there and shared it for them, and yes, that's embarrassing.
And there are horrifying stories of people whose lives have
been deeply affected by that sort of violation, and even today,
with laws in many states against what we came to
(04:16):
call revenge porn, the people who are affected, who have
had their pictures or videos put out on the Internet,
still have to navigate a Kofka esque maze to get
those pictures removed if they ever can. But I still
don't think that's as kafka, asque as having words that
are private between you and someone else. It doesn't matter
(04:39):
who Party A is and who Party B is, but
you're speaking candidly because you feel that you are in private.
And then someone takes those words and uses them against you.
For example, and here we go back to nineteen eighteen,
there was a cobbler of German origin living in Kentucky.
His name was Charles shober He had a shop. You
(05:01):
brought in your brogins, he healed your souls. He was
sixty six years old, had been living in America since
he was five, and had served as a police officer,
among other civic roles. On Independence Day as Babe Ruth,
both pitching and batting cleanup went all the way in
defeating the Philadelphia Athletics four to three in ten innings.
(05:24):
Schoberg and two pals who used to hang around the
store kibitzing with him the way I used to hang
out in George's comic book store and talk about favorite
issues of The Amazing Spider Man, were arrested. Members of
the local Citizens Patriotic League had decided that these fellows
were insufficiently supportive of the war effort. And therefore disloyal.
(05:46):
The CPL was one of a number of groups at
that time who were essentially organized collections of Karens who
were going around checking to see if everyone who should
have been drafted had been or if they had actually
gone to the war, and that no one said anything
that offended them, and if they did, they would insist
on talking to the manager. In Shoberke's case, because he
(06:07):
had a German accent. Probably they had hired detectives to
bug his shop, then turned over what they had heard
to federal prosecutors. Said. Prosecutors charged the three with trying
to quote favor the cause unquote of Germany and bringing
the American military into contempt, scorn, contumly, and disrespect. I
admit this may be the only time in my life
(06:27):
I've heard the word contumly used outside of Hamlet's soliloquy
for who would bear the whips and scorns of time?
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumly. I well remember
the high school vocabulary assignment, and you may too. This
policing of shirkers in the disloyal in Britain took the
form of the White Feather campaign, in which I think
(06:48):
mostly women, but maybe the occasional older fellow went around
and if they spotted any male of apparent draft age,
without knowing anything about the guy, like if he had
ninety eight dependents or was missing eleven of his toes,
would run up and hand him a white feather to
stigmatize him publicly as a coward. And there are a
number of stories of veterans who had been in France
(07:13):
and it had say they're private shot off. So now, yeah,
they're nineteen and unless you happen to look down their trousers,
they seem fine. But they've given they're done. The government
has said, thank you very much for your service, we'll
take the ball the rest of the way without you.
Just watch from the sidelines as best you can. And
these poor fellows go home and try to resume their lives. Yes,
they've put on civilian clothes because they're out. They charged
(07:34):
a German machine gun nest and lost their naughty bits.
What else can you ask for short of death? But nevertheless,
there they are waiting for a train and some lady
comes running up and chames them with a flower. And
what can they do but sit there and feel God
awful and say this is so unfair. I joke, but
I shouldn't because if you have seen any of the photographs,
(07:58):
your documentaries of the true victims of that war, who
came back horribly disfigured, with missing limbs and in many
cases missing faces, and had to go through the rest
of their lives with these awkward phantom of the opera
pros thesis, then you have seen the true meaning of horror. Unfortunately,
there are many true meanings of horror, and now that
I think about it, some of those documentaries also cover
(08:21):
the folks who came back with severe psychological disability or
what they used to call shell shock and what we
now call post traumatic stress disorder. To follow in the
footsteps of the great George Carlin, who talked about the
difference between shell shock and post traumatic stress disorder, the
linguistic difference. I mean, shell shock about did the job
in terms of description, while PTSD is distancing as hell.
(08:45):
It was shell shock. And if you see some of
that footage from over one hundred years ago and you
come away unmoved, then you must have a heart of stone.
As always, I digress at least a little bit. So
what had Schoberg and his friend said, they were shocking things,
things like this is a war for money. Someone is
getting rich off this war, and it ain't me. They
had said that the two Germans then running the war,
(09:08):
Paul von Hindenberg and Eric Ludendorf, were great generals. He
questioned if America was truly on the side of the
democracies when the Americans and the English were allies. They
talk of democracy, How can this country join with England
if it is democratic? England has been oppressing the Irish.
They wondered aloud whether American soldiers could be trained up
(09:30):
and brought to the Western Front before the Germans won
the war, which was exactly what Hindenburg and Ludendorf were
trying to do at the time. It was a real
possibility and not at all a secret. They asked Schoberg
how much money he had given to war causes like
war bonds, which he had, And did he sing to
himself in private while working? And if so, did he
sing in English or German? Everything that was recorded was
(09:54):
said in private conversations, as private as if you were
talking to your wife or your parents or your best friend,
and as private as if you were singing to yourself
while working or in the shower. Those words had no
power to move anyone. They weren't speeches made in front
of a mass audience at Union Square. Saying that those
three fellows in a shoe store or a shoe repair
(10:17):
shop had been equally as disloyal or harmful to the
war effort as someone who gave a major address is
like saying that your aunt Patti seventy four singing the
Hills are Alive with the sound of music in the
shower has the same impact as Julie Andrews singing it
on a seventy millimeter movie screen. The judge told the
(10:37):
jury that that didn't matter. All it took to be
disloyal was to have a disloyal state of mind. Disloyal
state of mind the Billy Joel song you never knew
you needed or desperately wanted to have. Well, they were convicted.
Schoberg was found guilty on twenty four counts, and he
was sentenced to ten years in federal prison. In his sixties,
(11:00):
despite having been in the US since the eighteen fifties,
he had not proved himself as an American. His two
friends convicted of fewer accounts received seven and five years
in federal prison, respectively, and there they sat until Warren
Harding became president and decided to forgive some of the
victims of government overreached by the Wilson administration. We ask,
(11:22):
can it happen here? Will it happen here? It has
happened here intermittently. It helps if some of us decide
to play along, like the citizen's protective Karens, the federal prosecutors,
the judge, the jury, and then multiply by fifty states
once people start to act. Is if you don't have
the rights you do, even if they're written down somewhere, functionally,
(11:44):
you don't have them. This brings to mind a joke
I read many years ago, and please forgive me, but
it involves the evil little man with the toothbrush mustache.
In my defense, I read it in a book on
Jewish humor. It's very basic, and it goes like this
that Adolf Hitler was not satisfied with the reports that
his propaganda minister was feeding him on his own popularity,
(12:07):
so he decided to disguise himself and see how the
citizenry really felt about him. So he goes out and
he winds up in a movie theater with a bunch
of average Germans and probably the odd Jewish person who
hadn't yet fallen into his clutches. Maybe it was early
in the regime, so the movie starts as was typical
(12:27):
at that time. The theater shows a newsreel. Who is
the subject of the newsreel, but of course the German
chancellor himself, Adolf Hitler. As soon as Adolf appears on
the big screen, everyone in the theater jumps up and shouts,
along with the audience in the newsreel, See Kyle, See Kyle.
Everyone that is except Hitler. Why because outside of the
(12:48):
mel Brooks version of him, he's not in the habit
of going around saying hile myself. And at that point,
the fella in the seat next to him leans over
and in the story I read that fella is supposed
to be Jewish. I don't think it really mattered whether
he is or he isn't. He leans down and whispers, listen, buddy,
we all feel the same way you do, but there's
no reason to get yourself in trouble. Thus endeth the joke,
(13:09):
such as it is. And the guy who said that
he didn't pass go. He didn't collect two hundred dollars.
He didn't emigrate to the States, but one irate phone
call later, he proceeded directly to the Infinite Inning. Well, hello,
(14:00):
and welcome back to the show. I wish I was
as happy as I sound. I am happy to be
back with you for Infinite Inning three hundred and forty six.
I remain for as long as they allow me to remain.
Steven Goldman, you are a convivial host for this trip
to the past on a mission to better understand the present.
I hope this episode of the show finds you well,
(14:22):
as you know if you follow along. I got out
this week's reissue episode of Daylight. This morn ain't coming
out at daylight. It's coming out on time, or as
on time as they get. But it has definitely been
a struggle. I won't perseverate about that. There's a word
for you. One of my closest friends likes using that word,
or at least he used to. He certainly uses it
more often than he uses the word contumly. He would
surprise the hell out of me if he uses the
(14:43):
word constantly anytime soon. I feel like my friends are
less focused on throwing me change ups, change ups just
for the sake of being entertaining. I don't mean for
the sake of, say, destroying my trust in them. No,
just for fun. I feel like that's more my job.
This same friend, I used to meet him for lunch,
which once a week about five minutes from where we live, respectively,
(15:04):
was kind of a spot in the middle in our
rather small town. And I would always be late because
I run late with things. I don't make a secret
of it. And he would say, where have you been?
And I would say I got lost, or I'd say
I got stuck in traffic, and I would just not
discuss it anymore. I'd move on for so how are you?
And it's not about being dishonest. If you asked me directly,
(15:25):
I would admit, yeah, I left late. I overslept. It's
about commitment to the bit and always supplying the unexpected.
If we make each other think, none of us will
ever go see now, at least knock Wood, I hope not.
There was a time in the seventh grade when I
failed to do my homework and the teacher asked me
in front of the rest of the class why I
had not done my homework, and I will spare you
(15:47):
the details. But I decided in that moment to see
just how much of the remaining forty five minutes of
the class period I could take up with my explanation.
She let me go about ten minutes, ten minutes when
she was occasionally tear and said, oh, Steven, quite a bit.
And I guess it was then that I knew I
would grow up to be a podcaster. I think the
(16:07):
mistake she made was saying something annoying like, and don't
say that the dog ates your homework, as if I
would do that, as if I would do something so
cheap and un original. And I said, no, it wasn't
the dog who ate my homework. It was an industrial
strength paper shredding machine. And then she made her second mistake,
which was to say what, rather than continuing to dwell
(16:28):
on the past, let me explain why the second act
of the show is going to be a little shorter
than usual. I already mentioned my voice, I already mentioned
time management challenges, and I am doing my best to
hide both at all times. But because the story doesn't
need to be that long. My thinking about this story
began in the middle of the week when my pal
(16:48):
and occasional guest on this show, marvelous Mike Ferrin erstwhile
partner on the late lamented Bob Dylan Everything Is Broken podcast,
not to mention my co star in Eleven Road Movies,
the Flight two series, which began with the now classic
Flight to Cleveland that critics hailed as the only true
follow up to the Hope Crosby pictures of the nineteen forties.
(17:11):
We're on a flight to Cleveland, even if we don't
know why. You remember he invited me to talk about
the collapsing. It's still ongoing. As I say these words,
I started laughing because I thought, how best to describe
what is happening to the Detroit Tigers. And what popped
into my mind was Van dyke Park's inscrutable lyrics to
(17:33):
the classic Bryan Wilson Beach Boys collaboration Surfs up, columnated
ruins Domino. That definitely describes what the Detroit Tigers have
done this month. If a team can domino, they surely have.
They are still domino ing. It was probably because of
the industrial strength paper shrudder. So where was that? Yes,
So Mike has a show on SiriusXM which he co
(17:57):
hosts with Jim Juquet, and he invited me to come
on to about some historical examples of teams that have collapsed.
They named some of the famous ones. I named some
of the famous ones. But I realized as we were
talking about it, and as I looked at some of
these teams, that there are clubs that are legitimately good
but for whatever reason, did suffer a big tail spin
(18:18):
in September. But that might just be a sequencing problem.
And if they just had a bad May or a
bad July and a good September and then fallen short,
we would have said they were heroic. And then there
are teams and I think of some of Bill Terry's
nineteen thirties Giants teams. I think about three of which
spun out, but two others won a pennant and won
a championship. You can't say that these weren't very good rosters,
(18:41):
but they did have a tendency to tail off. And
that was because he was the sort of manager that
picked nine guys and played them or eight guys and
rotated through the pitchers, and so they got tired or
if injuries set in, they didn't really have a fallback
position because the bench guys had never played. And another
team that qualifies that, I think is the nineteen seventy
(19:02):
eight Red Sox, where Don Zimmer played the same guys
all year and then Dwight Evans suffered a concussion on
a hit by pitch late in the season and Zimmer
just kept playing it because there wasn't anybody else. And
Evans went through that bit of the season in a
fugue state, hit something like one to sixty seven, and
tended to run in the wrong direction when balls were
(19:23):
hit towards him because he didn't know what was going on.
And here's the thing. If they hadn't been being chased,
it wouldn't have mattered. They didn't collapse in the sense
that they played two point fifty ball in September the
way the Tigers basically are. They just slacked off their
earlier pace because one thing that you learn in baseball
school is that one replacement level player can kill you dead.
(19:45):
And Dwight Evans was a great player. He was a
haul of very good player at the very least. You know,
I don't really care very much about who's in the
Hall of Fame or who's not. I talk about that
virtually every show that it's a career service award. But
I will tell you there are many players not as
good as Dwight Evans in the Hall of Fame that
it would be no insult to the gallery if at
(20:05):
some point the Veterans Committee or whatever they call it nowadays,
chose Dewey Evans to get a plaque. I've mentioned this before,
but since I was just flashing back to junior high
and high school, there was a year that Meat or
someone who makes school supplies put out that year's TOPS
cards in folder form, so you legitimately could have on
(20:26):
your desk a giant like eight x eleven baseball card
that had the picture on the front with the dress
from TOPS that year and the stats on the back.
And I spent so much class time not hearing a
word that the teacher said, but just going over those stats,
and I had four or five of them. I often
tell people when I'm frustrated with my career in some
(20:47):
sense that I didn't plan to talk or write about
baseball when I grew up, but it just happened. It
chose me, not the other way around. It's really not true.
I just wasn't aware of it well. Dwight Evans was
one of those folders, and I would look at I
think it was his nineteen eighty seven season, pretty sure,
three zero five four seventeen five sixty nine, led the
(21:10):
American League with one hundred and six walks, drove in
one hundred and twenty three runs, scored one hundred and
nine on thirty four homers, thirty seven doubles. And I
would just sit there in class and this teacher that
I had, who sadly actually seemed to have something like
Alzheimer's and they knew it, but he wouldn't quit and
they wouldn't retire him. Would be droning on and on
about William Faulkner's late in August, Jimminy Cricket, the main
(21:33):
character eating toothpaste. Did you know Jimminy Cricket was a
christ figure? And then he'd vapor lock and class would
just pause, like you stop the VCR with the remote
for up to five for ten minutes. The only person
who ruined Faulkner for me more than that guy was
Faukner himself. I keep trying, and I just can't. Someday
Somebody's gonna come in here. And look through my library
(21:54):
and say, boy, you like Fawkner, don't you. No, It's
just that I keep reloading and hoping that this one
will unlock the magic absolom Nope. Intruder in the dust, Nope.
As I lay dying, uh uh. The Reavers even nice
scored by John Williams, narration by our father Burgess Meredith
in a concert version. But no, sadly no. And so
(22:14):
all of that would be going on or not going on,
as the case might be, and it would just be
me and Dwight Evans and those stats and me saying,
uh so, no, not a replacement level player, but for
that month, don Zimmer made him one, or put him
in the position of being one, and in a close race,
in a race that you lose by one playoff game,
a playoff game that maybe you might have avoided. That's
(22:36):
all that it takes. But there are other kinds of teams.
And I mentioned this to Mike, and dare I call
him Jim, because we're not that kind of close. Perhaps
someday there are teams that never should have been there,
but for whatever reason, they managed to defy gravity for
a while. And what I said on the show and
I hadn't thought about it this way before, and I
(22:56):
think it's right. Is that some of those teams, the
collapse team and this year's Tigers maybe one, are kind
of like Wiley coyote. He runs off the cliff and
he treads air for a while, and yeah, inevitably he
falls and goes pef. But when you think about it,
that he ran on air for a while, that's pretty
cool too. We should give him some credit for that.
And so I didn't talk about the team that I'm
(23:16):
going to talk about today. In fact, I'm going to
talk about right after this break, the nineteen seventy seven
Minnesota Twins, a team that had it for a moment
but they never should have. And that's really all I
need to say. I'll unpack it just a little bit
more on the other side of this break, but mainly
what I want to talk about is their platoon, dah
(23:37):
and fourth outfielder. I think it's a more piquant story,
and I do hope you will stick around until, unlike
that tragic doomed coyote, we claw and scrabble and reach
the other side. Gee, Snoopy, Maybe this won't be such
(24:12):
a short show after all. I've been talking so dang much,
you know, I didn't even mention that. This week at
Baseball Perspectus, my column was called the Kaiser needs a
new arm, and he did because it had been mangled
at birth. But really, I'm on the same subject I've
been on free speech, and my question was, what if
we couldn't talk about what ails the Washington Nationals. What
(24:34):
if their new general manager, who was just hired this week,
at least tentatively, could lie about the state of the team,
what could you do about it? Yeah, we won the
championship this year. Well, I didn't see them in the postseason.
I watched every game on TV and I didn't see
sh We all feel the same way you do. But
there's no reason to get in trouble. So the nineteen
seventy seven Twins finished fourth with a record of eighty
(24:56):
four and seventy seven. They were seventeen and a half
games back back of the first place Kansas City Royals.
They were in first place for sixty days. Actually, they
spent their last day in first place by a mere
half game in mid August. On the last day that,
depending on your point of view, the last day that
Elvis was alive or the first day that he was dead,
(25:17):
however you want to look at it. That day they
lost a thirteen inning duel with the Baltimore Orioles, which
was briefly interrupted when a moth flew into Butch Weineger's ear.
He was the Twins catcher he was catching at the time. Look,
this may gross you out, It grosses me out. But
according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Lee May of the
(25:39):
O's was going to bat to lead off the bottom
of the sixth when Weineger pulled off his mask and
began twisting his head around. He seems to have fled
to the dugout, and who could blame him there was
a moth stuck in his ear. Now, given time and
a humane opponent, the Twins and their trainer might have
been able to figure this out. But baseball's rules do
not provide spensation to the catcher to go running madly
(26:03):
off the field because he feels like a bug is
trying to crawl into his brain. Unfortunately, the opposing manager
was not humane. He was earl Weaver. So he comes
running out onto the field one of several times he
did in that game, from which he was ultimately ejected,
not for this, but for arguing I think a called
third striker a check swing and he goes screaming to
(26:23):
the umpires. No, no, it's been ten We've stopped the
game for ten minutes. Baseball doesn't have timeouts, and so,
under pressure, the Twins trainer poured hot water into Wineger's ear,
killing the moth, but then left it there so that
play could resume. Weineger caught pitcher Pete Redford for four
batters with a dead moth in his ear before finally
(26:45):
having the insectoid corpse extricated between frames. Weineger had three
more hit bats in that game and didn't reach base.
Can you blame him? As I said, the Twins had
spent about sixty days in first place in the al Wes.
This was a team that had had one of the
best offenses in baseball in nineteen seventy six, and they'd
(27:06):
have a pretty good one again in nineteen seventy seven.
Rod Carew, moving permanently from second base to first base,
flirted with four hundred and won the MVP with a
three to eighty eight patting average and a ridiculous two
hundred and thirty nine hits. The outfield of Larry Heisel,
the sadly ill fated Lineman Bostock, and Disco dan Ford
(27:27):
was very productive, with Heiseel leading the AL with one
hundred and nineteen RBIs on a three zero two average
and twenty eight home runs. The pitching staff, however, was
terribly weak. Some of that was just because sometimes they are,
and some of that was because of the time in
baseball's history, and I'll get to that in a minute.
(27:47):
They had had a legit Hall of Famer, but they
had traded him in seventy seven. They had but one
legit starter in Dave Goltz, who won twenty games. Two
other starters were rushed prospects who'd never pan out, Paul
Thormiscott and Pete Redford. The fourth was a thirty one
year old named Jeff Zhon, a groundballing lefty who would
(28:08):
be quite the effective pitcher in the future, but was
coming off of some surgery and just wasn't great that year.
And they never did have a fifth starter, and that's
a sad story in itself. The fifth starter as of
opening day was a rookie lefty, at least I think
he was still a rookie, and he probably still is.
A rookie named Mike Pazik. He had been drafted in
(28:30):
nineteen seventy one by the Yankees, didn't impress, and in
nineteen seventy four, the Twins traded for him. Minnesota gave
him brief trials in both seventy five and seventy six,
and the reason that they were brief is that in
a total of twenty eight and the third innings, he
gave up forty one hits, walked fourteen, allowed five home runs,
struck out four point five per nine, and his overall
(28:51):
ERA was seven point eighty five. Now, if you look
up his minor league record, you might say to yourself, yeah, okay,
seems about right. The Twins, though, owner Calgar Griffith, pitching
coach Don McMahon, and manager Gene Mock, were going off
his nineteen seventy six at Triple A Tacoma, when he
had a fourteen and five record with a slightly negative
strikeout walk ratio but a four to fourteen ERA, which
(29:12):
was actually half decent in context. He made the team
out of spring training. He made his first three starts.
He pitched eighteen innings with a two point fifty ERA,
and was one to zero. You can't ask for anything
more from your fifth starter. But then he got into
the wrong car on the wrong road at the wrong time.
In late April, the twins flew into Minneapolis after completing
a road trip. Reliever Dave Carrithers had a VW van
(29:36):
and he offered Pazick and outfielder Disco dan Ford a ride.
They stopped for a drink. They did not drink to excess.
Everyone involved in this story passed a sobriety test, and
in a sense, it wouldn't have mattered if the ballplayers
had been drinking, because there wasn't a hell of a
lot they could have done about what happened next. The
(29:56):
two pitchers asked Ford if he wanted to stay with
them to get something to eat, and he said, nope,
I'm going home. So they headed off too, and that
was when they got into a wrong way accident. It
was not at all their fault. A twenty three year
old woman got on the highway by going down an
exit ramp and hit Cariths and Pazock head on. She
(30:18):
suffered minor injuries was not even taken to the hospital.
Cariths broke a wrist and injured a knee. He was
able to come back. Late in the season, Pazick suffered
two broken legs, both broken below the knees, and was
never able to come back. I could have been there too,
Ford said the next day just messed up my mind
(30:38):
a little today. Can't blame him. The woman was ticketed
for hazard is driving, three hundred dollars fine or ninety
days in jail, and that's all she got. And look,
you can't know what would have happened. Had Pazick been
able to pitch. He might have regressed on his own.
He probably would have. We know from baseball that's often
the way it goes. But he certainly deserved the chance
(30:59):
to try on his own. And I'm not saying that
we should blame the wrong way driver. It seems like she,
like I said, wasn't intoxicated. She just got lost and confused.
We should just blame cruel fate and leave it at that.
Shades of a team that really did collapse, the nineteen
sixty four Phillies, although you could argue they were like
the Twins in the sense that they were a bit
(31:20):
undermanned for the race that they found themselves in. Geene Mock,
manager of that team too, once again decided not to
solve the problem but his best he could just tried
to stick with a four man rotation the rest of
the way whenever he couldn't avoid going to a fifth starter.
It didn't work out. The Twins tried Ron Schuler, Dave Johnson,
Jeff Holly, and Bill Butler, and they combined to go
(31:41):
three and seven with a six forty four ERA in
one hundred and two innings. Nevertheless, as I've said a
couple of times now, the Twins were in first place
from April to mid June. They finished the first six
weeks of the season that takes us to the end
of May with a twenty nine and seventeen record, which
is a one hundred and two win pace. But they
(32:02):
just weren't that kind of club, and from then on
they weren't even a winning team. Nevertheless, having banked those wins,
they hung in there. They fell as far as five
and a half games out in mid July, but then
came back and just slipped ahead in mid August, holding
the half game lead I mentioned. On August the sixteenth,
they had forty three games to play, so about a
(32:23):
quarter of the season to go. Now to just spoil
the rest of this story slightly, from then on they
were very bad. But do you call them a collapse
team or do you say, looking at that team's strengths
and weaknesses and the almost total absence of a pitching staff,
they were a wily coyote team and they had run
on air for a while, and we should congratulate them
(32:45):
for that before well mourning them or scraping them off
the bottom of the canyon. From the day Elvis died
onward with Moody Blue climbing the charts man, can you
imagine Elvis singing surfs up? From that point on? From
the point that Elvis was very unlikely to record surfs
up or anything else, the Twins were a three to
(33:05):
eighty one team, one hundred lost team, and really in
September they were a lot worse than that. They were
more like the sixty two Mets. The Royals simultaneously were
an eight to ten team. They went thirty eight to
nine in that same period, the post Elvis period, the
Rangers also played really well, going twenty eight and eighteen,
(33:25):
a six to ten pace one hundred win pace. So
the Twins were surrounded and even if they hadn't fallen
off quite so hard, they still probably would have been passed.
Most of the Royals games were not head to head
with the Twins. They were just winning relentlessly anyway. So
here's the neat thing. Let's say the Twins had been
much better and had a five hundred record the rest
(33:47):
of the way, the Royals still would have passed them.
Let's just go crazy and say that the Twins win
over seventy five percent of their remaining games, they would
have finished with one hundred wins. Still not unless several
of those wins had come against the Royals, who played
them five times in September and beat them all five times,
(34:07):
though by that point for the actual Twins it was
much too late. And so I think this is a
matter of perspective. Should we say the Twins collapsed in
one sense? They did in another, reality just caught up
with them and they were passed by a truly great team,
a one hundred and two win team that had one
of the great stretch runs in history. As they say,
(34:28):
sometimes you just have to tip your cap. And now
I would like to ask you to tip your cap
to a break, because I want to get to the
aspect of this Twins team that I really wanted to
talk about. It's just one game in one player, but
something he said was well triggering is not quite the
right word, but again, like Mike Ferro, and it got
(34:49):
me thinking, and I want to share those thoughts with you.
The player in question had a very big day, but
you haven't heard of him at least I don't think
you have. Oh you have. Well, my apologies to you,
you scholar. Let's tell the rest of the class the
story together after this. The single game record for RBIs
(35:31):
by a Minnesota Twin, and that includes the Washington Senators
years is eight O show. It's been done twice, most recently.
The part time outfielder and DH Randy Bush played at
eight during a three for four, two homer game at
Texas in nineteen eighty nine. The Twins won that one
by a score of nineteen to three. Rangers pitchers included
(35:52):
Bobby Witt, Craig McMurtry, Brad Arnsberg, and former first round
pick as a shortstop Jeff Cunkle. Yes, Bush's second homer
came off of him the position player pitching in trash time,
and that practice is so common nowadays that I can
only hope that no one sets a home run record
with a major contribution from infielders of the utility flavor
(36:15):
and fourth outfielders and second catchers and so on in
the game. What was it about four to six weeks ago,
I've lost track of time. It's all dilated here at
the end of the Republic. When Kyle Schwarber hit four
home runs and had a shot at the fifth, I
really hope that he wouldn't set that record against the
third catcher or the mascot. Don't get me wrong, I
wanted to see him do it. I just didn't want
(36:37):
to see him do it that way. As you may recall,
Bush had a long career with the Twins. He was
drafted by them in the second round in nineteen seventy nine,
came up during the big change year of nineteen eighty
two that in part flows out of the year that
we're discussing now, and stayed with them for twelve seasons,
picking up two rings. The other player to do it,
and he did do it in nineteen seventy seven was
(36:59):
named Glenn Ada. Unlike Bush, Adams was kind of a
one season wonder for the Twins. Free agency had just
come in and owner Calvin Griffith was just unwilling to
pay that kind of money for anyone, and so he
was losing players left and right. He kept insisting that
other teams were going to go bankrupt spending big money
(37:19):
on players, but that wasn't going to happen to him,
no sir. And so he lost fourteen players from his
major league roster between nineteen seventy six and seventy seven.
And that's not counting Bert Blyleven, who he traded during
the seventy six season because he wasn't signed and Griffith
wasn't willing to pay him. That was the Hall of
Famer I mentioned earlier. The first player ever to exercise
(37:43):
his rights and change teams under the new system was
Twins fireman Bill Campbell, nickname inevitably Soup. In nineteen seventy six.
Soup had pitched in seventy eight games, all in relief,
thrown one hundred and sixty seven in two thirds innings,
and gone seventeen to five with twenty saves and a
three zero one era. Griffith offered him thirty five thousand
(38:04):
dollars to re sign with the Twins. He took the
Red Sox offer, which was one point one million dollars.
The rules for free agency at that time were not
that every team could negotiate with every player, but rather
that the free agents were in a pool and a
limited number of teams could draft the rights to speak
to each one of them. The Twins drafted the rights
(38:25):
to speak to seven players, lowballed them all and signed none.
And even with their own players, they're less than star players.
Griffith played games with them, specifically with his fourth outfielder
Steve Brye and his unsigned DH Steve Braun. There are
a lot of Steves in this story. Braun agreed to resign,
but only on the condition that Griffith did not protect
(38:47):
him in the upcoming expansion draft that was going to
populate the rosters of the Blue Jays and Mariners. You might,
if you're well vintage like me, remember Braun from the
champion nineteen eighty two Cardinals. He wasn't a player who
hit for very much power at all, but he always
ran very good on base percentages, finishing his career with
two seventy one three seventy one, three sixty seven averages.
(39:11):
He was Whitey Herzog's go to guy off the bench
for years and had a three to eighty one on
base in a pinch hitting role, which almost no one
does well. Griffith gave him some money hoping that he
would be taken in the draft, and he was by
the Mariners. Calvin was relieved. He tried the same trick
with Steve Bry who wasn't as special a player, and
no one bit. Eventually he sold him to Bud Sellig
(39:34):
and the Brewers. You need to play with a full roster, though,
so eventually Griffith bought former Pacific Coast League batting championship
Glenn Adams from the Giants, and he did make the team.
He hard his wrist early in the season and ended
up disappearing for about a month, but once he came back,
he was the lefty DH and sometime corner outfielder both corners.
(39:55):
He ended up hitting a very nice three thirty eight
with a three seventy six on base and a forced
sixty eight slugging percentage in ninety five games. Note that
he walked only eighteen times in two hundred and ninety
played appearances and hit only six home runs, so there
was a lot of success on balls and play, a
success that tends to waiver over time, and indeed he
did not have much of an encore in him. And
(40:16):
although two years later he hit three OHO one in
one hundred and nineteen games, it was a softer three
ZHO one. He had hit three sixty on balls and
play in seventy seven and he never came close to
that again. You can't take this big day away from him, though.
On June twenty sixth, he went four for five with
a double and a homer against the White Sox. Four
(40:36):
of the runs came on a second inning grand slam
off of Steve Stone. If any of you run into Steve,
ask him if he remembers that, but be gentle about it.
That game was at Minnesota Final Scorer Twins nineteen, White
Sox twelve. I should also mention this is fascinating to me.
In addition to what Adams did, which we'll get back
to in half a second. Carew went four for five
(40:58):
with a walk, six runs driven in, and five runs scored,
and got his average over four hundred for the first
time on the season. Again, this is late June. A
sellout Jersey Day crowd gave carew a standing ovation, and
Caru said, I've had more standing ovations this year than
I've had in my entire career. I can't believe it.
The thing that's so great about this is that the
(41:21):
crowds are starting to accept us more. They're pulling for
us more. It's a great feeling. Maybe they're finally starting
to accept me as a ballplayer. Him except Rod Caru.
He had already won five batting titles, He had a
record for steals of home What was there not to accept?
What are you implying about Minneapolis in nineteen seventy seven, Rod,
(41:44):
I wish I had known that. When I spoke to
him after the game, Adam's comment was, I've been trying
to pull the ball and hit everything hard since nineteen
seventy five. I won the Pacific Coast League batting title
with a three point fifty two mark as a spray
hitter in nineteen seventy four. The next year the Giants
sent me down. It made me think, Well, lots of
(42:04):
things can make you think, and you can even do
your own research, but will you think the right things.
Here are some aspects of this that are easier to
perhaps see in retrospect. Adams indeed did get something of
a raw deal from the Giants in nineteen seventy five,
but it's also not wholly surprising that they didn't look
at him the way they might have looked at a
(42:25):
fresh faced kid who had just won a minor league
batting title. He did, indeed, hit three point fifty two
with a four to twenty on base in a five
h seven slugging percentage with thirteen home runs in one
hundred and twenty seven games for Phoenix of the Pacific
Coast League in nineteen seventy four. He was, indeed a
contact guy, didn't walk much. He also wasn't a defensive
(42:46):
asset because he wasn't fast, and there were a lot
of turf parks in the National League. Even in the minors,
he DHD a lot because he had ongoing problems with
shoulder tendonitis that implies he couldn't throw well. As you know,
the National League, out of your stubbornness, didn't have the
designated hitter. They really didn't, because one guy at a
meeting decided to be oppositional defiant. You could look it up,
(43:07):
and so the Giants had a limited number of places
to play our hero. Now, could they have carried him
as a pinch hitter anyway, Sure, and maybe they should have.
If you can figure out how to squeeze a guy
that limited on a roster, and I think they were
at twenty four, then it's not a bad deal because
once a week you're going to want a contact hitter.
Once a week you're going to be playing a one
(43:29):
run game. There's going to be a runner at third
with less than two outs, and you have a high
strikeout guy at the plate, which today is everyone. And
if you had the tool, if you were able as
manager to pull the trigger and bring in a guy
who is going to put the ball in play, you
might do it. All these years later, it sounds like
the Giants sent down a prospect for reasons, but still
(43:51):
they didn't though, or not one in the sense that
we usually mean prospect, And they also didn't send him
down for long. He was twenty seven years old. He
had first been drafted by the Astros in nineteen sixty eight.
He sat in their system for three years, and I
guess he didn't impress them. If you add up his
nineteen seventy and seventy one seasons when he was still
prospect aged and playing a double and TRIPLEA. You get
(44:14):
almost exactly one hundred and sixty two games and averages
of three point fifteen three sixty four four oh three.
He had twenty six doubles, two triples, four home runs,
four steals and seven attempts, twenty nine walks and thirty
five strikeouts. And when you start applying discounts to those
averages for the levels of difficulty between where he was
(44:37):
and where he would be in the major leagues, the
values start to roll backwards and not be that exciting.
In addition, the Astros outfielders in the majors at that
time were Bob Watson, Cesar Sedanio, and Jimmy Winn, all
of whom could hit the ball through a brick wall
without trying too hard. Generally, you want your fourth outfielder
to be able to play center field. That wasn't Adams.
(45:00):
And although it is always dangerous to try thinking along
with the Astros, particularly in the nineteen seventies, you can
see why they made the decisions that they did. And
so they cut him all together in nineteen seventy two
and he went home for a solid year. I'm not
sure what he did in that time after he signed
with the Giants, and as we've discussed, played pretty well.
He was a human being who had a legit ability
(45:22):
to hit three hundred. How many of those are there
among us, not too many. But you have to be
able to do other stuff as well, like get on base,
hit for power, run, and field, and there has to
be room at the inn, and there just wasn't room
at the inn. The same thing was true on the Giants.
The Giants left fielder at the time was Gary Matthews,
(45:43):
the Sarge. He was a very good, high on base
hitter with speed and enough pop to hit over two
hundred home runs in the Majors during a long career
at a time that not every ball was soaring over buildings.
He was still in his twenties. The right fielder was
Bobby Mercer, also still in his twenties, although he'd been
in the Major since the Civil War, well the Vietnam War,
(46:04):
which took two early seasons of his career. He was
with the Giants for two years and although because of
the park largely he couldn't be the MVP contender he
was with the Yankees, he hit two seventy nine three
seventy nine, four to thirty two for them. Very good.
In context, there was nowhere to put Adams but on
the bench, and rightly or wrongly, the Giants chose not
(46:24):
to do that, at least initially. Then they brought him
up in the first week of May nineteen seventy five,
and they used him for pinch hitting and as a sub,
and he was very good that way, particularly as a
pinch hitter, going twelve for thirty three, three sixty four.
Now in nineteen seventy six, they said, great, we'll let
him do that all year. But pinch hitting is hard.
That's exclusively what he did, or almost exclusively. And if
(46:48):
he was trying to hit everything hard, well, he didn't.
He hit a homerless and nearly walkless two forty three
and seventy four at bats. Come December, the Giants needed
space on their roster to protect some kids in the
Rule five draft. And now we have come full circle
with Adams sold to a Twins team that was looking
for bargains, and we have a player who was blaming
(47:11):
his approach at the plate when really it was all
factors beyond his control. But then that's human instinct. Isn't
it to try to fix the unfixable, to try to
take command of situations even when our power over them
is limited. And I was just talking about the Vietnam
War in relationship to the timing of Bobby Mercer's career.
(47:33):
We couldn't win that, but we kept saying bombam harder,
as if that would change something, despite the fact that
the theory was disproven over and over again. And that's
kind of, in a more humane way, what Adams was saying.
I can't make them put me on the roster by
hitting three point fifty two, so I won't just hit
him from now on, I'll hit him harder. But he
had misidentified the limitations that were hurting him, and really
(47:56):
those limitations might not have hurt him with a different
club at a different time. But he couldn't change slow
with bad shoulders, and he couldn't make the Giants trade
Bobby Mercer. And so his solution was just a story
he was telling himself to keep from facing how little
control he really had. You know, the mister Rogers idea
that you're you and we like you for you and
(48:18):
you should like you for you. That cuts a couple
of ways, because it's not just who you are, but
who's around you. An opportunity is not just a matter
of what you do, but the context in which you
do it. And I don't know that Glenn Adams had
it in him to be a great Major leaguer on
too many more days than the big one that he had.
But look at a player like Greg Gross, who came
(48:39):
around at almost the same time that Adams did, and
with the Astros no less, with a similar skill set.
He was a lot younger, but he came up young,
so that's why they intersect. Watson and Sedanio were still
where Adams left them, but the Astros had traded Win
to the Dodgers in December seventy three. There was first
(49:00):
of all, room for Gross to play, and he was
just a little more rounded than Adams, a bit faster,
a lot more patient. But from about the time that
Adams came up, when he was twenty seven, he ended
up in that platoon and pinched a role with the Phillies.
In his case, he held the job not for a
few years but for ten years, and not all of
(49:21):
them were good, but they valued him in ways the
Twins didn't value Adams, and that by itself, a kind
of loyalty or respect leading to opportunity is enough to
make the difference between a long career off the bench
and a short one. Maybe I'm trying to make excuses
for my own feelings, but sometimes I go in circles
with the idea that in many life situations I should
(49:41):
have done more than I did. I was capable of
doing more, showing better. And yet isn't what you did,
definitionally what you were capable of doing? No, says an
ugly voice, you self sabotaged. But say you didn't, say
you did your best and it still wasn't good enough,
and for legit reasons and not just because your boss
was a son of a bitch. Then again, should you
(50:02):
have done better? Or was that all that you were
capable of? The utmost that you were capable of? Oh
so you're saying I'm limited? Well yeah, but isn't everybody?
And like Glenn Adams, was the opportunity in your personal
San Francisco? Ever? Really? There? My personal San Francisco the
(50:24):
sequel unofficial to my private Idaho. You can follow me
publicly at Stephen Gooldman dot b Sky dot social. That's
if you're into social media. If you're not, you can
write us, by which I mean me at Infinite Inning
at gmail dot com, and there remains a Facebook group.
Simply go to Facebook search on Infinite Inning. Bang, you're there.
I was quiet this week. I apologize, but researching this
(50:46):
episode didn't suggest anything like good pictures. They were all
grainy and nondescript, just like the nineteen seventies themselves. Say
did you check out this week's reissue episode? We went
back to episode seventy six and also talked about conspiracy
theories in the Should you wish to support the show,
and I dearly hope you do, please visit Patreon dot com.
Slash the Infinite Inning ads alone do not support us.
(51:07):
Hear of a rudimentary kind available at the hyphen infinite
hyphen Inning dot creator, hyphenspring dot com. Original soundtrack available
Cratis at casual Observer Music dot bandcamp dot com. Finally,
should you find yourself with the proverbial moment to spare,
please go to the podcature of your choice and rate,
review and subscribe. It helps the show gain it at
(51:28):
least I think it does. Does anyone use podcasters anymore?
Do you just absorb these through your hair, now, that's
how I do them. Howard theme song, which you are
hearing now and have been listening to throughout the episode,
was a co composition of myself and doctor Rick Mooring,
who says I've had nightmares about that industrial paper shredder
for years. You mean you were lying about that? While
(51:49):
not lying, I was just telling stories. It's what I
do and who I've always been. Remember, there's a big
difference between a lie and a tale. Between a lie
are named Scott and a Bard, And if I remain
that person for one more week, then I'll be back
next week with more tales from inside the Infinite Inning.
Let me say off the top, so that no one
feels that the admission was not worth the price, that
this is going to be a slightly shorter show than normal.
Usually I endeavor to give you at least forty five
minutes to an hour. However, my voice is acting a
little bit funny, and to be completely honest with you,
this week got away from me just a little bit.
(00:21):
And I think part of it is that the Pennant
Races or whatever it is we call them now, the
birth Races as I sort of saw them called on
MLB dot Com earlier. Today, we're taking up a lot
of my time. It's easier for me to walk away
from a mid June game than it is for me
to walk away from a late September game, especially one
(00:42):
that has implications for the postseason. And so the clock
just kept winding and unwinding, and like the Mets and
the Tigers, I found myself playing from behind, not once
but continuously. I said on Blue Sky, I think about
Wednesday that I had reached a point in the week
on which I reach every week in which I realize
I'm going to be okay schedule wise, so long as
(01:05):
today actually becomes yesterday. I need an eight day week,
and I look forward to whenever it is that I
can figure out how to stop feeling that way. I
also feel a bit down about the general trajectory of
the country. I wanted to share this story with you
for a couple of years now, ever since I first
read it. It's not a baseball story, but an American story.
(01:27):
I was going to say that that's the same thing.
But it's not accurate to say that all baseball stories
are American stories, but not all American stories are baseball stories.
The reason should be obvious. Sho hey Otani Martin Dihigo
on Mareschal Baseball Baby an American game, but it's not
only ours. I read about what I'm going to share
(01:48):
with you in a fantastic book by Adam Hawkschild, American Midnight,
The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracies Forgotten Crisis.
As I've had the book out this week, I can
looking at the cover and thinking, American Midnight, you were
a bit premature. That was the American quarter to eleven.
We're living through American Midnight now, Powell. But of course
(02:10):
the book is nearly four years old now and cannot
be expected to update itself. It's about the government crackdown
on civil rights during and after the First World War.
This is the black Sox time. A lot of enemies
lists got cleared by the government back then. Not that
the government was always wrong to be worried about German sympathizers.
(02:30):
It wasn't just German sympathizers, by the way, it was
labor sympathizers, anarchists, communist sympathizers, really, anyone who wasn't straight
and narrow with the then definition of Americanism. People of color, unfortunately.
But there was some sabotage. There was a little island
that used to sit near the New Jersey side of
the Hudson River that was used as an AMMO dump
(02:52):
during the war. Someone lit a match and literally blew
it off the map. True story. So there was a
real war in a real crisis, but there was necessarily
a real crisis of disloyalty. But what always happens when
we get into that mindset is that the disloyalty idea
becomes pretextual for a lot of reactionaries to just clear
(03:12):
the decks of people that they don't like. It was
illegal to say I don't think we should be in
this war, which people said constantly after the fact, but
you were not allowed to say it in nineteen seventeen
and nineteen eighteen. I don't want my son to be drafted.
You couldn't say that or anything of that nature. It
would be indictable for undermining the war effort. You could,
(03:34):
and some people did go to jail for that kind
of talk. And that book has an example of this
sort of overreach, which I think about continuously, particularly nowadays,
when we all have conversations online that we tell ourselves
our private but really aren't. And not just because you
(03:54):
could be sending intimate pictures between yourself and your significant
other and no they didn't share them, but someone got
in there and shared it for them, and yes, that's embarrassing.
And there are horrifying stories of people whose lives have
been deeply affected by that sort of violation, and even today,
with laws in many states against what we came to
(04:16):
call revenge porn, the people who are affected, who have
had their pictures or videos put out on the Internet,
still have to navigate a Kofka esque maze to get
those pictures removed if they ever can. But I still
don't think that's as kafka, asque as having words that
are private between you and someone else. It doesn't matter
(04:39):
who Party A is and who Party B is, but
you're speaking candidly because you feel that you are in private.
And then someone takes those words and uses them against you.
For example, and here we go back to nineteen eighteen,
there was a cobbler of German origin living in Kentucky.
His name was Charles shober He had a shop. You
(05:01):
brought in your brogins, he healed your souls. He was
sixty six years old, had been living in America since
he was five, and had served as a police officer,
among other civic roles. On Independence Day as Babe Ruth,
both pitching and batting cleanup went all the way in
defeating the Philadelphia Athletics four to three in ten innings.
(05:24):
Schoberg and two pals who used to hang around the
store kibitzing with him the way I used to hang
out in George's comic book store and talk about favorite
issues of The Amazing Spider Man, were arrested. Members of
the local Citizens Patriotic League had decided that these fellows
were insufficiently supportive of the war effort. And therefore disloyal.
(05:46):
The CPL was one of a number of groups at
that time who were essentially organized collections of Karens who
were going around checking to see if everyone who should
have been drafted had been or if they had actually
gone to the war, and that no one said anything
that offended them, and if they did, they would insist
on talking to the manager. In Shoberke's case, because he
(06:07):
had a German accent. Probably they had hired detectives to
bug his shop, then turned over what they had heard
to federal prosecutors. Said. Prosecutors charged the three with trying
to quote favor the cause unquote of Germany and bringing
the American military into contempt, scorn, contumly, and disrespect. I
admit this may be the only time in my life
(06:27):
I've heard the word contumly used outside of Hamlet's soliloquy
for who would bear the whips and scorns of time?
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumly. I well remember
the high school vocabulary assignment, and you may too. This
policing of shirkers in the disloyal in Britain took the
form of the White Feather campaign, in which I think
(06:48):
mostly women, but maybe the occasional older fellow went around
and if they spotted any male of apparent draft age,
without knowing anything about the guy, like if he had
ninety eight dependents or was missing eleven of his toes,
would run up and hand him a white feather to
stigmatize him publicly as a coward. And there are a
number of stories of veterans who had been in France
(07:13):
and it had say they're private shot off. So now, yeah,
they're nineteen and unless you happen to look down their trousers,
they seem fine. But they've given they're done. The government
has said, thank you very much for your service, we'll
take the ball the rest of the way without you.
Just watch from the sidelines as best you can. And
these poor fellows go home and try to resume their lives. Yes,
they've put on civilian clothes because they're out. They charged
(07:34):
a German machine gun nest and lost their naughty bits.
What else can you ask for short of death? But nevertheless,
there they are waiting for a train and some lady
comes running up and chames them with a flower. And
what can they do but sit there and feel God
awful and say this is so unfair. I joke, but
I shouldn't because if you have seen any of the photographs,
(07:58):
your documentaries of the true victims of that war, who
came back horribly disfigured, with missing limbs and in many
cases missing faces, and had to go through the rest
of their lives with these awkward phantom of the opera
pros thesis, then you have seen the true meaning of horror. Unfortunately,
there are many true meanings of horror, and now that
I think about it, some of those documentaries also cover
(08:21):
the folks who came back with severe psychological disability or
what they used to call shell shock and what we
now call post traumatic stress disorder. To follow in the
footsteps of the great George Carlin, who talked about the
difference between shell shock and post traumatic stress disorder, the
linguistic difference. I mean, shell shock about did the job
in terms of description, while PTSD is distancing as hell.
(08:45):
It was shell shock. And if you see some of
that footage from over one hundred years ago and you
come away unmoved, then you must have a heart of stone.
As always, I digress at least a little bit. So
what had Schoberg and his friend said, they were shocking things,
things like this is a war for money. Someone is
getting rich off this war, and it ain't me. They
had said that the two Germans then running the war,
(09:08):
Paul von Hindenberg and Eric Ludendorf, were great generals. He
questioned if America was truly on the side of the
democracies when the Americans and the English were allies. They
talk of democracy, How can this country join with England
if it is democratic? England has been oppressing the Irish.
They wondered aloud whether American soldiers could be trained up
(09:30):
and brought to the Western Front before the Germans won
the war, which was exactly what Hindenburg and Ludendorf were
trying to do at the time. It was a real
possibility and not at all a secret. They asked Schoberg
how much money he had given to war causes like
war bonds, which he had, And did he sing to
himself in private while working? And if so, did he
sing in English or German? Everything that was recorded was
(09:54):
said in private conversations, as private as if you were
talking to your wife or your parents or your best friend,
and as private as if you were singing to yourself
while working or in the shower. Those words had no
power to move anyone. They weren't speeches made in front
of a mass audience at Union Square. Saying that those
three fellows in a shoe store or a shoe repair
(10:17):
shop had been equally as disloyal or harmful to the
war effort as someone who gave a major address is
like saying that your aunt Patti seventy four singing the
Hills are Alive with the sound of music in the
shower has the same impact as Julie Andrews singing it
on a seventy millimeter movie screen. The judge told the
(10:37):
jury that that didn't matter. All it took to be
disloyal was to have a disloyal state of mind. Disloyal
state of mind the Billy Joel song you never knew
you needed or desperately wanted to have. Well, they were convicted.
Schoberg was found guilty on twenty four counts, and he
was sentenced to ten years in federal prison. In his sixties,
(11:00):
despite having been in the US since the eighteen fifties,
he had not proved himself as an American. His two
friends convicted of fewer accounts received seven and five years
in federal prison, respectively, and there they sat until Warren
Harding became president and decided to forgive some of the
victims of government overreached by the Wilson administration. We ask,
(11:22):
can it happen here? Will it happen here? It has
happened here intermittently. It helps if some of us decide
to play along, like the citizen's protective Karens, the federal prosecutors,
the judge, the jury, and then multiply by fifty states
once people start to act. Is if you don't have
the rights you do, even if they're written down somewhere, functionally,
(11:44):
you don't have them. This brings to mind a joke
I read many years ago, and please forgive me, but
it involves the evil little man with the toothbrush mustache.
In my defense, I read it in a book on
Jewish humor. It's very basic, and it goes like this
that Adolf Hitler was not satisfied with the reports that
his propaganda minister was feeding him on his own popularity,
(12:07):
so he decided to disguise himself and see how the
citizenry really felt about him. So he goes out and
he winds up in a movie theater with a bunch
of average Germans and probably the odd Jewish person who
hadn't yet fallen into his clutches. Maybe it was early
in the regime, so the movie starts as was typical
(12:27):
at that time. The theater shows a newsreel. Who is
the subject of the newsreel, but of course the German
chancellor himself, Adolf Hitler. As soon as Adolf appears on
the big screen, everyone in the theater jumps up and shouts,
along with the audience in the newsreel, See Kyle, See Kyle.
Everyone that is except Hitler. Why because outside of the
(12:48):
mel Brooks version of him, he's not in the habit
of going around saying hile myself. And at that point,
the fella in the seat next to him leans over
and in the story I read that fella is supposed
to be Jewish. I don't think it really mattered whether
he is or he isn't. He leans down and whispers, listen, buddy,
we all feel the same way you do, but there's
no reason to get yourself in trouble. Thus endeth the joke,
(13:09):
such as it is. And the guy who said that
he didn't pass go. He didn't collect two hundred dollars.
He didn't emigrate to the States, but one irate phone
call later, he proceeded directly to the Infinite Inning. Well, hello,
(14:00):
and welcome back to the show. I wish I was
as happy as I sound. I am happy to be
back with you for Infinite Inning three hundred and forty six.
I remain for as long as they allow me to remain.
Steven Goldman, you are a convivial host for this trip
to the past on a mission to better understand the present.
I hope this episode of the show finds you well,
(14:22):
as you know if you follow along. I got out
this week's reissue episode of Daylight. This morn ain't coming
out at daylight. It's coming out on time, or as
on time as they get. But it has definitely been
a struggle. I won't perseverate about that. There's a word
for you. One of my closest friends likes using that word,
or at least he used to. He certainly uses it
more often than he uses the word contumly. He would
surprise the hell out of me if he uses the
(14:43):
word constantly anytime soon. I feel like my friends are
less focused on throwing me change ups, change ups just
for the sake of being entertaining. I don't mean for
the sake of, say, destroying my trust in them. No,
just for fun. I feel like that's more my job.
This same friend, I used to meet him for lunch,
which once a week about five minutes from where we live, respectively,
(15:04):
was kind of a spot in the middle in our
rather small town. And I would always be late because
I run late with things. I don't make a secret
of it. And he would say, where have you been?
And I would say I got lost, or I'd say
I got stuck in traffic, and I would just not
discuss it anymore. I'd move on for so how are you?
And it's not about being dishonest. If you asked me directly,
(15:25):
I would admit, yeah, I left late. I overslept. It's
about commitment to the bit and always supplying the unexpected.
If we make each other think, none of us will
ever go see now, at least knock Wood, I hope not.
There was a time in the seventh grade when I
failed to do my homework and the teacher asked me
in front of the rest of the class why I
had not done my homework, and I will spare you
(15:47):
the details. But I decided in that moment to see
just how much of the remaining forty five minutes of
the class period I could take up with my explanation.
She let me go about ten minutes, ten minutes when
she was occasionally tear and said, oh, Steven, quite a bit.
And I guess it was then that I knew I
would grow up to be a podcaster. I think the
(16:07):
mistake she made was saying something annoying like, and don't
say that the dog ates your homework, as if I
would do that, as if I would do something so
cheap and un original. And I said, no, it wasn't
the dog who ate my homework. It was an industrial
strength paper shredding machine. And then she made her second mistake,
which was to say what, rather than continuing to dwell
(16:28):
on the past, let me explain why the second act
of the show is going to be a little shorter
than usual. I already mentioned my voice, I already mentioned
time management challenges, and I am doing my best to
hide both at all times. But because the story doesn't
need to be that long. My thinking about this story
began in the middle of the week when my pal
(16:48):
and occasional guest on this show, marvelous Mike Ferrin erstwhile
partner on the late lamented Bob Dylan Everything Is Broken podcast,
not to mention my co star in Eleven Road Movies,
the Flight two series, which began with the now classic
Flight to Cleveland that critics hailed as the only true
follow up to the Hope Crosby pictures of the nineteen forties.
(17:11):
We're on a flight to Cleveland, even if we don't
know why. You remember he invited me to talk about
the collapsing. It's still ongoing. As I say these words,
I started laughing because I thought, how best to describe
what is happening to the Detroit Tigers. And what popped
into my mind was Van dyke Park's inscrutable lyrics to
(17:33):
the classic Bryan Wilson Beach Boys collaboration Surfs up, columnated
ruins Domino. That definitely describes what the Detroit Tigers have
done this month. If a team can domino, they surely have.
They are still domino ing. It was probably because of
the industrial strength paper shrudder. So where was that? Yes,
So Mike has a show on SiriusXM which he co
(17:57):
hosts with Jim Juquet, and he invited me to come
on to about some historical examples of teams that have collapsed.
They named some of the famous ones. I named some
of the famous ones. But I realized as we were
talking about it, and as I looked at some of
these teams, that there are clubs that are legitimately good
but for whatever reason, did suffer a big tail spin
(18:18):
in September. But that might just be a sequencing problem.
And if they just had a bad May or a
bad July and a good September and then fallen short,
we would have said they were heroic. And then there
are teams and I think of some of Bill Terry's
nineteen thirties Giants teams. I think about three of which
spun out, but two others won a pennant and won
a championship. You can't say that these weren't very good rosters,
(18:41):
but they did have a tendency to tail off. And
that was because he was the sort of manager that
picked nine guys and played them or eight guys and
rotated through the pitchers, and so they got tired or
if injuries set in, they didn't really have a fallback
position because the bench guys had never played. And another
team that qualifies that, I think is the nineteen seventy
(19:02):
eight Red Sox, where Don Zimmer played the same guys
all year and then Dwight Evans suffered a concussion on
a hit by pitch late in the season and Zimmer
just kept playing it because there wasn't anybody else. And
Evans went through that bit of the season in a
fugue state, hit something like one to sixty seven, and
tended to run in the wrong direction when balls were
(19:23):
hit towards him because he didn't know what was going on.
And here's the thing. If they hadn't been being chased,
it wouldn't have mattered. They didn't collapse in the sense
that they played two point fifty ball in September the
way the Tigers basically are. They just slacked off their
earlier pace because one thing that you learn in baseball
school is that one replacement level player can kill you dead.
(19:45):
And Dwight Evans was a great player. He was a
haul of very good player at the very least. You know,
I don't really care very much about who's in the
Hall of Fame or who's not. I talk about that
virtually every show that it's a career service award. But
I will tell you there are many players not as
good as Dwight Evans in the Hall of Fame that
it would be no insult to the gallery if at
(20:05):
some point the Veterans Committee or whatever they call it nowadays,
chose Dewey Evans to get a plaque. I've mentioned this before,
but since I was just flashing back to junior high
and high school, there was a year that Meat or
someone who makes school supplies put out that year's TOPS
cards in folder form, so you legitimately could have on
(20:26):
your desk a giant like eight x eleven baseball card
that had the picture on the front with the dress
from TOPS that year and the stats on the back.
And I spent so much class time not hearing a
word that the teacher said, but just going over those stats,
and I had four or five of them. I often
tell people when I'm frustrated with my career in some
(20:47):
sense that I didn't plan to talk or write about
baseball when I grew up, but it just happened. It
chose me, not the other way around. It's really not true.
I just wasn't aware of it well. Dwight Evans was
one of those folders, and I would look at I
think it was his nineteen eighty seven season, pretty sure,
three zero five four seventeen five sixty nine, led the
(21:10):
American League with one hundred and six walks, drove in
one hundred and twenty three runs, scored one hundred and
nine on thirty four homers, thirty seven doubles. And I
would just sit there in class and this teacher that
I had, who sadly actually seemed to have something like
Alzheimer's and they knew it, but he wouldn't quit and
they wouldn't retire him. Would be droning on and on
about William Faulkner's late in August, Jimminy Cricket, the main
(21:33):
character eating toothpaste. Did you know Jimminy Cricket was a
christ figure? And then he'd vapor lock and class would
just pause, like you stop the VCR with the remote
for up to five for ten minutes. The only person
who ruined Faulkner for me more than that guy was
Faukner himself. I keep trying, and I just can't. Someday
Somebody's gonna come in here. And look through my library
(21:54):
and say, boy, you like Fawkner, don't you. No, It's
just that I keep reloading and hoping that this one
will unlock the magic absolom Nope. Intruder in the dust, Nope.
As I lay dying, uh uh. The Reavers even nice
scored by John Williams, narration by our father Burgess Meredith
in a concert version. But no, sadly no. And so
(22:14):
all of that would be going on or not going on,
as the case might be, and it would just be
me and Dwight Evans and those stats and me saying,
uh so, no, not a replacement level player, but for
that month, don Zimmer made him one, or put him
in the position of being one, and in a close race,
in a race that you lose by one playoff game,
a playoff game that maybe you might have avoided. That's
(22:36):
all that it takes. But there are other kinds of teams.
And I mentioned this to Mike, and dare I call
him Jim, because we're not that kind of close. Perhaps
someday there are teams that never should have been there,
but for whatever reason, they managed to defy gravity for
a while. And what I said on the show and
I hadn't thought about it this way before, and I
(22:56):
think it's right. Is that some of those teams, the
collapse team and this year's Tigers maybe one, are kind
of like Wiley coyote. He runs off the cliff and
he treads air for a while, and yeah, inevitably he
falls and goes pef. But when you think about it,
that he ran on air for a while, that's pretty
cool too. We should give him some credit for that.
And so I didn't talk about the team that I'm
(23:16):
going to talk about today. In fact, I'm going to
talk about right after this break, the nineteen seventy seven
Minnesota Twins, a team that had it for a moment
but they never should have. And that's really all I
need to say. I'll unpack it just a little bit
more on the other side of this break, but mainly
what I want to talk about is their platoon, dah
(23:37):
and fourth outfielder. I think it's a more piquant story,
and I do hope you will stick around until, unlike
that tragic doomed coyote, we claw and scrabble and reach
the other side. Gee, Snoopy, Maybe this won't be such
(24:12):
a short show after all. I've been talking so dang much,
you know, I didn't even mention that. This week at
Baseball Perspectus, my column was called the Kaiser needs a
new arm, and he did because it had been mangled
at birth. But really, I'm on the same subject I've
been on free speech, and my question was, what if
we couldn't talk about what ails the Washington Nationals. What
(24:34):
if their new general manager, who was just hired this week,
at least tentatively, could lie about the state of the team,
what could you do about it? Yeah, we won the
championship this year. Well, I didn't see them in the postseason.
I watched every game on TV and I didn't see
sh We all feel the same way you do. But
there's no reason to get in trouble. So the nineteen
seventy seven Twins finished fourth with a record of eighty
(24:56):
four and seventy seven. They were seventeen and a half
games back back of the first place Kansas City Royals.
They were in first place for sixty days. Actually, they
spent their last day in first place by a mere
half game in mid August. On the last day that,
depending on your point of view, the last day that
Elvis was alive or the first day that he was dead,
(25:17):
however you want to look at it. That day they
lost a thirteen inning duel with the Baltimore Orioles, which
was briefly interrupted when a moth flew into Butch Weineger's ear.
He was the Twins catcher he was catching at the time. Look,
this may gross you out, It grosses me out. But
according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Lee May of the
(25:39):
O's was going to bat to lead off the bottom
of the sixth when Weineger pulled off his mask and
began twisting his head around. He seems to have fled
to the dugout, and who could blame him there was
a moth stuck in his ear. Now, given time and
a humane opponent, the Twins and their trainer might have
been able to figure this out. But baseball's rules do
not provide spensation to the catcher to go running madly
(26:03):
off the field because he feels like a bug is
trying to crawl into his brain. Unfortunately, the opposing manager
was not humane. He was earl Weaver. So he comes
running out onto the field one of several times he
did in that game, from which he was ultimately ejected,
not for this, but for arguing I think a called
third striker a check swing and he goes screaming to
(26:23):
the umpires. No, no, it's been ten We've stopped the
game for ten minutes. Baseball doesn't have timeouts, and so,
under pressure, the Twins trainer poured hot water into Wineger's ear,
killing the moth, but then left it there so that
play could resume. Weineger caught pitcher Pete Redford for four
batters with a dead moth in his ear before finally
(26:45):
having the insectoid corpse extricated between frames. Weineger had three
more hit bats in that game and didn't reach base.
Can you blame him? As I said, the Twins had
spent about sixty days in first place in the al Wes.
This was a team that had had one of the
best offenses in baseball in nineteen seventy six, and they'd
(27:06):
have a pretty good one again in nineteen seventy seven.
Rod Carew, moving permanently from second base to first base,
flirted with four hundred and won the MVP with a
three to eighty eight patting average and a ridiculous two
hundred and thirty nine hits. The outfield of Larry Heisel,
the sadly ill fated Lineman Bostock, and Disco dan Ford
(27:27):
was very productive, with Heiseel leading the AL with one
hundred and nineteen RBIs on a three zero two average
and twenty eight home runs. The pitching staff, however, was
terribly weak. Some of that was just because sometimes they are,
and some of that was because of the time in
baseball's history, and I'll get to that in a minute.
(27:47):
They had had a legit Hall of Famer, but they
had traded him in seventy seven. They had but one
legit starter in Dave Goltz, who won twenty games. Two
other starters were rushed prospects who'd never pan out, Paul
Thormiscott and Pete Redford. The fourth was a thirty one
year old named Jeff Zhon, a groundballing lefty who would
(28:08):
be quite the effective pitcher in the future, but was
coming off of some surgery and just wasn't great that year.
And they never did have a fifth starter, and that's
a sad story in itself. The fifth starter as of
opening day was a rookie lefty, at least I think
he was still a rookie, and he probably still is.
A rookie named Mike Pazik. He had been drafted in
(28:30):
nineteen seventy one by the Yankees, didn't impress, and in
nineteen seventy four, the Twins traded for him. Minnesota gave
him brief trials in both seventy five and seventy six,
and the reason that they were brief is that in
a total of twenty eight and the third innings, he
gave up forty one hits, walked fourteen, allowed five home runs,
struck out four point five per nine, and his overall
(28:51):
ERA was seven point eighty five. Now, if you look
up his minor league record, you might say to yourself, yeah, okay,
seems about right. The Twins, though, owner Calgar Griffith, pitching
coach Don McMahon, and manager Gene Mock, were going off
his nineteen seventy six at Triple A Tacoma, when he
had a fourteen and five record with a slightly negative
strikeout walk ratio but a four to fourteen ERA, which
(29:12):
was actually half decent in context. He made the team
out of spring training. He made his first three starts.
He pitched eighteen innings with a two point fifty ERA,
and was one to zero. You can't ask for anything
more from your fifth starter. But then he got into
the wrong car on the wrong road at the wrong time.
In late April, the twins flew into Minneapolis after completing
a road trip. Reliever Dave Carrithers had a VW van
(29:36):
and he offered Pazick and outfielder Disco dan Ford a ride.
They stopped for a drink. They did not drink to excess.
Everyone involved in this story passed a sobriety test, and
in a sense, it wouldn't have mattered if the ballplayers
had been drinking, because there wasn't a hell of a
lot they could have done about what happened next. The
(29:56):
two pitchers asked Ford if he wanted to stay with
them to get something to eat, and he said, nope,
I'm going home. So they headed off too, and that
was when they got into a wrong way accident. It
was not at all their fault. A twenty three year
old woman got on the highway by going down an
exit ramp and hit Cariths and Pazock head on. She
(30:18):
suffered minor injuries was not even taken to the hospital.
Cariths broke a wrist and injured a knee. He was
able to come back. Late in the season, Pazick suffered
two broken legs, both broken below the knees, and was
never able to come back. I could have been there too,
Ford said the next day just messed up my mind
(30:38):
a little today. Can't blame him. The woman was ticketed
for hazard is driving, three hundred dollars fine or ninety
days in jail, and that's all she got. And look,
you can't know what would have happened. Had Pazick been
able to pitch. He might have regressed on his own.
He probably would have. We know from baseball that's often
the way it goes. But he certainly deserved the chance
(30:59):
to try on his own. And I'm not saying that
we should blame the wrong way driver. It seems like she,
like I said, wasn't intoxicated. She just got lost and confused.
We should just blame cruel fate and leave it at that.
Shades of a team that really did collapse, the nineteen
sixty four Phillies, although you could argue they were like
the Twins in the sense that they were a bit
(31:20):
undermanned for the race that they found themselves in. Geene Mock,
manager of that team too, once again decided not to
solve the problem but his best he could just tried
to stick with a four man rotation the rest of
the way whenever he couldn't avoid going to a fifth starter.
It didn't work out. The Twins tried Ron Schuler, Dave Johnson,
Jeff Holly, and Bill Butler, and they combined to go
(31:41):
three and seven with a six forty four ERA in
one hundred and two innings. Nevertheless, as I've said a
couple of times now, the Twins were in first place
from April to mid June. They finished the first six
weeks of the season that takes us to the end
of May with a twenty nine and seventeen record, which
is a one hundred and two win pace. But they
(32:02):
just weren't that kind of club, and from then on
they weren't even a winning team. Nevertheless, having banked those wins,
they hung in there. They fell as far as five
and a half games out in mid July, but then
came back and just slipped ahead in mid August, holding
the half game lead I mentioned. On August the sixteenth,
they had forty three games to play, so about a
(32:23):
quarter of the season to go. Now to just spoil
the rest of this story slightly, from then on they
were very bad. But do you call them a collapse
team or do you say, looking at that team's strengths
and weaknesses and the almost total absence of a pitching staff,
they were a wily coyote team and they had run
on air for a while, and we should congratulate them
(32:45):
for that before well mourning them or scraping them off
the bottom of the canyon. From the day Elvis died
onward with Moody Blue climbing the charts man, can you
imagine Elvis singing surfs up? From that point on? From
the point that Elvis was very unlikely to record surfs
up or anything else, the Twins were a three to
(33:05):
eighty one team, one hundred lost team, and really in
September they were a lot worse than that. They were
more like the sixty two Mets. The Royals simultaneously were
an eight to ten team. They went thirty eight to
nine in that same period, the post Elvis period, the
Rangers also played really well, going twenty eight and eighteen,
(33:25):
a six to ten pace one hundred win pace. So
the Twins were surrounded and even if they hadn't fallen
off quite so hard, they still probably would have been passed.
Most of the Royals games were not head to head
with the Twins. They were just winning relentlessly anyway. So
here's the neat thing. Let's say the Twins had been
much better and had a five hundred record the rest
(33:47):
of the way, the Royals still would have passed them.
Let's just go crazy and say that the Twins win
over seventy five percent of their remaining games, they would
have finished with one hundred wins. Still not unless several
of those wins had come against the Royals, who played
them five times in September and beat them all five times,
(34:07):
though by that point for the actual Twins it was
much too late. And so I think this is a
matter of perspective. Should we say the Twins collapsed in
one sense? They did in another, reality just caught up
with them and they were passed by a truly great team,
a one hundred and two win team that had one
of the great stretch runs in history. As they say,
(34:28):
sometimes you just have to tip your cap. And now
I would like to ask you to tip your cap
to a break, because I want to get to the
aspect of this Twins team that I really wanted to
talk about. It's just one game in one player, but
something he said was well triggering is not quite the
right word, but again, like Mike Ferro, and it got
(34:49):
me thinking, and I want to share those thoughts with you.
The player in question had a very big day, but
you haven't heard of him at least I don't think
you have. Oh you have. Well, my apologies to you,
you scholar. Let's tell the rest of the class the
story together after this. The single game record for RBIs
(35:31):
by a Minnesota Twin, and that includes the Washington Senators
years is eight O show. It's been done twice, most recently.
The part time outfielder and DH Randy Bush played at
eight during a three for four, two homer game at
Texas in nineteen eighty nine. The Twins won that one
by a score of nineteen to three. Rangers pitchers included
(35:52):
Bobby Witt, Craig McMurtry, Brad Arnsberg, and former first round
pick as a shortstop Jeff Cunkle. Yes, Bush's second homer
came off of him the position player pitching in trash time,
and that practice is so common nowadays that I can
only hope that no one sets a home run record
with a major contribution from infielders of the utility flavor
(36:15):
and fourth outfielders and second catchers and so on in
the game. What was it about four to six weeks ago,
I've lost track of time. It's all dilated here at
the end of the Republic. When Kyle Schwarber hit four
home runs and had a shot at the fifth, I
really hope that he wouldn't set that record against the
third catcher or the mascot. Don't get me wrong, I
wanted to see him do it. I just didn't want
(36:37):
to see him do it that way. As you may recall,
Bush had a long career with the Twins. He was
drafted by them in the second round in nineteen seventy nine,
came up during the big change year of nineteen eighty
two that in part flows out of the year that
we're discussing now, and stayed with them for twelve seasons,
picking up two rings. The other player to do it,
and he did do it in nineteen seventy seven was
(36:59):
named Glenn Ada. Unlike Bush, Adams was kind of a
one season wonder for the Twins. Free agency had just
come in and owner Calvin Griffith was just unwilling to
pay that kind of money for anyone, and so he
was losing players left and right. He kept insisting that
other teams were going to go bankrupt spending big money
(37:19):
on players, but that wasn't going to happen to him,
no sir. And so he lost fourteen players from his
major league roster between nineteen seventy six and seventy seven.
And that's not counting Bert Blyleven, who he traded during
the seventy six season because he wasn't signed and Griffith
wasn't willing to pay him. That was the Hall of
Famer I mentioned earlier. The first player ever to exercise
(37:43):
his rights and change teams under the new system was
Twins fireman Bill Campbell, nickname inevitably Soup. In nineteen seventy six.
Soup had pitched in seventy eight games, all in relief,
thrown one hundred and sixty seven in two thirds innings,
and gone seventeen to five with twenty saves and a
three zero one era. Griffith offered him thirty five thousand
(38:04):
dollars to re sign with the Twins. He took the
Red Sox offer, which was one point one million dollars.
The rules for free agency at that time were not
that every team could negotiate with every player, but rather
that the free agents were in a pool and a
limited number of teams could draft the rights to speak
to each one of them. The Twins drafted the rights
(38:25):
to speak to seven players, lowballed them all and signed none.
And even with their own players, they're less than star players.
Griffith played games with them, specifically with his fourth outfielder
Steve Brye and his unsigned DH Steve Braun. There are
a lot of Steves in this story. Braun agreed to resign,
but only on the condition that Griffith did not protect
(38:47):
him in the upcoming expansion draft that was going to
populate the rosters of the Blue Jays and Mariners. You might,
if you're well vintage like me, remember Braun from the
champion nineteen eighty two Cardinals. He wasn't a player who
hit for very much power at all, but he always
ran very good on base percentages, finishing his career with
two seventy one three seventy one, three sixty seven averages.
(39:11):
He was Whitey Herzog's go to guy off the bench
for years and had a three to eighty one on
base in a pinch hitting role, which almost no one
does well. Griffith gave him some money hoping that he
would be taken in the draft, and he was by
the Mariners. Calvin was relieved. He tried the same trick
with Steve Bry who wasn't as special a player, and
no one bit. Eventually he sold him to Bud Sellig
(39:34):
and the Brewers. You need to play with a full roster, though,
so eventually Griffith bought former Pacific Coast League batting championship
Glenn Adams from the Giants, and he did make the team.
He hard his wrist early in the season and ended
up disappearing for about a month, but once he came back,
he was the lefty DH and sometime corner outfielder both corners.
(39:55):
He ended up hitting a very nice three thirty eight
with a three seventy six on base and a forced
sixty eight slugging percentage in ninety five games. Note that
he walked only eighteen times in two hundred and ninety
played appearances and hit only six home runs, so there
was a lot of success on balls and play, a
success that tends to waiver over time, and indeed he
did not have much of an encore in him. And
(40:16):
although two years later he hit three OHO one in
one hundred and nineteen games, it was a softer three
ZHO one. He had hit three sixty on balls and
play in seventy seven and he never came close to
that again. You can't take this big day away from him, though.
On June twenty sixth, he went four for five with
a double and a homer against the White Sox. Four
(40:36):
of the runs came on a second inning grand slam
off of Steve Stone. If any of you run into Steve,
ask him if he remembers that, but be gentle about it.
That game was at Minnesota Final Scorer Twins nineteen, White
Sox twelve. I should also mention this is fascinating to me.
In addition to what Adams did, which we'll get back
to in half a second. Carew went four for five
(40:58):
with a walk, six runs driven in, and five runs scored,
and got his average over four hundred for the first
time on the season. Again, this is late June. A
sellout Jersey Day crowd gave carew a standing ovation, and
Caru said, I've had more standing ovations this year than
I've had in my entire career. I can't believe it.
The thing that's so great about this is that the
(41:21):
crowds are starting to accept us more. They're pulling for
us more. It's a great feeling. Maybe they're finally starting
to accept me as a ballplayer. Him except Rod Caru.
He had already won five batting titles, He had a
record for steals of home What was there not to accept?
What are you implying about Minneapolis in nineteen seventy seven, Rod,
(41:44):
I wish I had known that. When I spoke to
him after the game, Adam's comment was, I've been trying
to pull the ball and hit everything hard since nineteen
seventy five. I won the Pacific Coast League batting title
with a three point fifty two mark as a spray
hitter in nineteen seventy four. The next year the Giants
sent me down. It made me think, Well, lots of
(42:04):
things can make you think, and you can even do
your own research, but will you think the right things.
Here are some aspects of this that are easier to
perhaps see in retrospect. Adams indeed did get something of
a raw deal from the Giants in nineteen seventy five,
but it's also not wholly surprising that they didn't look
at him the way they might have looked at a
(42:25):
fresh faced kid who had just won a minor league
batting title. He did, indeed, hit three point fifty two
with a four to twenty on base in a five
h seven slugging percentage with thirteen home runs in one
hundred and twenty seven games for Phoenix of the Pacific
Coast League in nineteen seventy four. He was, indeed a
contact guy, didn't walk much. He also wasn't a defensive
(42:46):
asset because he wasn't fast, and there were a lot
of turf parks in the National League. Even in the minors,
he DHD a lot because he had ongoing problems with
shoulder tendonitis that implies he couldn't throw well. As you know,
the National League, out of your stubbornness, didn't have the
designated hitter. They really didn't, because one guy at a
meeting decided to be oppositional defiant. You could look it up,
(43:07):
and so the Giants had a limited number of places
to play our hero. Now, could they have carried him
as a pinch hitter anyway, Sure, and maybe they should have.
If you can figure out how to squeeze a guy
that limited on a roster, and I think they were
at twenty four, then it's not a bad deal because
once a week you're going to want a contact hitter.
Once a week you're going to be playing a one
(43:29):
run game. There's going to be a runner at third
with less than two outs, and you have a high
strikeout guy at the plate, which today is everyone. And
if you had the tool, if you were able as
manager to pull the trigger and bring in a guy
who is going to put the ball in play, you
might do it. All these years later, it sounds like
the Giants sent down a prospect for reasons, but still
(43:51):
they didn't though, or not one in the sense that
we usually mean prospect, And they also didn't send him
down for long. He was twenty seven years old. He
had first been drafted by the Astros in nineteen sixty eight.
He sat in their system for three years, and I
guess he didn't impress them. If you add up his
nineteen seventy and seventy one seasons when he was still
prospect aged and playing a double and TRIPLEA. You get
(44:14):
almost exactly one hundred and sixty two games and averages
of three point fifteen three sixty four four oh three.
He had twenty six doubles, two triples, four home runs,
four steals and seven attempts, twenty nine walks and thirty
five strikeouts. And when you start applying discounts to those
averages for the levels of difficulty between where he was
(44:37):
and where he would be in the major leagues, the
values start to roll backwards and not be that exciting.
In addition, the Astros outfielders in the majors at that
time were Bob Watson, Cesar Sedanio, and Jimmy Winn, all
of whom could hit the ball through a brick wall
without trying too hard. Generally, you want your fourth outfielder
to be able to play center field. That wasn't Adams.
(45:00):
And although it is always dangerous to try thinking along
with the Astros, particularly in the nineteen seventies, you can
see why they made the decisions that they did. And
so they cut him all together in nineteen seventy two
and he went home for a solid year. I'm not
sure what he did in that time after he signed
with the Giants, and as we've discussed, played pretty well.
He was a human being who had a legit ability
(45:22):
to hit three hundred. How many of those are there
among us, not too many. But you have to be
able to do other stuff as well, like get on base,
hit for power, run, and field, and there has to
be room at the inn, and there just wasn't room
at the inn. The same thing was true on the Giants.
The Giants left fielder at the time was Gary Matthews,
(45:43):
the Sarge. He was a very good, high on base
hitter with speed and enough pop to hit over two
hundred home runs in the Majors during a long career
at a time that not every ball was soaring over buildings.
He was still in his twenties. The right fielder was
Bobby Mercer, also still in his twenties, although he'd been
in the Major since the Civil War, well the Vietnam War,
(46:04):
which took two early seasons of his career. He was
with the Giants for two years and although because of
the park largely he couldn't be the MVP contender he
was with the Yankees, he hit two seventy nine three
seventy nine, four to thirty two for them. Very good.
In context, there was nowhere to put Adams but on
the bench, and rightly or wrongly, the Giants chose not
(46:24):
to do that, at least initially. Then they brought him
up in the first week of May nineteen seventy five,
and they used him for pinch hitting and as a sub,
and he was very good that way, particularly as a
pinch hitter, going twelve for thirty three, three sixty four.
Now in nineteen seventy six, they said, great, we'll let
him do that all year. But pinch hitting is hard.
That's exclusively what he did, or almost exclusively. And if
(46:48):
he was trying to hit everything hard, well, he didn't.
He hit a homerless and nearly walkless two forty three
and seventy four at bats. Come December, the Giants needed
space on their roster to protect some kids in the
Rule five draft. And now we have come full circle
with Adams sold to a Twins team that was looking
for bargains, and we have a player who was blaming
(47:11):
his approach at the plate when really it was all
factors beyond his control. But then that's human instinct. Isn't
it to try to fix the unfixable, to try to
take command of situations even when our power over them
is limited. And I was just talking about the Vietnam
War in relationship to the timing of Bobby Mercer's career.
(47:33):
We couldn't win that, but we kept saying bombam harder,
as if that would change something, despite the fact that
the theory was disproven over and over again. And that's
kind of, in a more humane way, what Adams was saying.
I can't make them put me on the roster by
hitting three point fifty two, so I won't just hit
him from now on, I'll hit him harder. But he
had misidentified the limitations that were hurting him, and really
(47:56):
those limitations might not have hurt him with a different
club at a different time. But he couldn't change slow
with bad shoulders, and he couldn't make the Giants trade
Bobby Mercer. And so his solution was just a story
he was telling himself to keep from facing how little
control he really had. You know, the mister Rogers idea
that you're you and we like you for you and
(48:18):
you should like you for you. That cuts a couple
of ways, because it's not just who you are, but
who's around you. An opportunity is not just a matter
of what you do, but the context in which you
do it. And I don't know that Glenn Adams had
it in him to be a great Major leaguer on
too many more days than the big one that he had.
But look at a player like Greg Gross, who came
(48:39):
around at almost the same time that Adams did, and
with the Astros no less, with a similar skill set.
He was a lot younger, but he came up young,
so that's why they intersect. Watson and Sedanio were still
where Adams left them, but the Astros had traded Win
to the Dodgers in December seventy three. There was first
(49:00):
of all, room for Gross to play, and he was
just a little more rounded than Adams, a bit faster,
a lot more patient. But from about the time that
Adams came up, when he was twenty seven, he ended
up in that platoon and pinched a role with the Phillies.
In his case, he held the job not for a
few years but for ten years, and not all of
(49:21):
them were good, but they valued him in ways the
Twins didn't value Adams, and that by itself, a kind
of loyalty or respect leading to opportunity is enough to
make the difference between a long career off the bench
and a short one. Maybe I'm trying to make excuses
for my own feelings, but sometimes I go in circles
with the idea that in many life situations I should
(49:41):
have done more than I did. I was capable of
doing more, showing better. And yet isn't what you did,
definitionally what you were capable of doing? No, says an
ugly voice, you self sabotaged. But say you didn't, say
you did your best and it still wasn't good enough,
and for legit reasons and not just because your boss
was a son of a bitch. Then again, should you
(50:02):
have done better? Or was that all that you were
capable of? The utmost that you were capable of? Oh
so you're saying I'm limited? Well yeah, but isn't everybody?
And like Glenn Adams, was the opportunity in your personal
San Francisco? Ever? Really? There? My personal San Francisco the
(50:24):
sequel unofficial to my private Idaho. You can follow me
publicly at Stephen Gooldman dot b Sky dot social. That's
if you're into social media. If you're not, you can
write us, by which I mean me at Infinite Inning
at gmail dot com, and there remains a Facebook group.
Simply go to Facebook search on Infinite Inning. Bang, you're there.
I was quiet this week. I apologize, but researching this
(50:46):
episode didn't suggest anything like good pictures. They were all
grainy and nondescript, just like the nineteen seventies themselves. Say
did you check out this week's reissue episode? We went
back to episode seventy six and also talked about conspiracy
theories in the Should you wish to support the show,
and I dearly hope you do, please visit Patreon dot com.
Slash the Infinite Inning ads alone do not support us.
(51:07):
Hear of a rudimentary kind available at the hyphen infinite
hyphen Inning dot creator, hyphenspring dot com. Original soundtrack available
Cratis at casual Observer Music dot bandcamp dot com. Finally,
should you find yourself with the proverbial moment to spare,
please go to the podcature of your choice and rate,
review and subscribe. It helps the show gain it at
(51:28):
least I think it does. Does anyone use podcasters anymore?
Do you just absorb these through your hair, now, that's
how I do them. Howard theme song, which you are
hearing now and have been listening to throughout the episode,
was a co composition of myself and doctor Rick Mooring,
who says I've had nightmares about that industrial paper shredder
for years. You mean you were lying about that? While
(51:49):
not lying, I was just telling stories. It's what I
do and who I've always been. Remember, there's a big
difference between a lie and a tale. Between a lie
are named Scott and a Bard, And if I remain
that person for one more week, then I'll be back
next week with more tales from inside the Infinite Inning.
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