October 4, 2025 • 44 mins
We begin by fixing the Rockies with the 1987 Cardinals, stopping off at the intersection of George Steinbrenner gaslighting and (one more time) my Chuck Knoblauch Story. Then we journey back to World War II and look at some dire events adjacent to some future Hall of Famers and try to place them in context of some current events involving today’s fighting forces. And then we come back to the Rockies, who turn out to be the key to the whole thing.
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):
I warn you ahead of time that this pure baseball
discussion is going to finish with a tautology. A tautology
is just restating the same thing in different words, so
that our premise and conclusion are the same damn thing.
It's a bit like saying, for a lunch, they all
ate hamburgers composed of chopped meat. I mean, that's what
a hamburger is. I can't help it, though. It's just
(00:23):
the way my reasoning, such as it is, wants to
flow this time out. As the playoffs went on this week,
there was some counter programming over at The Athletic with
an article by Andy McCullough regarding Colorado Rocky's dysfunction and
what they might do to fix it, assuming that they
want to. Now the answer is likely that there is
nothing they can do to fix it, because they wouldn't
(00:45):
have gotten to one hundred and nineteen losses and three
one hundred loss seasons in a row without the owner
being the impediment. It's similar to the Yankees during the
period of what we will call or what I call
high Steinbrennerism, which was about spending a lot of money
which kept the team at a certain level of winning
but not spending it intelligently enough to actually win. He
(01:07):
would stomp on the nuances of roster building in a
way that meant the club would eventually crash from old age.
And two, you couldn't ever have a young pitcher with
a live arm on the team. Old George really was
a kind of human gasolating machine that way, because he
loved bombed the fans with free agent money while screwing
up almost one hundred percent of everything else, with the
result that he always had his defenders despite being spectacularly
(01:30):
wrong a lot of the time. You want a great
example of that, Don Maddingly. Before Steinbrenner's supposed lifetime ban
in the late eighties, he spoke several times about the
way that ownership in the front office disrespected the players. Then,
once George was gone and the team crashed in nineteen ninety,
Mattingly bemoaned the fact that the boss wasn't there anymore,
(01:50):
because he would never have let that happen. He would
have made some changes, brought in some players. Well. First
of all, there was a question at the time as
to just how gone he really was. Second of all,
there were rumors that said he was letting the team
crash just to show New York how bad things would
get without him. And third, who did madding Lee think
put them in that situation to begin with? Who had
insisted they have an entire starting rotation composed of guys
(02:13):
aged thirty five to forty five. I'm not sure how
much you can really blame George for failing to anticipate
later developments like the Battery in Atlanta. But with the
Yankees land locked or at least gridlocked in the Bronx,
at some point they're going to be one of the
few teams that don't have ancillary real estate revenue, and
someone among his heirs is going to be bitter about
(02:35):
that and move the team to the Meadowlands, which was
George's go to threat for forever, on the condition that
about forty acres a parking lot get converted into a
ballpark village. George was George Steinbrenner the third, So maybe
this will be like the fifth or the sixth. The
George the six will be saying, we just can't afford
to sign Aaron Judge Junior junior unless we have condos.
We need those condos and maybe a casino and a
(02:58):
Babe Ruth meets Batman log Flume. Yes. McCullough's article highlights
the lack of investment in research by the Rockies, such
that there are a lot of questions. The team should
have some sense of the answers to this long into
its existence, but they don't. I quote, should the team,
as some suggest, build a lineup of sluggers and attempt
to bash its way back to prominence, Or should, as
(03:20):
others suggest, the team prioritize athletic defenders who can remove
some of the burden of run prevention from the pitchers.
These are questions worth studying. Perhaps executives say Corsfield can
never be conquered, but a massive research endeavor is still
worth trying. I have no idea why I read it
in that voice, but a Manhattan project for the Rockies
(03:42):
worth doing. Check. I've been thinking about this a lot
all season, and pretty much continuously since the Rockies came
into our lives. My instinct is that building the Rockies
requires three prongs. Number one, an obsession with patient players.
Number two, an obsession with fast at players. In number three,
a ground bawling and or high strikeout pitching staff. And
(04:05):
let me say at the outset that I do not
pat myself on the back and say, yes, you are
a genius. You've saw These things are easier said than done.
They are not freely available things. In fact, I'm so
humble about this. It reminds me of the time that
I asked Chuck Knobloch about his throwing problems. He had
developed the yips while with the Yankees. If I've told
(04:25):
you this before, forgive me, but this is actually something
that I quote all the time in my own daily life.
You will recall that Knoblock's throwing problems became so severe
that eventually the Yankees gave up and moved him to
left field. Well, while they were still in the midst
of trying to fix it, I found myself speaking to
him and I said, hey, Willie Randolph is a coach
on this team, which he was at the time. He
(04:47):
is one of the franchise's all time great second baseman
and was very good on defense. I wonder if you've
sought him out and asked for advice. And Knoblock looked
up at me because he was very short. I'm not
hugely tall. I don't think I'm even above average, but
I dwarfed Chuck Knoblock. And he looked up at me
with a kind of wonder and he said, no, that
would seem obvious, wouldn't it. Sometimes in life you don't
(05:13):
do the thing that would seem obvious for you to do.
And I said, so will you? And he promised that
he would so from then on. And it's been quite
a long time now. When I find myself doing something ridiculous,
such that my wife walks up and says, don't try
to clean your ears with an ice pick, or more aptly,
(05:33):
don't try to chop ice with a Q tip, I
will say that would seem obvious, wouldn't it. And the
reason that I bring this up in the context of
my Rocky solutions is that when I reported the conversation
to my editor at the time, she turned to me
and said, you did it. You fixed him, which of
course I had not, as I probably will not fix
(05:54):
the Rockies. Still, briefly, Number one reflects my belief that
the Rockies are going to hit and to allow a
lot of home runs. Therefore it behooves them to have
more men on base when they do than their opponents have.
He hits a solo homer you hit a two run homer,
he hits a three run homer, you hit a grand slam.
(06:15):
That's the Rockies way. Patience also seems less likely to
slump on the road. Number two is my answer to
the question that mccullop posed, do the Rockies build with
rhinos or Gazelle's. I choose Gazelle's for one thing, It's
never been tried, not by the Rockies. I mean, I
keep wondering what Whitey Herzog's nineteen eighties Cardinals, which is
(06:38):
to say, seven speedy switch hitters and Jack Clark would
have done in that park. Remember in nineteen eighty seven
when the Cardinals went to the World Series against the Twins,
the media National League team hit something like one hundred
and fifty home runs. The Cardinals had ninety four. They
were the only team in the league not to lose
one hundred baseballs. If Clark hadn't missed a month, they
(06:59):
probably would crossed that mark themselves. But even so, it
was Clark thirty five, Terry Pendleton twelve, Willie McGee eleven,
Jim Lindeman eight in really rough part time play, and
that was about it. Everyone else was like zero one
three on the other hand, they led the league in
walks drawn with six hundred and forty four, which is
(07:19):
a lot, particularly when you don't have a DH and
they also led in stolen bases with two hundred and
forty eight, again a ton. No one on the pitching
staff had a peak year. Aside perhaps from closer Todd Warrel,
they were just good. Despite being tied for the lowest
strikeout rate in the league. They had Ozzie Smith to
pick up the balls that got into play, and that
(07:41):
was enough. I always figure in life that if you
can't raise the bridge, you can lower the river. Having
a good defense makes it more likely the other guy
will hit solo home runs because your gloves will prevent
some singles simultaneously. If you go with the stars of
track and Field as your defense, yeah, you will hit
fewer homers. But with that big orchard the Rockies play in,
(08:04):
you might hit a bunch of triples with men on,
and that's merely as good. You will run the other
team's outfielders ragged. Again, I realized you can't just click
your mouse and tell door Dash or Uber Eats to
bring you a mess of speedy, patient switch hitters. I
wonder though, since no one in baseball drafting these days
is selecting for those guys most of the time, if
(08:25):
you might be able to load up in the lower
rounds of the draft and thereby fix the team faster.
If you look at some of Herzog's best players, they
meet that description. I realized that was a million years ago.
But he had a lot of low picks and non
drafted free agents. I'm not saying that raised players like
Chandler Simpson and Jake Mangam are great players right now
(08:45):
because they're not. And since Mangum is going on thirty,
he is what he is. But they came out of
the second and fourth rounds, respectively. Speedy Jose Cavalierro, who
came to the Rays via the Mariners and is now
with the Yankees, was a seventh round pick, and he
should have in Clint Barmis, who used to pick it
pretty well in the Rockies infield, very poor hitter, so
(09:05):
he was a tenth round pick in two thousand. Yet
he was still more valuable to the Rockies than say
Ian Stewart, their first round pick a couple of years later,
who actually had power On a war basis. Barmas was
more valuable to them than anyone they've drafted in the
last ten years. It pains me to say that too,
because in two thousand and six, despite playing in Denver,
(09:26):
Barmas hit two twenty two sixty four three p thirty
five in one hundred and thirty one games. And if
you want his road averages, just take about fifteen points
off all three of those percentages. You might weep while
doing it, as if you were chopping onions. You have
to feel like the offspring of Ozzie Smith and Ish
Tar to make up for that, and almost no one does.
(09:46):
He was good, but not that good. Point three about
pitchers is simply this, keep the ball out of play
as much as you can, keep the ball out of
the air as much as you can. This is another
thing that's easier said than done, too, because over the
last dick or so, pitching orthodoxy has been don't sink it,
pitch up. Possibly the Rockies should go backwards here. Possibly,
(10:06):
I don't know what I'm talking about. If they had
an R and D department, we could ask them, but
they don't, so we have to guess. And it should
go without saying that. There are only so many pitchers
like Ramber Valdez, who gets both strikeouts and a crazy
high ground ball rate. I can't help but mention one
more time that the Rockies are chronically impatient, so consistently
impatient that it seems cultural. Only four Rockies teams have
(10:29):
cleared six hundred walks in a one hundred and sixty
two game season, and the last time was sixteen years ago.
They won the Wild Card that year with a record
of ninety two and seventy. It worked for them. This year,
they didn't clear four hundred walks, which is a relatively
rare failure and the mark of an extremely impatient team. Now,
there are exceptions to every rule. The Royals were under
(10:51):
four hundred for four straight years starting in twenty fourteen,
and they twice reached the World Series and won once
during that period. But generally, not getting on isn't a
winning strategy. There are exactly three teams in history who
have drawn fewer than four hundred walks in a one
hundred and sixty two game schedule and reached the postseason
at all, and I just named two of them, the
(11:12):
twenty fourteen and fifteen Royals. The other was the Cardinals
in nineteen sixty eight, the Year of the Pitcher. All
three teams had very good pitching and played good defense.
Those Royals teams, even that Cardinals team, aside from Bob Gibson,
were not spectacular clubs. They do not rank with the
best teams of all time. Not on the high side anyway.
(11:34):
Gibson had one of the great seasons Year of the Pitcher,
or not so in a short series. He had a
tendency to distort things in the Cardinals favor, as a
large object will distort gravity. But even though the roster
had other future Hall of famers like Orlando Supaida, Lou Brock,
and Steve Carlton, oh and teenage Ted Simmons, just for
a second, mostly they were not at their best that year.
(11:55):
The club was just solidly built in a way where
their strengths, at least for a little while, compensated for
their weaknesses. The same thing went for the Royals, particularly
with a bullpen that defied gravity for a couple of years.
Bullpens often don't repeat because you're looking at small samples
and you don't know what it is you're seeing. Really,
there's a lot of fluke that goes into that. Not
(12:16):
the fish the fish flounder like even now, is lying
at the bottom of the ocean, looking up at you
and thinking thoughts. I must tell them something. But what
thinks the fluke. I will say, it is an open
marriage that we have. It will work this time, after all,
it worked once. See he's a fluke, so the deception worked.
(12:39):
Once you get it, I'll come in again. But the
point is, there are things that work all the time,
and I wonder if we're overthinking this. Maybe it's easier
to say that the secret to building a good team
is to acquire good players and just admit that the
Rockies have done a terrible job of that. I already
talked about the draft, which has been a problem for
(12:59):
them for a long time now, and then free agent
signings Ian Desmond Chris Bryant. Oh my, this is the
potential tautology that I mentioned earlier, that in order to
have a team composed of good players, the Rockies need
to get good players. And maybe it really is that simple.
The two thousand and seven Rockies team that went to
the World Series was in no way the nineteen twenty
(13:21):
seven Yankees, but they had a collection of very good
players who were largely not just a creation of corse Field.
Todd Helton is now in the Hall of Fame. Matt
Holliday was at least a Hall of very good guy
who played well in other places. Troy Tulowitzki was a
special shortstop on both sides of the ball until injuries
brought his peak period in his career as a whole
(13:42):
to an early close, so he never really did learn
what he might have done outside of Corsefield. You might
have forgotten about Brad Hopp, who wasn't a great outfielder.
He was pushed to the pastors because Helton had him
blocked at first base. But from two thousand and six
through two thousand and nine he hit two eighty eight
with a three eighty four on base percentage in a
five to eighteen slugging percentage. And not every player who
(14:04):
goes into coursefield hits like Charlie Keller. He was actually
quite good on the road in those years too. As
for the pitching staff, the rotation with guys like Jeff Francis,
Aaron Cook, and in the second half that you're a
young Ubaldo Jimenez was just good enough to hand off
to an above average bullpen. They had no Bob Gibson
having a ten war season, but it worked because the
(14:26):
totality of the team was sufficient to compensate. And so yeah,
I kind of think we've solved it. Higher front office
guys who can identify good players and then try to
acquire them. That's really it. There was no special sauce,
no magic formula. Everything else about the park, about the altitude,
(14:46):
about the road trips, and the way that the players
have to adjust. There is some validity to all of them,
but at bottom, they're special pleading, hardly powerful enough to
negate this basic rule of baseball, just get good players.
When you were a very little kid, did you ever
get frustrated because something you needed to do, say, learn
to ride a bike, or learn to swim, or memorize
(15:09):
your multiplication tables frustrated you, And so you turned to
your mom or to your swimming teacher, and you said,
I can't, I can't, I can't, And you could, you could,
you could, but at that moment you were vexed and
you didn't have the capacity to cope, so you didn't
want to try anymore. When the Rocky cite the park
as somehow defeating them every single time, they're being that
(15:30):
little kid. They're deflecting and they're rewriting history because we
can show it wasn't always the case. Guys, the answer
for you is the same as the answer for all
of us. Try harder, do better, be accountable. These and
other home truths are served daily alongside the Continental Breakfast
at no extra charge. They're included with your room. Just
(15:52):
turn left at the top of the stairs and grasp
the knob with a strength that indicates a firmness of character,
and you'll be welcome at the end of the infinite inning. Well,
(16:38):
hello there, and welcome back to the show. I am
Stephen Goldman, York n Vivio host for this three hundred
and forty seventh trip to the past, on a mission
to better understanding the present hour time machine as always
being the great American game of Baseball. And just as
I have not gone through these three hundred and forty
seven missions without being changed, I hope you two have
(17:00):
been changed. But as they sing in Wicked, for the Better,
it was not planning on quoting Wicked today. I still
haven't seen the movie either one of them. The second
one's not out yet, right, but I think I quoted
it wrong. Too, because the line is something like, I
don't know if I've been changed for the better, but
I have been changed for good. Honestly, I kind of
want it the other way here on the Infinite Inning.
I hope we both came in good and now we
(17:22):
are somewhat improved by the experience of taking these voyages together.
I hope you don't mind if I barrel through this
interstitial segment before our second story time this particular week,
because it may seem to you like I don't have
a schedule at all. To be honest, it seemed that
way to most people for much of my life. But
I do, and there are certain goals and benchmarks I
(17:43):
hit in certain periods of time each week, and well,
this week I have failed it that very badly. I'm
not exactly sure why, but I've gotten rolling on this
episode much later than I typically do. And so, whereas
in this section I typically give you a piece of
my mind outside of the baseball stories that we're going
to tell and talk a bit more directly about current events,
(18:05):
this time I'm going to issue that so I get
this sucker to you before dawn. Part of it was
if you want my own kind of Rocky special, pleading
that as a middle aged cancer guy, every six months,
I go through a tranch of doctor's appointments so that
I don't end up in a bad situation and need
them a lot more often, like continuously, until I don't
need them until I am beyond needing anything. You see
(18:28):
what I'm getting at, And somehow, in part because I
admit I don't pay close attention to this stuff, when
the person at the doctor's checkout counter says, back in
six months, how about Friday the third, I'm just so
eager to get out of there by that point that
I just say yes to whatever they propose. And sometimes
as a result of that, what happens is they all
pick at random the same week, and my game token
(18:51):
landed on that square this week. Go to all the
doctor's appointments, Do not pass, go, do not collect two
hundred dollars say turn your head and cough and man.
Those things, as I said, necessary, but they're not good
for production. If you do want to hear me extemporize
a bit more on the way we live now, and
you know what I mean by that, head over to
this week's reissue episode, in which we went all the
(19:13):
way back to episode number seven of the show, when
we were all a lot younger and I talk not
only about baseball but about the current government shut down
and rethrew some existential dread, which is really what I'm
feeling right now. As the song goes the existential blues.
I have not listened to that one in forever, And
to be honest, you're going to get a whole lot
of the way we live now right after this next break,
(19:35):
because our story goes back to World War Two, but
it's really about now as well, and it ain't so
squarely on baseball. I'm sorry to say. Then, Again, as
I discussed during that reissue episode, you won't hear me
apologize for doing what it is we do around here.
Very briefly for those of you who enjoy catching me
over at Baseball Perspectus as well. This week, I did
(19:56):
not write about the way we live now. I wrote
about the way the Angels of now and the rumor
that owner Artie Moreno is focused on hiring Albert Pooholes
as his next manager, which seems completely pointless because he
should hire a roster first. What amused me most of
all is that since Albert Pooholes is already under a
personal services contract to the Angels, Reno might save some
(20:18):
money on the deal. That's why during the depression so
many owners found themselves enamored of the idea of the
player manager. You know, times are bad when owners want
to economize so badly that they'll turn the welfare of
their investment over to a guy who's twenty five. And
whereas there were other player managers before then and a
few since then, most of them are concentrated in that
(20:40):
very dire era. Okay, well, let's hope this break that's
coming up here is not dire. On the other side
will be coming in on a wing and a prayer too.
Europe in nineteen forty four and the battle in which
General mccauliffe famously responded to a German demand that his
men surrender with one word, and you know what the
word was nuts. I've remarked many times over the years
(21:27):
on the show, and it's over eight years now, that
if we wanted to, we can include the Battle of
the Bulge in our list of baseball stories. Of course,
baseball everything is baseball, and there's a little baseball on
all of American history and vice versa. First, there were
a number of young players who saw combat in the
Battle of the bulg which was a huge affair, and
(21:47):
we'll get into detail a little bit more in a minute,
but that group included Warren Spahn in the future, a
thirteen time twenty game winner, Cecil Travis three fourteen hitting shortstop,
three time pennant winner, two time championship manager Ralph Houck
In one thousand game Hall of Fame knuckleball reliever Kwait Wilhelm,
and some of them fought with distinction and were wounded.
(22:07):
I don't mean to apply that any of them fought
without distinction. I mean that they received citations and medals
and so on. Over eight thousand Americans were killed and
nearly fifty thousand wounded, so an entire sold out stadium
of men suffered something between a scratch and the loss
of some part of themselves. And both groups, the dead
and the severely wounded, may have contained some potential additional spawns.
(22:33):
But when the Germans have shot off your arm or
some chunk of your brain responsible for fine motor control,
there's no coming back, so we can't know. We'll never
know what was lost, and that applies not only to baseball,
but to every walk of life, we don't know who
now lies under French soil or in places like Arlington,
(22:55):
who might have contributed greatly to the welfare of the
nation or the world. When I've referred to the Battle
of the Bulge on this program, I've usually talked about
it in terms of spawn, who the Braves manager Casey
Stengele called gutlass when he wouldn't throw at a batter
at Casey's instructions. And then, to Casey's great chagrin, obviously,
he became a great pitcher and a war hero. And
(23:16):
Casey was never shy about admitting, as he said, when
I mess them up, I really messed them up. And
just as a side note to that, a person with
a healthy ego owns it when he's made a mistake.
Another thing I talk about in terms of the Battle
of the Bulge is Americans use something that they could
take for granted knowledge of the game to combat enemy infiltrators.
(23:36):
Operation Grief required Commando Otto Skorzeny and his men to
wear captured American uniforms behind the lines and make as
much mischief as they could, including misdirecting traffic, among other things.
Maybe more than a lot of other things. A continent
sized war is an exercise in logistics, in getting men
(23:57):
and material to the right place at the right time.
Not every heroic soldier is Captain America. Some of them
are more or less accountants, guys who know their way
around a spreadsheet or a purchasing order, and it really
doesn't matter if they're buff or not. Some of them
are dentist's assistants. You've got a million men two thousand
(24:17):
miles from home and one of them pops a filling.
Are you going to send him back to Brooklyn? Or
do you want to have a dentist on site to
fix that thing, To plug that hole and get the
guy back out front with his rifle. And some aspect
of that, as you're moving men about these countries is
literally directing traffic. Patton is a pretty complicated, problematic movie
(24:39):
for me. There was a thread on Blue Sky that
I jumped into earlier this week about that. But there
are a couple of scenes I absolutely do believe wholeheartedly
when Pattent's ability to move his army is disrupted by
traffic jams. Hell, my plans to go to lunch are
frequently disrupted by traffic jams. Imagine trying to squeeze, just
for argument's sake, two hundred and fifty one thousand soldiers
(25:01):
into a small geographic area that in normal times might
accommodate no more than ten thousand, and never all of
them in one place. Now you roll in with the boys,
some of them in tanks or trucks, or with mobile
kitchens or dentists setups. Plus you have to move the
bullets for those soldiers, shells for the big guns, not
to mention the big guns themselves, food for all of
(25:24):
the above, the support staff, the doctors, the nurses. It's
just it's just an unimaginably huge exercise. So it behooved
the Germans to mess with that as much as they
could and turn it into a standard rush hour here
in central New Jersey. As you know from the other
times I've talked about this, once we caught into what
was happening, we thwarted Operation Grief in part by asking
(25:46):
doubtful American soldiers what position had Babe Ruth played, What
league do the White Sox play in? What is the
name of the Brooklyn baseball team? And it kind of
amuses me to think that there are right, wrong answers
to all of those. But I hope no smart ass
private was dumb enough to say the superbus, the bridegrooms.
(26:07):
If the MP didn't know his trivia, you get your
can shot off, and that is a dumb way to die.
The Robbins right. So to review the Battle of the Bulge,
Warren Spahn and which team plays in Brooklyn. Baseball was
part of the Battle of the Bulge. The Battle of
the Bulge isn't important but costly victory in American history,
and baseball is part of that too. It's all of
a piece, all part of the infinite inning. And so
(26:30):
is this. This week the current Secretary of Defense, who
styles himself bars Bar, the Secretary Cretario, called in all
our far flung generals from around the world so they
could listen to a very important harangue in person. He said,
many sketchy things, and I'm not going to cover them
all today. I just want to talk about the bulge
(26:53):
and what mars Bar, the Secretary called stupid rules of engagement.
I quote, and I won't do it in that voice.
We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We
also don't fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie
the hands of our war fighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt,
(27:15):
and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically
correct and overbearing rules of engagement. Let me just stipulate
this the United States. We don't like to admit it,
but we've lost a bunch of wars, and a lot
of the ones that we won we had help with those,
like the French in the Revolutionary War. We kind of
won the Civil War, but since we were both sides,
(27:36):
we also lost it, and neither side really distinguished itself.
But however we lost them. We didn't lose them because
of politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement. Before you
shoot that guy, make sure you've got his pronouns right. Oops, sorry,
they're pronouns right. That has never happened. But let's talk
about the absence of rules of engagement. Seventeenth, nineteen forty four,
(28:01):
The Battle of the Bulge is ongoing. It wasn't like
Gettysburg a three day affair. This was more like four
to six weeks, and December seventeenth was only day two,
give or take. Some of you probably already know where
I'm going with this. There aren't any great films devoted
to the Battle of the Bulch that I can think of.
The one all star Hollywood film with Hank Fonda in
nineteen sixty five is not good at all, but it
(28:23):
knew to include this event and the stuff about the
baseball players too. Briefly, the Germans were losing the war.
Their boss you know who I'm talking about, decided to
roll the dice by throwing in what reserves he had
left in order to win a decisive battle in the
West and force the Americans in British to the negotiating table.
In the east, the Soviets were coming on fast and
(28:46):
there was no chance of either a decisive win or
negotiating to the end of the war. A lot of
high ranking Germans, including that guy, could never quite get
it through their heads that we hated him or them
more than we feared communism, so we weren't going to
break the alliance, not then anyway. Once he was gone,
different matter. He noted that the Allies had a weak
(29:07):
spot in the Ardens Forest as they were closing in
on Germany having landed at Normandy back in June. And
you know what happened after that? He would throw all
his tanks into that weak spot. If it worked, he
would split the American and British forces, which would allow
him to encircle both of them and destroy them in turn.
Then he would drive all the way to the sea,
(29:29):
depriving the Allies of the crucial Belgian port of Antwerp.
And they had some initial success, but literally ran out
of gas, among other things, and all he really succeeded
in doing was killing a lot of people on both
sides and exhausting reserves he might have used to save
his people from the vengeance of the Russians, who felt
they had a lot of payback to do. They weren't
(29:51):
wrong about that, but they weren't particular about who they
took out their grievances on and how they went about
doing it. Of course, none of that was clear on
day one undred day two, and maybe not on Day twenty.
There was just a lot of confusion because the Germans
had achieved a total surprise. And what made it worse
was that bad weather kept Allied planes out of the
sky for a while, which meant pansers could roll and
(30:13):
the infantry columns could march without fear of being shot
from above or bombed from above. And in this way
did two hundred thousand German soldiers with six hundred tanks
get the drop on eighty thousand Americans and their four
hundred tanks. And so to day two, December seventeenth, I
want to talk about the first SS Panser Regiment of
the Waffen SS, the Blowtorch Battalion. Yeah, the secret Political
(30:38):
Police had their own combat units. Yes, it's a very
bad idea. Soldiers with extra political indoctrination, and they weren't
necessarily any more effective. They were just meaner again. Extra brutality, yes,
extra wins no, And that fact by itself may be
sufficient indictment of what Mars are. The Secretary dead this week.
(31:03):
But let's go further. That happy go lucky band of
Nazis was commanded by one Joachim Piper, a veteran of
the brutal Eastern Front, and he had been part of
what made it brutal. German intelligence had sent him after
an American field dump in a Belgian town called Belingen. Remember,
the Germans didn't have the gas to do what they
(31:24):
planned to do. Piper's instructions, which came down from the top,
were that this battle was to be fought with and
I quote a wave of terror and fright, lacking humane inhibitions.
And here I quote from a time for trumpets, the
Untold Battle of the Bulge by Charles Brown MacDonald. As
(31:45):
Piper himself later recalled the order, the German soldiers were
to be reminded of the innumerable German victims of the
bombing terror. He was also nearly certain that's a quote
that it was expressly stated that prisoners of war must
be shot where the local conditions of combat should so
(32:05):
require it also a quote. Although that proviso was incorporated
into the COMF group's order for the attack, Piper himself
made no mention of it in his oral briefing to
his commanders, for they were all and again a quote
from him experienced officers to whom this was obvious. The
word to kill prisoners nevertheless reached almost all subordinate units.
(32:28):
One company commander enjoined his men to fight in the
old SS spirit, and added, I am not giving you
orders to shoot prisoners of war, but you are all
well trained SS soldiers. You know what you should do
with prisoners without me telling you that. A private recalled
that not only were they to take no prisoners, but
(32:48):
Savilians who show themselves on the streets or at the
windows will be shot without mercy. One non commissioned officer
urged his men to think of the thousands of German
women in chill, buried in the rubble of German cities.
Then they would know what you, as SS men have
to do in case you capture American soldiers. The offensive
(33:10):
was aimed at quote, the murderers of our mothers, fathers,
and children unquote, and reading that, even all these decades later,
I'm still tempted to say you started it. But rather
than engage with ghosts in a debate over who had
the moral high ground, I just want to point out
(33:30):
what the moral ground was, how low it had been set,
and what that would mean for Americans, and what forsaking
well a moral ground at all meant for Americans on
and forgive the sports reference, but on both sides of
the ball, because we got to confront the consequences from
both sides, offensive and defensive. Piper's column rolled along, murdering
(33:55):
every American they encountered who surrendered. Maybe you visited an
American military cemetery and seeing the rows and rows of
white headstones could be overseas, could be here in the States.
Looking at them, you might think this fellow lying nearest me,
he might have been struck by an artillery shell, like
the giants Infielder Harvard Eddie Grant in the Great War,
(34:18):
the young man one plot over. Maybe a sniper got him.
And sometimes that's true, but often it's not. What is
almost as likely to happen, And depending on which war
and which battles the cemetery represents, it might be very
likely is that the first guy caught the flu and
died in hospital. The second guy really was wounded, but
(34:38):
it seemed like a minor thing until sepsis set in
and he died in bed. And the third guy broke
his neck falling off a bridge while being drunken disorderly
like Ed Delahanty and Khaki, and the fourth member of
the honor dead at the end of the row. He
was in Belgium in December nineteen forty four. His own
tank had been shot out from under him, and he
(34:59):
stood in the road waving a white flag so the
guys coming up and the panthers wouldn't shoot him down,
and they didn't. They ran him over instead. That actually
describes one of Piper's victims, and we will discuss the
rest of them. Unfortunately, right after this brief intermission, later
(35:43):
that day, Piper and his men encountered and overwhelmed Battery
B of the two hundred and eighty fifth Field Artillery
Observation Battalion boxed in over one hundred American boys surrendered.
They were promptly marched into a field, looted of their goods,
and then murdered via panzer mounted machine guns. A few Americans,
(36:05):
presumably in the rear of the group, ran and got away,
but over eighty were killed. Germans walked among the fallen,
looking for anyone still wreathing so they could shoot them
in the back of the head. These Americans had thought
they were headed to a pow camp until it all
was over. Had they been treated that way according to
(36:25):
the Geneva Conventions, they would have been back out in
less than six months when the war did end, and
then gone on to live the rest of their lives.
They died in the Belgian snow instead. It is very
easy to say the words eighty four dead. It is
much more difficult to try and really feel it, to
attempt to walk in the boots of the men who
(36:48):
died there, young men who had interrupted whatever their plan
for life had been, college, marriage, perhaps a life like
their parents had, or perhaps something different or better. And
I promise you at least a few dreamed of throwing
a screwball in the major leagues like Warren Spahn did.
(37:08):
And I bet you that Warren Spahn well knew, because
word of this crime quickly circulated through the American armed forces,
that it was only a matter of luck of being
salted onto the battlefield in a different place. That Warren
Spahn escaped that fate. And given how many were killed
or maimed, I don't think it's unreasonable to say that
(37:32):
it was a very near thing, a very lucky thing
that we got to experience Warren spawn at all, or
any of the other players that I mentioned. Piper left
the scene before the shooting began, but his men weren't done.
Some of the American boys who had gotten away took
refuge in a nearby cafe. The Germans tracked them there,
(37:52):
set the building on fire, and when the Americans ran out,
they gunned them down to I believe that number is
included in the eighty four despite this, a few members
of Company B, about fifteen or twenty feigned death and
got away with it. When the Germans left, they went
to find help, and, as I said a moment ago,
word of the murders spread, and all by themselves, without
being ordered. In this way, American boys decided they weren't
(38:15):
going to take SS soldiers prisoner anymore, and so the
cycle of violence deepened. On January first, nineteen forty five,
the United States eleventh Armored Division of Patten's Third Army
killed eighty German prisoners using the exact same procedure Piper's
men used. He marched them into a field and mowed
them down. Patten wanted to cover it out then, Indeed
(38:37):
it was covered up. Earlier in this segment, I celebrated
some of our beloved ballplayers who fought with distinction in
the Battle of the Bulch. Let me give you one
more that you've never heard of. Former New York Giants
minor leaguer Paul Melblom. He was twenty eight going on
twenty nine, and he was a New Jersey high school kid.
(38:57):
He was in the US eleventh Armored Division and fought
in the battle. Did he take part in killing those POWs.
I don't know if he did he took that information
with him, because he was killed in battle on January fourteenth.
Melblam had been a pitcher, but suffered some sort of
arm injury that stopped his career almost from the beginning.
(39:18):
Whatever it was, he was convinced he had to give
up the game. By the time he was inducted in
November nineteen forty two, he was working in a DuPont
chemical lab. He had three other brothers, all of them
simultaneously serving in the war. One of them was wounded
in Normandy. So we're very nearly into saving Private Ryan
or fighting Sullivan's territory here. I should point out that
(39:38):
the former was fiction, but the latter was based on
a true story of the simultaneous loss of five brothers.
I very much doubt that Paul Melblam was one of
the killers of those Germans. But if he was, should
I still celebrate him as I do spawn Look, members
of the SS were some of the most failed, sorry
excuses for human beings. Ever, I haven't much sympathy for
(40:01):
any of them. They murdered literally millions. Some of them
individually were responsible for thousands of deaths. I don't think
the eighty Germans marched into a field and we're machine
gunned and precisely the way that the SS had murdered.
Our boys were innocent kittens, but they also weren't the
same guys. And we do not believe, at least we're
(40:24):
not supposed to believe in collective punishment. Nowadays, we're only
allowed to be proud of our country, never to be
critical of it or expect it to do better, to
want it to do better in the same way that
we root for ourselves to do better. We can't root
for our country in the way we would for to
come full circle in this episode the Rockies, Do you
(40:46):
want the Rockies to do better? If that's true, then
you also admit that the Rockies have a problem. If
we're not allowed to speak frankly about the Rockies and
to be accurate in the way that we speak about
the Rockies any other ball club, or our siblings, our spouses,
our best friends, and our government, then we are stuck
(41:08):
with what we've got or what they want to give us.
So let me ask you, are we proud of what
the Americans did in revenge? Is this a moment that
we should celebrate later on we condemned Piper to death
that was converted to what turned out to be about
ten years in prison. Was that the right way to
go about it? Was it insufficient? Did we need to
(41:29):
teach those guys a lesson? Even though it wasn't those
guys who got the lesson. When we celebrate Warren Spahn
for his service in the war and in that battle,
we celebrate him because he was taking the part of
his country, he was defending freedom, and that is an
honorable and noble thing. Do we then say that the
(41:51):
murder of eighty disarmed men who can no longer fight
back is precisely the same thing? On the great moral
continue that spending a life for liberty and justice is
the same as spending one in pursuit of cold blooded
revenge does saying they started it, they did it first?
(42:11):
Excuse us? Or are there moments, even in war, when
some sort of better angel should have restrained our worst impulses?
The answers to these questions aren't always easy. Nor do
I easily condemn boys who were scared, frightened far from home,
who made moral choices that at another time they might
(42:32):
have thought better of. But I do know this, Mars
bar the secretarycretary would build a monument to that cruelty,
make that kind of cruelty policy missing that the other
side generally has another inning, another turn it bat, and
there is always a soldier on your side, whether you
win or lose. Who has to be the last boy
(42:55):
to die in a war? Wouldn't it be better if
his death had meaning and a family didn't lose a
sun as the result of just one last spasmodic lashing
out in anger and revenge. Sorry for the cheery story,
ladies and gentlemen, I hope you have fun with the
(43:15):
playoff games this weekend and in the upcoming week As always,
should you wish to follow me on social media, you
can do so at Stephen Gooldman dot Besky dot social.
I'm always happy to hear from you, and you can
write us, by which I mean me at Infinite Inning
at gmail dot com. There's still a Facebook group. Simply
go to Facebook search on infinite Inning. Bang, You're there.
I put up a photo of the late Paul Milbloom there,
(43:36):
a ballplayer who remains among his countries honored dead. Should
you wish to support the show, and I very much
hope you do. Please visit patrion dot com. Slash the
Infinite Inning gear of a rudimentary kind available at the
hyphen Infinite hyphen Inning dot creator, hyphenspring dot com. Original
soundtrack available gratis at Casualobserver Music dot bandcamp dot com. Finally,
(43:57):
should you find yourself with the proverbial moment to spare,
please go to the podcatcher of your choice and rate,
review and subscribe. And if your podcasterer doesn't let you
do those things, go spin some old World War Two
songs like coming in on a Wing and a prayer,
Praise the Lord and pass the Ammunition. That one still
gets me. Our theme song, which you are listening to
now and have been hearing throughout the episode, was a
(44:18):
co composition of myself and doctor Rick Mooring, who says
I don't want to be Mars Mars, but I wouldn't
mind being flakyak secret secret Floppy Floppy. Well, I'll go
see about arranging that, and assuming I can, I'll be
back next week with more tales from inside the Infinite
(44:40):
Inning
I warn you ahead of time that this pure baseball
discussion is going to finish with a tautology. A tautology
is just restating the same thing in different words, so
that our premise and conclusion are the same damn thing.
It's a bit like saying, for a lunch, they all
ate hamburgers composed of chopped meat. I mean, that's what
a hamburger is. I can't help it, though. It's just
(00:23):
the way my reasoning, such as it is, wants to
flow this time out. As the playoffs went on this week,
there was some counter programming over at The Athletic with
an article by Andy McCullough regarding Colorado Rocky's dysfunction and
what they might do to fix it, assuming that they
want to. Now the answer is likely that there is
nothing they can do to fix it, because they wouldn't
(00:45):
have gotten to one hundred and nineteen losses and three
one hundred loss seasons in a row without the owner
being the impediment. It's similar to the Yankees during the
period of what we will call or what I call
high Steinbrennerism, which was about spending a lot of money
which kept the team at a certain level of winning
but not spending it intelligently enough to actually win. He
(01:07):
would stomp on the nuances of roster building in a
way that meant the club would eventually crash from old age.
And two, you couldn't ever have a young pitcher with
a live arm on the team. Old George really was
a kind of human gasolating machine that way, because he
loved bombed the fans with free agent money while screwing
up almost one hundred percent of everything else, with the
result that he always had his defenders despite being spectacularly
(01:30):
wrong a lot of the time. You want a great
example of that, Don Maddingly. Before Steinbrenner's supposed lifetime ban
in the late eighties, he spoke several times about the
way that ownership in the front office disrespected the players. Then,
once George was gone and the team crashed in nineteen ninety,
Mattingly bemoaned the fact that the boss wasn't there anymore,
(01:50):
because he would never have let that happen. He would
have made some changes, brought in some players. Well. First
of all, there was a question at the time as
to just how gone he really was. Second of all,
there were rumors that said he was letting the team
crash just to show New York how bad things would
get without him. And third, who did madding Lee think
put them in that situation to begin with? Who had
insisted they have an entire starting rotation composed of guys
(02:13):
aged thirty five to forty five. I'm not sure how
much you can really blame George for failing to anticipate
later developments like the Battery in Atlanta. But with the
Yankees land locked or at least gridlocked in the Bronx,
at some point they're going to be one of the
few teams that don't have ancillary real estate revenue, and
someone among his heirs is going to be bitter about
(02:35):
that and move the team to the Meadowlands, which was
George's go to threat for forever, on the condition that
about forty acres a parking lot get converted into a
ballpark village. George was George Steinbrenner the third, So maybe
this will be like the fifth or the sixth. The
George the six will be saying, we just can't afford
to sign Aaron Judge Junior junior unless we have condos.
We need those condos and maybe a casino and a
(02:58):
Babe Ruth meets Batman log Flume. Yes. McCullough's article highlights
the lack of investment in research by the Rockies, such
that there are a lot of questions. The team should
have some sense of the answers to this long into
its existence, but they don't. I quote, should the team,
as some suggest, build a lineup of sluggers and attempt
to bash its way back to prominence, Or should, as
(03:20):
others suggest, the team prioritize athletic defenders who can remove
some of the burden of run prevention from the pitchers.
These are questions worth studying. Perhaps executives say Corsfield can
never be conquered, but a massive research endeavor is still
worth trying. I have no idea why I read it
in that voice, but a Manhattan project for the Rockies
(03:42):
worth doing. Check. I've been thinking about this a lot
all season, and pretty much continuously since the Rockies came
into our lives. My instinct is that building the Rockies
requires three prongs. Number one, an obsession with patient players.
Number two, an obsession with fast at players. In number three,
a ground bawling and or high strikeout pitching staff. And
(04:05):
let me say at the outset that I do not
pat myself on the back and say, yes, you are
a genius. You've saw These things are easier said than done.
They are not freely available things. In fact, I'm so
humble about this. It reminds me of the time that
I asked Chuck Knobloch about his throwing problems. He had
developed the yips while with the Yankees. If I've told
(04:25):
you this before, forgive me, but this is actually something
that I quote all the time in my own daily life.
You will recall that Knoblock's throwing problems became so severe
that eventually the Yankees gave up and moved him to
left field. Well, while they were still in the midst
of trying to fix it, I found myself speaking to
him and I said, hey, Willie Randolph is a coach
on this team, which he was at the time. He
(04:47):
is one of the franchise's all time great second baseman
and was very good on defense. I wonder if you've
sought him out and asked for advice. And Knoblock looked
up at me because he was very short. I'm not
hugely tall. I don't think I'm even above average, but
I dwarfed Chuck Knoblock. And he looked up at me
with a kind of wonder and he said, no, that
would seem obvious, wouldn't it. Sometimes in life you don't
(05:13):
do the thing that would seem obvious for you to do.
And I said, so will you? And he promised that
he would so from then on. And it's been quite
a long time now. When I find myself doing something ridiculous,
such that my wife walks up and says, don't try
to clean your ears with an ice pick, or more aptly,
(05:33):
don't try to chop ice with a Q tip, I
will say that would seem obvious, wouldn't it. And the
reason that I bring this up in the context of
my Rocky solutions is that when I reported the conversation
to my editor at the time, she turned to me
and said, you did it. You fixed him, which of
course I had not, as I probably will not fix
(05:54):
the Rockies. Still, briefly, Number one reflects my belief that
the Rockies are going to hit and to allow a
lot of home runs. Therefore it behooves them to have
more men on base when they do than their opponents have.
He hits a solo homer you hit a two run homer,
he hits a three run homer, you hit a grand slam.
(06:15):
That's the Rockies way. Patience also seems less likely to
slump on the road. Number two is my answer to
the question that mccullop posed, do the Rockies build with
rhinos or Gazelle's. I choose Gazelle's for one thing, It's
never been tried, not by the Rockies. I mean, I
keep wondering what Whitey Herzog's nineteen eighties Cardinals, which is
(06:38):
to say, seven speedy switch hitters and Jack Clark would
have done in that park. Remember in nineteen eighty seven
when the Cardinals went to the World Series against the Twins,
the media National League team hit something like one hundred
and fifty home runs. The Cardinals had ninety four. They
were the only team in the league not to lose
one hundred baseballs. If Clark hadn't missed a month, they
(06:59):
probably would crossed that mark themselves. But even so, it
was Clark thirty five, Terry Pendleton twelve, Willie McGee eleven,
Jim Lindeman eight in really rough part time play, and
that was about it. Everyone else was like zero one
three on the other hand, they led the league in
walks drawn with six hundred and forty four, which is
(07:19):
a lot, particularly when you don't have a DH and
they also led in stolen bases with two hundred and
forty eight, again a ton. No one on the pitching
staff had a peak year. Aside perhaps from closer Todd Warrel,
they were just good. Despite being tied for the lowest
strikeout rate in the league. They had Ozzie Smith to
pick up the balls that got into play, and that
(07:41):
was enough. I always figure in life that if you
can't raise the bridge, you can lower the river. Having
a good defense makes it more likely the other guy
will hit solo home runs because your gloves will prevent
some singles simultaneously. If you go with the stars of
track and Field as your defense, yeah, you will hit
fewer homers. But with that big orchard the Rockies play in,
(08:04):
you might hit a bunch of triples with men on,
and that's merely as good. You will run the other
team's outfielders ragged. Again, I realized you can't just click
your mouse and tell door Dash or Uber Eats to
bring you a mess of speedy, patient switch hitters. I
wonder though, since no one in baseball drafting these days
is selecting for those guys most of the time, if
(08:25):
you might be able to load up in the lower
rounds of the draft and thereby fix the team faster.
If you look at some of Herzog's best players, they
meet that description. I realized that was a million years ago.
But he had a lot of low picks and non
drafted free agents. I'm not saying that raised players like
Chandler Simpson and Jake Mangam are great players right now
(08:45):
because they're not. And since Mangum is going on thirty,
he is what he is. But they came out of
the second and fourth rounds, respectively. Speedy Jose Cavalierro, who
came to the Rays via the Mariners and is now
with the Yankees, was a seventh round pick, and he
should have in Clint Barmis, who used to pick it
pretty well in the Rockies infield, very poor hitter, so
(09:05):
he was a tenth round pick in two thousand. Yet
he was still more valuable to the Rockies than say
Ian Stewart, their first round pick a couple of years later,
who actually had power On a war basis. Barmas was
more valuable to them than anyone they've drafted in the
last ten years. It pains me to say that too,
because in two thousand and six, despite playing in Denver,
(09:26):
Barmas hit two twenty two sixty four three p thirty
five in one hundred and thirty one games. And if
you want his road averages, just take about fifteen points
off all three of those percentages. You might weep while
doing it, as if you were chopping onions. You have
to feel like the offspring of Ozzie Smith and Ish
Tar to make up for that, and almost no one does.
(09:46):
He was good, but not that good. Point three about
pitchers is simply this, keep the ball out of play
as much as you can, keep the ball out of
the air as much as you can. This is another
thing that's easier said than done, too, because over the
last dick or so, pitching orthodoxy has been don't sink it,
pitch up. Possibly the Rockies should go backwards here. Possibly,
(10:06):
I don't know what I'm talking about. If they had
an R and D department, we could ask them, but
they don't, so we have to guess. And it should
go without saying that. There are only so many pitchers
like Ramber Valdez, who gets both strikeouts and a crazy
high ground ball rate. I can't help but mention one
more time that the Rockies are chronically impatient, so consistently
impatient that it seems cultural. Only four Rockies teams have
(10:29):
cleared six hundred walks in a one hundred and sixty
two game season, and the last time was sixteen years ago.
They won the Wild Card that year with a record
of ninety two and seventy. It worked for them. This year,
they didn't clear four hundred walks, which is a relatively
rare failure and the mark of an extremely impatient team. Now,
there are exceptions to every rule. The Royals were under
(10:51):
four hundred for four straight years starting in twenty fourteen,
and they twice reached the World Series and won once
during that period. But generally, not getting on isn't a
winning strategy. There are exactly three teams in history who
have drawn fewer than four hundred walks in a one
hundred and sixty two game schedule and reached the postseason
at all, and I just named two of them, the
(11:12):
twenty fourteen and fifteen Royals. The other was the Cardinals
in nineteen sixty eight, the Year of the Pitcher. All
three teams had very good pitching and played good defense.
Those Royals teams, even that Cardinals team, aside from Bob Gibson,
were not spectacular clubs. They do not rank with the
best teams of all time. Not on the high side anyway.
(11:34):
Gibson had one of the great seasons Year of the Pitcher,
or not so in a short series. He had a
tendency to distort things in the Cardinals favor, as a
large object will distort gravity. But even though the roster
had other future Hall of famers like Orlando Supaida, Lou Brock,
and Steve Carlton, oh and teenage Ted Simmons, just for
a second, mostly they were not at their best that year.
(11:55):
The club was just solidly built in a way where
their strengths, at least for a little while, compensated for
their weaknesses. The same thing went for the Royals, particularly
with a bullpen that defied gravity for a couple of years.
Bullpens often don't repeat because you're looking at small samples
and you don't know what it is you're seeing. Really,
there's a lot of fluke that goes into that. Not
(12:16):
the fish the fish flounder like even now, is lying
at the bottom of the ocean, looking up at you
and thinking thoughts. I must tell them something. But what
thinks the fluke. I will say, it is an open
marriage that we have. It will work this time, after all,
it worked once. See he's a fluke, so the deception worked.
(12:39):
Once you get it, I'll come in again. But the
point is, there are things that work all the time,
and I wonder if we're overthinking this. Maybe it's easier
to say that the secret to building a good team
is to acquire good players and just admit that the
Rockies have done a terrible job of that. I already
talked about the draft, which has been a problem for
(12:59):
them for a long time now, and then free agent
signings Ian Desmond Chris Bryant. Oh my, this is the
potential tautology that I mentioned earlier, that in order to
have a team composed of good players, the Rockies need
to get good players. And maybe it really is that simple.
The two thousand and seven Rockies team that went to
the World Series was in no way the nineteen twenty
(13:21):
seven Yankees, but they had a collection of very good
players who were largely not just a creation of corse Field.
Todd Helton is now in the Hall of Fame. Matt
Holliday was at least a Hall of very good guy
who played well in other places. Troy Tulowitzki was a
special shortstop on both sides of the ball until injuries
brought his peak period in his career as a whole
(13:42):
to an early close, so he never really did learn
what he might have done outside of Corsefield. You might
have forgotten about Brad Hopp, who wasn't a great outfielder.
He was pushed to the pastors because Helton had him
blocked at first base. But from two thousand and six
through two thousand and nine he hit two eighty eight
with a three eighty four on base percentage in a
five to eighteen slugging percentage. And not every player who
(14:04):
goes into coursefield hits like Charlie Keller. He was actually
quite good on the road in those years too. As
for the pitching staff, the rotation with guys like Jeff Francis,
Aaron Cook, and in the second half that you're a
young Ubaldo Jimenez was just good enough to hand off
to an above average bullpen. They had no Bob Gibson
having a ten war season, but it worked because the
(14:26):
totality of the team was sufficient to compensate. And so yeah,
I kind of think we've solved it. Higher front office
guys who can identify good players and then try to
acquire them. That's really it. There was no special sauce,
no magic formula. Everything else about the park, about the altitude,
(14:46):
about the road trips, and the way that the players
have to adjust. There is some validity to all of them,
but at bottom, they're special pleading, hardly powerful enough to
negate this basic rule of baseball, just get good players.
When you were a very little kid, did you ever
get frustrated because something you needed to do, say, learn
to ride a bike, or learn to swim, or memorize
(15:09):
your multiplication tables frustrated you, And so you turned to
your mom or to your swimming teacher, and you said,
I can't, I can't, I can't, And you could, you could,
you could, but at that moment you were vexed and
you didn't have the capacity to cope, so you didn't
want to try anymore. When the Rocky cite the park
as somehow defeating them every single time, they're being that
(15:30):
little kid. They're deflecting and they're rewriting history because we
can show it wasn't always the case. Guys, the answer
for you is the same as the answer for all
of us. Try harder, do better, be accountable. These and
other home truths are served daily alongside the Continental Breakfast
at no extra charge. They're included with your room. Just
(15:52):
turn left at the top of the stairs and grasp
the knob with a strength that indicates a firmness of character,
and you'll be welcome at the end of the infinite inning. Well,
(16:38):
hello there, and welcome back to the show. I am
Stephen Goldman, York n Vivio host for this three hundred
and forty seventh trip to the past, on a mission
to better understanding the present hour time machine as always
being the great American game of Baseball. And just as
I have not gone through these three hundred and forty
seven missions without being changed, I hope you two have
(17:00):
been changed. But as they sing in Wicked, for the Better,
it was not planning on quoting Wicked today. I still
haven't seen the movie either one of them. The second
one's not out yet, right, but I think I quoted
it wrong. Too, because the line is something like, I
don't know if I've been changed for the better, but
I have been changed for good. Honestly, I kind of
want it the other way here on the Infinite Inning.
I hope we both came in good and now we
(17:22):
are somewhat improved by the experience of taking these voyages together.
I hope you don't mind if I barrel through this
interstitial segment before our second story time this particular week,
because it may seem to you like I don't have
a schedule at all. To be honest, it seemed that
way to most people for much of my life. But
I do, and there are certain goals and benchmarks I
(17:43):
hit in certain periods of time each week, and well,
this week I have failed it that very badly. I'm
not exactly sure why, but I've gotten rolling on this
episode much later than I typically do. And so, whereas
in this section I typically give you a piece of
my mind outside of the baseball stories that we're going
to tell and talk a bit more directly about current events,
(18:05):
this time I'm going to issue that so I get
this sucker to you before dawn. Part of it was
if you want my own kind of Rocky special, pleading
that as a middle aged cancer guy, every six months,
I go through a tranch of doctor's appointments so that
I don't end up in a bad situation and need
them a lot more often, like continuously, until I don't
need them until I am beyond needing anything. You see
(18:28):
what I'm getting at, And somehow, in part because I
admit I don't pay close attention to this stuff, when
the person at the doctor's checkout counter says, back in
six months, how about Friday the third, I'm just so
eager to get out of there by that point that
I just say yes to whatever they propose. And sometimes
as a result of that, what happens is they all
pick at random the same week, and my game token
(18:51):
landed on that square this week. Go to all the
doctor's appointments, Do not pass, go, do not collect two
hundred dollars say turn your head and cough and man.
Those things, as I said, necessary, but they're not good
for production. If you do want to hear me extemporize
a bit more on the way we live now, and
you know what I mean by that, head over to
this week's reissue episode, in which we went all the
(19:13):
way back to episode number seven of the show, when
we were all a lot younger and I talk not
only about baseball but about the current government shut down
and rethrew some existential dread, which is really what I'm
feeling right now. As the song goes the existential blues.
I have not listened to that one in forever, And
to be honest, you're going to get a whole lot
of the way we live now right after this next break,
(19:35):
because our story goes back to World War Two, but
it's really about now as well, and it ain't so
squarely on baseball. I'm sorry to say. Then, Again, as
I discussed during that reissue episode, you won't hear me
apologize for doing what it is we do around here.
Very briefly for those of you who enjoy catching me
over at Baseball Perspectus as well. This week, I did
(19:56):
not write about the way we live now. I wrote
about the way the Angels of now and the rumor
that owner Artie Moreno is focused on hiring Albert Pooholes
as his next manager, which seems completely pointless because he
should hire a roster first. What amused me most of
all is that since Albert Pooholes is already under a
personal services contract to the Angels, Reno might save some
(20:18):
money on the deal. That's why during the depression so
many owners found themselves enamored of the idea of the
player manager. You know, times are bad when owners want
to economize so badly that they'll turn the welfare of
their investment over to a guy who's twenty five. And
whereas there were other player managers before then and a
few since then, most of them are concentrated in that
(20:40):
very dire era. Okay, well, let's hope this break that's
coming up here is not dire. On the other side
will be coming in on a wing and a prayer too.
Europe in nineteen forty four and the battle in which
General mccauliffe famously responded to a German demand that his
men surrender with one word, and you know what the
word was nuts. I've remarked many times over the years
(21:27):
on the show, and it's over eight years now, that
if we wanted to, we can include the Battle of
the Bulge in our list of baseball stories. Of course,
baseball everything is baseball, and there's a little baseball on
all of American history and vice versa. First, there were
a number of young players who saw combat in the
Battle of the bulg which was a huge affair, and
(21:47):
we'll get into detail a little bit more in a minute,
but that group included Warren Spahn in the future, a
thirteen time twenty game winner, Cecil Travis three fourteen hitting shortstop,
three time pennant winner, two time championship manager Ralph Houck
In one thousand game Hall of Fame knuckleball reliever Kwait Wilhelm,
and some of them fought with distinction and were wounded.
(22:07):
I don't mean to apply that any of them fought
without distinction. I mean that they received citations and medals
and so on. Over eight thousand Americans were killed and
nearly fifty thousand wounded, so an entire sold out stadium
of men suffered something between a scratch and the loss
of some part of themselves. And both groups, the dead
and the severely wounded, may have contained some potential additional spawns.
(22:33):
But when the Germans have shot off your arm or
some chunk of your brain responsible for fine motor control,
there's no coming back, so we can't know. We'll never
know what was lost, and that applies not only to baseball,
but to every walk of life, we don't know who
now lies under French soil or in places like Arlington,
(22:55):
who might have contributed greatly to the welfare of the
nation or the world. When I've referred to the Battle
of the Bulge on this program, I've usually talked about
it in terms of spawn, who the Braves manager Casey
Stengele called gutlass when he wouldn't throw at a batter
at Casey's instructions. And then, to Casey's great chagrin, obviously,
he became a great pitcher and a war hero. And
(23:16):
Casey was never shy about admitting, as he said, when
I mess them up, I really messed them up. And
just as a side note to that, a person with
a healthy ego owns it when he's made a mistake.
Another thing I talk about in terms of the Battle
of the Bulge is Americans use something that they could
take for granted knowledge of the game to combat enemy infiltrators.
(23:36):
Operation Grief required Commando Otto Skorzeny and his men to
wear captured American uniforms behind the lines and make as
much mischief as they could, including misdirecting traffic, among other things.
Maybe more than a lot of other things. A continent
sized war is an exercise in logistics, in getting men
(23:57):
and material to the right place at the right time.
Not every heroic soldier is Captain America. Some of them
are more or less accountants, guys who know their way
around a spreadsheet or a purchasing order, and it really
doesn't matter if they're buff or not. Some of them
are dentist's assistants. You've got a million men two thousand
(24:17):
miles from home and one of them pops a filling.
Are you going to send him back to Brooklyn? Or
do you want to have a dentist on site to
fix that thing, To plug that hole and get the
guy back out front with his rifle. And some aspect
of that, as you're moving men about these countries is
literally directing traffic. Patton is a pretty complicated, problematic movie
(24:39):
for me. There was a thread on Blue Sky that
I jumped into earlier this week about that. But there
are a couple of scenes I absolutely do believe wholeheartedly
when Pattent's ability to move his army is disrupted by
traffic jams. Hell, my plans to go to lunch are
frequently disrupted by traffic jams. Imagine trying to squeeze, just
for argument's sake, two hundred and fifty one thousand soldiers
(25:01):
into a small geographic area that in normal times might
accommodate no more than ten thousand, and never all of
them in one place. Now you roll in with the boys,
some of them in tanks or trucks, or with mobile
kitchens or dentists setups. Plus you have to move the
bullets for those soldiers, shells for the big guns, not
to mention the big guns themselves, food for all of
(25:24):
the above, the support staff, the doctors, the nurses. It's
just it's just an unimaginably huge exercise. So it behooved
the Germans to mess with that as much as they
could and turn it into a standard rush hour here
in central New Jersey. As you know from the other
times I've talked about this, once we caught into what
was happening, we thwarted Operation Grief in part by asking
(25:46):
doubtful American soldiers what position had Babe Ruth played, What
league do the White Sox play in? What is the
name of the Brooklyn baseball team? And it kind of
amuses me to think that there are right, wrong answers
to all of those. But I hope no smart ass
private was dumb enough to say the superbus, the bridegrooms.
(26:07):
If the MP didn't know his trivia, you get your
can shot off, and that is a dumb way to die.
The Robbins right. So to review the Battle of the Bulge,
Warren Spahn and which team plays in Brooklyn. Baseball was
part of the Battle of the Bulge. The Battle of
the Bulge isn't important but costly victory in American history,
and baseball is part of that too. It's all of
a piece, all part of the infinite inning. And so
(26:30):
is this. This week the current Secretary of Defense, who
styles himself bars Bar, the Secretary Cretario, called in all
our far flung generals from around the world so they
could listen to a very important harangue in person. He said,
many sketchy things, and I'm not going to cover them
all today. I just want to talk about the bulge
(26:53):
and what mars Bar, the Secretary called stupid rules of engagement.
I quote, and I won't do it in that voice.
We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We
also don't fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie
the hands of our war fighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt,
(27:15):
and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically
correct and overbearing rules of engagement. Let me just stipulate
this the United States. We don't like to admit it,
but we've lost a bunch of wars, and a lot
of the ones that we won we had help with those,
like the French in the Revolutionary War. We kind of
won the Civil War, but since we were both sides,
(27:36):
we also lost it, and neither side really distinguished itself.
But however we lost them. We didn't lose them because
of politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement. Before you
shoot that guy, make sure you've got his pronouns right. Oops, sorry,
they're pronouns right. That has never happened. But let's talk
about the absence of rules of engagement. Seventeenth, nineteen forty four,
(28:01):
The Battle of the Bulge is ongoing. It wasn't like
Gettysburg a three day affair. This was more like four
to six weeks, and December seventeenth was only day two,
give or take. Some of you probably already know where
I'm going with this. There aren't any great films devoted
to the Battle of the Bulch that I can think of.
The one all star Hollywood film with Hank Fonda in
nineteen sixty five is not good at all, but it
(28:23):
knew to include this event and the stuff about the
baseball players too. Briefly, the Germans were losing the war.
Their boss you know who I'm talking about, decided to
roll the dice by throwing in what reserves he had
left in order to win a decisive battle in the
West and force the Americans in British to the negotiating table.
In the east, the Soviets were coming on fast and
(28:46):
there was no chance of either a decisive win or
negotiating to the end of the war. A lot of
high ranking Germans, including that guy, could never quite get
it through their heads that we hated him or them
more than we feared communism, so we weren't going to
break the alliance, not then anyway. Once he was gone,
different matter. He noted that the Allies had a weak
(29:07):
spot in the Ardens Forest as they were closing in
on Germany having landed at Normandy back in June. And
you know what happened after that? He would throw all
his tanks into that weak spot. If it worked, he
would split the American and British forces, which would allow
him to encircle both of them and destroy them in turn.
Then he would drive all the way to the sea,
(29:29):
depriving the Allies of the crucial Belgian port of Antwerp.
And they had some initial success, but literally ran out
of gas, among other things, and all he really succeeded
in doing was killing a lot of people on both
sides and exhausting reserves he might have used to save
his people from the vengeance of the Russians, who felt
they had a lot of payback to do. They weren't
(29:51):
wrong about that, but they weren't particular about who they
took out their grievances on and how they went about
doing it. Of course, none of that was clear on
day one undred day two, and maybe not on Day twenty.
There was just a lot of confusion because the Germans
had achieved a total surprise. And what made it worse
was that bad weather kept Allied planes out of the
sky for a while, which meant pansers could roll and
(30:13):
the infantry columns could march without fear of being shot
from above or bombed from above. And in this way
did two hundred thousand German soldiers with six hundred tanks
get the drop on eighty thousand Americans and their four
hundred tanks. And so to day two, December seventeenth, I
want to talk about the first SS Panser Regiment of
the Waffen SS, the Blowtorch Battalion. Yeah, the secret Political
(30:38):
Police had their own combat units. Yes, it's a very
bad idea. Soldiers with extra political indoctrination, and they weren't
necessarily any more effective. They were just meaner again. Extra brutality, yes,
extra wins no, And that fact by itself may be
sufficient indictment of what Mars are. The Secretary dead this week.
(31:03):
But let's go further. That happy go lucky band of
Nazis was commanded by one Joachim Piper, a veteran of
the brutal Eastern Front, and he had been part of
what made it brutal. German intelligence had sent him after
an American field dump in a Belgian town called Belingen. Remember,
the Germans didn't have the gas to do what they
(31:24):
planned to do. Piper's instructions, which came down from the top,
were that this battle was to be fought with and
I quote a wave of terror and fright, lacking humane inhibitions.
And here I quote from a time for trumpets, the
Untold Battle of the Bulge by Charles Brown MacDonald. As
(31:45):
Piper himself later recalled the order, the German soldiers were
to be reminded of the innumerable German victims of the
bombing terror. He was also nearly certain that's a quote
that it was expressly stated that prisoners of war must
be shot where the local conditions of combat should so
(32:05):
require it also a quote. Although that proviso was incorporated
into the COMF group's order for the attack, Piper himself
made no mention of it in his oral briefing to
his commanders, for they were all and again a quote
from him experienced officers to whom this was obvious. The
word to kill prisoners nevertheless reached almost all subordinate units.
(32:28):
One company commander enjoined his men to fight in the
old SS spirit, and added, I am not giving you
orders to shoot prisoners of war, but you are all
well trained SS soldiers. You know what you should do
with prisoners without me telling you that. A private recalled
that not only were they to take no prisoners, but
(32:48):
Savilians who show themselves on the streets or at the
windows will be shot without mercy. One non commissioned officer
urged his men to think of the thousands of German
women in chill, buried in the rubble of German cities.
Then they would know what you, as SS men have
to do in case you capture American soldiers. The offensive
(33:10):
was aimed at quote, the murderers of our mothers, fathers,
and children unquote, and reading that, even all these decades later,
I'm still tempted to say you started it. But rather
than engage with ghosts in a debate over who had
the moral high ground, I just want to point out
(33:30):
what the moral ground was, how low it had been set,
and what that would mean for Americans, and what forsaking
well a moral ground at all meant for Americans on
and forgive the sports reference, but on both sides of
the ball, because we got to confront the consequences from
both sides, offensive and defensive. Piper's column rolled along, murdering
(33:55):
every American they encountered who surrendered. Maybe you visited an
American military cemetery and seeing the rows and rows of
white headstones could be overseas, could be here in the States.
Looking at them, you might think this fellow lying nearest me,
he might have been struck by an artillery shell, like
the giants Infielder Harvard Eddie Grant in the Great War,
(34:18):
the young man one plot over. Maybe a sniper got him.
And sometimes that's true, but often it's not. What is
almost as likely to happen, And depending on which war
and which battles the cemetery represents, it might be very
likely is that the first guy caught the flu and
died in hospital. The second guy really was wounded, but
(34:38):
it seemed like a minor thing until sepsis set in
and he died in bed. And the third guy broke
his neck falling off a bridge while being drunken disorderly
like Ed Delahanty and Khaki, and the fourth member of
the honor dead at the end of the row. He
was in Belgium in December nineteen forty four. His own
tank had been shot out from under him, and he
(34:59):
stood in the road waving a white flag so the
guys coming up and the panthers wouldn't shoot him down,
and they didn't. They ran him over instead. That actually
describes one of Piper's victims, and we will discuss the
rest of them. Unfortunately, right after this brief intermission, later
(35:43):
that day, Piper and his men encountered and overwhelmed Battery
B of the two hundred and eighty fifth Field Artillery
Observation Battalion boxed in over one hundred American boys surrendered.
They were promptly marched into a field, looted of their goods,
and then murdered via panzer mounted machine guns. A few Americans,
(36:05):
presumably in the rear of the group, ran and got away,
but over eighty were killed. Germans walked among the fallen,
looking for anyone still wreathing so they could shoot them
in the back of the head. These Americans had thought
they were headed to a pow camp until it all
was over. Had they been treated that way according to
(36:25):
the Geneva Conventions, they would have been back out in
less than six months when the war did end, and
then gone on to live the rest of their lives.
They died in the Belgian snow instead. It is very
easy to say the words eighty four dead. It is
much more difficult to try and really feel it, to
attempt to walk in the boots of the men who
(36:48):
died there, young men who had interrupted whatever their plan
for life had been, college, marriage, perhaps a life like
their parents had, or perhaps something different or better. And
I promise you at least a few dreamed of throwing
a screwball in the major leagues like Warren Spahn did.
(37:08):
And I bet you that Warren Spahn well knew, because
word of this crime quickly circulated through the American armed forces,
that it was only a matter of luck of being
salted onto the battlefield in a different place. That Warren
Spahn escaped that fate. And given how many were killed
or maimed, I don't think it's unreasonable to say that
(37:32):
it was a very near thing, a very lucky thing
that we got to experience Warren spawn at all, or
any of the other players that I mentioned. Piper left
the scene before the shooting began, but his men weren't done.
Some of the American boys who had gotten away took
refuge in a nearby cafe. The Germans tracked them there,
(37:52):
set the building on fire, and when the Americans ran out,
they gunned them down to I believe that number is
included in the eighty four despite this, a few members
of Company B, about fifteen or twenty feigned death and
got away with it. When the Germans left, they went
to find help, and, as I said a moment ago,
word of the murders spread, and all by themselves, without
being ordered. In this way, American boys decided they weren't
(38:15):
going to take SS soldiers prisoner anymore, and so the
cycle of violence deepened. On January first, nineteen forty five,
the United States eleventh Armored Division of Patten's Third Army
killed eighty German prisoners using the exact same procedure Piper's
men used. He marched them into a field and mowed
them down. Patten wanted to cover it out then, Indeed
(38:37):
it was covered up. Earlier in this segment, I celebrated
some of our beloved ballplayers who fought with distinction in
the Battle of the Bulch. Let me give you one
more that you've never heard of. Former New York Giants
minor leaguer Paul Melblom. He was twenty eight going on
twenty nine, and he was a New Jersey high school kid.
(38:57):
He was in the US eleventh Armored Division and fought
in the battle. Did he take part in killing those POWs.
I don't know if he did he took that information
with him, because he was killed in battle on January fourteenth.
Melblam had been a pitcher, but suffered some sort of
arm injury that stopped his career almost from the beginning.
(39:18):
Whatever it was, he was convinced he had to give
up the game. By the time he was inducted in
November nineteen forty two, he was working in a DuPont
chemical lab. He had three other brothers, all of them
simultaneously serving in the war. One of them was wounded
in Normandy. So we're very nearly into saving Private Ryan
or fighting Sullivan's territory here. I should point out that
(39:38):
the former was fiction, but the latter was based on
a true story of the simultaneous loss of five brothers.
I very much doubt that Paul Melblam was one of
the killers of those Germans. But if he was, should
I still celebrate him as I do spawn Look, members
of the SS were some of the most failed, sorry
excuses for human beings. Ever, I haven't much sympathy for
(40:01):
any of them. They murdered literally millions. Some of them
individually were responsible for thousands of deaths. I don't think
the eighty Germans marched into a field and we're machine
gunned and precisely the way that the SS had murdered.
Our boys were innocent kittens, but they also weren't the
same guys. And we do not believe, at least we're
(40:24):
not supposed to believe in collective punishment. Nowadays, we're only
allowed to be proud of our country, never to be
critical of it or expect it to do better, to
want it to do better in the same way that
we root for ourselves to do better. We can't root
for our country in the way we would for to
come full circle in this episode the Rockies, Do you
(40:46):
want the Rockies to do better? If that's true, then
you also admit that the Rockies have a problem. If
we're not allowed to speak frankly about the Rockies and
to be accurate in the way that we speak about
the Rockies any other ball club, or our siblings, our spouses,
our best friends, and our government, then we are stuck
(41:08):
with what we've got or what they want to give us.
So let me ask you, are we proud of what
the Americans did in revenge? Is this a moment that
we should celebrate later on we condemned Piper to death
that was converted to what turned out to be about
ten years in prison. Was that the right way to
go about it? Was it insufficient? Did we need to
(41:29):
teach those guys a lesson? Even though it wasn't those
guys who got the lesson. When we celebrate Warren Spahn
for his service in the war and in that battle,
we celebrate him because he was taking the part of
his country, he was defending freedom, and that is an
honorable and noble thing. Do we then say that the
(41:51):
murder of eighty disarmed men who can no longer fight
back is precisely the same thing? On the great moral
continue that spending a life for liberty and justice is
the same as spending one in pursuit of cold blooded
revenge does saying they started it, they did it first?
(42:11):
Excuse us? Or are there moments, even in war, when
some sort of better angel should have restrained our worst impulses?
The answers to these questions aren't always easy. Nor do
I easily condemn boys who were scared, frightened far from home,
who made moral choices that at another time they might
(42:32):
have thought better of. But I do know this, Mars
bar the secretarycretary would build a monument to that cruelty,
make that kind of cruelty policy missing that the other
side generally has another inning, another turn it bat, and
there is always a soldier on your side, whether you
win or lose. Who has to be the last boy
(42:55):
to die in a war? Wouldn't it be better if
his death had meaning and a family didn't lose a
sun as the result of just one last spasmodic lashing
out in anger and revenge. Sorry for the cheery story,
ladies and gentlemen, I hope you have fun with the
(43:15):
playoff games this weekend and in the upcoming week As always,
should you wish to follow me on social media, you
can do so at Stephen Gooldman dot Besky dot social.
I'm always happy to hear from you, and you can
write us, by which I mean me at Infinite Inning
at gmail dot com. There's still a Facebook group. Simply
go to Facebook search on infinite Inning. Bang, You're there.
I put up a photo of the late Paul Milbloom there,
(43:36):
a ballplayer who remains among his countries honored dead. Should
you wish to support the show, and I very much
hope you do. Please visit patrion dot com. Slash the
Infinite Inning gear of a rudimentary kind available at the
hyphen Infinite hyphen Inning dot creator, hyphenspring dot com. Original
soundtrack available gratis at Casualobserver Music dot bandcamp dot com. Finally,
(43:57):
should you find yourself with the proverbial moment to spare,
please go to the podcatcher of your choice and rate,
review and subscribe. And if your podcasterer doesn't let you
do those things, go spin some old World War Two
songs like coming in on a Wing and a prayer,
Praise the Lord and pass the Ammunition. That one still
gets me. Our theme song, which you are listening to
now and have been hearing throughout the episode, was a
(44:18):
co composition of myself and doctor Rick Mooring, who says
I don't want to be Mars Mars, but I wouldn't
mind being flakyak secret secret Floppy Floppy. Well, I'll go
see about arranging that, and assuming I can, I'll be
back next week with more tales from inside the Infinite
(44:40):
Inning
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