Infinite Inning 352: Why Are There Bad People When There is Also Good Baseball

We look at an ordinary day of baseball, May 8, 1949, and some extraordinary—and tragic—things that happened. First, a couple of good pitchers get shelled, then we witness some typically disposable regular season games before noticing a young woman who was treated as if she too were disposable, though she very much was not.

Trigger Warning: The second half of this episode contains discussion of a violent crime and some images may be disturbing.

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

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm going to spend some time this week on May eighth,
nineteen forty nine. As we'll see, it was a typical
day in a typical post war baseball season. I choose
to dwell on this day for spiritual reasons. I want
to start here though, by highlighting something small from that day.

(00:21):
It fits on the spine of the discussions that we're
going to have in our time together. And it gives
me a chance to tell Casey stengels story too, from
his very dour days with the Boston Braves, although I
guess it's not really his story in this one. He
just serves as the straight man. He's not the one
giving the smart alec answer. On May eighth, the Pittsburgh

(00:43):
Pirates and Boston Braves played a double header. The Pirates,
who weren't any good, swept the Braves, who were the
defending NL Pennant winners. The Braves were in all sorts
of disarray at the time. Their manager, future Hall of
Famer Billy Southworth, a very belated Hall of Famer, had
lost the clubhouse or at least some of his star players.

(01:03):
He was drinking a lot, in part because well, he
had a problem, in part because we've discussed this before.
There was some tragedy in his background. He had lost
his son during World War Two, and he would be
sent home for his own good about two thirds of
the way through the season, As so often happens, the
number of players took a step back from their pennant

(01:23):
winning levels in nineteen forty nine, and so the Braves
had a disappointing season. But I think nothing hurt more
than Johnny Saine, the picture of spawn and sane and
pray for rain fame, having an off year since returning
from war service. Sain had won twenty games in three
straight seasons, and in nineteen forty eight he had gone

(01:46):
twenty four and sixteen. That's a ton of decisions by
our standards of today, especially because starting pitchers aren't left
in to take the loss anymore, or mostly they're not
if they give up a bunch of runs in the first,
but they're not going to be around to take the
losses late. Thus, in twenty twenty four, in the entire
major leagues, nineteen pitchers reached double figures in both wins

(02:10):
and losses. Only eighteen this year twenty twenty five, fourteen,
and twenty twenty three and if we ask, well, how
many were allowed to lose more than ten games, the
answer is one in twenty twenty three, Charlie Morton twenty
twenty four, none, twenty twenty five to two, Zach Gallon,
who the Diamondbacks just kept hoping would refer to his

(02:33):
usual form. And the other was Brady Singer of the Reds,
who went fourteen and twelve. And I would assume that
without looking that some of those losses were due to
poor run support, because the Reds were just a terrible
offensive club, and he pitched decently in nineteen forty eight
when Johnny Sain was having that big season for the
Pennant Winners, that twenty four and sixteen season with a

(02:55):
two to sixty ERA, he threw twenty eight complete games,
which led the league, and unsurprisingly, he also led the
league in innings pitch the National League, that is, with
three hundred and fourteen and two thirds. And he had
been a very good pitcher, but he had also been
worked so hard that we now understand that those prior
three seasons were going to precipitate a breakdown. I happened

(03:19):
to write something at Baseball Perspectives this week, quoting a
Peter Gammon's column from nineteen eighty five, in which he
was relaying, as opposed to approving of I guess that
the owners had proved that free agent contracts were bad,
or at least long term ones were, because before free agency,
no one ever went on the disabled or injured list,

(03:39):
or whatever list you want to call it. The quote
was something like, in nineteen seventy four, players had a
total of four hundred and fifty days lost to the DL,
and in nineteen eighty five it was eight thousand days.
The implication being that those lazy, good for nothing players
were sitting for injuries that they didn't really need to

(03:59):
see it through, but because their contracts were guaranteed no
matter what they did well, they could just kick back, relax,
and go fishing. But there's a converse to that, which is,
when you're hurt, you should sit first, because the next
man up is going to be better than you, assuming
that half of you is not as good as all

(04:21):
of him, or whatever percentage of you is injured. Second
of all, especially if you're a pitcher, you might do
damage that is going to permanently reduce your ability to
produce at your previous level. And in Saint's case, Sain
did not have a guaranteed contract and his performance, which
included a loss of velocity that I infer from his

(04:43):
averaging over four strikeouts per nine over those three very
good years, but dropping to two point seven per nine
in nineteen forty nine. He pitched through that injury. He
wasn't bad, he didn't forget how to pitch. But he
went ten and seventeen with a four eighty one er,
and given the league environment and his home park, that
was a pounding tantamount to what some of what the

(05:05):
worst starting pitchers in the major leagues this year did
Jake Irvin or Mitchell Parker of the Washington Nationals. And sorry, guys,
you didn't get great support, but still, an ERA of
five seventy is an ERA of five seventy. Jake allowed
a league leading thirty eight home runs in one hundred
and eighty innings. That's the kind of thing that I'm
talking about, and that's not about defensive support. Insane start

(05:26):
against this bad Pirates lineup on May eighth, he didn't
get an out, not one. The Boston Globe game story
notes that he lasted just eleven pitches before Southworth had
seen enough, with the Pirates making contact with nine of them.
In the nightcap, both teams scored four runs in the first,
with former nl MVP Bob Elliott homering for the Braves,

(05:48):
then each scored a single tally in the third before
the Braves went decisively ahead in the seventh, or at
least you'd think that eight to five would have been
decisively ahead, but they blew that lead too, because south
brought Sane on in relief to close it out, and
he gave up two triples, one scoring two inherited runners.
There's a small irony in that, because although he would

(06:11):
come back and win twenty games in nineteen fifty, it
wasn't a great season. The total better reflected offensive support
than great pitching, and from then on he'd be making
a beeline for bullpen work, and he was pretty decent
at that in some seasons, just not in this game.
One beat writer said Staines start reminded him of an
earlier one by Al Javery. They called him Bear Tracks

(06:34):
Bear Trax Javery. He was a local feller from Worcestern, Massachusetts.
He supposedly threw hard by the standards of the day
and certainly during the Warriors he was a decently effective pitcher.
He was actually a two time All Star average out
his nineteen forty two through nineteen forty four seasons, and
he had a three twenty six er strong for the time.

(06:55):
Not exceptionally strong, but good. He had a lot of
help from the park and a warsoft and ball. But
like I said, he was still an above average pitcher now,
just like Sane, Just like all pitchers, he had his
off days. On July third, nineteen forty three, the Braves
hosted the Pirates, managed by Casey's friend Frankie Frish, the
Fordham Flash with Javery pitching against Johnny G. That sounds

(07:19):
like such a nineteen forties pitcher. Johnny G. His nickname
was whiz, But Johnny WHIZG doesn't make sense, so maybe
they just said Johnny G. Whizz I wasn't there. I'm
only guessing. I feel like his official nickname should have
just been an exclamation point, so you get that Johnny
G sound. You have to have that exclamation point. He
actually left after two and two third score listenings. I

(07:40):
think he had been hurt. This was functionally a rehab
start and he was relieved by another great baseball name,
Xavier Risino from queens Hey, Xavier as for Bear Trax.
He lasted five pitches five. The Pirates leadoff hitter was
shortstop Huck Geary. He was purely a wartime player, and
even by that standard, he couldn't hit at all. In

(08:02):
fifty five games, he averaged one sixty two forty one
ninety seven. But he made one of his thirty lifetime
hits in the first hit bat of this game, and
it was a double, which represents a quarter of his
lifetime total. Frank Coleman, a right fielder out of Canada,
but in no other way reminiscent of Larry Walker, batted second.

(08:23):
He singled, pushing Huck Geary to third. Next up left
fielder Jim Russell. Now Russell could hit a bit even
in peacetime, and his baseball card is filled with black ink,
all of it in the caught stealing category. Oh well,
he doubled. He scored Geary, and then the cleanup hitter,
a player we just discussed a few minutes ago. Third baseman,

(08:43):
future nl MVP, six time All Star, the Hall of
Fame never heard of him hit another double. He scored
two more runs, And at that point Casey came out
of the dugout, took the ball and called for reliever Kirby.
Kirby with an E. Farrell and while he and catch
or film Massy, we're waiting for the pitching change to

(09:04):
take place, Casey turned to the catcher and said, what
went wrong? What kind of stuff did AL have? Massy replied,
how the hell should I know? I haven't caught a
ball yet. Sometimes, even for otherwise competent people, nothing that
we try on a given day will work. That's just
the way the ball bounces into and through the infinite inning. Well,

(10:04):
hello there, and welcome back to the show Infinite Inning,
number three fifty two in an ongoing series. And as ever,
I am your cordial, your amiable host, Steven Goldman, for
this time travel trip to the past on a mission
to better understand the present, the time machine being as always,
the game of baseball. Although I must warn you this

(10:27):
week just to be kind about things. How could I
be a cordial or amiable host? Were I not kind
enough to issue this warning? That the story in our
second segment will have a lot of baseball in it,
but it's going to get kind of far away from
baseball and into a pretty nasty true crime story, which
we will go over lightly. However, there are some details

(10:50):
in it that are kind of upsetting. The story itself
is kind of upsetting, and as always, my intention is
not to indulge in anything like sensation or to get
off the very broad topic of this show, but as ever,
to dwell at the intersection of a certain set of
American ideals and see how they cooperate or clash. That's

(11:11):
the baseball part of things, and sometimes it's the cruelty too.
I hope this episode finds you well and enjoying your weekend.
It's been an eventful week. We finally had the elections
of November twenty twenty five. Those results made me hopeful.
But to borrow from Churchill, I don't know that we're
at the beginning of the end, but perhaps the end

(11:32):
of the beginning, and that's a better place than we
were before Tuesday, and for times like these, I will
take that. And yet it would be foolish to relax
one's guard, and so I choose not to. And I
feel like that is part of the theme of the
second act of the show too. How to balance those
two considerations, momentary relief and necessary perpetual vigilance. You can't

(11:56):
go through life saying, hey, we got the fire out,
when's the next fire now? Five minutes from now. As
I alluded to earlier this week at Baseball Prospectus, my
column began as a bit of a just for fun lark.
Let's look back at some of Peter Gammon's old nineteen
eighties columns from forty years ago. When and you've heard
me remark upon this many times each week or so,

(12:17):
he would publish this huge sheet of rumors and just
see you with the benefit of hindsight and sometimes with
the benefit of what we would have known standing right there,
and then how those deals turned out, or if they
even happened at all. For example, early that offseason, this
is after nineteen eighty five, before nineteen eighty six, the
Expos vowed that they would trade Andre Dawson rather than

(12:39):
lose him in free agency. Well they didn't. And not
only that, but the Yankees were telling Gammons this is
on December first of that year, that they had him
wrapped up. No matter how exactly the Yankee trade for
Andre Dawson is structured, the Yankees people believe that it
will be made. Not only that, but they believe that

(12:59):
if they get Dawson and right handed pitcher Bill Gullikson,
they are favorites to become the fifth straight Ale East
second place finisher to win the following year. The New
York Times report of the deal, which has Joe Kelly,
Rich Birdy, Dennis Rasmussen, and outfielder Henry Coddo going for
Dawson and Gullicksen, seems to be correct, at least for

(13:20):
the time being. It's hard for me to read that
without laughing because the Yankees had very little pitching under
ninety years old. Rasmusen was one of them, and he
would have one of the better seasons of his career
in nineteen eighty six. No one was expecting that, but nevertheless,
they had no surplus of pitching to deal from in
other places. He was talking Gammons, that is, about their
reacquiring or retaining Phil Nicro and Joe Nikro. Phil was done,

(13:45):
he was in his mid forties. Joe was forty one
and about there too. Let's pretend it happened. Let's call
Gullicksen and Rasmussen a watch, because that's what they would
have been in nineteen eighty six. And note that a
Yankees outfield that year of Andre Dawson, Ricky Henderson, and
Dave Winfield would only have been marginally better than the

(14:06):
one they did have because the left fielders primarily Dan
Pasqua and Ken Griffey Senior at least prior to their
trading senior to the Braves for Claudell Washington and the
shortstop Paul Zuvella, primarily because they were desperate for a
shortstop and because they were mad at Griffy, and Griffy
was mad at them. But those players plus a few

(14:26):
more combined to hit two seventy nine, three sixty six
four forty two. Dawson never posted a three sixty six
on base percentage in his life. That's not what his
game was about. So to say that he would have
been spectacularly better than that assemblage maybe defensively, I'll give
you that, but offensively no. Another watch, and the Yankees

(14:48):
went ninety and seventy two in our reality, and in
the Gamo reality they would have gone something like ninety
and seventy two. And as someone who lived through that
season as a kid and suffered with that, Yankee he's
team and its geriatric pitching staff. I was kind of
offended retroactively, extremely retroactively to read that, But I was

(15:09):
more offended by reading further, not just what Gammons had
to say about trade rumors, but picking up a few
comments that he had made regarding baseball's labor situation, and
that heavily implied as the quote that I gave you
a few minutes ago regarding the disabled or injured list,
did that the owner should do something about free agency.

(15:30):
And what we know now, what we've known for a
long time, in fact, is that at that time the
owners were deeply engaged in illegal collusion which violated their
collective bargaining agreement with the players, and they were not
suddenly all wise about free agency. They were just refusing
to sign each other's players. And I felt very disappointed
because I've always liked Peter Gammons, I've always admired him,

(15:53):
and to see, even forty years ago, him carrying water
for the owners in a way that would be so
deleterious to the game and so cynical about the players
just really knocked him down a peg for me, because
players were not cynically taking advantage of free agency long
term contracts. Rather, there is risk inherent in free agency

(16:14):
long term contracts. In any long term contract, think of commodities.
If you're a farmer and you're selling milk for I'm
just going to make up a number a dollar a gallon,
and I contract with you as a wholesaler to lock
in that price for five years, ten years, however many years,
and then during the period of the deal, the price
of milk drops by half. I'm in trouble, but that's

(16:36):
the deal that I, in my wisdom made right. And
the owners for most of a century had non guaranteed
short term contracts, and if a player didn't live up
to the terms, if they thought that he didn't live
up to the terms, they could cut him or release
him and owe him nothing. Then the union actually got
some backbone, got some favorable court decisions, and they bargained

(16:57):
for a different reality. Now, like the of us, they
could auction their skills to the highest bidders. And the
owners and the union got together and over a period
of different collective bargaining agreements have negotiated a number of
boundaries to that ability that the owners consented to. So yes,
in the ridiculous pre free agency universe. The owners had

(17:18):
investment without risk once they were somewhat restricted from acting
like a monopolistic, lawless cartel and put in competition with
themselves a little bit in a real way. There was
no form of free agency that wasn't going to entail
that same form of risk to them which everyone else
experiences all the time. And it would be true whether

(17:38):
any of us got hired for a job, we might
not be able to do that job for whatever reason,
and it might take a year to find that out.
It might take a week, it might take five years.
In that same column I talked about the mega contract
or then mega contract that Bruce Suitor got from the Braves.
It paid him for most of the rest of his life.
The problem was that Suitor, throughout the six years of

(17:59):
the day, he basically couldn't pitch, and when he did pitch,
he was ineffective. Now, all of us have had colleagues,
and maybe they weren't under six year contracts, maybe they
were at will employees, but nonetheless they persisted in their
jobs who were not worth a dime that they got,
and yet whatever they were being paid that went to
them every two weeks or whenever you get paid, that

(18:21):
went into their bank accounts, so they got to spend it,
they got to live on it, they got to save it,
and every dime of the company's money was wasted. So
I don't understand why then or now. And remember back
when Gammons was writing in eighty five, Free Agency was
still within its first ten years. But why should owners
get to cry about a situation which is basically equivalent

(18:41):
to the human situation. Garrett Cole needs shoulder surgery and
is going to miss some time at work. You need
shoulder surgery and you're going to miss some time at work. Well,
I'll let you read the rest of it if you're
so inclined to. I should note that we also, as always,
had a reissue episode this week. I talked about teams
that hit a ton of home runs and still lose,

(19:02):
which is part of my master plan for the Colorado Rockies,
not fixing them but at least making them entertaining. Are
you listening, mister Deepodesta? And I really hope that when
Deepodesta has his introductory trade conference, someone asks him how
his approximately ten years with a dysfunctional Cleveland Browns team
reflects his input, because there's some stuff in there that

(19:25):
is a real indictment of whatever executive was responsible for
it and his judgment, not to mention his ethics and morality. Finally,
I have had some Alfuera coffee. Doctor Rick Mooring, who
is not just someone I made up, I don't think,
shared a carton of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership's Roosevelt Blend,

(19:46):
which is packaged in partnership with Afuera. This single origin
coffee for the all day, every day coffee drinker has
notes of roasted almond, coco coffee and tobacco with mild
acidity and smooth finish. Now having tried it, I find
that description to be accurate. It's a smooth cup of coffee,

(20:06):
which is the way that I like it. I do
not like fruity notes like strawberry in my coffee. They
throw me off and just clash with my sensibilities. Berry
flavors and coffee always taste like a note of rust
to me, a strong note of rust, and it really
ruins the cup. Now, I admit I was balked by
tobacco too, because I imagine the odor of ash trace

(20:29):
And here's the funny thing, you can kind of smell
that note in the pot, not kind of you can
smell that note in the pot when you take it
off the burner, but in the cup you don't taste it,
except maybe for a tiny note of background bitterness that
blends with the whole thing and possibly even added to
my enjoyment of it. So there you go, an honest,

(20:49):
ethically pure endorsement of a Fuera coffee. Go to Afuera
and use the code infinite inning to get fifteen percent
off and see if you agree with me. And yes,
a tiny bit of that will trickle down on to
the show and help me keep the show going and
drinking things like a Fata coffee, which is sourced from sustainable,
certified Rainforest Alliance farms in Central and South America, primarily

(21:13):
in El Salvador. And they've got volcanic soil, which who
knew adds notes of tobacco to coffee? Who knew that
volcanoes are smoking? Well, wait a minute, I guess they do,
don't they tobacco notes. We're living the high life, folks.
Volcano coffee, so round, so full, so fully packed. And
now we return to this afternoon's broadcast of The Lone Ranger,

(21:35):
or more accurately, on the other side, we will have
our second story of the show, which returns to a
date I mentioned earlier May eighth, nineteen forty nine, and
some things that happen on the baseball field and some
darker things that happened off of it. Stay with me, okay,
and we'll resume our conversation.

Speaker 2 (21:53):
Then.

Speaker 1 (22:04):
This story is about baseball, but it also has a
lot of not baseball in it, which contradictorily, I think
is also kind of subrosa still baseball, I got here
by accident. Sometimes when you're doing research, you can't help
but be a tourist. And I was looking at a
particular game, Yankees at Senators July one, nineteen forty nine,

(22:26):
which the Yankees won with a four run top of
the ninth inning. What was intriguing about that inning was that,
with the game on the line, Casey, yes he was
the manager there too, called on three consecutive pinch hitters
and all three delivered. I feel reasonably comfortable guessing that
that was something like a one time occurrence in baseball history.
And I was hoping that someone said something cute or

(22:49):
clever about it at the time. No such luck that
I can see, at least so far, but I'm not
done looking. As I was flipping through various newspapers in
and around that time, I kept coming across a trial
then going on and seeing pictures associated with it and
some sensational sounding headlines, and I just decided to follow
my curiosity and see what had happened. And most of

(23:12):
what I'm about to say is just based on that
newspaper reading, with a little bit coming from the one
book that has been written about this story. It's called
Flowers for Dana by Denise Tanaka, which is also based
on the newspapers, because the trial transcript seems to have
been lost and so reading the book was a bit circular.
But I wanted to see if my understanding of this

(23:34):
disturbing event was consistent with that of someone who had
spent years looking at it, and I think it was.
If you happen to be on Blue Sky during the
World Series, and I'm talking about the social media alternative
to what used to be called Twitter but is now
the Reich's ministry of propaganda, you are aware that a
feed that is normally pretty dominated by politics and other

(23:56):
Esoterica really saw a takeover by baseballs. There was just
a lot of enthusiasm for this World Series, as also
demonstrated by the high television viewership numbers. The Dodgers are
bad for baseball. No one in baseball ever screamed, that's
a different discussion. A few days ago, the management at
Blue Sky commented, I think I have this right that

(24:19):
during Game seven, something like three percent of the total
comments during that period were about the ballgame. And that
may not sound like much, but when you think about
how many people are on there and just how much
total noise there is, and I include myself in that noise,
it's a high number. The thing I like about Blue
Sky is that there are a lot of people I

(24:42):
find politically sympathetic and vice versa. The downside of that
is that it brings out scolds and other people who
are basically resistant scrifters who just post a lot of
very basic, lowest common denominator stuff that's supposed to be
red meat for lefties. And some of them are clearly bots,
but others seem to be actual people who just have

(25:03):
a very narrow, militant view of how we should be
living life. During this period if we're serious about changing
the way that we're living. And so when you have
a thread that's light or frivolous, it could be about
movies or music or indeed sports, you sometimes get this
irritating or at least see how can you talk about

(25:24):
baseball at a time like this? And the simple answer
is that we have to let a little light into
our lives sometimes or will suffocate. And further, we don't
owe anyone an explanation for how we spend our time
in this world. If you generic you try to dictate
that to me, generic me, then you're no less a

(25:44):
fascist than anybody else. I feel like there was less
of that during the World Series because it would have
just been a hopeless undertaking. It would have just been
submerged in the tide of joy and community. And although
it was a very tense World Series and a lot
of people see not to be enjoying themselves, even within that,
I think they were still having a lot of fun.

(26:05):
More than that, the world is so very large, just
our nation is so very large a continental empire, and
so much happens simultaneously that you can't keep track of
all the action, but you can't become myopic and monofocused either,
and I feel like this day in nineteen forty nine
demonstrates that. But it's also, I warn you, a sad

(26:27):
story of a very random and inexplicable act of violence.
The Book of matthew notes that he knows the fall
of every sparrow. Rodger Kipling later wrote, he never wasted
a leaf for a tree? Do you think he would
squander souls? And so here we enter the country of
theodesy and the problem of evil in a world that's
supposed to be moral and good, or perhaps a variation

(26:49):
on that musical question which goes, how can there be
evil in a world in which baseball also exists? As
I said earlier, May eighth, nineteen forty nine, was an
ordinary day in an ordinary post war season. It was
a Sunday. The one hundred and fifty four game season
had started late by our standards, so teams had only
fifteen or twenty games under their belts. In the American League,

(27:11):
the Yankees were off to a fifteen and four start
and were up on Cleveland and Detroit by four games each.
They would eventually play that back In the National League,
the Giants, at twelve and seven had a narrow lead
over the Dodgers at one game back. The Braves were
a game and a half behind, and the rest of
the league wasn't too far out either. Conversely, back in
the American the Saint Louis Browns, at three and seventeen,

(27:35):
were already twelve and a half games back. Their season
was over and it had barely begun. There were thirteen
games that day, and since it was a Sunday, there
were five double headers. I already told you about Johnny
Stain's game a few other highlights. The White Sox and
A's split a pair at Comiski Park. A young Nelly

(27:56):
Fox appeared as a pinch runner in the second game,
not for the White so the team for which he
would have a Hall of Fame career, but for the A's,
the team that would soon trade him away. The Senators
swept Cleveland. Washington would lose one hundred and five games. Cleveland,
the defending champions, would win eighty nine. But these things
happen in baseball. In the opener, the Senators knocked around

(28:18):
knuckleball lefty Gene Bearden. I don't think I've told his
story on the show, and I need to because it
has all kinds of elements to it, heroism, danger, a
slow rise, and a quick fall. In nineteen forty eight,
he went twenty and seven with a league leading two
forty three ERA, and not at all unrelated, Cleveland won
the most recent championship in team history, and then the

(28:40):
rest of his career he didn't come close to that,
not within light years of it. In that game, Cleveland
had future Hall of famers batting second, third, fourth, and sixth,
center fielder Larry Doby, shortstop Lou Boudreau, second baseman Joe Gordon,
and right fielder Minnie Minoso. They still had one Hall
of Famer to go because Sanchel Paige came on in relief.

(29:01):
The Senators hit him too. How could they disrespect a
national treasure like that? In the nightcap, Senator's Rady sid Hudson,
who would go eight and seventeen on the season, pitched
a four hit shutout backed by a home run from
Sherry Robertson, a utility player who is on the roster
through nepotism. He was a nephew of the owner the Yankees.

(29:23):
With wild but hard throwing lefty Tommy Burne on the
mount shut out the Tigers twelve to nothing. Burn walked
only four, which for him was a Greg Maddox game.
The Tigers had brought an ace level pitcher out for
that one too, curveball specialist Virgil Trucks. But in keeping
with one of the themes of this episode, sometimes great
pitchers have bad days, sometimes bad pitchers have good days,

(29:44):
Tommy Henrick went four for four in this one. Yogi
Barra three for five. Yogi needs no introduction. And maybe
I've talked about Henrick enough that I don't have to
go into him again either. Possibly I've said this every
time he's come up, but he fascinates me in that
he had Hall of Fame hitting ability, maybe low key,
but for real he had it. But first Cleveland covered

(30:04):
him up in the miners, which gave him a late
arrival date in the majors. He lost three years to
military service, and both before and after that he had
all the injuries. And what happened is what happened, and
we can't change that. But we can kind of imagine
alternative world so in which things were a little or
dramatically different, if you pretend he didn't lose that time

(30:24):
in service to his country. For whatever reason and pencil
in three years of what was his typical performance at
the time. He lands at around fifty career wins above replacement,
which is probably somewhere around the floor for where a
Hall of Famer needs to be. Now, if you really
want to get him over the hump, you have to
pretend he didn't get hurt all the time too. But
as it was, he hit two eighty two, three eighty two,

(30:47):
four ninety one in about thirteen hundred career games. That
is a winning player. There were a couple of other
doubleheaders I have yet to discuss. The Phillies in Red
split a pair at Philadelphia Johnny Van drmir versus Kurt
Simmons in game one, Simmons pitch better, but the Phillies
lost it. In extras, when the Red scent eleven batters
to the plate in the top of the twelfth future
Hall of Famer Red Robin held the hold on. Holy Moly,

(31:10):
did I just say, Red Robin, that's a very bad
burger chain. I really just said that. There was one
in my town.

Speaker 2 (31:17):
It closed up.

Speaker 1 (31:18):
They had some decent sandwiches, but they had no staff.
You'd go in, they'd seat you at the table, they'd
see you say order through the tablet that was on
a tripod on the table, and you'd never see another
human being again. If you needed a refill, you were
out of luck. If they never brought you your food,
you were out of luck. If the biker gang at
the next table set you on fire, you were out
of luck. It was like a dine in drive through.

(31:40):
It was very disconcerting and kind of depressing to just
be alone on the floor of a restaurant. What I
meant by that spectacular brain misfire was future Hall of
Famer Robin Roberts. He held the Reds to one run
over six innings in a curfew shortened Game two, while
the Phillies aided by a homer from Bill Swish. Nicholson

(32:00):
I so enjoy saying that two time National League home
run leader scored eight. It will not surprise you to
learn that the Red Sox swept a double header from
those lowly Browns. It might surprise you to learn that
Ted Williams did not have a big day, going two
for nine. Second game was called for darkness after eight
still a hazard as of nineteen forty nine. The Dodgers
beat the Cardinals in a back and forth game at Brooklyn.

(32:21):
Gil Hodges, one of five future Hall of famers in
the Dodgers lineup that day, hit a home run Peewey
Reese let off. That's one, Duke Snider two, Jackie Robinson
and Roy Campanella batted three, four, five, and Hodges batted sixth.
Preacher Row in the midst of a terrific five year
run as a starting pitcher picked up his sole save

(32:42):
of the season in that one. Finally, the first place Giants,
who would eventually subside and finish under five hundred thrashed
the Cubs ten to one, Bobby Thompson hitting a home
run off of Monk Dubial in that one. As I
said earlier, a typical day in baseball, every game is differ.
Every game counts for someone or something, where the fans

(33:03):
who were in attendance, but at the same time they're
really disposable, and most of the individual ones in the
long season are not well remembered. They're only typical baseball games.
There weren't too many odd or unusual plays, There were
no ejections. The strangest one I could find was that
in the seventh inning of the first White Sox A's
game rookie outfielder gust Erneil or is it Zernil? I

(33:25):
never know. As usual Ozarkike they called him. He was
one dimensional, but the one dimension was power, and he
would lead the American League in home runs in nineteen
fifty one, and in nineteen fifty three he would hit
forty two home runs for the Athletics, But at this
time he was with the White Sox. Parenthetically, the deal
that sent him from the White Sox to the A's

(33:46):
you can second guess all day long. You could not
long after it happened too. That was April thirtieth, nineteen
fifty one. It was a three way deal that included
the A's, the White Sox, and Cleveland, with Cleveland giving
away Minnie Minoso to the White Sox and the White
Sox sending Zarneil to the A's. The reason that Zarneil
was with the White Sox to begin with, Cleveland had

(34:08):
sold him there. You've probably lost track of where I
was with all this, and practically so have I. But
what it is is that in the seventh inning of
the first game, Zerneil knocked a double the other way,
or it might have been a foul ball down the
right field line with a man on the man being
Luke Kappling. At that point, everyone in the park, including
the umpires, lost the ball boof just gone vanished from sight,

(34:30):
said one game story, no evidence that it had ever
been there. The umpires gathered debated for five minutes, shrugged
and called it a ground world double and who could
really second guess them at that point. The biggest baseball
news of the day, and it didn't get that much
fanfare happened off the field when the Veterans Committee announced
it had elected two pitchers to the Hall of Fame,

(34:51):
three Finger Brown or Mordecai Brown or Minor Brown, whatever
you want to call him, and Kid Nichols. Nichols, though
older than Brown, was still around though he was about
to turn eighty. But Brown had a more typical Hall
of Fame story in that the committee had named him
a little over a year after he left this planet.
He never knew at that time, and now he was

(35:13):
in a box under the ground in Tarra Hout. I
know that we can never have perfect timing with that
sort of thing, but I just wish that Hall of
Fame voters would be more sensitive to the mortality of
people to who they are going to give the Ultimate
Career Service Award. That's all it is. It doesn't matter
more than that. If you think you can make somebody happy,

(35:35):
if you think you can change someone's life, if you
think you can glow them up in the eyes of
the nation and more particularly their grandkids, please do that.
I mentioned that Nellie Fox was a Hall of Famer
a while back. Nellie Fox did not make it through
the Baseball Writers voting. He had fifteen years on the ballot,
but he was gone five years into that period. Now

(35:58):
that is not the voter's that he got cancer and
sick and quickly and passed away at the age of
forty seven. On the other hand, by the time he
exited the ballot, he missed by something like one or
two votes. He finished with seventy four points something percent.
And I'm sure the complexion of the electorate had changed
over those fifteen years. But to the extent that some

(36:19):
writers had hung around voting and voting and voting, and
we know that happens, it would have been good if
they had thought a little more carefully earlier, because if
they were capable of figuring it out by nineteen eighty five,
they might have figured it out by nineteen seventy three
as well. And that goes especially for the no one
is a first ballot Hall of Famer guy. They all
have to wait their turns. According to me, those guys

(36:41):
are the worst self important sons of bitches. And I'll
tell you why, because, never mind Nelly Fox getting cancer,
We've been very fortunate that no one in that waiting
period has stepped off the curb at the same time
that a drunk driver was coming around the corner. And
certainly I can name you at least one Hall of
Famer that happened to Melo, who died in a head
on crash with a drunk driver long after Fortunately he

(37:04):
had been enshrined in the Hall of Fame and got
to enjoy the thing. You never know when bad luck
will show itself, and you never know when someone will
give you just a little push, the worst possible push,
one that is simultaneously so ill intentioned and so inexplicable.
But then that's the next story that I want to
tell as part of this discussion. Something else that happened

(37:26):
on May eighth, nineteen forty nine, something much darker than
a misplaced line drive. And so I'm going to pause
for a break here, just to give anyone who wants
to hop off a chance, or if you have kids
in the car, for you to reach your destination that
drop off point, whether it's at school or Aunt Sally's,
and then you can turn me back on, so to speak,

(37:48):
and listen to the rest of the episode without worrying
that anyone's going to hear anything that will be unnecessarily
troubling and tough to explain. Except for you, I'm sorry
to say, and except for me, let's get through it together.

Speaker 2 (38:01):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (38:15):
We turn now to a city that was then pretty
far from any major league outposts, and it still is,
but today it's a city of one hundred thousand. It
sits in the southwestern part of the state of Virginia.
It is called Roanoke. I personally have never been there.
I'm pretty sure I've done area radio multiple times, so
folks around town might have heard my voice at some point,

(38:37):
but they've never seen me, and I've never seen them.
I have passed by on Interstate eighty one on my
way to Mississippi a number of times. I probably will again.
It looks like they have a high quality art museum
on the premises, and that intrigues me, so perhaps next
time I'll make time to stop that Sunday. Sunday, May
the eighth, while all this baseball was going on, two

(38:58):
sixteen year old students at the local high school had
an unscheduled encounter in the Christ Episcopal Church parish house,
but only one of them walked out. The one who
didn't was a sixteen year old girl named Dana Marie Weaver.
She lay alone there for most of the night and
a morning, but when the janitor came in on Monday,

(39:19):
he found her lying on the floor of the building's
second floor kitchen. She was lying in a pool of blood.
There were bruises on her legs and on her throat,
and a bad gash on her head. Her skirt and
slip were pulled up, which would figure in the way
that both the police and the prosecutors viewed or approached
things as they both tried to catch the perpetrator, and

(39:41):
then once they did, to ask that that person be
subjected to the death penalty specifically, and we'll return to
this in a moment. Post mortem examination showed that Dana
had not been sexually assaulted, but that was not an
aspect that the prosecutors ever let go of, and I
don't know whether they were right or wrong about that.
The examination also showed that the severe blow to her

(40:04):
head had not been what killed her, but rather the
bruises on her neck indicated she had been strangled for
at least five minutes. But beyond that, there weren't a
whole lot of clues. The kitchen had been wrecked around her,
there was broken glass and chairs knocked over, but in
an era before cameras were on the present, there was
just no evidence of who had been there. Well, except

(40:26):
for one thing. All the fingernails on Dana's left hand
were broken, and there was blood and skin under them,
but who's As you would expect, the police work backwards
and figured out how she had gotten to that place
at that time. On both Saturday and Sunday, Dana had
spent time on what sounds like a group date with
three students from Virginia Tech. She and whichever of the

(40:49):
three boys she was seeing shared a car with two
other couples. On Sunday. Their afternoon outing wrapped up at
about six pm, and she asked to be dropped off
not at home, but at the She seems to have
thought that there was going to be some kind of
youth meeting, and there had been, but they had left
gone off on some kind of picnic that was a
scheduled thing, But somehow she hadn't known that everyone she

(41:11):
had been with, the three fellas, they had a solid alibi,
even the janitor, who being black, sadly fell under automatic
suspicion he had been far out of town at the
estimated time of death. The police, who admitted they were
grasping its straws, said they were looking for a prowler,
a prowler with a raw gash on his face, but
they had no luck finding him in the immediate hours

(41:33):
after Dana's body was found, because there wasn't any such person.
Rather than tease this out and be coy, I'm just
going to tell you what had really happened. A boy
named Lee Scott, called Buddy, was in the parish house
when Dana arrived. He was also sixteen and a student
at her high school. He had glasses and a flat

(41:53):
top haircut. He was perhaps something of a jock. He
was in the boy Scouts, taught swimming at the YMCA.
Also a lifeguard, had been elected his homeroom president, he
sang bass in the church and school choir, and he
had been given a pin for never missing a Sunday
service at church. His grades were even good. In the
years to come, his folks and friends would continually emphasize

(42:18):
what an accomplished, upright, and very normal child he was.
But that's what makes this story so strange and hard
to live with. Everything about it is wrong and unfair,
of course, particularly to the victim. Conversely, I think that
the murderer got a more than fair deal, and yet
he so thoroughly destroyed another human being in an instant,

(42:41):
and himself as well, that it's hard to believe that
we could go wrong so suddenly and with so little provocation.
But let me tell the story that Sunday afternoon, he
had gone to the parish house to play ping pong
with his best friend. Said friend never showed, but Buddy
was still waiting around when it came in. They knew

(43:01):
each other purely from passing in the hallways. They weren't friends,
they hadn't dated, they hadn't arranged any kind of assignation.
I'm not sure if this next bit is from his
trial testimony or just supposition. But perhaps he said, Hey, Dana,
as long as you're here, you want to play some
table tennis. That's why I came here. And she said sure.

(43:22):
So they went to get the paddles and the balls,
but they couldn't find the equipment, and as part of
that hunt, they ended up in the kitchen, where they
opened up the fridge and each helped themselves to a
glass bottle of doctor pepper. Now we come to the
part of the story that makes me think that maybe
sex was somehow part of this story, even if it
wasn't in the way that they were thinking about at

(43:43):
the time. It also, in a very strange and oblique way,
makes sports a part of this story, the dark, corrupting
part of sports that arises when people say sports is
not for fun, sports is for being tribal. They stood
in the kitchen, drinking their sodas and talking. The subject
turned to a boy that Dana had dated and then

(44:04):
broken up with. The school wrestling champ fellow named Jimmy.
Buddy supposedly idolized Jimmy. I guess the breakup was not
amicable because Dana started bad mouthing Jimmy and when she
said that he was an overrated wrestler and had won
the state championship purely due to luck, Buddy hit her

(44:25):
in the head with his glass bottle of doctor pepper.
He said he had just gotten really, really angry all
of a sudden, and the rest he didn't really remember.
The two struggled. Dana put a long, easily visible gash
on Buddy's right cheek with her nails. You can see
it in his arrest photos. He might have kicked her

(44:46):
in the legs. She might have kicked at him, and
that's why her skirts had ridden up, as they were
long and restrictive, and she would have needed to get
them out of the way or kind of kicked past them.
At some point. Buddy said he got his hands around
her throat, just wanting to fight her off, but when
he let go, she was no longer alive. For an
amnesiac in some sort of blackout state. He had a

(45:10):
lot of presence of mind in that moment. He left,
and when he did, he took two items with him,
the glass soda bottle he had hit Dana with and
a cloth bag. The cloth bag is the part of
this story besides all of it. I mean that really
bothers me. Given Buddy's later defense, the parish house kitchen

(45:31):
had an old style coffee urn, before coffee makers had
disposable filters or metal mesh baskets that you could clean
out and reuse. You line them with a cotton bag.
Why did he take that because there was blood on it?
Why was there blood on the bag because he probably

(45:51):
used it to strangle Dana put a pin in that.
Buddy took off out the back by the way for
his best friend's house, the one who had stood up
for Ping Pong. He was bleeding from the scratches that
she had inflicted upon him, and his clothes were soaked
in blood, so he decided not to knock because that
would have been a lot to explain. Instead, he stashed

(46:14):
the evidence under one of his friend's hedges and went home.
He got past his parents somehow, He undressed, stashed his
bloody clothes in the back of his closet, and he
went to sleep. The next morning, he went to school
just like always, and that afternoon he went to teach
swimming just like always. Anyone who asked about the gash

(46:35):
on his face, including his folks, he said he had
gotten it scratching at pimples or from poison oak, or
something implausible like that. If you see the pictures, it
wasn't that sort of scratch. It was a curving line
raked down his cheek. On Tuesday, Dana's body having by
then been discovered and the cops having started questioning kids
and teachers at the school, the principal announced that the

(46:56):
school would be collecting money to buy flowers for Dana's funeral.
As homeroom president, Buddy collected the money. According to the
book I mentioned earlier flowers for Dana. The gashes and
scrapes were still severe enough to be noticeable, and one
student remarked, apparently jokingly, that, given the description of who
the cops were after, Buddy might be the killer. Yeah,

(47:17):
I killed her. Call the police, he replied. At some
point later that day, a female student did give the
police a tip about Buddy, and I don't know that
she had any special knowledge. I don't think she did,
because no one did. I think she just looked at
his face and put two and two together. The police
arrested him right there at the school. He was interrogated
for hours and hours, seemingly without a lawyer. Present. His father,

(47:41):
just not believing that his straight arrow kid could have
done this thing, allowed the police to search his room.
The clothes came out eventually, so did the bottle and
the bag under the hedge. During his interrogation, Buddy kept
insisting that he couldn't remember anything, so the police asked
his dad for permission to administer sodium pentathal, so called

(48:02):
truth serum. Still not believing that his son had done this,
he gave his consent, and that's when Buddy gave something
like a confession. He had done it, but he hadn't
intended to. He hadn't learned Dana there. There was no
sexual motive and no attempt to violate her. She had
just said something critical of a boy that he liked
to the state wrestling champ and he lost it. He

(48:25):
was put on trial for first degree murder with sexual intent.
The prosecutors stuck to their belief that this was a
case of attempted rape that turned into murder. He was
on trial for his life with a possible penalty of death,
and given that, and given all the evidence against him,
the trial was very strange because it happened at all.

(48:46):
He had a good lawyer, and the lawyer looked at
everything I told you figured appropriately this was hopeless, and
in his opening statement to the jury said, look, he
did it. I'm not asking you for acquittal. He deserved
so punishment, that's a quote. Yet he did not have
Buddy plead guilty in return for a lesser sentence. There

(49:07):
was no plea bargain. They went through the whole thing,
and I don't know if his lawyer was hanging his
client's life on what he said was the only way
to look at this as a fight between two children
gone tragically wrong. So why punish a good boy? Or
Buddy's parents wouldn't let him plead out. I really don't
get it. His lawyer even allowed him to testify in
his own defense, and he came across his rather dead

(49:29):
eyed and unemotional, which was not good. He repeated again
no premeditation, that he had just been seized by this
rageful impulse. He blacked out, and by the time he
came back to himself, Dana was dead. And yet when
it came time for the judge to instruct the jury,
they were given only one choice, was he guilty of
murder or not? They were not allowed to consider manslaughter,

(49:52):
which seems to be what Buddy's attorney had been angling
for well. Two and a half hours later, the verdict
came in as expected, guilty, spared the death penalty, but
he got ninety nine years. His main reaction was to
wonder aloud how many books he might be able to
read in that time. That freaked people out too. In
the years that followed, his family and friends made many

(50:14):
pleas for a retrial, a pardon, or parole, and those
pleas hinged on first what a great kit he had
been prior to the evening of May eighth, nineteen forty nine,
which was irrelevant, and that the jury had been improperly selected,
which every appeals court disagreed with, And that the jury
should have been allowed to consider manslaughter since, according to

(50:36):
Buddy's story, he had murdered Dana accidentally and without intent.
And I would almost think that that's correct, that he
got a raw deal in that sense. But I don't
think it's correct. I think, at least in some aspect
he lied. Why because of that cloth rnbag, the one
that he might have. I'm not saying I know this
for sure, but some of the evidence suggested it grabbed

(50:57):
and wrapped around this poor girl's throat, This poor girl
whose only crime was to bad mouth a boy that
he had some kind of bro style crush on. That's
not the same thing as trying to end a fight.
To conclude a scuffle with a girl. By the way,
that's picking up a weapon and using it to kill
it is calculated. It's hard to even believe his explanation

(51:21):
for his rage. She said, a guy who wasn't even
there had won the state wrestling championship by luck, and
he killed her for that. But he was turned down
for parole four times. But somehow in the mid nineteen sixties,
his family got his case before the politically powerful conservative
Senator Harry Bird, who in turn pressured the outgoing governor

(51:43):
Albertis Harrison. Harrison granted a conditional parole on his last
day in office in nineteen sixty six, but he had
served about sixteen and a half years. He moved in
with family in Ohio, got married, had kids, and concluded
his own time on the planet while living in Indiana
in nineteen ninety six, Dana stayed dead. That's how that works.

(52:08):
And so we come full circle. How can we talk
about baseball at the same time. We talk about this
because both things happened at the same time. Are they
related only by the fact that they both occupied a
place in this world at the same time. Just like
as throughout the postseason, throughout every round, throughout all seven

(52:29):
games of the World Series, the leadership of our country
was abducting children and hard working parents whose paperwork happens
to be incomplete and incarcerating them. God knows where. How
could we talk about baseball when that was happening. How
could we not? This is the world we were given,
the world we made, or both, and it contains a

(52:51):
dissonant kaleidoscope of love and violence. To experience both without
going mad is the crucible of the human adventure, and
no amount of complaining about it will force it to
make sense or produce an acceptable ratio of joy and mourning,
happiness and suffering, and so on. And so though I

(53:15):
only learned about Dana's story this week, over seventy six
years after the fact, I feel terrific sorrow for the useless,
inexplicable death that she suffered. But I also wish I
had a ballgame to watch that would distract me from
it and remind me of the good parts of life.
It's how we get through and there's no shame in that,

(53:36):
no shame at all. Or we could talk about the
Rockies some more. Should you wish to talk to me
on social media, you can do so at Stephen Gooldman
dot bsky dot social. You can also write us, by
which I mean me at Infinite Inning at gmail dot com,
and the Facebook group remains. Simply go to Facebook search

(53:56):
on Infinite Inning. Bang You're there. Should you wish to
support the show, and this show is very much brought
to you by our advertisers and especially our Patreon supporters,
please go to Patreon dot com slash the Infinite Inning.
And on that note, I would like to thank new
Patreon subscribers Tedster and Dennis. Thank you so much. Tedster
and Dennis. Here of a rudimentary kind available at the

(54:20):
hyphen Infinite Hypheninning dot creator, hyphenspring dot com. Original soundtrack
available gratis at Casualobserver Music dot bandcamp dot com. Finally,
should you find yourself with the proverbial moment to spare,
go to the podcatcher of your choice and rate, review
and subscribe. And if your podcatcher doesn't let you do
those things, find the nearest person that you love and

(54:41):
give them a hug.

Speaker 2 (54:42):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (54:43):
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 Moring, who says the deepest,
deadest part of space within ourselves the only place where
love gives formation and birth to a stone. Well, if
I can just stay out of the weather long enough
to avoid getting rained on by the sun, I'll be

(55:06):
back next week with more tails from inside the Infinite Inning.