Infinite Inning 349: The Very Complicated Bat Factory

We observe the passing of the Milwaukee Brewers out of the championship picture via Casey Stengel (who once managed the minor league Brewers to a championship) mourning a day Whitey Ford was outdueled by a journeyman. Then we go back to 1965 to note the difference between a protest and a riot, theorize about what the latter implies about its participants, and finish with a sincere attempt to alleviate the pain of one of America’s worst urban riots by making a new kind of bat.  

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

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
If you were new to this podcast, which has been
running for about eight years now, over eight years. Normally
the show is structured like this. We start with a
kind of cold to open. Now I admit this. Sometimes
the cold open goes twenty minutes, so it's not exactly
a teaser, but that's the intention. I tell you one story.

(00:20):
Then we cue the opening theme song. I welcome you
to the show. I freestyle it for about ten minutes,
talking about whatever's on my mind. Sometimes I throw in
a smaller story, more of an anecdote that I thought
was not worthy of blowing out into a full segment
of the program, but I still was excited to share
it with you. Then we take a break, and then

(00:41):
we have a longer second story that wraps up. We
cue more music. I give you the end credits spiel.
I say goodbye, and we come back next week, health permitting,
if we're lucky enough to make it another week. In
this crazy world, I've certainly told you enough stories about
great ballplayers dropping dead in the prime of life that

(01:02):
we shouldn't take anything for granted. We should be pretty
comfortable with that idea by now. Now. The reason that
I tell you that about the structure of the show
is that I've really got only one story for tonight.
Why well, because shohee Hotani just pitched six shutout innings
and hit three home runs, and it's hard for me

(01:24):
to do both at the same time, both talk about
history and witness it. I kept thinking about an exchange
of letters between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, who at
that time still liked each other. A lot later, Churchill,
I think, in particular, got frustrated with Franklin, and they
weren't necessarily still the best of pals by the time

(01:46):
FDR passed away, although everyone involved had to pretend, but
before that they really did enjoy each other. And despite
the fact that the world was totally emiserated in the
years that they did know each Othersevelt was tofed enough
by the relationship to write Winston and say, it is
fun sharing the same censury with you. I kept thinking

(02:08):
it is fun to share baseball with sho hey Otani,
to be a fan at the same time that he
is playing and doing things that no one has ever
seen before. A friend of mine texted me as Otani
was coming out of the game again three homers at
least one of them hit as long and as hard
as any that you're going to see or are likely

(02:30):
to see at Dodger Stadium and six shutout innings. And
he said, has anyone ever had a postseason game like
this before? My answer was no. I mean, look, Reggie
Jackson hit three homers in a World Series game. If
you're as old as I am, then you were around
for that. But did he pitch? Did he ever pitch
the stuff that Otani does regularly? Babe Ruth only really

(02:53):
did for a year or two. I happened to be
looking earlier today at a Yankees game from the mid
Fiftiesnineteen fifty four, a year that the Yankees were beaten
out to the Pennant despite winning over one hundred games
by a Cleveland team that set a record for victories
in a single season, and it happened this was one

(03:13):
reason why they didn't every loss counts right well. In
late May, they played the Washington Senators, a bad team
with an ownership that just wasn't trying, and they dropped
a one nothing game. Whitey Ford one of the better
pitchers of all time. Without specifying where he ranks, He's
up there against Johnny Schmidz, who wasn't one. He threw

(03:34):
curveballs and change ups on his curveball, and more curveballs,
and there's nothing wrong with that. And Johnny Schmitz had
a long career with some good years. He was a lefty.
They called him Bear Tracks. And you know, if you've
been a baseball fan for any appreciable length of time,
that sometimes your team will come in scoring ten runs
a game, and a lefty junk baller will somehow just

(03:55):
shut him down. And that's what happened to the Yankees
that day. Yogi Berra three, Mickey Mantle, oh for four.
I could reach you the whole box score, it would
sound exactly like that. Schmitz went all the way on
a three hitter, no runs, one walk, two ks. Meanwhile,
Ford allowed a first inning run on an infield single,
a bunt back to the mound by Eddie Yost, which

(04:18):
he then threw away, so Yost made it to first
advance to second on the error. One out later, Mickey vernons,
sometimes a great player, sometimes a terrible one, singled to
left field. That's the opposite field for the lesser Mickey
in the game, scored Yost, and that was it for
the afternoon. That was the game. Ford went eight innings,
allowed seven hits, that one run, one walk, six strikeouts.

(04:39):
Great game. Saye came in, Johnny Sain came in in relief,
pitched a scoreless inning. Didn't matter. Now, as I said,
this sort of thing happens. But if you're manager of
the Yankees, Casey Stengele, you're trying to win your sixth
consecutive pennant. You've just pitched your ace a guy nicknamed
Chairman of the Board, against someone whose nickname sounds like
a Ben and Jerry's flavor, you do expect to win.

(05:00):
And he was rather annoyed. First, he was annoyed because
he was ejected after that very first play, for arguing
that Yost ran into his own bunt or the bunt
ran into him after he was out of the batter's box,
which would have been an automatic out. Mostly, though, he
was annoyed at the upset of Schmidt's out pitching forward.
Imagine my fella getting beat in spite of his great

(05:22):
pitching by Schmidts. Casey said, Now, I ain't got anything
against Schmidt's personally, but he has no right pitching a
three hitch shutout against us. If he beats us again,
I'll kiss you in Macy's window and pay your way
to Europe and back. When my big, strong, right handed
hitters can't hit a left hander like him, I gotta
do something the next time. I'll send in all left

(05:45):
handed hitters against him, especially ones who'll make him pitch
and not go chasing those squibs and sliders he suckers
them with. I bring this up because it's exactly the
opposite of what happened to the Milwaukee Brewers in the series,
out of which they were just swept by the Los
Angeles Dodgers. There were no junk balling left handers making

(06:06):
them look foolish with off speed stuff. There was just
a Dodgers' rotation on a roll, allowing one run a
day for four straight days. And I feel bad for
the Milwaukee Brewers and their manager because they really had
a fun, deep team. There wasn't an Otani type player
in the center of it. Just everybody was pretty good

(06:28):
above average. Unfortunately, their rotation was not set up. They
had to go with an opener a couple of times,
and their offense in the regular season was below average
in home runs but tied for the league lead in
batting average and was above average in walks, and of
course tied or i'm sorry, led the league in stolen
bases as well. So you have to chain up hits

(06:50):
if you're the Milwaukee Brewers, and well it's hard to
do that against a starting staff of this quality. No,
Johnny schmiz is here again, No offense to Johnny Schmitz
wherever he may now be. And here's the thing, it
didn't have to be that way. Tyler Glass now did
not have a one point six RA in the regular season.

(07:12):
Yoshinobu Yamamoto did not have a one RA in the
regular season, Blake Snell did not have a zero RA
in the regular season, and show Hey Otani's RA was
closer to three than zero. It's just that for four days,
whoever picked up the dice shot a seven on the

(07:32):
first try every time? And what do you call that?
Where have you gone when no matter what you do,
the other guy is suddenly, somehow, magically, miraculously better than
you when you haven't done anything wrong, but somehow you
can't do anything right either. Well, you've arrived somewhere very special.

(07:54):
And there's a name for that. Ray Land though you
won't find it on any map, but those who have
been there know it well. They speak of it to
each other only in hushed, odd whispers. Yes, the Milwaukee
Brewers have found themselves dwelling in the infinite inning. Well,

(08:48):
hello there. You might also say the Milwaukee Brewers have
found themselves dwelling in the off season, and I honestly
do feel bad about that. Had the Brewers and the
Mariners advanced to the World Series, we would have been
guaranteed that one team that has never won a championship
would win one, unless, of course, Rob Manfred decides to

(09:09):
kick off his planned lockout of a year from now
a little early. Let's hope not. As it is, I
keep reflecting on the fact that we will have that
hanging over us sword of damacles like for the entirety
of the twenty twenty six season. It's a real downer
of a thought, especially when you are thrilling to things

(09:30):
like show, hey Otani cruising around the bases for the
third time on the evening, having put enough miles on
a ball that he's probably earned a frequent flyer vacation
to some well to go home. Basically, as I speak
these words, to you. We're still a couple of days
at minimum from knowing if the Mariners or the Blue
Jays will represent the American League in the World Series.

(09:52):
All those scenarios have some appeal, right The Blue Jays
have not won a World Series in over thirty years.
Certainly do again. The Mariners never have. This is a
matchup of the nineteen seventy seven expansion teams. So you
really would say that the Mariners. They really should say
to the Blue Jays, look, you've done this, You've checked
this box off. We both showed up at the same time.

(10:15):
We both made our share of mistakes. Can we have
a chance? Please? But of course it doesn't work that way.
And then, on the other hand, we haven't had a
repeat champion in twenty five years since the Yankees did
their three peat thing from nineteen ninety eight through two
thousand and the Dodgers have a chance to do that
if they win their second World Series in a row.

(10:36):
I realize everyone hates the overdug. I realize that everyone
gets mad at the Dodgers for how much they spend.
I think that anger is somewhat misplaced. We can unpack
that another time, because, as I said, we're pressed today.
It's late on the East coast of America. But look,
that would be whether you approve of it or not
approve of their methods, that is a historic achievement of

(10:56):
a different kind. Again, given a quarter of a century
between repeat winners, there's a lot of entropy that affects
baseball teams nowadays, and for them to surmount that, however transiently,
even for two years, especially with how shaky they looked
at times this season, that is something worth looking forward to,

(11:17):
should it happen. Let's quickly run through this week's bulletin board.
Bit this week at Baseball Prospectus, I wrote a story.
It's still up on the front page, although you have
to scroll down a bit. It's called Mike Schilt and
the One More Thing, And I used Mike Schilt's resignation
as manager of the San Diego Padres to write at
length about something I actually talked about here on the
show very briefly, way back in its first year, and

(11:40):
that was a kind of well traumatic is probably overstating it,
but upsetting incident from my high school career, and I
think nowadays they would actually call it sexual harassment. It
was by another guy, and it took place in the
gym locker room pretty much every day for a while,
and I call it the story of the naked gym guy.

(12:01):
Every day before and after class, he would strip down
to his bright white jockey shorts, take out a huge
role of cash, hold it about where his genitals would
have been, and aggressively fondle it while shouting at me,
do you like that? I'm sorry. It was very strange.

(12:23):
It's still very strange. I didn't know the guy at all.
He wasn't a rival or an enemy or anything. I
went to a large high school and never had a
single class with the guy. We had no friends in common.
But the point is the reason that I went into
this is because some of the coverage of Shelter resignation
talked about very fleetingly the effect that getting death threats

(12:44):
from online gamblers had in essentially making him lose his
joy in this job. And it seemed to me that
it was very similar to this time in my life
where I was having difficulties at home, difficulties in school,
difficulties with my dating life, and then out of nowhere,
this naked guy comes along with his wad of cash

(13:05):
and is just very strangely aggressive for no reason, twice
a day, not at any other times. As I say
in the story, he didn't say I'll meet you after
the bell or any He just came in, did his thing,
and he left. And as you know, I'm not very religious,
but if someone had walked up to me at that
point and had said, you're already under so much strain,

(13:25):
my son, but God is testing you with this one
more thing. God has sent the naked gym guy and
his pornographic role of money, I would have believed them,
or at least I would have said, yeah, it seems reasonable.
Good supposition on your part. You probably still won't see
me in the puce because I like to sleep in weekends.
I like to sleep in weekdays as well. That's partly

(13:47):
why I'm in so much trouble right now. But it
is a good metaphor for what I'm going through. Thank you,
Ringo Star. I don't know why I imagined it is,
Ringo Star. I'm a little pungy right now because again,
late hours are not unfamiliar to me. But it's hard
not to be giddy when you look back at an
incident like that, a series of incidents, because it went

(14:08):
on and on and on and not feel like you
have to laugh, because otherwise you start reliving the stress.
And it seemed to me that Mike Shilt, if you
do read the full coverage of what happened, was not
getting along with his GM, was not getting along with
the coaches, was not getting along with the media. And
you could say, Okay, that's nothing new for Mike Shilt,

(14:29):
we know that about him. But then you say, okay,
here's one more brick death threats. Well, maybe that's what
pushed him over the edge. And similarly, I was holding
on until the naked Jim guy showed up, and I
did eventually, I guess I'm here talking to you now.
I got through it. I also didn't have the option
to resign and go home, but Mike Shilt did. I'll

(14:49):
tell you one more thing. No one left any comments
on that story. Usually I get a number of them,
but no one said anything. If you happen to read it,
leave me a note. I know you're not supposed to
read the comments of if you're a writer, I kind
of like the comments, especially when they're complimentary. I am
that needy. My ego is that week. So if you
do read it scrawl something on the wall, okay, and
let me know that you were there. One final note

(15:12):
on this that came up just this very second. I
have my phone here on my desk. It's well off
to the side, both because some frequency in it occasionally
interferes with the microphone while I'm talking to you, and
I also like to give you my full attention, so
I don't need any of its pop ups or flashing
lights or anything else distracting me. That said, I like

(15:33):
to keep it around because sometimes my kids are out
of the house or my elderly mom might need to
contact me on an emergency basis, so it and I
are never too far apart. Well, I glanced over there
just now as I was telling you all about the
naked Jim guy, and I see that the phone is
lit up and there's this wall of text climbing up
the screen and scrolling off. So I picked it up,

(15:55):
and it turned out that my phone was worried about me.
Some combination of words that I just spoke to you
awoke some AI aspect of my phone, and it started
listening as if it were in therapy mode. So I
pick it up. I look down at the wall of text,
and the first words from my phone are it seems

(16:16):
like you've been through something very traumatic. Well, yeah, thank you,
mister phone, and maybe you could help out Mike Shilt too.
Where the hell were you when I needed you? Though?
Would you like me to use my taser function to
shock mister naked Jim Got Yes? Please, I'll tell you
a secret. I have no idea what happened to that guy.
I never saw him again after a certain point. Glory, glory, hallelujah.

(16:39):
But I know this. Every single time I talk about it,
I get a tiny bit of revenge. Dude, whatever your
issues were, you shouldn't have picked on a guy who
writes okay. Despite my best intentions, I've talked us through
to pretty much the point in the show that we
normally take a break. So let's do that. Before we do,

(17:01):
let me say of our second story that it is
very much a baseball tale, that it reflects events primarily
of sixty years ago, but it still feels very current
to me, and finally that it was provoked by this
week's reissue episode. This week's reissue episode revisited I think
it was episode seventy six, and my guest was Stephen Johnson,

(17:23):
who had written a column at the time for the
Amsterdam News, a historic black newspaper, about what it was
like to be a fan of color at that time.
This was about eight years ago. If you listen to
my comments in this section, the same section of the
show back then, it sounds very quaint because the world

(17:43):
of race relations that we live in now is not
the same one that we lived in then. And part
of it is that George Floyd happened almost two years
after I recorded that episode, and so things changed, and
there was a reaction and account reaction, and we're still
living in the aftermath of both. And that got me

(18:04):
to thinking about one of the prior times that what
we used to call race riots, very much a misnomer
because they're often very one sided, had caused a realignment
of politics. And that brought me to Los Angeles in
nineteen sixty five, and I was surprised to learn there
was some baseball as part of the fallout. I'd enjoy
telling you about that, should you allow it, And I

(18:26):
hope you do, because I'm going to begin doing so
right after this brief intermission. Just over sixty years ago.

(18:56):
On August eleventh, nineteen sixty five, the Watts neighborhood in
South Los Angeles went up in flames. As William O'Neill
wrote in The Coming Apart, an informal history of the sixties,
Five days later, thirty four people were dead, four thousand
more under arrest, and much of Watts in ashes stores

(19:16):
had been looted and burned. Firemen who tried to save
them were driven off by snipers. It took fourteen thousand
National guardsmen to restore order. There were many explanations put
forward at the time. Chief Parker blamed civil rights workers
and nameless conspirators. Mayor Samuel W. Yordy blamed the communists.

(19:37):
As with riots taking place closer to our time, this
one seems to have begun with a police stop of
a black motorist. Three men in a car actually by
cops for drunk driving, and the interaction turned violent. Rumors
about just how violent it was exceeded the initial reality.
It was said that the cops had punched or kicked
a pregnant woman in the stomach, which hadn't happened. A

(20:00):
gathered the cops lost control of the scene. The onlookers
began throwing things at them and matters spiraled. As I
just told you, this went on for days, A lot
of it was broadcast live across the country, and like
other events of its kind, although I believe this was
the biggest to that point, it was shocking to the mainstream,
well white audience. And while it's very hard to mind

(20:23):
read people, particularly backwards by more than half a century,
it does seem like the attitude on the part of
the mainstream was didn't we just pass the Voting Rights Act?
Weren't we supposed to be done with all this friction now,
which is of course naive, And it should go without
saying that violence, whether justified or not, whether you have
a point or not, is always triggering for people, always

(20:44):
causes a counter reaction, as I said earlier, and I
say that because one of the traps we fall into
when we talk about incidents like this is who is
really at fault? Was Eric Garner, who died saying I
can't breathe when police pinned him down on July seventeenth,
twenty fourteen. He was stopped for selling illegal cigarettes. Yeah, true,

(21:05):
he was committing some sort of a crime. Did he
resist arrest? Seems like it did. George Floyd attempt to
pass a fake twenty dollars bill on May twenty fifth,
twenty twenty. Well, that was the charge. Did he even
know it was a fake twenty dollars bill? If you
went to a store and just pulled a twenty out
of your wallet without looking too closely, would you know?
Do you check every bit of change that you're given?

(21:28):
Of course not. Well, put that aside. The point is that, yes,
they were doing illegal things, but we do have rights,
or we did until recently. We have due process. We
do not empower cops to kill people for misdemeanor crimes
or even most felonies. So if you say that everything
was the victim's fault because they were criminals, then you've

(21:48):
reduced morality and justice to he started it, and implicitly
you're okay with whatever happens to you the next time
a traffic cop with a quotea to meat pulls you
over for going forty miles per hour in a thirty
five mile per hour zone in Watts in nineteen sixty five.
The young man who was pulled over, twenty one year
old Marquette Fry, may well have been driving while intoxicated.

(22:10):
He was convicted of that after, and he may well
have resisted arrest. I don't know if the police used
appropriate force in responding to him or not. I don't
know what provoked the crowd. I know at the time
people pointed to a lot of negatives about the predominantly
black neighborhood of Watts. It was suffering from, among other things,

(22:31):
thirty percent unemployment among adult males and an old in
decrepit housing stock. It was primarily a ghetto. Simultaneously, the
police department was something like ninety five percent white. It
was headed by an out racist, the aforementioned Chief Parker,
and it didn't have the greatest reputation among the community.
For that reason. After the initial incident, Chief Parker dismissed

(22:55):
it by saying something like one monkey started throwing things,
and all the other monkeys wanted to do it too.
Very classy. He sounds almost as if he could have
been a member of the Young Republicans. The photographs of
the guys in that chat, I hope you do know
what I'm referring to. If not look it up, have
had me humming Spike Jones Ter Fure's face all week.
The problem with pointing to those things as a reason

(23:17):
for most of a week of fires and violence is
that it's excusing a non sequitor. You can say this
group has been abused, this group has legitimate frustrations, this
group feels unrepresented and unheard, But that doesn't necessarily or
at all give that group license to set fire to

(23:38):
its own neighborhood or any part of this city. And
it's counterproductive for them, even if they think that that's
a reasonable response. As we've outlined earlier, one of the
things that happened both during the Watch Riots and George
Floyd was that white people went out and bought a
ton of guns. I want to hasten to say that
I think the Watch riots and the George Floyd events

(23:59):
were very different things. I wasn't around for the Watch riots,
but I did watch as most of the nation did,
the George Floyd protests, and it seemed to me that,
unlike descriptions of the Watch riots, that most of the
violence I'm not saying all but a good deal of
the violence that we saw on television actually came from

(24:19):
the authorities. It was not instigated by the protesters. I
think in both cases the origins of the violence are
the same, because why would police want to make a
peaceful protest more dangerous for everyone involved, including them. That's
contra the point of having police. Similarly, you may be
frustrated with a situation. You may want to break things,

(24:43):
But the upshot of breaking your own things is that
once you're done, you have less than what you started with.
Then you probably didn't start with a lot. Plus you've
alienated many people who might otherwise have been sympathetic. Now
I'm going to venture an answer again as to why
both both sides would act contrary to their own interests.

(25:03):
And it may well be you may well say, gee, Steve,
this is a trite explanation, and I'll tell you. Normally,
I would go through before I said this sort of
thing to you, a handful of books on mob psychology,
seeing if it was a valid thought or not, and
then I'd give you what I learned. I haven't done
that this time. I just want to go with my
gut this once. And the reason for that is that

(25:25):
we're witnessing something on the streets of America today where
our government has empowered a certain group of people to
be very cruel to another group of people in the
same way, maybe not to the same extent, not to
the same murderous extent yet, but in a similar way
to how the Nazi government took ordinary people out of Germany,

(25:47):
out of Poland, out of Ukraine and made them gods
over outgroups. You know who those outgroups were, and they
committed mass murder in a way that under other systems
they would not. And it wasn't just because they were
following orders. I'm not saying that. It was because in
many cases there was something inherent to them that allowed

(26:10):
them to follow those orders, allowed them to participate in
that system and not think very hard about it, and
in some cases probably feel pretty good about it. And
it seems to me that a lot of what we
think of as civilization is just a veneer. In any
group of us, there are those looking for permission to
act down and break things. It's just the law of averages.

(26:32):
Just as we can gather any one hundred people, let's say,
and line them up by height and find that of
the one hundred, sum are above average and height and
some are below average and height, there are going to
be people who are fine with societies strictures and structures,
including the prohibition on hurting others, even if they're different
from you. And at the high end of the distribution,

(26:53):
there are people who would never think of doing anything
like that. Ever, it wouldn't occur to them to the
street against the light, never mind inflict violence on their
fellow human. And then there are people on the other
end of the spectrum who are barely restrained by our
structures or resent them, or who are incapable of being

(27:15):
restrained by them. And those are the people we call sociopaths.
And often they commit enough violations that in normal times
they go to jail. When people get angry, whether you
consider that anger justified or not, it doesn't matter. All
of the restraints on them weaken, and as I just said,
some of them don't have very strong restraints to begin with.

(27:35):
I'll tell you a personal story. I don't get truly
angry very often. That was a skill I had to
learn because I certainly came with a temper installed. And
when I do get very angry, I have this urge
to throw things. There's a physical component to it, to
the energy that seems to be generated in my body.
At those times, I don't have the urge to hurt anyone,

(27:57):
thank goodness, but that energy wants to be discharged, And
on those really rare occasions that I've gotten away from myself,
if something's at hand, it just seems very natural to
pick it up, and you get the idea. As a teenager,
as a young adult, I used to give into that
urge sometimes or more often say the mean, sharp, cutting thing,

(28:19):
when I could have tried to diffuse the situation, when
I could have used that same creativity and ability to
speak and communicate to say something constructive or kind or
simply calm. Because who do you argue with most often
in your life? The people who are around you most often?
Who is around you most often the people who you
care about and who care about you, So why would

(28:41):
you want to wound them, even if they have in
that moment wounded you. It took me a stupidly long
time to reason this out, And there was an occasion
when I was eighteen or nineteen when I got that
way into that very bitter mood and I said something
cruel to someone, and I've been ashamed of it ever since.
It wasn't a slur, was anything bigoted. It was just

(29:02):
very cruel and very personal, and I saw the look
in that person's eyes and I thought, do I want
people to look at me that way? And so right there,
I embraced the shame that I felt. It was actually
constructive shame, which is a pretty rare thing in life,
and I changed, I hope for the better. And eventually
a long time later, I reached out to that person

(29:24):
and I apologized and they said, I don't remember what
you're talking about, so it must not have been that bad.
But that was a mercy. I hope they were just
being kind. I mean, I hope both in a way.
And that doesn't mean that I never became angry again. Right,
Life has a lot of annoyances. So flash forward a
few years and I'm in a relationship with the woman
who became my wife, my best friend, and we had

(29:46):
an argument about something We've always argued very rarely. I've
been very fortunate in that way, so it's hard to
imagine what it was even about. But in that moment,
I had that same energy again, the energy that had
to be led out over our kitchen table, our very
first kitchen table. I was probably twenty four years old.
We had just moved in together. I was twenty three

(30:08):
or twenty four when we did that, and again. I
saw the way that this person that I loved so
much and I knew love me so much, was looking
at me. She had never seen me like that, and
I knew it had never occurred to her that I
could be like that, And she was asking herself, have
I misunderstood this person? And I vowed to myself right

(30:29):
then that I would never disillusion her like that ever again.
Which is not to say that we have never argued
again in all the years since, or that I have
never been angered by something or someone. And did I
fail to be the best person I could be in
some of those moments, Yeah, I did. But that was
the last time I acted out in that way, because

(30:51):
very simply, it's not who I choose to be. At
the risk of sounding as if I'm patting myself on
the back, there are a lot of people who never
get outside of themselves that way and realize that by
losing control, they're losing themselves and diminishing themselves in the
eyes of others. In fact, some relish the opportunity, they

(31:11):
lean into it, and when they see structures that restrain
us weakening, they let themselves off the leash. In many cases,
they were barely on it to begin with, and that's
when they take liberties. They also take televisions from shattered
storefront windows. And if in any given group of people,
this is not about race, This is just about a collection,

(31:32):
a sample to borrow from Leo Durocher one more time,
doesn't matter if they're black, white, or striped like a zebra.
They could be all Asian, they could be all white,
they could be all black, they could be all Native American,
they could be all marsh and it could be a
milange of all of the above. If in that sampling
of people you have too many who are of below

(31:54):
average self restraint, then they're going to riot. They're going
to give themselves permission to rampage. And of course, in
a large enough group, when we're talking about thousands and
thousands of people, they could just be citizens of a place.
They could be police, they could be wearing a National
Guard uniform. The larger the sample, the larger the distributions. Right,

(32:15):
the more people we have, the more of them are
going to be sorted to the extreme law abiding side
in the extreme chaotic side. Once someone throws the first rock,
the lawful people are still the lawful people, but the
chaotic people say whoo, and they go to town. A
world run by intelligent people might recognize this and not
give people reason to go off the chain. It would

(32:38):
try to anticipate their frustrations and meet them in the
middle somewhere. And that's why when we come full circle
and start arguing about causes of violence, it sounds really
weak to say, well, they were poor and had been
pushed around by the cops and they were just frustrated
as an explanation, because what we're really doing is looking
for places where this struck that keep us doing our

(33:02):
regular day to day thing, weaken and give people permission
to act out, and acting out, by the way, that
is very different from protest. Protest is actually the opposite
of riot, although for the reasons I just explained, protest
can become a riot, But then so can a soccer
game or a concert. Again, it depends on who is

(33:23):
given permission to do what, and if you're looking at
something like Kent State, again, it was the authorities who
lost control, not the kids. The kids just died. Watts,
as I said earlier, was finally calmed by a combination
of a curfew and an influx of police and National Guardsmen.
There was, by the way, no federalization of the latter.

(33:44):
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara did write up the executive
order for President Lyndon Johnson to give him that power
to deploy the military into Los Angeles, but they never
used it. I want to tell you in advance that
the rest of this story, the base all part, is funny.
In places you may laugh at it. I did, and

(34:04):
I immediately felt ashamed. The truth is, it is funny.
It was funny to me in part because my wife,
who seems to be coming up a lot tonight, Hi, Steffie,
has had a long career with startup technology companies, and
what is always fascinating to me to observe is how
people often don't know what they don't know. It's always

(34:26):
obvious in retrospect, but it's fascinating how the entrepreneurs involved
don't know it and then deny what they don't know. Somehow,
what they don't know is always a cost center. Recently,
we watched one of the documentaries about the mini sub
that imploded on its way to running rich tourists down
to the Titanic a few years ago. The man behind

(34:46):
that business had well more of a clue how to
build a deep sea diving vessel than you or I do,
but not more than the experts he hired, and they
kept telling him that his design was fatally flawed. There
are the scenes in that documentary when engineers are running
tests of miniature versions of his sub and you hear

(35:07):
it fail, and that sound is chilling, both because you
know it anticipates what is going to happen to actual
live human beings, including that founder of the company, and thus,
in refusing the information that is being placed in front
of him that he is in fact paying for, he
is committing an act of hubris that would embarrass an
ancient Greek playwright. And his response is not you are wrong,

(35:30):
and I will tell you why, using data and statistics
and other information that suggests to me that our experiment
is flawed. His answer is simply no. At one point,
my wife was involved with building a box, and you
would think that a box is a well understood technology,
but it turns out that building a box is very complicated,

(35:53):
and in fact it's complicated in some of the same
ways that building a deep sea diving vessel is complicated,
because if the ends don't meet right, they're going to fail.
And if you don't apply the glue to the ends, right,
they're going to fail. Fortunately for me and our children,
my wife was conducting these experiments not at twenty thousand

(36:14):
leagues under the sea, but on dry land. And the
worst thing that happened with a failure, the worst consequence
beyond the boss, the rich guy in charge being annoyed,
is that you would have a mestic cleanup. Whatever was
in the box was no longer in the box. Different deal.
If you're a captain of the Nautilus and you're responsible
for the lives of others, there is a tiny little

(36:36):
bit of well the box version in this story. No
one was hurt, but technology failed, not just technology, but
people because their intentions outweighed their capacity to execute them.
And in that sense, it's a bit of a tragedy
because they really were good intentions. And so on the

(36:56):
other side of this break, I will tell you the
brief tail of the California Golden Oaks baseball bat. In
another timeline, shoe Hey Otani would have hit three home
runs with one of those tonight. In the aftermath of

(37:28):
the riots, a lot of well meaning people decided that
what Watts needed was investment. Others, less well meaning decided
that what California needed was law and order and elected
Ronald Reagan to the governorship. In the book Nixon land
Rick Pearlstein and I really recommend this book, by the way,
argues that it was also the reaction to the Watts

(37:50):
riots instrumental in electing Richard Nixon to the presidency. Big
baseball fan Richard Nixon, Oh well, nobody's perfect, perfectly flaw.
I mean that said, if he's somewhere where the energy
that once was Richard Nixon can observe what's happening to
our nation, he must be well laughing his butt off,

(38:11):
I would imagine, or finding reason to be even more
bitter than he was. His argument about Watergate was, if
the president does it, it's not illegal. At the time
everybody went ew Now via our Supreme Court, that is
the law. It's just true. So Watts in Nixon's home
state of California required investment, and what one well meaning

(38:32):
fellow from Compton, an African American entrepreneur named Norm Hodges,
an engineer who had run an aircraft materials testing program,
decided that the kind of investment needed was industry. It
needed a factory to provide jobs. Specifically, it needed a
baseball bat factory. He wanted to manufacture a special bed,

(38:55):
the watts Wallaper. There was some time in the early
part of the tw twentieth century a boxer known as
the Wattswalloper. I don't know if he was channeling that
guy or just like the alliteration. The Wattswalloper was going
to give a lot of people jobs. He recruited over
one hundred and fifty co investors, most of all of
them Black Dodgers. Lou Johnson and Johnny Roseboro got on board,

(39:18):
and he started the Green Power Foundation. He also got
endorsements from big leaguers from out of town like Kurt
Flood and Leon Wagner. Don Nukeom was on the board.
They rented a building something barely standing for a buck
a year, borrowed fifty thousand dollars, bought some lathes, and
then they started hiring. Hodge's plan was to give the

(39:40):
first shot to people who struggled the most to get jobs,
convicted criminals. The joke was, Hodges told the Los Angeles
Times much later, you had to have thirty arrests to start.
This was a very noble idea. Hodges, who manufactured the
bats under the name California Golden Oaks Products, got a

(40:00):
lot of positive attention for it. By the nineteen seventies,
he had enough local clout to run for the congressional
district representing Compton as a Republican. Had he won, said
The Amsterdam Times, he would have become quote the first
black Republican member of the US House of Representatives since
Oscar de Priest of Chicago, who served from nineteen twenty

(40:22):
eight through nineteen thirty five. This was nineteen seventy six.
He didn't win. It was a landslide for the Democratic incumbent,
but it shows something that he was a candidate at all,
particularly for a party that just had no interest in
running people of color. There would be no black Republican
member of the House of Representatives until nineteen ninety one,

(40:44):
a span of fifty six years. That Norm Hodge's loss
doesn't reflect poorly on him at all. I really came
to like him learning about him. The little that I did.
People would write things that are just amazing in retrospect.
For example, after the assassination of Robert Kennedy in nineteen
sixty nine, One columnist wrote that buying one of the

(41:06):
bats would be an appropriate gesture of remembrance because, I
quote Robert Kennedy believed in things like the Watts Wallaper.
He knew that man needs the dignity of a job
more than he needs the shame of a welfare check.
Alas Hodges' idea didn't work, Green Power was able to

(41:27):
make bats. It just wasn't able to make good bats.
It wasn't just the inexperienced employees, but the wood the
bats cracked on impact, any impact. I want to let
Green Power probably Hodges take it from here, because on
May ninth, nineteen sixty eight, they took out a full
page ad in the Los Angeles Times that was the

(41:49):
sixties equivalent of a go fundme appeal. First, there is
a picture of a tall, thin black man in a
suit under large print that says, Billy twe just bought
a new suit. The last one he picked out cost
him six months. Below that, the ad goes on to say,
this is a story about one hundred and fifty three

(42:11):
negroes that have it made and a million who don't.
The one hundred and fifty three are doctors, lawyers, physicists, businessmen, athletes, teachers,
and engineers. They started green Power. Their average income is
twelve thousand dollars a year, and here they are begging.

(42:31):
Then there's another smaller photo. It's a little hard to
make out, but I think it's the Golden Oak workers
on the factory floor. The text picks up again. If
you've got the time, drive south on San Pedro Street,
just north of Twelfth Street in South Los Angeles. There's
a two story telephone company building with a roof that

(42:51):
leaks when it rains. It's empty except for six lathes,
thirty nine men, two girls in a makeshift office, and
a pile of freshly turned baseball bats. Then there's a
picture of the bat. It looks like a bat. It's
a bit thicker at the top than we're used to nowadays.
Baseball bats Wattswallopers. You've heard about them. Lou Johnson and

(43:14):
John Roseboro have endorsed them. The Dodgers will give them
away to all the youth leagues on every home run,
every big play. The Wattswalloper has been written up in
Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The Times. Bill
Stout did a brilliant CBS television show on the Green
Power Foundation and wants to do another. Green Power has

(43:36):
orders for thousands of Wattswallopers from kids, baseball leagues, department stores,
sporting goods companies, schools, and recreation departments. But they're not
going to make it to first base if you don't help.
They're not going to make it through June. If they
don't make it through May, they're pooped and they're broke. Listen,

(44:00):
and now comes something I really admire, a kind of confession,
a confession that Norm Hodges and friends had vastly overcomplicated
what it was they were attempting to do in Watts Again. Again,
the intentions were good, the plan not so much. Listen.

(44:20):
If you want to make a good baseball bat, you
start with a good hard eastern white ash right wrong. Not.
If you want to make bats in southern California on
no money, you start with plentiful, cheap California oak. It's
terrible wood. You can cut it and ship it for

(44:41):
next to nothing, But a scientist shows you how to
treat it with safe radiation, change it into a hardwood.
Then an aerospace expert shows you how to wind a
thin filament of glass around the shaft, so the grip
is right and the bat is twice as strong. You're ready.

(45:02):
Now you look for men that know how to make
baseball bats, good, dependable, skilled workers. Right wrong again. If
you think green power started with poor raw material for bats,
look at the human raw material. They picked. Losers, convicted criminals,

(45:22):
former narcotics users, unskilled men who didn't believe in America
because America didn't believe in them. All those human beings
you don't like to think about, they believe in green power.
You teach a man to make a baseball bat, but
first you teach him to come to work every day,

(45:44):
to come back after lunch. You teach him about a
paycheck because he's never had one before. You pay him
two dollars an hour. And at the end of the week,
he buys the second new suit he's ever had, and
the cops pick him up because the last time he
picked out a suit, the store was closed. So you
go down to the station and tell the green power

(46:06):
story again. You work with these men like you'd work
with a polio case, and they begin to respond with
small successes. You give them small shots of self respect.
They can't handle a big dose yet. That's where the
time goes. That's where the money went. Now Green Power
has a payroll and a pile of bats that aren't

(46:28):
any good because these men didn't know how to make
bats when they started. Now they do, and they're the
nucleus of a two hundred and fifty man payroll in
June if the place is still open. This is incredible, right.
This is Norm Hodges or someone who works for Norm
Hodges talking about their own effort and explaining what it

(46:48):
is they're trying to do and why it went wrong.
But again, it went wrong for noble reasons. It reminds
me a bit of those Dominos commercials from a few
years ago. People, our pizza is really bad, that it
tastes like salty styrofoam. Well, we agree, we're trying to
do better now. They ran those for forever, like how
long does it take to figure it out? But at

(47:10):
no point did they say our pizzas were bad because
we were cutting costs. We admit it, but we were
cutting costs to send needy kids through college, to give
people who wouldn't otherwise be employed jobs as delivery men
and women. That would have been dishonest because the real
answer was simply, we thought we could stretch our profit
margins by scouring junk yards across America and recovering vinyl

(47:33):
seat covers from discarded cars from the sixties, seventies, and
eighties and then melting them over old bread instead of
using cheese. Norm Hodges was different. Norm Hodges was saying, Look,
I tried to make baseball bats in California, even though
we don't have the right trees. So I tried to
use science to make the trees better, which turned out
to be a heavier lift than while just using trees.

(47:54):
And then I hired people who were unhirable anywhere else
and tried to get them to actually show up up
before I could teach them how to make bats, which
again I didn't have the right wood to do. So help.
Then there's a kind of odd picture. I'll let the
ad describe it. Send Green Power ten dollars and they'll
send you half a bat. It will be on a

(48:15):
black with your name on it. Hang one on your wall,
and when people ask about it, give them the whole story.
If you do business in South Los Angeles, buy one
for each of your customers and have them put it
up in their store. Or office. It translates quickly. It
says I'm with you, or buy one for your son
or your grandson's room, and tell them what it's about.

(48:38):
Tell them how one hundred and fifty three men got
out of Watts and why they had to go back,
And then there was a slip to clip and mail
with your check. Here's a heartwarming thing. They made enough
money off of that ad to pay off their loans
and stay in business, but in the long run they
couldn't break into the bat business, not with California oak bats.

(49:00):
For a while they turned to straight furniture making, which
was probably easier, but I don't think they're in business anymore.
Hodges ended up in Kansas City, in fact, running a
housing program for the poor the Twenty Good Men Volunteered
Neighborhood Improvement Agency, which shows he stayed true to his values.
The idea was to train people in the construction trade

(49:22):
by putting them to work renovating decrepit housing stock, so
once again he was trying to teach people who couldn't
get a job how to get a job. Then they
would fund more efforts by selling those restored houses too
low income buyers. So the idea was to have a
virtuous cycle. He died in nineteen ninety two in Kansas City.

(49:43):
A lot of people give you wings, but very few
give you wind and wings, said Veda Monday, a city
councilwoman and co founder of the twenty Good Men organization.
His wind continues to blow. I really do wish his
bats continued to swing. But in this case, it really
is the thought that counts. Susan Rher, a friend of his,

(50:05):
wrote in the Kansas City Star at the time of
his death, this man walked the talk. He wasn't good
because he could get tax credits. He wasn't good because
it was his job and he was getting paid for it.
He wasn't good because someone told him to do it.
Norm was just good for nothing, by which she meant
no reason. It just was inherent to him, and he

(50:28):
saw good in everyone. Our greatest tribute to this man
who touched us all is to continue his work. That
is our challenge, and that challenge is his legacy. We
can cooperate with each other, we can work together, we
can get the job done. We can continue his work.
We can all be good for nothing. It is a

(50:50):
good idea, isn't it. We can be together, as the
Jefferson Airplane sang in nineteen sixty nine. It's a different
idea than the one many of us subscribe to now,
is that we should be driven apart and set against
each other. And in this case, this one time, the
idea began with a baseball bat. If I had been
around then, I'd like to think that I would have

(51:11):
sent in my ten dollars for a half bat on
a plaque, and as Norm wanted us to do, I
would have told the story when people ask why do
you have a half bat on a plaque? It would
be like the end of Camelot. Each evening from December
to December, before you brush your teeth and things like that,
think back on all the tales that you remember of

(51:33):
Cali Bat. Ask every person if he's heard the story,
and tell it strong and clear to every cat that
once there was a fleeting wisp of glory called Cali Batt.
I really do believe that we can be together. The

(51:54):
story you just heard is one that took me completely
by surprise. I had other plans for this episode, but
I felt like it need to be told, or want
it to be told. It's not always up to me.
What's up to you is if you choose to follow
me on social media, which you can do at Stevengoldman
dot bsky dot social. You can also write us, by
which I mean me at Infinite Inning at gmail dot com,
and there's a Facebook group. Simply go to Facebook search

(52:17):
on Infinite Inning. Bang, you're there. I did put up
a picture of the half bat on a plaque. I
wonder if they're still out there. Time to check eBay.
Should you wish to support the show, and I very
much hope you do, please visit Patreon dot com. Slash
the Infinite Inning hear of a rudimentary kind available at
the hyphen Infinite hyphen Inning dot creator hyphenspring dot com.

(52:39):
But don't you feel odd when you pick up stuff
that's been endorsed to other people? Say you want a
picture signed by the late great actress Carol Lombard, but
she endorsed it to Ralph best wishes. Don't you feel
a bit weird about that? Who's Ralph? Original soundtrack? Available
gratis at casual Observer Music dot bandcamp dot com. Behinally,
should you find yourself with the proverbial moment to spare,

(53:00):
please go to the podcature of yourself and rate, review
and subscribe. And if your podcatcher doesn't let you do
those things, tell them Ralph sent you, and do it anyway.
Our theme song, which you are hearing now and have
been listening to throughout the episode, was a co composition
of myself and doctor Rick Mooring, who says, today I
choose not to quote myself, but the great Robert Heinland,
who wrote a society adapts to facts or it does

(53:23):
not survive, spoken like a scientist. Well, if I can
fend off the ghostly Ralph who just attempted to set
fire to my bed despite the fact that he's intangible,
I'll be back next week with more tales from inside
the Infinite Inning serves me right calling out a ghost
groupie like that,