Infinite Inning Reissue 10 (053): On Cobb, Robinson, American Values, and 3000 Hits

In new remarks for this week’s baseball, history, and politics reissue, we discuss the Infinite Inning creed and ask what it is we can infer about whole groups if Johnny Bench was a better player than Johnny Roseboro or Lou Gehrig more of a slugger than Vic Power? (Hint: not a damned thing). Then we return to stories of Paul Waner’s 3000th hit and Ty Cobb’s racism and how it intersected with American attitudes during his formative years.   

The Infinite Inning is a journey to the past to understand the present using baseball as our time machine. Baseball, America's brighter mirror, often reflects, anticipates, and even mocks the stories we tell ourselves about our world today. Baseball Prospectus's Steven Goldman discusses the game’s present, past, and future with forays outside the foul lines to the culture at large. Expect history, politics, stats, and frequent 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 (00:26):
Hello, and welcome to another Infinite Inning reissue episode. I
am Stephen Goldman, as always your convivial host, for a
trip to the past on a mission of better understanding
the present, the vehicle being Baseball. This week brings us
a look back at an episode from May twenty eighteen
and a show in which I talked to former Royals

(00:46):
infielder Greg Pryor. It was a thrill for me to
talk to him in that When I was first getting
into baseball, one of the things that really turned my
mind onto the game was the Avalon Hill tabletop game
status pro Baseball. Terrible name, and it was probably a
bit less nuanced than strat o matic, And I know
some stratamatic officionados would say that it was much less nuanced,

(01:07):
but it was one of the ways I learned how
baseball worked and who the players were at that time.
The set that I had let you replay the nineteen
eighty four season. That year, Prior was with the Royals
and he played a lot because George Brett missed fifty
eight games. Prior was a utility infielder. His season didn't
start Brett's, that is, until mid May, because he tore

(01:28):
ligaments in one of his knees during spring training, and
then he was out for some decent chunks of time
in August in September as he tried to play through
a torn left hamstring that resulted in one of the
disappointments of having that season to replay, I didn't get
classic Brett to round things off. After his season got started,
he spent roughly a month hitting more or less as
you might have expected at that time, going into the

(01:49):
last week of June hitting three zo two with a
three to eighty eight on base percentage and a five
to fifteen slugging percentage. His average dropped under three hundred
at that point, and with those injuries he never got
over the mark again. He just had an off year.
He had a big year in nineteen eighty five, but
eighty four not so good. He hit two seventy four
three twenty four to twenty seven over the rest of
the season, and it wasn't a big offensive year, so

(02:12):
relative to the league, he wasn't bad, but it wasn't
what you would have expected from him. One of the
rules I had made for myself in playing that season
was I had to be honest about playing time and
not load up on small sample guys. I'll give you
an example. That was the year before the Yankees had
Ricky Henderson. So although they had Dave winfield and right

(02:32):
and sometimes centerfield having one of his best seasons, he
hit about three forty. The other two outfield spots were
a milange of players like Steve kemp Ken, Griffy and
Omar Moreno, none of whom were at their best. And heck,
Moreno's best, which came with the Pirates in the seventies,
wasn't even very good, so you can imagine what his
worst might look like. In fact, I'll tell you, in

(02:52):
one hundred and ninety nine games with the Yankees he
hit twoin fifty with a two eighty three on base percentage,
in a three fifty three slugging percent, and stealing twenty
eight bases in forty three attempts. That was in about
one full season of playing time in terms of plate appearances,
spread over parts of three years. Conversely, the Yankees had
an outfield prospect named vic Mada twenty three years old,

(03:15):
and he played thirty games that year, and he played
them well. He was signed out of the Dominican Republic
and without checking. I imagine he was one of their
earliest players from that island. Now, they also had Jose
Rijo come up at nineteen that year, and Rejo beat
Mada to the show by about three months. Still, Mata
was early in the parade. He's now in his sixties.
He went on to a long career in scouting, which

(03:37):
is to say that he wasn't much of a prospect.
His career minor league averages were two seventy eight, three
thirty two, three seventy five, and he didn't even run
much yet. In thirty games that year, he hit three
twenty nine with a three thirty three on base percentage,
slugged for forty three, including a home run off of
Neil Heaton. In my opinion back then and I suppose now,

(03:58):
it would have been cheating to play a simulated season
in which Mada got six hundred played appearances using the
card generated from those numbers instead of the real center
fielders that the Yankees used, who were much worse than that.
And that role applied to all teams. Thus, when I
went to make out my Royals lineups, very often i'd
have to write Willie Wilson centerfield Pat Sheridan rightfield, Jorge

(04:20):
Or to DH and then eighth or so not George Brett,
but Greg Pryor third base. Prior didn't hit much, you see,
although by his standards he wasn't awful that year, so
it was neat for me to talk to one of
my cards. Although now that I think about it, that
was maybe the most recent of what had been many
occasions in which I talked to players from that set,

(04:42):
primarily Yankees. But I didn't think about status pro cards
when I talked to Dave Winfield or Mike peal Rulo
or from that Royals team, Steve Balboni, and that was
because they were very familiar in other ways. Prior, and
I mean no disrespect to him at all, wasn't a
Hall Hall of Fame player like Winfield. He didn't have

(05:02):
thirty homer seasons like pali Rulo or Balboni. He was
just a solid major league bench player who had a
roughly ten year career. And there was nothing else besides
that to displace what I had known about him from
my card set. Now, having had the conversation with him
that I did have, now I think Greg Pryor trapped

(05:24):
during Disco Demolition Night. That's a stronger association than a
table top board game. If you want to hear that discussion,
the original episode is still out there and you can
seek it out, but I'm not reproducing that as I
have not reproduced the conversations during these reissue sessions. What
you will get to hear if you go forward from

(05:46):
this point is two stories from that episode. First, we
talk about Hall of Fame outfielder Paul Wayner Big Poison
or Big Poison, depending on how you choose to read it,
but it was Big Poison because that was the brooklyn
Nite nickname for him in his brother Lloyd Wayner, Little Poison,
and how Paul got three thousand hits twice. Our second

(06:06):
tale travels south to a then new Memorial in Alabama
and covers Tycob, Jackie Robinson, and the peculiar American problem
of lynching during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Maybe Europe had something tantamount to that sort of thing
during the witch hunting days, but I don't think so.
Lord knows how many weird old ladies were murdered just

(06:28):
because they happened to be weird old ladies. But I
don't think there was anything like that in modern times.
Nazi Germany aside, there wasn't that kind of standardized murder
of citizens just because someone looked at you funny and
they were of the wrong pallor. And yes, imperialist situations
are a very different matter, whether we're talking Germans, are
British in Africa during that nineteenth century, or the Americans

(06:52):
in the Philippines. Everyone got some practice at racialist killing.
By spectacular coincidence, I had already planned to reissue this
particular episode before Elon Musk had trained his Twitter ai
to spew out Nazi talking points, and I feel like

(07:13):
this is something that I need to address because there
were a lot of people cheering on the revelation that
the opposite of woke is Nazi. Think about it. What
is an antonym for empathy or sympathy for that matter, Well, unsympathetic.
That's a word that's in everyday conversation. I am unsympathetic,

(07:33):
meaning I don't care about your problems, and no doubt
there are times when that is a called for attitude. See,
the trap that I fall into is that you can't
generalize about anything. But I'm thinking of an occasion in
which some person takes say and I'll do this just
to be satirical or perotic about it. This is an
extreme example. Takes the public position that everyone should be

(07:56):
entitled to carry guns everywhere at all times, and in fact,
anyone who they disagree with, and then they get shot.
Then I would be unsympathetic. But when you're talking about
some sort of systemic injustice as opposed to tempted fate
and found out, then we're in a problematic area of discourse.
Years ago on this show, I told a story about

(08:17):
a player who used the N word, and although it
was repulsive to me, I said that word is part
of the story because I felt that the impact of
the story required it. And then I listened to a
discussion by an African American professor of English talking about
Huckleberry Finn and why she did not choose to allow
that word, which is prolific in that book, to be

(08:40):
used in her classroom, even though it is part of
the text. And I realized I was very wrong. And
if I can inarticulately sum up her point of view,
we all know what the word is. It doesn't need saying.
We can simply allude to it. We are all responsible
for cleaning up our own spaces and not making them
any worse than they have to be. And it is

(09:01):
such a loaded and painful and ugly word for so
many people, So why would you want to introduce it
into your own environment, which is probably bad enough as
it is in so many ways. Or to put it
another way, be sensitive to the feelings of those around you,
even or especially when you really feel like you should
say something that's going to cause them pain. Does this

(09:23):
occasion really rise to the threshold of hurting someone else? Now?
I imagine that what I just said rises to the level
of woke for a lot of people, whatever that word
means at this point. But like I said, the opposite
of unsympathetic or unempathetic is woke. That term has been
successfully demonized, and yet so much of this country's foundation,

(09:45):
the thing that made it different, however, imperfectly, was situated
in woke. What do you call? We hold these truths
to be self evident, that all men are created equal,
but really basic wokeness, the statement was so broad as
to not disinclude anyone. Abraham Lincoln noticed that in a

(10:06):
letter to one of his close friends. Josh Speed in
eighteen fifty five, he said, our progress in degeneracy appears
to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we
began by declaring that all men are created equal. We
now practically read it as all men are created equal
except Negroes. Soon it will read all men are created

(10:27):
equal except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics. When it comes
to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where
they make no pretense of loving liberty, to Russia, for instance,
where despotism can be taken pure and without the base
alloy of hypocrisy. Well, even back then there would have
been people who said, you're woke, abe, screw those folks.

(10:47):
This is a white Christian man's country. Thing is It isn't,
and it wasn't. And the moment that people who don't
meet that description are here, you have to decide how
much of an asshole you're going to be to keep
it or return it to the way that you think
it should have been in those prelapse arian times, which
again it never was. If you've listened to the infinite
inning for long enough, you know that the idea that

(11:10):
all people deserve to be treated with equal dignity and
have equal rights under the law. Whatever they look like,
whatever their gender, their sexuality, their religion is key to
the values that I try to express on this program
through the stories I tell. When I started, I was
under the impression that the majority of my fellow Americans,

(11:30):
and thus the majority of my listeners would, along with me,
hold these truths to be self evident, that all men
are created equal. I don't get bored of saying it.
I hope you don't get bored of listening to it.
I was wrong, and because I was wrong about that,
I never stated it as a set of principles for
which I was consistently arguing and insisting that baseball had

(11:50):
taught us again and again over its long history. So,
for the record, I believe that America belongs to all Americans,
and you define Americans as who may up the population
of America at any given time. Yes, it was founded
by one group of people, and that group of people
included in it not just white male landholders, but women,
free blacks, Catholics, Christians of all denominations, Jews, Native Americans

(12:14):
who had stuck around the colonized areas, and probably at
least to some extent, every other flavor of humanity then
on the planet. And yes, it was only white male
landholders and slaveholders in Philadelphia, whether as part of the
Continental Congress that declared independence or the later Constitutional Convention.
But even then the country was so much more than that. Remember,

(12:36):
New York was a port, Boston was a port. New Orleans,
which would be part of the national territory soon enough,
was a port. People were coming in and out all
the time, and some of them stuck. And whereas the
founding fathers didn't specifically include everybody, as Abraham Lincoln pointed out,
they didn't specifically disinclude them either. America was made up

(12:57):
of those who were in America. And to invoke Lincoln
again to the extent that all men are created equals
seemed hypocritical or not true. He said, duh, it's something
we were supposed to work towards. And this is really important,
because if America is not an ethnicity but a set
of values, then inclusion requires not a skin color or

(13:20):
a place of origin, but subscribing to those values, which
is a question of education. By another rather disturbing coincidence, yesterday,
as I record these words, the Vice President of the
United States gave a speech in which he disagreed with
this definition of America as being defined by a set

(13:41):
of principles rather than the more traditionally nationalistic idea of
blood and soil, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles,
let's say, of the Declaration of Independence. He said, that's
a definition that is way over inclusive and under inclusive
at the same time. It was over inclusive, he said,
because cause it would let in anyone who agrees with

(14:02):
the principles, which yeah, and would disinclude some hypothetical person
whose ancestor fought in the revolution or civil war and
yet disagreed with the idea that all men are created equal.
He referred to the idea of America as a system
of beliefs as either I've seen it reported a couple
of different ways, either a creole nation, which is just

(14:26):
pure racism. Times columnist Jamel Bowie translated it or paraphrased
it as mongrel. Or he might have said creedle, which
kind of makes more sense in context. But I don't know.
I wouldn't put anything past that, fella. I've always found
paranoia about the ethnic mix of America and white Americans'
fears of losing their majority very strange, because it seems

(14:48):
to me that if you're worried about maintaining American values,
first we need to agree on what those values are,
and then teach them to everyone, our own children and
newcomers powerfully, in fact, and make being conversant with them
at a high level a condition of gaining citizenship. We
can't do anything about our own rotten historical education system,

(15:09):
but we can certainly help newcomers in that regard. The
alternative building walls and keeping people out doesn't do anything
to perpetuate our values. It degrades them, and it does
nothing to teach them to those who we do let
in or in fact, to ourselves. We should say all
men are created equal. That means you, too, bubb mister newcomer,

(15:29):
and anyone you happen to meet, you should have the
expectation of equal treatment under the law and from everyone
around you, and then we walk the walk further. I
believe that society should be meritocratic, like baseball is today
now that the color line is gone, which means that
a person should advance based on their abilities and performance,
not on what they look like or who their parents were.

(15:52):
That said, I do believe that the history of the
United States has been one of racism applied in certain
times and places to a changing cast of out groups,
whether it's the Irish one hundred and fifty years ago,
or the Chinese and Japanese in California during the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, or blacks pretty much everywhere at
any time. When you look at how federal housing authorities

(16:13):
this is just one example consistently redlined black neighborhoods, helping
to amiserate them. I don't see how that's anything other
than systemic racism at work. I do believe that sometimes
fixes are necessary, although that's a very complicated issue, advantaging
one group while not disadvantaging another, and vice versa. However,
in the long run, when you look at us, not

(16:33):
as individuals but as a nation, every one of us
is a financial or intellectual actor for the welfare of
this country, and the more of us who are equipped
to contribute, the better the country will be. And that
always requires people being able to live in a way
that they are not in fear of poverty or dispossession.
I do not believe there is a scientific basis for racism.

(16:55):
There are minor variations among all people, and some have
different gifts than us, but no person or group can
be described as inferior. I believe that all human beings
have value, and once they are here on the planet,
I mean, they should have a right to life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness. As an example of refusing
to generalize about people, I do not infer that because

(17:18):
Johnny Bench was a better player than Johnny Roseborow, that
whites are superior to blacks. Nor do I believe that
because Roy Campanella was a better player than Joe Girardi,
that blacks are superior to white's. Either Bench and Campanella
were better than the players I paired them with, but
that's all you can read into it, the same way
you wouldn't read anything into comparing two white players or

(17:39):
two black players. Lou Gerig was better than no Johnny Sturm,
who replaced him down the line. Ricky Henderson was better
than Vince Coleman. What does that tell you that you
can extrapolate not a bloody thing. These differences are situational
at the individual level, so you might as well forget
about them. Further on, the subject of generalization every group

(18:01):
you can think of, whether you collect people on the
basis of race, religion, gender, sexuality, or philatally, you're going
to find some exemplars who are a credit to that
group and some who are an embarrassment to it. Humans
are like that me. I love them all and disdain
them all in equal measure until they show me who

(18:21):
they are. But even then, that person, for good or ill,
is only one of the group in question. The rest
of us as the Jefferson airplane saying we can be together,
or to put all of that another way, baseball repudiates racism.
Baseball repudiates the idea that we can live together. For
what is a twenty five or twenty six man roster

(18:44):
but a melting pot. I said earlier that the opposite
of woke is Nazi, and the opposite of Nazi is baseball.
That's all I've got for this reissue episode. We'll take
a quick break, and on the other side we will
get to the tale of Paul Wayner I promised a
few minutes ago. You'll hear for me a couple of
other times throughout the rest of the episode as we
take breaks and wrap things up. As always, thanks for listening.

(19:27):
This may shock you, but there are alternative religious systems
to the infinite inning. Some of them are even more pessimistic,
which is hard to believe. And this week I've been
scouring the source books for those religious systems looking for
the specific instructions regarding the holy number three thousand. I

(19:52):
know it must be in here somewhere, because these texts
cover a lot of ground. I mean, here's Leviticus on baldness.
If a man loses the hair of his head and
becomes bald, he is clean. If he loses the hair
on the front part of his head and becomes bald
at the forehead, he is clean. But if a white

(20:14):
affection streaked with red appears on the bald part in
the front or at the back of the head, it
is a scally eruption that is spreading over the bald
part in the front or at the back of the head.
The priest shall examine him. If the swollen affection on
the bald part in the front or the back of
his head is white streaked with red like the leprosy

(20:35):
of the body skin in appearance, the man is lepros
and he is unclean. The priest shall pronounce him unclean.
He has the affection on his head as for the
person with a leprous affection. His clothes shall be rent
his head shall be left bare, and he shall cover

(20:56):
over his upper lip, and he shall call out unclean, clean, unclean.
He shall be unclean. As long as the disease is
on him. Being unclean, he shall dwell apart. His dwelling
shall be outside the camp. Paging onward a bit, there
are instructions as to how to make amends if you

(21:18):
have sex with your slave who has been promised to
another dude. Progressive times, those were, and warnings not to
eat roadkill. I guess people needed to be told that
back then, just as they needed to be told to
steer clear of the bald guy with the open source.
Nothing about three thousand, There nothing about if a baldman
has three thousand hits. It's very confusing to me, because

(21:41):
we have deified this number, we worship this number, and
this number is a big pile of something. But quantity
is not necessarily equal to quality. And yet as soon
as some player's odometer rolls up from two nine hundred
and ninety nine to three thousand, we all dance around

(22:04):
the Golden Calf, the golden calf being the statue of
whatever ballplayer is outside of your local ballpark, and somewhere
during that jamboree, Robert Moses Grove comes down from the mountain,
gets very angry, and throws tablet shaped fastballs at everybody.
By the time you hear this, one three thousand hit
player Ichiro Suzuki will have retired and another member will

(22:29):
likely have joined the club, Albert Pooholes. And I mean
no disrespect to those players or their accomplishments. They have
had tremendous careers and glorious peaks. But at the same time,
pooh Hooles would not be in the position that he's
in now had the Angels not unwisely signed him to

(22:49):
a never ending godstopper of a contract that may outlast
us all. He may still be signed to the Angels
when the sun goes nova. If the Angels did not
owe him so much dough, they might likely have moved
on by now, because, by some measures, Albert Poohols was
the least productive hitter in baseball last year, and again

(23:11):
in his prime, he was a spectacular player, but age
and injuries have worn him down, and baseball has always
been a meritocracy. If you can play better than the
next guy at your position, you play, and if not,
the other guy plays. That's how teams win. But and
we saw it with Craig Bigio, we saw it with

(23:33):
Derek Jeter. To a lesser extent, we sure as hell
saw it with Pete Rose with his highly selfish pursuit
of Ty Cobbs record, which damaged the hell out of
the Reds for a couple of years. The goal of
winning gets subordinated to this kind of sentimentality where it's

(23:54):
decided that the player's victory lap is somehow superior to
the other stuff like hitting or fielding the baseball. Normally,
we don't celebrate big piles of things weird. Al Yankovic
had a song about the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota,
and if the song had been about the biggest diamond

(24:14):
in the Smithsonian Institute or the biggest building in Manhattan,
the song wouldn't have been funny. Because they're both league
leaders in their categories. But they're also singular objects and tangible,
and they have a concrete value or function, whereas a
ball of twine is just a ball of twine, and

(24:34):
there's no good reason for it to exist. Making a
trip to go see it is the ultimate act of
empty decadence. And three thousand hits, depending on the player
in his condition at the time, can be just like that.
And you can't hold three thousand hits. You can only
look at the number at Baseball Reference or on the
back of a baseball card. If I told you that

(24:54):
I was in possession of three thousand wire hangers, you'd
have me locked up and oh on that basis, I
don't see that Wade Bogs having three ten hits, or
out Kayline having three thousand and seven, or Pooh Holes
having three thousand when he gets over that mark makes
them markedly different or superior in any way to Sam

(25:15):
Rice or Sam Crawford or Frank Robinson or Rogers Hornsby
or Al Simmons, all of whom stopped in the twenty
nine hundreds because either they couldn't quite get there or
because in terms of the older players on that list,
nobody cared. But somewhere in there someone decided that three
thousand was really, really important, and we just uncritically accept that.

(25:38):
I defy you to construct a rational argument for the
value of three thousand hits that is not based on sentimentality.
You know when three thousand would be a meaningful number
if Albert pooholes. And I'm not saying this is his
sole responsibility or his responsibility at all, but just as
an example, took some of the many millions of dot

(26:00):
that he's earned and provided food, shelter, and clothing to
three thousand underage war refugees from any of the countless
conflicts we've got going on around the globe. Having said
all that, there is one three thousand hit story that
I kind of like. It belongs to Paul Wayner. Paul
Wayner was a weird contradiction in terms because he was

(26:22):
an incredible precision ballplayer, a three point thirty three career hitter,
a guy who was very patient, who rarely struck out,
who lashed up to sixty two doubles and twenty two
triples in a season, and yet in contradiction to this,
he was apparently inebriated a good percentage of the time.

(26:43):
Casey Stengel, who managed him with the Braves in nineteen
forty one, extolled Wayner's base running ability, saying that he
was a great bass runner. He had to be, because
if he slid wrong, he might damage the flask in
his hip pocket. There's another story about a rookie who
helped himself to the bottle of coke that Wayner kept
in the dugout. The next thing anybody knew, the rookie

(27:05):
was suffering from the DTS and had to be taken
off to have his stomach pumped. It wasn't coke, you see.
One other thing to know about Wayner, who played from
nineteen twenty six to nineteen forty five the first fifteen
of those seasons with the Pittsburgh Pirates, was that he
was apparently tremendously nearsighted, but whenever they tried to fit

(27:26):
him with glasses, he found that he could hit better
without them than with them. No, he couldn't read the
signs on the outfield fence four hundred feet away. But somehow,
some aspect of whatever ocular difficulties he was suffering from,
the ball seemed to be much larger when he couldn't

(27:47):
see what was going on than when he could, so
he hit blind. I note that he was hit about
two times a season and not at all for the
last seven years of his career, so it didn't affect
his ability to duck any Wayner had his lab big
season for the Pirates in nineteen thirty nine, when he
was thirty six years old, and shortly after that he
started on the wandering phase of his career, the nomadic phase.

(28:12):
His career was extended by the manpower shortage caused by
World War Two after nineteen forty one, because teams needed
players like him who were in their forties. There's a
line in I Think The Glory of Their Times where
Wayner talks about playing for the Yankees, which he did
in nineteen forty four and nineteen forty five, and he

(28:34):
remembered somebody shouting from the stands, Hey, Paul, why are
you playing for the Yankees, And he answered because Joe
Debajio is in the Army, which was honest at least.
So in those last few years of his career he
bounced from the Dodgers to the Braves, back to the Dodgers, and,
as I just said, finally to the Bronx. Well. At
this same time he was pursuing his three thousandth hit,

(28:57):
and that came not once but twice. He really did
it on two separate occasions. On June seventeenth, nineteen forty two,
the Braves were home against the Reds and Wayner hit
a grounder to short which Eddie Juice bobbled. The official
scorer called it an infield hit that actually displeased Wayner,

(29:18):
who was jumping up and down on first base saying no, no, no, no,
waving to the press box. The other players are crowding
around him to congratulate him on three thousand hits. He's
only stopped go away.

Speaker 2 (29:29):
No.

Speaker 1 (29:30):
He didn't want his three thousandth hit to be some
borderline single. He wanted it to be no doubter. There
was an off day after that, but in Wayner's next game,
which was appropriately at home against the Pirates, he singled
for the true three thousandth hit. This one was acceptable
to him. Would have been amusing had this one also

(29:51):
been some kind of bleeder or bad hop grounder, And
he just kept turning them down until he finally got
one that he liked. But no, this one was acceptable.
He was hitting two sixty with a three eighty seven
on base and a three h two slugging at the time,
which is kind of a mix of good and bad things.
Some of that three oh two was that he wasn't
a power hitter. Some of it was Braves Field, which

(30:13):
was the only ballpark in the major leagues where they
should have let you hit the ball as far to
the outfield as you could and then run out to
wherever it landed and hit it again. You still wouldn't
have hit a home run, but on the hole. It's
just that at this stage of his career, when he
was thirty nine years old, Wayner was a very run
of the mill ball player, and everybody's allowed to play
as long as they can get someone to let them play.

(30:35):
But had Wayner chosen to stop after his nineteen thirty
nine season, he would have finished with a three forty
two average and about twenty eight hundred hits, and that
would have changed nothing. It's kind of like burt Lylevin,
Tommy John and Jim Cott. Burt Lylevin had two hundred
and eighty seven career wins Kott had two hundred and
eighty three. John had two hundred and eighty eight. For

(30:56):
a long time all three weren't in the Hall of Fame,
but eventually a campaign on behalf of bly Love and
who did have a lot of other things going on
beyond those wins cleared the way for him to get
in deservedly. And I'm not saying that John or Cott
necessarily are deserving of the same treatment. But what we
can know for sure is that the red carpet would

(31:17):
have been rolled out for all three right at the
get go if John had finished with twelve more wins
and bly leven with thirteen more, and Cott was seventeen more.
And the question is why, why three hundred, why three thousand?
I don't know, and neither do you. The only thing
I am certain of is that it's not in the
Old Testament. I may have to learn Sanskrit or Babylonic Cuneiform,

(31:40):
but I'm gonna keep looking. How did Pete Townshend not
put this in the Seeker?

Speaker 2 (31:50):
I knocked on the chairs, I'm knocked on the tables, fables.
They called me the sea cuts. I'm inside.

Speaker 1 (32:13):
I won't get a game while I'm not to till today.
I tell you, if you push back from what you're
doing right now, pull out a piece of paper and
try to make a list of all the things that
we venerate that the answer as to why is, well,
just because we always have you would lose your freaking

(32:33):
marbles and maybe some other things you don't need. That
could be our slogan, throw off your chains, baseball fans.
All we have to lose are our wire hangers. I'm
Steven Goldman and this is the Infinite Inning Baseball Podcast. Well,

(33:27):
hello there, Hey, Linda, I thought I would help you
with the dishes. You don't have to do that, Lisa. Well,
it's just that I wanted a moment alone. I wanted
to know what you thought of Larry. What I think
of Larry. Huh, Yes, Larry my boyfriend. Linda. Don't Linda
me what. It's just that you're my little sister. I

(33:50):
have to look out for you. I knew it. You disapprove,
You always disapprove. It's not that it's just that Larry
isn't a man that old prejudice. This is the twenty
first century. Do you really think I'd care if you
brought a woman home. Larry isn't a man or a woman.
He's a coyote in a tuxedo. No he isn't, Yes

(34:14):
he is. No he isn't. He works in sales, that
may be, But at dinner tonight he took the entire
turkey and ran off with it. He was joking, Then
where is the turkey? Why is my dinner party eating
yogurt and leftover lasagna? Linda, you were just like this
when I brought home. Episode fifty three. Episode fifty three

(34:35):
was also a coyote in a tuxedo. You're obsessed. No,
you're obsessed, Okay, but admit it. For a coyote in
a tuxedo, he's kind of hot. Yeah, yeah, he is.
I miss doing those little stories. Is just that to
make the time manageable, I had to stop, and speaking
of management, the management insists that we take a break.

(34:58):
On the other side, a wide ranging discussion of Ty Cobb,
Jackie Robinson, and the post Civil War to twentieth century
epidemic of lynching. Last week, the National Memorial for Peace

(35:20):
and Justice opened in Montgomery, Alabama. This is more popularly
being referred to as the National Lynching Museum. That's really
what it's about, this epidemic of racially motivated extra judicial
killings of African Americans that took place primarily in the South,
although some did happen in the North from the end

(35:42):
of the Civil War into the nineteen fifties. Really, although
the peak was in the period of nineteen hundred to
nineteen twenty, let's say, and I just have a small
comment on that as it refers to baseball. No one
knows the exact number of lynchings that were committed, but

(36:03):
over four thousand have been documented. The most common excuse
was that a black man was accused of sexually assaulting
a white woman, and to avenge their honor, white men
then got quite rowdy and went out, and whether the

(36:23):
accusation was correct or not, they took what they considered
to be justice in their own hands. In a sense,
this was redundant because the judges were white, the juries
were white, the police were white and not short of
racial prejudice on their own. So those people, once accused
were doomed regardless. But because for a long time after emancipation,

(36:48):
forces in the South were determined to make a truism
out of what Roger Tawny had said way back in
the dread Scott decision that black people had no rights
that a white person was a deliged to respect. This
is also about political power. You don't have to give
representation or even pay the slightest attention to people who

(37:08):
you have so thoroughly terrorized and deprived of their rights
that if they say the wrong word, they can just
be instantly killed without repercussions. And put a pin in this.
Georgia led the league, and you don't get a prize
for this one. I lynchings during these years. It happened
more often there than anywhere else. I bring all that

(37:31):
up because of Ty Cobb. When you read about Cob,
it is taken for granted in many books about him
until the most recent and most important, that he was
a super racisty racist. You open up, say Richard Back's
big photo book on Cobb, and that's about the first
thing that you read, Boy, oh boy, was he a bigot?

(37:53):
And that description, to be as fair to Cob as
one can be, is fact by assertion. Those authors, whether
it's Charles Alexander or the fraud al Stump or mister Bach,
are a relying on each other to some extent, and
so history just becomes a circular thing where I cite
you and you cite me, and then the third party

(38:13):
cites both of us and it's factual. But if the
original source was flawed, then everything that comes after was flawed,
and be what they're doing is inferring from the record
of some of the interracial fights that Cob got into
that his actions were racially motivated. And from there, it's

(38:34):
not exactly crazy to say, if someone beats up a
black person specifically because they're black, then this is the
definition of racism, and therefore ty Cob was a racist.
More recently, a couple of years ago, there was a
book by Charles Leersen, Ty Cobb A Terrible Beauty, which
is a bit of revisionist history, but in a good way.
It's a complete biography, but a big part of the

(38:55):
book's thesis is that because Cob never addressed the motives
for some of these incidents, that we can't truly know
if racism was at the root of them, because, let's
face it, he was a guy prone to flying off
the handle at everybody, not just at African Americans, and
what's more, that some of his run ins with African

(39:16):
Americans were fictional or exaggerated. It also doesn't help that
Cobb's reputation was slaughtered posthumously by the aforementioned Stump in
a series of cynical exploitations of the ballplayer's name, not
to mention his nanoseconds long exposure to Cob, which he

(39:36):
serially exaggerated. And there's another element to the Learson book
as well, which is that the memory of Cob was
poisoned by a kind of reverse bigotry that because he
was born in Georgia in eighteen eighty six, it has
just been assumed that he had to be racist. And
to further all of this, the author marshals all the

(39:57):
positive things that Cobb said about integrat about players like
Roy Campanella and so on. He was not resistant to
the integration of the major leagues. I'm not sure that
the case is proved. Yes, I think the case has
proved that some of the things that people say about Cobb,
that he actually killed a black man, just aren't true.

(40:18):
But the fact that he had a meritocratic attitude about
the breaking of the color line after nineteen forty seven
doesn't really prove anything about nineteen oh seven. Only the
most limited person is the same for their entire lives,
and it's to be hoped that Cobb at sixty five
was not the same man that he was at twenty five.

(40:38):
Maybe he learned something. Even though civil rights had miles
and miles and miles to go as of the nineteen fifties,
as of Jackie Robinson. As Jackie Robinson himself makes clear,
if civil rights didn't have miles to go, Jackie Robinson
wouldn't have been necessary. America is still a very different
place from that of fifty years earlier. So maybe Cobb

(41:01):
had changed with the times at least a little bit simultaneously.
And at the risk of using the same condemnation by
virtue of the time and place of Cobb's birth, he
would have been a hell of an outlier had he
not been at least somewhat of a racist as a
young man. And just to give you a sense of

(41:23):
the environment, in August nineteen oh six in Brownsville, Texas,
there was a regiment of the so called Buffalo Soldiers,
that's what they called, segregated all black units that was
headquartered there. And on the night of August twelfth, there
was supposedly an attack on a white woman. Well, that

(41:43):
was the signal always for violence to such a degree
that I believe this was in the nineteen twenties, a
group called the Georgia Women's Interracial Commission was moved to
actually put out a public statement. We believe no falser
appeal can be made to Southern manhood than that mob
violence is necessary for the protection of womanhood, or that

(42:05):
the brutal practice of lynching and burning of human beings
is an expression of chivalry. In other words, please stop,
we don't need your help. Stop using us, the women
of Georgia, as an excuse to go around murdering people.
That was not the first time that something like that
had been said, but no one listened because it had
become almost a pastime. And I know that sounds like

(42:27):
a light way of saying it, but there was a
trade in souvenir postcards in pictures of black bodies. People
would mob these scenes, and you see these torchlit pictures
and people grinning ghoulishly, leaning into the shot as if
they were photo bombing a selfie, and they would make

(42:48):
off with souvenirs like body parts, bits of clothing. How
do you explain that? How do you tell your grandchildren?
See this dried item looks kind of like a fig
that's an ear. See this shirt's not mine. You'll never
believe where I got it. And knowing this, knowing what
would happen when word got out that a white woman
was assaulted. True or not, the white officers at Brownsville

(43:11):
restricted the troops to base. Well that night a bartender
was murdered, and quote unquote, witnesses said one of those
black soldiers did it. There wasn't a riot this time.
There wasn't a lynching this time, except in the most
organized of senses. Because it was assumed that the witnesses

(43:32):
were telling the truth. The entire regiment was put on
trial and dishonorably discharged, meaning they lost their wages, their ranks,
their pensions. Theodore Roosevelt, who was President at the time,
had been making overtures to the black community through gestures
like inviting Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House.

(43:53):
The idea that a black person would be allowed in
the White House except in a servile position was shocking
in that day. But when Washington asked him to set
aside the convictions, Roosevelt refused, and not only that in
his State of the Union that winter. While he did
very gently condemn lynching, and again, think of how much

(44:16):
of a thing lynching had to be for the President
of the United States to mention it in the State
of the Union. Roosevelt said that every lynching represents, by
just so much a loosening of the bonds of civilization.
But he had far harsher remarks for the victims of lynching, saying,
the greatest existing cause of lynching is the perpetration, especially

(44:39):
by black men, of the hideous crime of rape, the
most abominable in all the category of crimes, even worse
than murder. He had uncritically accepted the calumny, which went
back at least a couple of one hundred years, that
black men were in a continual fever to have their
way with white women. This was so thoroughly accepted that

(45:02):
it was an all purpose get out of jail free
card for any white who, for whatever reason did violence
to a black person. In September there were the infamous
Atlanta race riots. That's in Atlanta, Georgia, again provoked supposedly
by a series of sexual assaults on white women. These
were not substantiated ever to this day, but on a nice,

(45:26):
warm Saturday, it was enough of a motive for the
white population of Atlanta to go on a rampage and
kill god knows how many people, we don't know to
this day, two dozen seems like a good bet injuries.
Who knows. And six months after that, Ty Cobb was
in Augusta, Georgia for spring training with the Detroit Tigers.

(45:49):
They were playing at the ballpark that usually hosted the
Augusta Tourists, where Cobb had played just a couple of
years before. And there's a lot that's mysterious about what
I'm going to tell you, and since it was one
hundred and eleven years ago, we're never going to know
the answer. On March sixteenth, nineteen oh seven, Cobb got
into a fight with Henry Bungee Cummings, the groundskeeper and yes,

(46:12):
an African American, at the Augusta ball Park, and subsequently
with Cummings's wife, Savannah. No one really saw what happened.
They just know that Cummings went up to Cobb and
you see what he said, reported variously as either Hya
Peach or Hya Carrie, which makes no damn sense. Cob
refused to shake his hand, and then no one knows

(46:35):
exactly why a fight ensuit. Cummings's wife, Savannah saw her
husband being thrashed. She intervened, Supposedly Tiger's catcher Charlie boss
Schmidt came upon Cobb in the act of choking this woman,
and he objected to womanhood black or white. He was
a progressive dude for the day, I guess, being treated

(46:57):
that way, and he and Cobb went to scrapping. That
bout was inconclusive as other Tigers finally pulled them apart.
It wasn't a total mismatch. By the way, Cummings was
twenty five years old. It's not like Cobb was attacking
somebody who was seventy or as in the infamous nineteen
twelve incident in New York, trying to kill somebody who
had no hands with which to defend themselves. Whatever transpired,

(47:19):
it was so bad that that night Tiger's manager, Huey Jennings,
offered to swap Cobb to Cleveland straight up for Elmer Flick,
another future Hall of Famer, although someone whose career was
going to come to a rapid end due to illness,
and that's something we should discuss in another show. The
bad blood between Boss Schmidt and Cobb persisted long enough

(47:40):
that further down the road in that spring training tour,
after they had moved on to Meridian, Mississippi. Again, depending
on what reports you read. Either they had kind of
a squared off boxing match in which Schmidt beat the
Holy tar out of Cobb, or Schmid simply cold cocked
him and proceeded to stomp the hell out of him.

(48:00):
Either way, Cob got the worst of it. Did Race
cause the initial altercation in Augusta or was it just
a detail something that was coincidental. I don't know, but
I do know that the aforementioned incident in New York
happened because the spectator shouted a racial epithet at Cobb
which questioned the purity of his whiteness. In nineteen oh eight,

(48:24):
he got involved in another fight with an African American,
a guy named Fred Collins, who was paving a street
and said you can't walk here in the wet cement,
which really was doing Cob of favor, but he objected
to it and attacked the man. And further down the
road there was a fight with a African American maid
in a hotel. And these are just the ones that

(48:46):
are confirmed, where as a more famous incident in which
Cob got into an altercation with a hotel bellboy and
the house dick, in which, by the way, he also
got the worst of it got a black jack upside
the head. Learson does a pretty convincing job of showing
that it was unlikely that the incident was racially motivated

(49:09):
because no black people happen to be on the scene. Nonetheless,
the fact that we have all these episodes, at least
three of them, in which Cobbs seemed to have totally
unmotivated confrontations with people who were not white, does seem
to suggest that you can take the boy out of
nineteen oh six Georgia, but you can't take the nineteen

(49:31):
oh six Georgia. Well, you know, the alternative that the
race of the people in these three incidents that I
just mentioned was coincidental feels like special pleading. It reminds
me of John Cleace in Monty Python's argument sketch.

Speaker 2 (49:45):
I told you I'm not allowed to argue unless you've paid.

Speaker 1 (49:47):
I just paid. You didn't I did, No, you didn't.

Speaker 2 (49:50):
Look, I don't argue about them. You didn't pay.

Speaker 1 (49:52):
Ah, If I didn't pay, why are you.

Speaker 2 (49:54):
Arguing I got you there? You haven't. There's I have.
If you were arguing it must have paid. Not necessarily,
I could be arguing in my time.

Speaker 1 (50:01):
So there you go. Ty Cobb wasn't a racist. He
was just beating up black people in his spare time.
Parenthetically and in the same neck of the woods as
Monty Python. There is a passage in the Leerson book
which clanks so badly that it makes me doubt the
rest of the effort he wrote. Black people were a
constant in Cobb's life, more so than with other ballplayers,

(50:23):
if only because most other ballplayers didn't have a household
staff like he did. He employed at least two black
domestics at his home in Augusta, and starting in about
nineteen fourteen, went about Detroit and elsewhere with a black valet,
as successful men of that era sometimes did. The comedian
Jack Benny and his sidekick Eddie Rochester Anderson were perhaps
the last surviving examples of this phenomenon. I hate to

(50:47):
say this, but Eddie Rochester Anderson was an actor. He
was a very well compensated actor who played Jack Benny's
valet on radio and television. He did not go home
with Jack Benny. He had his own family life and career,
as Hattie McDaniel, who made a career of playing various

(51:08):
domestics and in fact won an Academy award for playing
one and Gone with the Wind said she would rather
play a maid than be a maid. Well, Eddie Anderson
played a vla, but he wasn't one. I digress, And
remember when I said this would be short. Apparently I
was lying to you. The reason I bring all of
this up and on the occasion of a memorial to lynching,

(51:29):
is simply this. I don't think that, as the old
sources have it, that Cobb was abnormally racist, and I
don't think, as Leerson would have it, we don't know
if he was racist at all. What I would suggest
is that he was normally racist, that he was most
likely as racist as the typical white American of the

(51:52):
day would have been. And if you want to suspect
him on the basis in the time and place of
his birth, well that may not be wholly fair, but
it is kind of reasonable given the cultural norms that
prevailed at that place in time. At the same time
as those Atlanta race riots, the government of Georgia simply
disenfranchised the entirety of the African American population. They just

(52:14):
weren't going to vote anymore. Cob may not have been
part of that, but he was in it, it was
immersed in it. The reason that making him out to
be the most racisty racist ever does a disservice to us,
not to Cob, is that it places him out of
the realm of the human Remember in two thousand and four,
when the film Downfall, about Hitler's last days, came out.

(52:35):
This is the film that launched a million memes with
Bruno Ganz ranting in Hitler's conference room. One of the
criticisms of that film is that it provoked too much
empathy for Hitler. And I don't mean that people were saying, ah, Hitler,
but that he was relatable, crazy, but relatable. There was
a recognizable human being being portrayed there, and many people

(53:00):
people felt that was wrong. I think it's right. The
Nazis were not monsters from Mars. They were people. They
were human beings, and that human beings did what they
did to other human beings is something we have to
grapple with as human beings. The human animal is capable
of great goodness but also great evil, and in those

(53:23):
years in Germany, they organized and decided to inflict a
whole lot of it on other people. If we don't
accept that they're human beings, human beings of a different
political persuasion than us, of dark and unholy beliefs that
we don't share, but nonetheless human beings. Then we have
excused them. We have given them an exculpation, being that, hey,

(53:46):
they weren't people to begin with. Ironically, that's what they
said about everybody else. Well, if we make ty Cobb
this dangerous, psychotic, virulent racist, then it excuses him.

Speaker 2 (54:00):
Two.

Speaker 1 (54:00):
He was smart, he was educated, he was successful, he
was driven. He was a lot of admirable things, and
he had some flaws among them, probably most likely that
he liked to pound the hell out of people whose
color was different from him, just because he could. If,

(54:21):
as with the Nazis, we don't accept that he was
a human being, if we treat him as a monster
instead of a person, we've excused his behavior and we've
excused ourselves because we don't have to grapple with that
same potential for evil that exists in every human being, white, black, male, female,

(54:44):
any color, gender whatever that you want a name, it's
always there among us. And if it's not in you
or it's not in me, well I hope that we're
that good hearted. And if we can pat ourselves on
the back that way great, but there's always the person
next to you or the person next to them. It's
never far away. And in fact, whenever you think people

(55:04):
are clear of it, you'll see it come boomeranging back
faster than Ty Cobb could leg out a triple. That's
the way he was an outlier. Otherwise just a typical American.
By George Brett's Most Unspeakable surgery. We have come to
the end of another show. This is where in the

(55:25):
older episodes I told you how to follow us on Twitter,
but I am no longer on Twitter, and neither are you.
As always, you can presently follow me at Stevengoldman dot
bsguy dot Social, where on a more or less daily basis,
often several times a day you will find me in
a state of cosmic dismay over the way things are

(55:49):
going copyright trademark patent pendings, by which I mean me
at Infinite Inning at gmail dot com, and there's now
a Facebook group you can find it under Infinite Inning.
A lot of you have joined us. Then It's been
a lot of fun so far. And of course please
go to the podcatcher of your choice and rate and
review us. It is very helpful to getting more eyes

(56:09):
on the show. Where is that ears? I'm very confused.
We have a sponsor now, but nevertheless, this episode is
brought to you. It had to be brought to you
by the number four. Our producer is Illinois Hatfield. Our
theme song, which you are listening to now and have
in fact been listening to throughout the episode, was a
co composition of myself and doctor Rick Mooring, who suggested

(56:30):
I ask Greg Pryor who rocked the mustache better, you
or Tom Selleck. Unfortunately, he asked me this mere minutes
after I had concluded the interview. Next time, Rick, Next time, Well,
if I don't put too much pine tar on my
everything bagel which prevents me from shaking it loose and
grasping the microphone, that's not a metaphor. I'll be back

(56:51):
next week. That's all for this reissue episode. See you
this weekend with a brand new show episode three thirty eight.
No idea what it will be about? Get you a
question now,