The recent tragic flooding in Texas causes us to revisit the passing of one of baseball’s greatest and strangest southpaws and, in this week’s new remarks, wonder just when it is that anyone actually learns anything, and then how long will it be until they forget it again?
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?
Music by AudioCoffee: https://www.audiocoffee.net/
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?
Music by AudioCoffee: https://www.audiocoffee.net/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Well, hello there, and welcome back to the Infinite Inning
reissue series after a week off. I am Stephen Goldman,
AZ always your host for the Infinite Inning series, and
even it would be neat if I had somebody else
come in and do these and comment on them. Steve
clearly wasn't at his best in this episode. Well, as
we'll get to in a moment, I'm clearly not at
(00:46):
my best in this reissue for legal reasons. But first
a few words on the subject matter of this reissue episode.
For the vast majority of people, moral clarity only comes
later after the events and then they signed on to.
The majority view is if they had been subjected to
peer pressure, or as if they had thought that all
(01:07):
the time. The singer songwriter Jill so Buell, who died
tragically in a fire just a few months ago, had
a song Heroes which mentions all those French who joined
the resistance after the war. Was that stolen valor? Sure,
but it points to something more significant. It's easier to
just go along, to get along and not think too hard.
It's like one of Claude Raine's best lines in Casa Blanca.
(01:31):
It does seem like almost every line he has in
that film as quotable. But I've thought of this one
quite a bit over the last six months. I blow
with the wind, and the prevailing wind happens to be
from vich as you know v. She was the collaborationist
puppet state set up by Germany in the southern part
of France after it conquered the country. That way, the
Germans didn't have to occupy the whole territory, at least
at first, although they did do that after about two years.
(01:53):
After the big moral testing is over, there follows a
period of concordance on the great wrongs of the recent past.
Then that generation and the generation it raised starts to
die off, and even before that it loses its cultural
potency and a great unlearning takes place. If you are
part of my cohort, you are a child more or
(02:15):
less of the Boomers and a grandchild of the so
called Greatest generation. Actually, both my parents kind of fell
between those two stools. They were a little old to
be Boomers, my dad in particular, sorry Mom. My mother,
like all four Beatles, was born during the war, although
she's younger than the youngest of them. The late and
much missed George maybe that makes all the difference. Actually,
(02:37):
after all, the boomers voted for Ronald Reagan and a
program of dismantling the New Deal state, which was couched
in Cold war and racist rhetoric to overcome the reasons
for the existence of the social safety net with something
that was more visceral and easy to understand on an
emotional level. Ah, we're in trouble. Ah, we're being stolen
(03:01):
from and it always works. There's a bear in the
woods and a welfare queen in the supermarket. That's what
sold the country on Reagan. The boomers, you see, forgot
what came before them. My folks never did again, maybe
by virtue of just being a little older and so,
as the late Brian Wilson wrote or co wrote, I
just wasn't made for these times. The Great Depression ended
(03:23):
roughly eighty five years ago as a result of the
greatest government employment program of all time, World War two,
brought to you by international aggressive fascism. The war itself
and the threat of fascism ended eighty years ago this August.
Very few people now have a living memory of any
of that. I was reading an old magazine from nineteen
(03:43):
forty today as you know that I do most days,
And it mentioned a then current joke about the threat
of a worldwide takeover by one of those dictatorial regimes.
This issue came out after France had fallen in June
nineteen forty, but more than a year before Pearl Harbor.
So the US was not in the war, and no
(04:04):
one knew if we ever would be. There were just
a lot of opinions about whether we should be or
inevitably would be. The joke was roughly that it was
based in truth. The Nazis were trying to work out
the purchase of a million dollars or so worth of
tanks from General Motors. Sure, said GM, which was also
kind of a true thing. A lot of American companies
(04:25):
cooperated with the Germans before and sometimes during the war.
But what about delivery. Don't worry about that, the Nazis replied,
We'll pick them up when we're passing through Detroit. Well,
you could joke about the threat because it wasn't yet manifest.
Hitler was quoted around that time as saying he had
no plans to attack America, but he reportedly said America
(04:47):
is permanently on the brink of revolution. It will be
a simple matter for me to produce unrest and revolts
in the US, so that these gentry will have their
hands full with their own affairs. We have no use
for them in Europe. We shall soon have stormtroopers in America.
Into the hands of our youth will be given the
great statesmanlike mission of Washington, which this corrupt democracy has
(05:10):
trodden underfoot. And they did have a nascent version of
their stormtroopers. They had the bund which had a big
youth outreach operation, essentially the American Hitler youth. And it
might have worked too, if not for that same meddling
toothbrush mustache guy and his crazy dog, which he later
had poisoned. I'm sad to report as a test of
(05:30):
his own suicide capsule. In other words, he didn't give
his plans time to come to fruition, and we can
all be grateful for that. This week's reissue takes us
back to the show's first year and episode nineteen from
August thirty first, twenty seventeen. I almost said nineteen seventeen.
It feels like it was that long ago. I was
(05:52):
still learning how to do this podcasting thing. And I
hope you will forgive my weak delivery, and whatever other
foibles show up in the episode. There's one big one,
which I'll get to in a moment. This episode contained
the story of the death of the great, very weird
pitcher Rube Waddell, shortly after he helped a small town
in Kentucky tried to avoid being flooded out by the
(06:13):
Mississippi River, which is just what the Mississippi River tends
to do. As you know, we are still in the
aftermath of a national tragedy relating to a river flooding
in Texas. The point here was to talk about Waddell,
not rivers, but it seems like a good thing to
talk about again in order to remind people that rivers
(06:34):
are very dangerous beasts. That's why I relate this episode
back to the idea that moral clarity or agreement only
comes after we haven't gotten to a place where we
agree as a people, or even in individual states, as
to how to deal with the facts of nature on
the ground. In this week's issue of The New Yorker,
(06:57):
there's a good article, a short one by their Standards too,
for those of you who don't like to read ten
thousand words at a shot. It's hard for me too nowadays.
The article is by John C. Brook and it's titled
In an Age of climate change, how do we Cope
with Floods? The point is not to scold the counties
in Texas that might or might not have mismanaged this
crisis or mitigated it somewhat with better preparation, or the
(07:21):
federal government. That argument has been made in other places
and is alluded to in the article, but rather to
make some points about rivers and flood management in general,
specifically the futility of building lots of housing and infrastructure
in a floodplain and then telling the river, now, don't
you go there? That would inconvenience us as an aside
as a parenthetical, In the early eighteen hundreds, the Germans
(07:45):
straightened the Upper Rhine River. They unkinked it. It had
a big u in it, and they carved a straight
line in it. And that involved a lot of wetland loss.
And I've always wondered what kind of species loss the
habitat loss caused. That's not something anyone was thinking about
too much back then. Now, having read this article, I
also wonder what flooding events that led to and probably
(08:08):
leads to down to the current day. A river's meanders,
that's a noun, are part of channeling water. You could
say that backwards too, switching your nouns for your verbs.
A river's channels cause water to meander instead of flood.
After all, you can't have a surge if there's not
a large volume that's pent up in a small place.
(08:29):
And if you pen in the river, you're going to
create that kind of volume with the resultant force from
a great body that has almost literally gotten too big
for its pants. There's a process of force and counterforce
that creates the path that the river takes. We don't
seem to accept that. In the Seabrook article, there's a
(08:51):
great quote from Kevin Geiger, a former firefighter who's now
working in river management and flood mitigation. He says, the
reason the fire department exists is they believe that things
are going to burn, But there is no equivalent of
a fire department in flood response. Seabrook ads that's because,
(09:11):
Geiger continued, we don't believe in floods the same way
we don't practice for them. He glanced over at the
otto Quechee River. Maybe it's because fires don't have a
benign state like rivers do today. The river is happy.
The Roof checked out in nineteen fourteen, when he was
just thirty seven years old. Whatever was up with him,
(09:32):
Whether his issues were psychological physical, which is possibly a
redundant thing to say, or both complicated by substance abuse,
he was given a set of cards that was unlikely
to lead to longevity. If the river hadn't gotten him,
something else would have, probably the tuberculosis, which contributed to
the weakness that allowed the exposure to the river to
(09:55):
kill him. Was nineteen fourteen too early to be thinking
about the river in the way that we're talking about here, maybe,
But it was also a time of massive hubris on
the part of humanity, when we really believed we were
masters of the planet and could do whatever we wanted
to it without consequences. We or some of us, still
haven't gotten over that idea completely. I don't know if
(10:18):
the Rube ever got over that idea where he personally
was concerned, but baseball has a way of hurrying things
along for its most arrogant players. I mentioned a couple
of times a few minutes ago that this reissue episode
is kind of a mess. You will hear the sound
change quite a bit as we get to the end
of the show. As you know, part of my motivation
(10:40):
for doing this series of reissues was to remove places
where some of the podcasting services had belated trouble with
my use of copyrighted music, even as in the case here,
I was commenting on baseball fan Randy Newman's famous Louisiana
nineteen twenty seven in a way that seems to me
to be fair use. As always, I'm not a lawyer,
and I don't have the bandwidth to argue with them anyway.
(11:03):
The problem for me in remedying that this week was
that I don't have the original tracks after eight years
if I ever did actually, and I had made some
of my remarks alongside the song as a voiceover, I
can't quite separate the two. I use some tools to
mask it as much as possible, and then I added
a music bed to cover it further. And the result
(11:24):
is honestly kind of a mess, a bit of a
sonic swamp. But I hope you can overlook that. That's
all for me for this reissue episode. You may hear
from me again throughout the remainder of the show as
I patch over old breaks and the like. As always,
thank you for listening to this Infinite Inning reissue episode.
(12:01):
Sometimes there were only questions. On July seventeenth, nineteen fifty six,
the Milwaukee Braves were hosting the New York Giants at
County Stadium. The Giant starting pitcher was Reuben Gomez, a
star in Puerto Rico who had come to the majors
and become something of a star here too, winning thirteen
games his rookie year and seventeen with a two point
(12:22):
eight eight ERA in his second started in won World
Series game that year too. He was a right handed screwballer,
which was kind of cool, and he also had a
good fastball and a slider curve depending on what you read,
and this is important, he wasn't a guy who shied
away from pitching inside or risking fights with the high
and tight pitches. He didn't hit a lot of guys,
at least not in the statistical record, but there were
(12:44):
a number of troubling fights that resulted from him hitting
or dusting batters. In nineteen fifty three, he hit Dodgers
right fielder call for Rillo, which ignited a massive brawl
that sawt Rillo break his hand, He hit Frank Robinson
in the head and put him in the hospital, and
he even fought his own team made Willie Mays at
one point, although they later said that that had been
more playful than angry. But whatever the case, this was
(13:06):
not a guy who shied away from confrontation or from
using his pitches to establish his dominance on the mound
sort of. This day, July seventeenth, fifty six was an exception.
The Braves had scored a couple of runs off of
Gomez in the bottom of the first, and when the
Braves came up to take their turn at bat in
the bottom of the second, Gomez was apparently still a
(13:26):
little annoyed by that the leadoff hitter that inning was
first baseman Joe Adcock. He's a player who continues to fascinate,
even though he hung him up way back in nineteen
sixty six. He was one of the great power hitters
his career three hundred and thirty six home runs doesn't
sound like a lot now, but at the time he
retired it was fairly high up on the list, and
the total fails to convey the fact that he got
(13:46):
hurt a lot, including for reasons were about to discuss here,
and that periodically various Braves managers would get it in
their head that he needed to be platooned or rested
for players who weren't nearly his equal in skill, like
Joe Torre's older Frank. As a result, there are a
lot of three hundreds in the bat column on his
baseball card that could have been five hundreds, and if
(14:07):
they were five hundreds, well, he would have put up
thirty home runs annually without much of a struggle. When
the game in question took place, he was in the
midst of what would be the best hitting season of
his career. On the season, he hit two ninety one
and slugged about six hundred with thirty eight home runs,
and he tended to have huge days. Most famously, in
nineteen fifty four, he had a game at Little Ebitts
Field in Brooklyn in which he went five for five
(14:30):
with seven RBIs and five runs scored, including a double
and four home runs, which set a record for total
bases in a game at the time. He had other
days like that too, In fact, he had one in
nineteen fifty six, which I'll get to in a second.
It's kind of the coda to this story. He had
come into the July seventeenth game crazy hot. In July
of fifty six, he had a Giancarlos Stanton month, the
(14:51):
kind of month that Stanton's having now. He hit three
p fifty eight with fifteen home runs in thirty games,
and in the eight games heading into the game in question,
he had gone nine for twenty seven with seven home runs.
This was a guy who was on fire. He also,
by reputation, tended to dig in crowd the plate. He
was a big guy, six four to two ten, at
(15:11):
least according to the official statistics, and so it wasn't
unusual for him to get brushed back. Just as Gomez
didn't hit a lot of people, Adcock didn't get hit
a lot, just seventeen times in a seventeen year career.
And yet if you read the coverage of him when
he was an active player, you'd think the guy was
a human pincushion. And I suspect the reason for that
is that on the few occasions he actually was hit,
(15:32):
it was a very memorable event. So back to the
top of the second inning, Gomez threw one inside and
it nailed Adcock on the wrist. There are pictures of
him cradling his arm. It wasn't broken or anything, but
as he trotted down to first he was pretty angry.
That's where those memorable prior events come into play. Remember
that record setting eighteen total base day I mentioned from
(15:54):
nineteen fifty four, Well, in the next game, the Dodgers
hit Adcock in the head. Later that year, Don Nukem
of the Dodgers hit Adcock in the hand, breaking his
thumb and ending his season. The following July, in nineteen
fifty five, Giants pitcher at Hern hit him on the
wrist and broke it, ending his season after eighty four games. Further,
the Giants, who had been managed by Leo du Rocher
(16:16):
for the previous seven years, were known as a head
hunting ball club, although what's interesting about that is that
they didn't put up crazy high hit by pitch totals
at that time. Sal Magley, the famous barber, never led
the National League in hit batters, and on reflection, I
wonder if that doesn't prove anything the real headhunters, as
opposed to the psychopaths and guys who are actually wild
(16:36):
and can't control what they're doing are so good with
their command that they rarely do actually hit anybody. They
just shave them, a bit like a barber who comes
close with his blades but doesn't cut. So Adcock likely
has summer all of this history on his mind as
he's trotting down to first base and he says some
rude things to Gomez. Gomez said some rude things back.
(16:58):
Whatever they were, they were sufficiently provocative to spur Adcock
into action. He turns at first base and goes running
for the mound, head down. As I said, six four
two ten, at least this is an imposing specimen to
be charging at you on the mound. Gomez, by the way,
four inches shorter, forty pounds later. Still, Gomez was typically
(17:19):
all for this kind of thing, so what he did
next doesn't seem like it's in character. Seeing Adcock, he
took the baseball and threw it at him and hit
him a second time, this time on the thigh. That
wouldn't be sufficient to stop a charging rhinoceros, which was
pretty much what Adcock was at that point. So Gomez,
realizing he was right out of bullets, turns and runs
like hell, making for the giants, dugout. Now the entire
(17:41):
Braves team is charging in from the outfield from the
infield in pursuit of Gomez, trying to cut him off
from reaching the safety of the clubhouse. Simultaneously, all the
Giants on the field, all the umpires, and the occasional
policemen are also charging for the Giants dugout trying to
intercept the Braves. Gomes made it, covered himself in glory,
(18:01):
and the umpires and the cops managed to sort things
out before a huge riot erupted. Gomez had to be
escorted by policemen from the clubhouse back to the team
hotel to ensure his safety. But one thing that's in
all subsequent tellings of this story, and I'm not sure
if it's true or not, it's not in any of
the newspaper reports, is that Gomez ran all the way
to the clubhouse and then came back to the dugout
(18:23):
to continue the fight, this time holding an ice pick
in his hands. That wasn't noted by the National League
when they handed down their punishments for this event. Gomez
got a three game suspension in a two hundred and
fifty dollars fine. Adcock was just fined one hundred dollars,
wasn't suspended at all. His only comment was, I've never
been so mad in all my life. Once Adcock had
cooled down, when reporters asked if he expected Gomez to
(18:44):
apologize to him, he said, I don't know. Maybe I
should apologize to him. Gomez said, I saw him coming
at me, so I threw the ball at him. I
ran away because I didn't want him to break my ribs. So,
as I said, I have questions. First of all, what
did Adcock and Gomez say to each other that got
them both so worked up? Second? Why did Gomez run
away when he typically relished a fight. Third, what made
(19:05):
him assume that Adcock was going to go for his ribs?
When baseball fights break out, you don't typically see players
thinking work the body as if Bergus Meredith's character from
Rocky was coaching them from just outside the ring, They
just swing away in not particularly any strategic fashion. Finally,
what the hell was an ice pick doing in the
visitors clubhouse at Milwaukee County Stadium? And would Gomez have
(19:27):
really punctured a player on a major league ball field.
I suppose we'll never know. Mahatma Gandhi once said it
is better to be violent if there is violence in
our hearts, then to put on the cloak of nonviolence
to cover impotence. Gomez managed to do all of the above.
One last note if you like small, wholesome style payback.
The day after the game, Adcock went two for four
(19:50):
with two RBIs and a run scored against the Giants,
and then in the final game of the series, he
had one of those Joe Adcock days four for four,
a double, two home runs, eight RBI. Naturally, praise manager
Fred Haney gave his last bat of the day to
Frank Tory. I'm Stephen Goldman and this is the Infinite
Inning Baseball Podcast. Well, hello there, what's the name of
(20:50):
this bed and breakfast? You say to Evan Rude the Alamo,
Evan Rude replies, not even looking up from his guidebook.
Well wait, you say, if it's a bed and breakfast,
why are all those fellows with guns walking around on
the roof. You ask so many questions, says Evan Rud.
How about that army camped across the way there? Local color,
(21:11):
says Evan Rud, accepting his explanation. You enter the building,
you are greeted by an odd mater d who identifies
himself as Colonel Travis and requests that you take the
first watch. Welcome Congressman Crockett. He says, who's Congressman Crockett.
You say, my name is Gorovitz. Funny joke, Congressman Crockett.
Colonel Travis says, here's your gun. And so you find
(21:32):
yourself not at the holiday and but atop a crumbling
mission as all the soldiers in the world run screaming
towards you, waving pictures of your mother. You scream, shocking
yourself awake, and you realize you shouldn't have watched all
those Disney Channel fest Parker reruns before bed time. To
take that pill that doctor Ephram prescribed for you, the
(21:53):
one that prevents you from having psychotic delusions about heroic Congressman.
With a feeling of deep relief, you reach for a
bottle labeled episode nineteen. Damn, you think, but I looked
good in that coonskin cap. Welcome back to the show.
Before we move on, just in the interest of honesty
and to give you a glimpse of what my daily
life is like, I just want to share with you
(22:16):
that last bit as it actually occurred. You see, my
big twenty pound black and white cat, Mickey was helping
me do some recording tonight. Let's go back to the
end of the Little Reverie. You just heard deep relief
you reach for a bottle labeled episode nineteen. Damn you think,
but I looked good in that coonskin cap, Ladies and gentlemen.
(22:39):
The joy of being a cat owner we have. I
almost said the cliche, we have a really great show
for you tonight, but no, let's not go all show businesses.
Just me and the whole enterprise is spectacularly humble. I
want to talk to you about a picture a great
pitcher who was born almost one hundred and forty one
years ago and died one hundred and three years ago
(23:02):
at the age of thirty seven, named Rube Wadell. Wadell
was a very strange character. There was something off about
him compared to how we classify normality of emotion or thought.
There was something wrong, but there was also something very
very right. Keep that in mind as we continue. Like
most Americans, it's been hard for me to tear my
thoughts away from the disaster down in Texas. The flooding
(23:25):
brought on by Hurricane Harvey, which has reached almost biblical proportions.
They've obliterated every American record for rainfall, not just in
the state of Texas, not just in the month of August,
but just rainfall period. Even if you're a far away
observer or are so narrow mentally that you're only concerned
as a baseball fan, this is the most trivial of things.
But the hurricane even affects that with the arguments over
(23:48):
the relocation of various Astros games. But what's really striking,
beyond the extent of the disaster and the suffering that
has occurred because of it, is how familiar it all is.
I've lived through some of the more intense versions of
these storms that, from time to time, but perhaps with
increasing frequency, make their way up north, even if they're
(24:09):
not a patch on the kind that come directly from
the Gulf of Mexico onto the continental United States. And
I also married into a family of Mississippians, so I've
gotten to meet and talk with many people who have
experienced some of these historic storms and the humanitarian disasters
that resulted from them. It's striking how unprepared we always are.
How next time we swear we will be prepared, But
(24:31):
when next time comes, it's just like the first time
every time, And there's no indication that this time Hurricane
Harvey will change anything. I was just reading the Washington Post.
This was published on August twenty ninth, and I quote
Congress is likely to approve a Harvey recovery bill, as
it has after past disasters, to cover the huge cost
(24:51):
of storm damages. The cuts proposed by the administration would
slice away funding for long term preparedness efforts, many of
them put in place to address the sluggish federal response
to Hurricane Katrina in two thousand and five. The proposed
cuts would include programs run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency,
the Department of Housing in Urban Development, which helps rebuild homes, parks, hospitals,
(25:13):
and community centers. The National Weather Service, which forecasts extreme storms,
and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose research and
community engagement helps coastal residents prepare for disaster. So, like
I said, nothing will change until the next time. And
if you're familiar with what happened with Katrina, when doctors
were euthanizing elderly patients. They couldn't move out of the
(25:35):
flooded hospitals. You know just how bad it can get.
So in defiance of nature will take away some money
and make it harder for people to recover this time
or to deflect the next time. Ruewadell, there was something
very very wrong with him, and yet he knew. You
don't do that. You don't make it harder on people,
(25:55):
or harder on yourself, for that matter. In an emergency,
you roll up your sleeves and you pitch in. Rube
lived to help people. No one exactly knew what his
motives were or why he enjoyed it so much, but
he did, and he lived, and he died for that
in circumstances very much like those now. I could fill
a couple of hours with a full biography of him,
but suffice it to say that as a pitcher he
(26:16):
was peak Randy Johnson or Sandy Kofax, and he put
up their kinds of strikeout totals three hundred strikeouts and
more at a time when batters were too busy bunting
to strike out very much at all. As I've suggested,
as a man, he was damaged somehow. You can almost
see it in his formal portraits. His eyes pierce you
in a way that's a little uncomfortable. What was wrong
(26:37):
with him defied diagnosis at the time, and if we
had him here, maybe we could figure it out with
modern techniques. But failing that, it's impossible to know. Alcoholism
definitely had something to do with it, but drunk or sober,
he seemed to have no impulse control, getting himself into
fights with teammates or fans in the stands, hopping the
train for the coast in the middle of a series
(26:58):
in Milwaukee, eventually turning out is a referee of a
boxing matcher as one of the boxers themselves, or tending
bar in a saloon, or playing fullback on the local
football team or goalie for the local soccer team. Who
even knew Americans played soccer? In nineteen hundred and on
one occasion when they couldn't find him, he was located
under the stands shooting marbles with kids, and he reportedly
(27:19):
greatly resented being dragged away from that to go pitch
a Major league ballgame. A lot of times he just
took off to go fishing, particularly when a club had
fined him for being drunken, disorderly. He loved fishing. That's
another thing that's hard to figure because it's such a quiet,
contemplative activity for somebody who was always running off somewhere.
But this is my favorite story of missing Rubwadell. I
(27:40):
think this was with the Philadelphia A's, but who knows.
It could have been with any of his many teams,
and it also could have been mythical. He's supposed to
make his start, but he can't be found anywhere, and
Connie Mack has his coaches and ballplayers fanned out around
Philadelphia looking everywhere for Rube. Is he in a saloon drinking?
Where could he be? Where could he be? Mac and
his boys are at a total loss. But then the
(28:02):
friends nothing could be more public domain than the works
of John Philips Suza. But perhaps the recording that I
used was not. Therefore, I'm afraid that I'm just going
to have to describe the gag to you, which is
that Connie max men heard parade music, saw the parade
coming down the street, and were very surprised to see
their ace pitcher, perhaps in full Harold Hill uniform, leading
(28:27):
the parade. Seventy six swaw dels you have to hand
it to him. That's a hell of a stunt, and
I don't even know if it was a stunt. He
was kind of a cross between Ferris Bueller and Chancy Gardner.
He was just the kind of guy who would wake
up one morning and a couple hours later would be
leading a parade. He was much more likely, though, to
be pulling people out of a burning building. He had
(28:47):
a thing about fires, or specifically Fireman. I make him
sound like an arsonist, but he was the opposite. He
lived to put out fires. He worshiped Fireman to the
extent that he sometimes wore a red Union suit under
his base ball uniform so he could rip it off
like Superman if he heard a siren. And whereas fans
or opposing teammates could throw him off his game by
(29:09):
distracting him with a cute puppy or a scary snake,
nothing got him like fire engines. Connie Mack said this
in Baseball Magazine in nineteen twelve. We used to put
Rube in centerfield when we weren't pitching him. He never
wanted to sit on the bench, and we had to
humor him or he wouldn't have stayed on the lot.
He was a bully field or two. One day we
(29:30):
were having quite a battle with some team, and Rube
was covering center field for us. We were being hard
pressed with only one out. The other team filled the
bases in the fifth inning and a brace of good
batters were up. We had two strikes on the next man,
and then something happened. A black cloud of smoke appeared
in the sky back of centerfield fence, and a little
later a blaze. Then came the clash and clanking of
(29:50):
firebells and the clatter of horses hoofs. I happened to
look in the direction of the blaze. High up on
the centerfield fence. I saw Rube perched looking at the blaze,
silhouetted against the red glare of the conflagration. I let
out a blast that nearly woke the dead. Rube heard
bee and looked around. He seemed undecided as to his
next move, but he wasn't long in making up his mind.
(30:12):
With a graceful salute of his hand as if to say,
so long, fellows, he dropped from sight on the other
side of the fence and was on his way to
the fire. And he didn't just spectate. When he got
to the fire, he ran into burning buildings and dragged
people out. This is documented, and that's not the only thing.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
I mean.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
Once he was on the ferry from Camden to Philadelphia
when someone played a joke on Rube by shouting woman overboard,
he dove in. That's how he was about those things.
And it happened on the baseball field too. Now, look,
some of this might be a little exaggerated, and just
as retro sheet hasn't yet found a game that Rubewadell
played in center field as proposed in the previous anecdote,
(30:50):
newspaper reports at the time don't describe this exactly the
way I'm going to tell it to you. But as
the song goes, some of this is true and some
of this is better, And this is how I prefer
to think about it. On July first, nineteen oh four,
the A's were in Boston playing the Red Sox. The
Red Sox starter was a pitcher named Jesse Tannehill, and
(31:10):
at bat was an outfielder, a young one, a second
year player named Danny Hoffman, and Rube had taken a
liking to him. Well. Tannehill came inside and Hoffman couldn't
get out of the way. He didn't even try. Really
that people describe what happened to Ray Chapman the same
way as if he was in a trance like state,
hypnotized by the ball and just couldn't move and the
ball smacked him right under the right eye. It was
(31:33):
apparently a devastating injury. He went down. Some reports say
that the eye was nearly pushed out of the socket
by the force of the blow. The a's surrounded the kid,
The team doctor came out, and everybody's saying, where's the ambulance? Already,
where's the ambulance was being really slow to get there,
and the doctor, nervous, said the ambulance doesn't get here.
Now he's going to die right here. And Rube, hearing this,
(31:56):
picked up Hoffman, threw him over his shoulder and ran
him out out of the ballpark and onto the street,
where he got in a cab. And by cab, I
possibly mean the kind that was drawn by horses. This
was nineteen oh four. He then sat with the kid
in the hospital all night in his baseball uniform, sponging
his brow until he regained consciousness. Rube spent six years
(32:18):
with the a's Connie Mack was able to deal with
him for much longer than any other baseball official in
his life. But in nineteen oh five, on the eve
of the World Series, he tore up his pitching arm
scuffling with a teammate over a hat. Some people thought
maybe he had been bribed to skip the series, but
that doesn't appear to be the case, and although he
could still pitch after that, he wasn't peae Chrissale good anymore.
(32:40):
He was just pretty good, and that wasn't enough for
Connie to deal with him anymore, so he traded him off,
sold him. Actually, he pitched for the Browns for a
few years before drifting into the miners, and he wound
up with the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association, and
the manager there, Joe Cantalon, decided to look out for him.
In the winter of nineteen twelve, he took Rube home
(33:01):
with him to his farm, which was in Hickman, Kentucky.
Hickman then is now is in the southwest corner of
the state, to right on the Mississippi River, and the Mississippi,
as it did in nineteen twenty seven, overran its banks
and threatened to inundate the town. Who do you suppose
it was? Who stood in the ice cold torrent water
up to his nipples piling sandbags. Yes, Rube Wadell was water,
(33:27):
not a fire, but he looked at it the same way.
Pneumonia set in and he barely survived it and couldn't
really shake it. And at that point, perhaps taking advantage
of his weakened body, tuberculosis came on board as well.
He struggled to pitch for one more year, but he
couldn't do it. He was wasted, and a guy who
had been six' one and two hundred pounds was literally
(33:48):
shrinking before everyone's eyes. He was failing. In the winter
of nineteen thirteen, he was found incoherent and feverish wandering
the streets of Saint Louis. Cantalon took charge of him,
sent him to Texas, where his sister was living. Waddell
had been married many times, but more often than not
wound up in jail for nonsupport and subsequently divorced. As
he further declined, he ended up in a sanitarium and
(34:10):
died April first, nineteen fourteen. Connie Mackett helped pay for
his medical care, as he would later, along with John McGraw,
help pay for him to receive a proper headstone. And
if his death wasn't a direct result of going down
in the flood, then the man fulfilling his desire to
be a hero was at the very least approximate. Cause
I'm sure you remember the nineteen seventy four Brandy Newman
(34:34):
song Louisiana nineteen twenty seven. What always strikes me about
the song is not just.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
The swelling chorus or the introduction that is right out
of Stephen Foster or Gone with the Wind, but the
third verse, when the President of the United States appears.
In real life, the President didn't even come down.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
Calvin Coolidge said no.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
He would not go see the flood. The writers and
governors and congressmen begged him be their call and offers
some sucker to the people whose lives have been washed away.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Instead, he sent Herbert Hooper, and Herbert Huber did a
pretty good job, oftens considered, but he also did it on.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
A shoestring, because neither he nor Coolidge believed that the
government should help anybody whose lives have been swept away
by an axual disaster.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
Hoover relied on the Red Cross, just like we do now.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
And look, the hell isn't enough because in some ways
it never can be enough.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
Still, why is it that we haven't learned anything?
Speaker 2 (35:31):
And we don't know now what Rubwaddell knew over one
hundred years ago. See, even if the president wasn't really there,
that much is accurate. The politician says, isn't it a shame?
And shakes his head and goes, but that's all you get.
To get more, you need a hero. He needs somebody
who has something very very wrong with them, who's.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
Distracted by puppy.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Dogs and fire engines, but also knows right from wrong
and knows what Franklin wrote I said long after his
death is true that when your neighbor's.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
House is on fire, you don't.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
Haggle over the price of the gardens. And if he
happens to be a left handed picture with liking in
his arm, so much the better.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
By Atticus's spectacles, we've reached the end of another show.
This is where I used to tell you how to
care me and the Gawler on social media. It's however,
you get.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
That in particular in your social media but whatever you
can't find me. You can even go into baseball perspective,
and you can watch the social kinds of things you
hear me talking about the Infinite including the random moments
of my research Stephen the old ads for last because
when I went, if it's.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
Right, We're terrible.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
You can also write in at Infinite Inning at gmail
dot com, and please, as always rate us at the
podcasting service of your choice, iTunes or what have you.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
It really is appreciated. As James Cagney said in Yankee
Doodle Dandy, my mother, thanks you, my father, thanks you,
my sister thanks you, and I thank you. We have
a sponsor now, but nonetheless, this episode is still brought
to you by the number thirty four. Our producer has
been mixing this show on a nineteen thirty five Spartan
five point fifty eight sled radio, which explained so much,
(37:24):
but I can't argue with him. It's so pretty.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
Our theme song, The Infinite Man, was co written by
myself and doctor Rick Mooring. When I was Rick's best man,
I gave a rather long toast and when I sat
down another good friend said, you know, it wasn't a
very good toast.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
But it's not your fault. We just overestimated you as
a writer and set the bar too high. Later, his
drunk uncle told me that it was just something you
had to sit through, like a funeral or my daughter's
tuba recital. I always have thought of myself as a
member of the family. Well, if things are only half
as bad as five times the amount of foreboding, I
have about two thirds of the state of things that
(37:58):
I'm ninety nine percent likely to be back next week.
And that's all for this reissue episode of The Infinite Inning.
Thank you for listening. And here's to the cat I
mentioned earlier. Poor old Mickey. He got a raw deal
and checked out early. I missed my twenty pound cat,
and I'll miss you until this weekend, when episode three
point forty of The Infinite Inning brings us together again
Well, hello there, and welcome back to the Infinite Inning
reissue series after a week off. I am Stephen Goldman,
AZ always your host for the Infinite Inning series, and
even it would be neat if I had somebody else
come in and do these and comment on them. Steve
clearly wasn't at his best in this episode. Well, as
we'll get to in a moment, I'm clearly not at
(00:46):
my best in this reissue for legal reasons. But first
a few words on the subject matter of this reissue episode.
For the vast majority of people, moral clarity only comes
later after the events and then they signed on to.
The majority view is if they had been subjected to
peer pressure, or as if they had thought that all
(01:07):
the time. The singer songwriter Jill so Buell, who died
tragically in a fire just a few months ago, had
a song Heroes which mentions all those French who joined
the resistance after the war. Was that stolen valor? Sure,
but it points to something more significant. It's easier to
just go along, to get along and not think too hard.
It's like one of Claude Raine's best lines in Casa Blanca.
(01:31):
It does seem like almost every line he has in
that film as quotable. But I've thought of this one
quite a bit over the last six months. I blow
with the wind, and the prevailing wind happens to be
from vich as you know v. She was the collaborationist
puppet state set up by Germany in the southern part
of France after it conquered the country. That way, the
Germans didn't have to occupy the whole territory, at least
at first, although they did do that after about two years.
(01:53):
After the big moral testing is over, there follows a
period of concordance on the great wrongs of the recent past.
Then that generation and the generation it raised starts to
die off, and even before that it loses its cultural
potency and a great unlearning takes place. If you are
part of my cohort, you are a child more or
(02:15):
less of the Boomers and a grandchild of the so
called Greatest generation. Actually, both my parents kind of fell
between those two stools. They were a little old to
be Boomers, my dad in particular, sorry Mom. My mother,
like all four Beatles, was born during the war, although
she's younger than the youngest of them. The late and
much missed George maybe that makes all the difference. Actually,
(02:37):
after all, the boomers voted for Ronald Reagan and a
program of dismantling the New Deal state, which was couched
in Cold war and racist rhetoric to overcome the reasons
for the existence of the social safety net with something
that was more visceral and easy to understand on an
emotional level. Ah, we're in trouble. Ah, we're being stolen
(03:01):
from and it always works. There's a bear in the
woods and a welfare queen in the supermarket. That's what
sold the country on Reagan. The boomers, you see, forgot
what came before them. My folks never did again, maybe
by virtue of just being a little older and so,
as the late Brian Wilson wrote or co wrote, I
just wasn't made for these times. The Great Depression ended
(03:23):
roughly eighty five years ago as a result of the
greatest government employment program of all time, World War two,
brought to you by international aggressive fascism. The war itself
and the threat of fascism ended eighty years ago this August.
Very few people now have a living memory of any
of that. I was reading an old magazine from nineteen
(03:43):
forty today as you know that I do most days,
And it mentioned a then current joke about the threat
of a worldwide takeover by one of those dictatorial regimes.
This issue came out after France had fallen in June
nineteen forty, but more than a year before Pearl Harbor.
So the US was not in the war, and no
(04:04):
one knew if we ever would be. There were just
a lot of opinions about whether we should be or
inevitably would be. The joke was roughly that it was
based in truth. The Nazis were trying to work out
the purchase of a million dollars or so worth of
tanks from General Motors. Sure, said GM, which was also
kind of a true thing. A lot of American companies
(04:25):
cooperated with the Germans before and sometimes during the war.
But what about delivery. Don't worry about that, the Nazis replied,
We'll pick them up when we're passing through Detroit. Well,
you could joke about the threat because it wasn't yet manifest.
Hitler was quoted around that time as saying he had
no plans to attack America, but he reportedly said America
(04:47):
is permanently on the brink of revolution. It will be
a simple matter for me to produce unrest and revolts
in the US, so that these gentry will have their
hands full with their own affairs. We have no use
for them in Europe. We shall soon have stormtroopers in America.
Into the hands of our youth will be given the
great statesmanlike mission of Washington, which this corrupt democracy has
(05:10):
trodden underfoot. And they did have a nascent version of
their stormtroopers. They had the bund which had a big
youth outreach operation, essentially the American Hitler youth. And it
might have worked too, if not for that same meddling
toothbrush mustache guy and his crazy dog, which he later
had poisoned. I'm sad to report as a test of
(05:30):
his own suicide capsule. In other words, he didn't give
his plans time to come to fruition, and we can
all be grateful for that. This week's reissue takes us
back to the show's first year and episode nineteen from
August thirty first, twenty seventeen. I almost said nineteen seventeen.
It feels like it was that long ago. I was
(05:52):
still learning how to do this podcasting thing. And I
hope you will forgive my weak delivery, and whatever other
foibles show up in the episode. There's one big one,
which I'll get to in a moment. This episode contained
the story of the death of the great, very weird
pitcher Rube Waddell, shortly after he helped a small town
in Kentucky tried to avoid being flooded out by the
(06:13):
Mississippi River, which is just what the Mississippi River tends
to do. As you know, we are still in the
aftermath of a national tragedy relating to a river flooding
in Texas. The point here was to talk about Waddell,
not rivers, but it seems like a good thing to
talk about again in order to remind people that rivers
(06:34):
are very dangerous beasts. That's why I relate this episode
back to the idea that moral clarity or agreement only
comes after we haven't gotten to a place where we
agree as a people, or even in individual states, as
to how to deal with the facts of nature on
the ground. In this week's issue of The New Yorker,
(06:57):
there's a good article, a short one by their Standards too,
for those of you who don't like to read ten
thousand words at a shot. It's hard for me too nowadays.
The article is by John C. Brook and it's titled
In an Age of climate change, how do we Cope
with Floods? The point is not to scold the counties
in Texas that might or might not have mismanaged this
crisis or mitigated it somewhat with better preparation, or the
(07:21):
federal government. That argument has been made in other places
and is alluded to in the article, but rather to
make some points about rivers and flood management in general,
specifically the futility of building lots of housing and infrastructure
in a floodplain and then telling the river, now, don't
you go there? That would inconvenience us as an aside
as a parenthetical, In the early eighteen hundreds, the Germans
(07:45):
straightened the Upper Rhine River. They unkinked it. It had
a big u in it, and they carved a straight
line in it. And that involved a lot of wetland loss.
And I've always wondered what kind of species loss the
habitat loss caused. That's not something anyone was thinking about
too much back then. Now, having read this article, I
also wonder what flooding events that led to and probably
(08:08):
leads to down to the current day. A river's meanders,
that's a noun, are part of channeling water. You could
say that backwards too, switching your nouns for your verbs.
A river's channels cause water to meander instead of flood.
After all, you can't have a surge if there's not
a large volume that's pent up in a small place.
(08:29):
And if you pen in the river, you're going to
create that kind of volume with the resultant force from
a great body that has almost literally gotten too big
for its pants. There's a process of force and counterforce
that creates the path that the river takes. We don't
seem to accept that. In the Seabrook article, there's a
(08:51):
great quote from Kevin Geiger, a former firefighter who's now
working in river management and flood mitigation. He says, the
reason the fire department exists is they believe that things
are going to burn, But there is no equivalent of
a fire department in flood response. Seabrook ads that's because,
(09:11):
Geiger continued, we don't believe in floods the same way
we don't practice for them. He glanced over at the
otto Quechee River. Maybe it's because fires don't have a
benign state like rivers do today. The river is happy.
The Roof checked out in nineteen fourteen, when he was
just thirty seven years old. Whatever was up with him,
(09:32):
Whether his issues were psychological physical, which is possibly a
redundant thing to say, or both complicated by substance abuse,
he was given a set of cards that was unlikely
to lead to longevity. If the river hadn't gotten him,
something else would have, probably the tuberculosis, which contributed to
the weakness that allowed the exposure to the river to
(09:55):
kill him. Was nineteen fourteen too early to be thinking
about the river in the way that we're talking about here, maybe,
But it was also a time of massive hubris on
the part of humanity, when we really believed we were
masters of the planet and could do whatever we wanted
to it without consequences. We or some of us, still
haven't gotten over that idea completely. I don't know if
(10:18):
the Rube ever got over that idea where he personally
was concerned, but baseball has a way of hurrying things
along for its most arrogant players. I mentioned a couple
of times a few minutes ago that this reissue episode
is kind of a mess. You will hear the sound
change quite a bit as we get to the end
of the show. As you know, part of my motivation
(10:40):
for doing this series of reissues was to remove places
where some of the podcasting services had belated trouble with
my use of copyrighted music, even as in the case here,
I was commenting on baseball fan Randy Newman's famous Louisiana
nineteen twenty seven in a way that seems to me
to be fair use. As always, I'm not a lawyer,
and I don't have the bandwidth to argue with them anyway.
(11:03):
The problem for me in remedying that this week was
that I don't have the original tracks after eight years
if I ever did actually, and I had made some
of my remarks alongside the song as a voiceover, I
can't quite separate the two. I use some tools to
mask it as much as possible, and then I added
a music bed to cover it further. And the result
(11:24):
is honestly kind of a mess, a bit of a
sonic swamp. But I hope you can overlook that. That's
all for me for this reissue episode. You may hear
from me again throughout the remainder of the show as
I patch over old breaks and the like. As always,
thank you for listening to this Infinite Inning reissue episode.
(12:01):
Sometimes there were only questions. On July seventeenth, nineteen fifty six,
the Milwaukee Braves were hosting the New York Giants at
County Stadium. The Giant starting pitcher was Reuben Gomez, a
star in Puerto Rico who had come to the majors
and become something of a star here too, winning thirteen
games his rookie year and seventeen with a two point
(12:22):
eight eight ERA in his second started in won World
Series game that year too. He was a right handed screwballer,
which was kind of cool, and he also had a
good fastball and a slider curve depending on what you read,
and this is important, he wasn't a guy who shied
away from pitching inside or risking fights with the high
and tight pitches. He didn't hit a lot of guys,
at least not in the statistical record, but there were
(12:44):
a number of troubling fights that resulted from him hitting
or dusting batters. In nineteen fifty three, he hit Dodgers
right fielder call for Rillo, which ignited a massive brawl
that sawt Rillo break his hand, He hit Frank Robinson
in the head and put him in the hospital, and
he even fought his own team made Willie Mays at
one point, although they later said that that had been
more playful than angry. But whatever the case, this was
(13:06):
not a guy who shied away from confrontation or from
using his pitches to establish his dominance on the mound
sort of. This day, July seventeenth, fifty six was an exception.
The Braves had scored a couple of runs off of
Gomez in the bottom of the first, and when the
Braves came up to take their turn at bat in
the bottom of the second, Gomez was apparently still a
(13:26):
little annoyed by that the leadoff hitter that inning was
first baseman Joe Adcock. He's a player who continues to fascinate,
even though he hung him up way back in nineteen
sixty six. He was one of the great power hitters
his career three hundred and thirty six home runs doesn't
sound like a lot now, but at the time he
retired it was fairly high up on the list, and
the total fails to convey the fact that he got
(13:46):
hurt a lot, including for reasons were about to discuss here,
and that periodically various Braves managers would get it in
their head that he needed to be platooned or rested
for players who weren't nearly his equal in skill, like
Joe Torre's older Frank. As a result, there are a
lot of three hundreds in the bat column on his
baseball card that could have been five hundreds, and if
(14:07):
they were five hundreds, well, he would have put up
thirty home runs annually without much of a struggle. When
the game in question took place, he was in the
midst of what would be the best hitting season of
his career. On the season, he hit two ninety one
and slugged about six hundred with thirty eight home runs,
and he tended to have huge days. Most famously, in
nineteen fifty four, he had a game at Little Ebitts
Field in Brooklyn in which he went five for five
(14:30):
with seven RBIs and five runs scored, including a double
and four home runs, which set a record for total
bases in a game at the time. He had other
days like that too, In fact, he had one in
nineteen fifty six, which I'll get to in a second.
It's kind of the coda to this story. He had
come into the July seventeenth game crazy hot. In July
of fifty six, he had a Giancarlos Stanton month, the
(14:51):
kind of month that Stanton's having now. He hit three
p fifty eight with fifteen home runs in thirty games,
and in the eight games heading into the game in question,
he had gone nine for twenty seven with seven home runs.
This was a guy who was on fire. He also,
by reputation, tended to dig in crowd the plate. He
was a big guy, six four to two ten, at
(15:11):
least according to the official statistics, and so it wasn't
unusual for him to get brushed back. Just as Gomez
didn't hit a lot of people, Adcock didn't get hit
a lot, just seventeen times in a seventeen year career.
And yet if you read the coverage of him when
he was an active player, you'd think the guy was
a human pincushion. And I suspect the reason for that
is that on the few occasions he actually was hit,
(15:32):
it was a very memorable event. So back to the
top of the second inning, Gomez threw one inside and
it nailed Adcock on the wrist. There are pictures of
him cradling his arm. It wasn't broken or anything, but
as he trotted down to first he was pretty angry.
That's where those memorable prior events come into play. Remember
that record setting eighteen total base day I mentioned from
(15:54):
nineteen fifty four, Well, in the next game, the Dodgers
hit Adcock in the head. Later that year, Don Nukem
of the Dodgers hit Adcock in the hand, breaking his
thumb and ending his season. The following July, in nineteen
fifty five, Giants pitcher at Hern hit him on the
wrist and broke it, ending his season after eighty four games. Further,
the Giants, who had been managed by Leo du Rocher
(16:16):
for the previous seven years, were known as a head
hunting ball club, although what's interesting about that is that
they didn't put up crazy high hit by pitch totals
at that time. Sal Magley, the famous barber, never led
the National League in hit batters, and on reflection, I
wonder if that doesn't prove anything the real headhunters, as
opposed to the psychopaths and guys who are actually wild
(16:36):
and can't control what they're doing are so good with
their command that they rarely do actually hit anybody. They
just shave them, a bit like a barber who comes
close with his blades but doesn't cut. So Adcock likely
has summer all of this history on his mind as
he's trotting down to first base and he says some
rude things to Gomez. Gomez said some rude things back.
(16:58):
Whatever they were, they were sufficiently provocative to spur Adcock
into action. He turns at first base and goes running
for the mound, head down. As I said, six four
two ten, at least this is an imposing specimen to
be charging at you on the mound. Gomez, by the way,
four inches shorter, forty pounds later. Still, Gomez was typically
(17:19):
all for this kind of thing, so what he did
next doesn't seem like it's in character. Seeing Adcock, he
took the baseball and threw it at him and hit
him a second time, this time on the thigh. That
wouldn't be sufficient to stop a charging rhinoceros, which was
pretty much what Adcock was at that point. So Gomez,
realizing he was right out of bullets, turns and runs
like hell, making for the giants, dugout. Now the entire
(17:41):
Braves team is charging in from the outfield from the
infield in pursuit of Gomez, trying to cut him off
from reaching the safety of the clubhouse. Simultaneously, all the
Giants on the field, all the umpires, and the occasional
policemen are also charging for the Giants dugout trying to
intercept the Braves. Gomes made it, covered himself in glory,
(18:01):
and the umpires and the cops managed to sort things
out before a huge riot erupted. Gomez had to be
escorted by policemen from the clubhouse back to the team
hotel to ensure his safety. But one thing that's in
all subsequent tellings of this story, and I'm not sure
if it's true or not, it's not in any of
the newspaper reports, is that Gomez ran all the way
to the clubhouse and then came back to the dugout
(18:23):
to continue the fight, this time holding an ice pick
in his hands. That wasn't noted by the National League
when they handed down their punishments for this event. Gomez
got a three game suspension in a two hundred and
fifty dollars fine. Adcock was just fined one hundred dollars,
wasn't suspended at all. His only comment was, I've never
been so mad in all my life. Once Adcock had
cooled down, when reporters asked if he expected Gomez to
(18:44):
apologize to him, he said, I don't know. Maybe I
should apologize to him. Gomez said, I saw him coming
at me, so I threw the ball at him. I
ran away because I didn't want him to break my ribs. So,
as I said, I have questions. First of all, what
did Adcock and Gomez say to each other that got
them both so worked up? Second? Why did Gomez run
away when he typically relished a fight. Third, what made
(19:05):
him assume that Adcock was going to go for his ribs?
When baseball fights break out, you don't typically see players
thinking work the body as if Bergus Meredith's character from
Rocky was coaching them from just outside the ring, They
just swing away in not particularly any strategic fashion. Finally,
what the hell was an ice pick doing in the
visitors clubhouse at Milwaukee County Stadium? And would Gomez have
(19:27):
really punctured a player on a major league ball field.
I suppose we'll never know. Mahatma Gandhi once said it
is better to be violent if there is violence in
our hearts, then to put on the cloak of nonviolence
to cover impotence. Gomez managed to do all of the above.
One last note if you like small, wholesome style payback.
The day after the game, Adcock went two for four
(19:50):
with two RBIs and a run scored against the Giants,
and then in the final game of the series, he
had one of those Joe Adcock days four for four,
a double, two home runs, eight RBI. Naturally, praise manager
Fred Haney gave his last bat of the day to
Frank Tory. I'm Stephen Goldman and this is the Infinite
Inning Baseball Podcast. Well, hello there, what's the name of
(20:50):
this bed and breakfast? You say to Evan Rude the Alamo,
Evan Rude replies, not even looking up from his guidebook.
Well wait, you say, if it's a bed and breakfast,
why are all those fellows with guns walking around on
the roof. You ask so many questions, says Evan Rud.
How about that army camped across the way there? Local color,
(21:11):
says Evan Rud, accepting his explanation. You enter the building,
you are greeted by an odd mater d who identifies
himself as Colonel Travis and requests that you take the
first watch. Welcome Congressman Crockett. He says, who's Congressman Crockett.
You say, my name is Gorovitz. Funny joke, Congressman Crockett.
Colonel Travis says, here's your gun. And so you find
(21:32):
yourself not at the holiday and but atop a crumbling
mission as all the soldiers in the world run screaming
towards you, waving pictures of your mother. You scream, shocking
yourself awake, and you realize you shouldn't have watched all
those Disney Channel fest Parker reruns before bed time. To
take that pill that doctor Ephram prescribed for you, the
(21:53):
one that prevents you from having psychotic delusions about heroic Congressman.
With a feeling of deep relief, you reach for a
bottle labeled episode nineteen. Damn, you think, but I looked
good in that coonskin cap. Welcome back to the show.
Before we move on, just in the interest of honesty
and to give you a glimpse of what my daily
life is like, I just want to share with you
(22:16):
that last bit as it actually occurred. You see, my
big twenty pound black and white cat, Mickey was helping
me do some recording tonight. Let's go back to the
end of the Little Reverie. You just heard deep relief
you reach for a bottle labeled episode nineteen. Damn you think,
but I looked good in that coonskin cap, Ladies and gentlemen.
(22:39):
The joy of being a cat owner we have. I
almost said the cliche, we have a really great show
for you tonight, but no, let's not go all show businesses.
Just me and the whole enterprise is spectacularly humble. I
want to talk to you about a picture a great
pitcher who was born almost one hundred and forty one
years ago and died one hundred and three years ago
(23:02):
at the age of thirty seven, named Rube Wadell. Wadell
was a very strange character. There was something off about
him compared to how we classify normality of emotion or thought.
There was something wrong, but there was also something very
very right. Keep that in mind as we continue. Like
most Americans, it's been hard for me to tear my
thoughts away from the disaster down in Texas. The flooding
(23:25):
brought on by Hurricane Harvey, which has reached almost biblical proportions.
They've obliterated every American record for rainfall, not just in
the state of Texas, not just in the month of August,
but just rainfall period. Even if you're a far away
observer or are so narrow mentally that you're only concerned
as a baseball fan, this is the most trivial of things.
But the hurricane even affects that with the arguments over
(23:48):
the relocation of various Astros games. But what's really striking,
beyond the extent of the disaster and the suffering that
has occurred because of it, is how familiar it all is.
I've lived through some of the more intense versions of
these storms that, from time to time, but perhaps with
increasing frequency, make their way up north, even if they're
(24:09):
not a patch on the kind that come directly from
the Gulf of Mexico onto the continental United States. And
I also married into a family of Mississippians, so I've
gotten to meet and talk with many people who have
experienced some of these historic storms and the humanitarian disasters
that resulted from them. It's striking how unprepared we always are.
How next time we swear we will be prepared, But
(24:31):
when next time comes, it's just like the first time
every time, And there's no indication that this time Hurricane
Harvey will change anything. I was just reading the Washington Post.
This was published on August twenty ninth, and I quote
Congress is likely to approve a Harvey recovery bill, as
it has after past disasters, to cover the huge cost
(24:51):
of storm damages. The cuts proposed by the administration would
slice away funding for long term preparedness efforts, many of
them put in place to address the sluggish federal response
to Hurricane Katrina in two thousand and five. The proposed
cuts would include programs run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency,
the Department of Housing in Urban Development, which helps rebuild homes, parks, hospitals,
(25:13):
and community centers. The National Weather Service, which forecasts extreme storms,
and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose research and
community engagement helps coastal residents prepare for disaster. So, like
I said, nothing will change until the next time. And
if you're familiar with what happened with Katrina, when doctors
were euthanizing elderly patients. They couldn't move out of the
(25:35):
flooded hospitals. You know just how bad it can get.
So in defiance of nature will take away some money
and make it harder for people to recover this time
or to deflect the next time. Ruewadell, there was something
very very wrong with him, and yet he knew. You
don't do that. You don't make it harder on people,
(25:55):
or harder on yourself, for that matter. In an emergency,
you roll up your sleeves and you pitch in. Rube
lived to help people. No one exactly knew what his
motives were or why he enjoyed it so much, but
he did, and he lived, and he died for that
in circumstances very much like those now. I could fill
a couple of hours with a full biography of him,
but suffice it to say that as a pitcher he
(26:16):
was peak Randy Johnson or Sandy Kofax, and he put
up their kinds of strikeout totals three hundred strikeouts and
more at a time when batters were too busy bunting
to strike out very much at all. As I've suggested,
as a man, he was damaged somehow. You can almost
see it in his formal portraits. His eyes pierce you
in a way that's a little uncomfortable. What was wrong
(26:37):
with him defied diagnosis at the time, and if we
had him here, maybe we could figure it out with
modern techniques. But failing that, it's impossible to know. Alcoholism
definitely had something to do with it, but drunk or sober,
he seemed to have no impulse control, getting himself into
fights with teammates or fans in the stands, hopping the
train for the coast in the middle of a series
(26:58):
in Milwaukee, eventually turning out is a referee of a
boxing matcher as one of the boxers themselves, or tending
bar in a saloon, or playing fullback on the local
football team or goalie for the local soccer team. Who
even knew Americans played soccer? In nineteen hundred and on
one occasion when they couldn't find him, he was located
under the stands shooting marbles with kids, and he reportedly
(27:19):
greatly resented being dragged away from that to go pitch
a Major league ballgame. A lot of times he just
took off to go fishing, particularly when a club had
fined him for being drunken, disorderly. He loved fishing. That's
another thing that's hard to figure because it's such a quiet,
contemplative activity for somebody who was always running off somewhere.
But this is my favorite story of missing Rubwadell. I
(27:40):
think this was with the Philadelphia A's, but who knows.
It could have been with any of his many teams,
and it also could have been mythical. He's supposed to
make his start, but he can't be found anywhere, and
Connie Mack has his coaches and ballplayers fanned out around
Philadelphia looking everywhere for Rube. Is he in a saloon drinking?
Where could he be? Where could he be? Mac and
his boys are at a total loss. But then the
(28:02):
friends nothing could be more public domain than the works
of John Philips Suza. But perhaps the recording that I
used was not. Therefore, I'm afraid that I'm just going
to have to describe the gag to you, which is
that Connie max men heard parade music, saw the parade
coming down the street, and were very surprised to see
their ace pitcher, perhaps in full Harold Hill uniform, leading
(28:27):
the parade. Seventy six swaw dels you have to hand
it to him. That's a hell of a stunt, and
I don't even know if it was a stunt. He
was kind of a cross between Ferris Bueller and Chancy Gardner.
He was just the kind of guy who would wake
up one morning and a couple hours later would be
leading a parade. He was much more likely, though, to
be pulling people out of a burning building. He had
(28:47):
a thing about fires, or specifically Fireman. I make him
sound like an arsonist, but he was the opposite. He
lived to put out fires. He worshiped Fireman to the
extent that he sometimes wore a red Union suit under
his base ball uniform so he could rip it off
like Superman if he heard a siren. And whereas fans
or opposing teammates could throw him off his game by
(29:09):
distracting him with a cute puppy or a scary snake,
nothing got him like fire engines. Connie Mack said this
in Baseball Magazine in nineteen twelve. We used to put
Rube in centerfield when we weren't pitching him. He never
wanted to sit on the bench, and we had to
humor him or he wouldn't have stayed on the lot.
He was a bully field or two. One day we
(29:30):
were having quite a battle with some team, and Rube
was covering center field for us. We were being hard
pressed with only one out. The other team filled the
bases in the fifth inning and a brace of good
batters were up. We had two strikes on the next man,
and then something happened. A black cloud of smoke appeared
in the sky back of centerfield fence, and a little
later a blaze. Then came the clash and clanking of
(29:50):
firebells and the clatter of horses hoofs. I happened to
look in the direction of the blaze. High up on
the centerfield fence. I saw Rube perched looking at the blaze,
silhouetted against the red glare of the conflagration. I let
out a blast that nearly woke the dead. Rube heard
bee and looked around. He seemed undecided as to his
next move, but he wasn't long in making up his mind.
(30:12):
With a graceful salute of his hand as if to say,
so long, fellows, he dropped from sight on the other
side of the fence and was on his way to
the fire. And he didn't just spectate. When he got
to the fire, he ran into burning buildings and dragged
people out. This is documented, and that's not the only thing.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
I mean.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
Once he was on the ferry from Camden to Philadelphia
when someone played a joke on Rube by shouting woman overboard,
he dove in. That's how he was about those things.
And it happened on the baseball field too. Now, look,
some of this might be a little exaggerated, and just
as retro sheet hasn't yet found a game that Rubewadell
played in center field as proposed in the previous anecdote,
(30:50):
newspaper reports at the time don't describe this exactly the
way I'm going to tell it to you. But as
the song goes, some of this is true and some
of this is better, And this is how I prefer
to think about it. On July first, nineteen oh four,
the A's were in Boston playing the Red Sox. The
Red Sox starter was a pitcher named Jesse Tannehill, and
(31:10):
at bat was an outfielder, a young one, a second
year player named Danny Hoffman, and Rube had taken a
liking to him. Well. Tannehill came inside and Hoffman couldn't
get out of the way. He didn't even try. Really
that people describe what happened to Ray Chapman the same
way as if he was in a trance like state,
hypnotized by the ball and just couldn't move and the
ball smacked him right under the right eye. It was
(31:33):
apparently a devastating injury. He went down. Some reports say
that the eye was nearly pushed out of the socket
by the force of the blow. The a's surrounded the kid,
The team doctor came out, and everybody's saying, where's the ambulance? Already,
where's the ambulance was being really slow to get there,
and the doctor, nervous, said the ambulance doesn't get here.
Now he's going to die right here. And Rube, hearing this,
(31:56):
picked up Hoffman, threw him over his shoulder and ran
him out out of the ballpark and onto the street,
where he got in a cab. And by cab, I
possibly mean the kind that was drawn by horses. This
was nineteen oh four. He then sat with the kid
in the hospital all night in his baseball uniform, sponging
his brow until he regained consciousness. Rube spent six years
(32:18):
with the a's Connie Mack was able to deal with
him for much longer than any other baseball official in
his life. But in nineteen oh five, on the eve
of the World Series, he tore up his pitching arm
scuffling with a teammate over a hat. Some people thought
maybe he had been bribed to skip the series, but
that doesn't appear to be the case, and although he
could still pitch after that, he wasn't peae Chrissale good anymore.
(32:40):
He was just pretty good, and that wasn't enough for
Connie to deal with him anymore, so he traded him off,
sold him. Actually, he pitched for the Browns for a
few years before drifting into the miners, and he wound
up with the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association, and
the manager there, Joe Cantalon, decided to look out for him.
In the winter of nineteen twelve, he took Rube home
(33:01):
with him to his farm, which was in Hickman, Kentucky.
Hickman then is now is in the southwest corner of
the state, to right on the Mississippi River, and the Mississippi,
as it did in nineteen twenty seven, overran its banks
and threatened to inundate the town. Who do you suppose
it was? Who stood in the ice cold torrent water
up to his nipples piling sandbags. Yes, Rube Wadell was water,
(33:27):
not a fire, but he looked at it the same way.
Pneumonia set in and he barely survived it and couldn't
really shake it. And at that point, perhaps taking advantage
of his weakened body, tuberculosis came on board as well.
He struggled to pitch for one more year, but he
couldn't do it. He was wasted, and a guy who
had been six' one and two hundred pounds was literally
(33:48):
shrinking before everyone's eyes. He was failing. In the winter
of nineteen thirteen, he was found incoherent and feverish wandering
the streets of Saint Louis. Cantalon took charge of him,
sent him to Texas, where his sister was living. Waddell
had been married many times, but more often than not
wound up in jail for nonsupport and subsequently divorced. As
he further declined, he ended up in a sanitarium and
(34:10):
died April first, nineteen fourteen. Connie Mackett helped pay for
his medical care, as he would later, along with John McGraw,
help pay for him to receive a proper headstone. And
if his death wasn't a direct result of going down
in the flood, then the man fulfilling his desire to
be a hero was at the very least approximate. Cause
I'm sure you remember the nineteen seventy four Brandy Newman
(34:34):
song Louisiana nineteen twenty seven. What always strikes me about
the song is not just.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
The swelling chorus or the introduction that is right out
of Stephen Foster or Gone with the Wind, but the
third verse, when the President of the United States appears.
In real life, the President didn't even come down.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
Calvin Coolidge said no.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
He would not go see the flood. The writers and
governors and congressmen begged him be their call and offers
some sucker to the people whose lives have been washed away.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Instead, he sent Herbert Hooper, and Herbert Huber did a
pretty good job, oftens considered, but he also did it on.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
A shoestring, because neither he nor Coolidge believed that the
government should help anybody whose lives have been swept away
by an axual disaster.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
Hoover relied on the Red Cross, just like we do now.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
And look, the hell isn't enough because in some ways
it never can be enough.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
Still, why is it that we haven't learned anything?
Speaker 2 (35:31):
And we don't know now what Rubwaddell knew over one
hundred years ago. See, even if the president wasn't really there,
that much is accurate. The politician says, isn't it a shame?
And shakes his head and goes, but that's all you get.
To get more, you need a hero. He needs somebody
who has something very very wrong with them, who's.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
Distracted by puppy.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Dogs and fire engines, but also knows right from wrong
and knows what Franklin wrote I said long after his
death is true that when your neighbor's.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
House is on fire, you don't.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
Haggle over the price of the gardens. And if he
happens to be a left handed picture with liking in
his arm, so much the better.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
By Atticus's spectacles, we've reached the end of another show.
This is where I used to tell you how to
care me and the Gawler on social media. It's however,
you get.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
That in particular in your social media but whatever you
can't find me. You can even go into baseball perspective,
and you can watch the social kinds of things you
hear me talking about the Infinite including the random moments
of my research Stephen the old ads for last because
when I went, if it's.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
Right, We're terrible.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
You can also write in at Infinite Inning at gmail
dot com, and please, as always rate us at the
podcasting service of your choice, iTunes or what have you.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
It really is appreciated. As James Cagney said in Yankee
Doodle Dandy, my mother, thanks you, my father, thanks you,
my sister thanks you, and I thank you. We have
a sponsor now, but nonetheless, this episode is still brought
to you by the number thirty four. Our producer has
been mixing this show on a nineteen thirty five Spartan
five point fifty eight sled radio, which explained so much,
(37:24):
but I can't argue with him. It's so pretty.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
Our theme song, The Infinite Man, was co written by
myself and doctor Rick Mooring. When I was Rick's best man,
I gave a rather long toast and when I sat
down another good friend said, you know, it wasn't a
very good toast.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
But it's not your fault. We just overestimated you as
a writer and set the bar too high. Later, his
drunk uncle told me that it was just something you
had to sit through, like a funeral or my daughter's
tuba recital. I always have thought of myself as a
member of the family. Well, if things are only half
as bad as five times the amount of foreboding, I
have about two thirds of the state of things that
(37:58):
I'm ninety nine percent likely to be back next week.
And that's all for this reissue episode of The Infinite Inning.
Thank you for listening. And here's to the cat I
mentioned earlier. Poor old Mickey. He got a raw deal
and checked out early. I missed my twenty pound cat,
and I'll miss you until this weekend, when episode three
point forty of The Infinite Inning brings us together again
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