In this week’s new remarks, a sentimental farewell to the great Ryne Sandberg, the traffic en route to Citi Field and the world outside our windows, and a lesson from position players pitching. Then in our flashback segment, the entertaining but ill-fated Pea Ridge Day and the oddly parallel fates of a 1920s movie star and a New York Giants center fielder.
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?
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?
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Well, hello there, and welcome to the twelfth in the
Infinite Inning reissue series. This episode going back almost exactly
seven years, I begin with the words a man has
no right to be sillier than God intended him to be.
I don't know that I ever believed those words, but
(00:46):
they are part of one of the stories that we
will revisit on this episode. I will get to that
in a moment. I have to confess that I'm having
trouble focusing today. I'm having a minor surgical procedure at
the end of the week. Of course, they're all minor
until someone says oops, But will hope that no one does.
That it's minor, but important and necessary. But I have
(01:10):
a disproportionate amount of anxiety. I have a lot of
anxiety all the time, and combine that with some legit
health problems, and it becomes very hard for me to
get out of my routine. My routine is what gives
me security and therefore frees me from anxiety. And then again,
people do say oops, or just strange things happen. Do
(01:32):
you ever think of the passing of the children's book
author Margaret wise Brown? You know, good Night Moon, Runaway bunny,
or is that Runaway Moon and good night Bunny? No?
Why would you? But she was on a book tour
in France. Her appendix popped, she underwent successful surgery from that,
she successfully recovered from that. They were about to release
her from the hospital. Someone said, how are you feeling.
(01:54):
She said, I'm feeling great. Look and she kicked up
a leg and that leg threw a clot and that
was the end of Margaret wise Brown. So I'm not
going to do that, no matter how much anyone begs.
It's too bad because she was pretty young, and if
you read about her in addition to reading her classic
kids books, it seems like she was a pretty neat
(02:14):
and adventurous person. The procedure is two days out, as
I say these words, and it's a good thing. It's
intended to deal with something that is problematic and disruptive
now and will only get worse in the future if
I don't confront it. So I consented to do this
thing for my own good. But you know what it's like.
It's like eating spinach, except they sedate you first and
(02:36):
then ask you to eat it, and then they wake
you up, and in many ways you feel worse than
when you started, and of course you hope that in
the long term that's no longer the case. But it's
that part in particular that I am not looking forward to.
Ryan Sandberg passed away yesterday. The great second basement. What
(02:57):
I have to go through is somewhat a to what
did him in It's not the same thing. And whereas
he had cancer, I don't just now, and certainly not
that flavor that I know of. It's not a cancer
thing at all, knock Wood. The lesson, though, any gentleman
in the audience, which I assumes most of you, is
that if you're of a certain age, keep your eye
(03:17):
on that part of your body. Actually it's hard to
keep an eye on it, and even keeping a finger
on it is awkward and uncomfortable and requires a certain
level of expertise. So just do your regular blood tests, okay,
nuff said. Sandberg's MVP season nineteen eighty four was huge
for me as a kid, learning to love baseball at
(03:39):
a level that would change my life. He and another
number twenty three, Don Mattingly Donnie Baseball and his performance
that year were a big part of what caused baseball
to flower open for me. Mattingly had to fight his
way off the bench that season because he began the
year stuck behind and out of place Ken Griffy Senior
at first base. Yankees manager Yogi Berra announced during spring
(04:03):
training that he saw Mattingly as a reserve. Once Mattingley
got in there, he won the al batting title, hitting
three forty three on two hundred and seven hits. At
that same moment, Sandberg had already had two full seasons
with the Cubs after coming over from the Phillies with
Larry Boa in the January nineteen eighty two deal that
sent shortstop Ivon DeJesus back East. His first two seasons,
(04:26):
he scored one hundred and three and ninety four runs respectively,
stole some bases, and played good defense, but he wasn't
as good a hitter relative to the league as say
Nico Horner has been the last four or five years.
Then came nineteen eighty four. He hit three fourteen with
a three sixty seven on base percentage and a five
to twenty slugging percentage, with thirty six doubles, nineteen triples,
(04:47):
nineteen home runs, thirty two steals. The Cubs, who hadn't
won a darned thing since nineteen forty five, took the
nl East. They then lost a five game NLCS to
a Padres team that on paper wasn't as good as
they were, So it goes, but Sandberg was good in
the series at least. I loved Mattingly because of his
precision at the plate and in the field. I loved
Sandberg because he could do a little bit of everything.
(05:09):
And those are still my favorite kinds of players, and
they're vanishingly rare. I know it's a cliche to say
that the best baseball was the baseball when you were
twelve or thirteen or fifteen, and yeah, that season was
in that ballpark for me. And yet some confluence at
that time of the trends in the game, the mix
(05:30):
of stadiums that were grass and turf, the baseball as
it changed from season to season, and just the mix
of talent coming into the league led to a lot
of these sorts of players being in the major leagues,
and you had this incredible diversity that kind of went
from the Steve Balboni type hitting about thirty home runs
(05:52):
for the Royals at that time, low on base percentage,
low average, slow slugger, And then you had Wide bogs
Off on his own island, and Tony Gwynn Off on
his and Sandberg and Eric Davis and Jan sam Well
and Darryl Strawberry, and there was just this plethora of
players who could surprise you at any given moment with
(06:15):
what they might do. And you may be able to
tell me, and you probably will tell me that, Hey,
look at Bobby Witt Junior. Hey, look at Trey Turner.
Hey look at Jeremy Pania or Jacob Wilson at least
this year, at least when they're healthy, and you might
be right. Heck sho hey Otani is his own version
(06:35):
of that, in his partially unprecedented way or mostly unprecedented?
Can you be mostly unprecedented? So losing Ryan Sandberg is
this weird refracted form of mourning Because I did not
know him personally, I can't compare myself to his family
or friends who are missing an active and daily presence
(06:56):
in their lives, and of course we empathize with them,
having unfortunately lost at times loved ones of our own.
For those of us who were merely fans and fans
of someone who last played a long time ago, we're
missing both a version of that person who was incredibly
ephemeral given the cruel aging curve of baseball, and of
(07:19):
course a time in our own lives, and a version
of ourselves and the way we received the world at
that time, which were sadly equally ephemeral. And if you're
like me and you have a high ability to time travel,
to re experience memories as if they were real, you
can get a visceral sense of what it was like
(07:41):
to see and hear and feel in that time. And
it is incredibly poignant at moments such as these when
Ryan Sandberg an artifact of that time for us again
as opposed to those who loved him in a daily
and intimate way. I'm not making a direct comparison to
the loss suffered by those people. He's an evocation, and
(08:04):
it's an evocation of something that whether people from that
period are here or not, are artifacts from that period
or here or not, you can't really go back there. Today,
we are going to be listening to excerpts from episode
sixty eight from about this moment. In twenty eighteen, our
first story was about the ill fated pitcher p Ridge Day,
(08:24):
and the quote with which I opened this reissue episode
is from that story. A man has no right to
be sillier than God intended him to be. I'm not
sure if time has proved that right or not. Thinking
of the way we live now, I think it's wrong.
Then in the second segment, well, I admit I made
kind of a hash of the re edit of the
(08:45):
show for this reissue, and I hope it's still listenable.
This was another episode in which we were coping with
issues involving who has the right to play Major League
Baseball after they transgressed against public morale? You know, back
when we had public morality. Should the player who was
caught using peds and serve his suspension be felt to
(09:07):
have had a blank slate? What about those players found
to have engaged in domestic violence? American justice seems to
be that you do the crime, you serve the time,
and then you're back to being a citizen in good standing.
In reality, it doesn't work that way in baseball or
out of it. But the question for baseball that we
argued about with various guests and various episodes is should
(09:29):
we let it go? Is it wrong to be uncomfortable
with letting it go for this re edit. We pick
up that discussion kind of in the middle, because once
again I brought this up on a previous reissue. I
didn't feel like rehashing a lot of the old names
who are now out of the game. I feel like
I just want to let them rest. I don't want
to hear those names again. You might recall that one
(09:50):
player we discussed was not drafted due to having pled
guilty to doing something horrible to a child when he
was a child. Another is still killing it in the
Mexican League at forty two, but has been out of
the American Majors for three years. He was caught using peds,
not terrorizing any of his family members, a very important distinction.
And the third player we discussed, Pitcher, has been out
(10:13):
of the major since twenty twenty, although he too is
still playing I believe in Japan. I just felt like
letting the names go and sticking with the issues. So
if you listen to the original sixty eight or those
clues give you sufficient context, you'll figure them out. What
I hope is that I left enough of the subsequent
story about suspected rapist Fatty Arbuckle, not a player, but
(10:34):
a movie star and suspected car thief and Giants outfielder
Benny Koff, to give you a sense of the story,
to give you a complete listening experience. I don't really know.
As I said earlier, I'm very distracted, but I hope
you're able to enjoy it or benefit from it. As usual,
our mission is to both entertain and edify. The temperature
(10:56):
in my part of the world today is ninety eight
degrees fahrenheit. It feels like one hundred and ninety six.
I watched a few minutes of some of the Blue
Jays Orioles games that are going on right now. They
were poorly attended, and that was probably the case because
of scheduling, but it was also just too hot for
fans to be out there. The Orioles had workers hosing
(11:17):
off the fans, and I still felt sorry for them,
and I felt worse for the players. We have seen
players become dehydrated or disoriented or nauseous on the field
from the effects of severe heat this summer. I still
remember and am somewhat traumatized by the day opening day
in fact, at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, when the plate umpire,
(11:40):
perhaps burdened by well, his own physicality, obviously, but also
a hot day simply turned from the plate and died.
And I start to worry, given current climate trajectories, at
what point this hole playing outside in the summer thing
just becomes non viable. I've read that Major League Soccer
is looking at a shift to a fall to spring
(12:03):
schedule that would match the European football calendar soccer calendar,
and I thought, are they nuts? These guys are going
to run up and down the field for an hour
in one hundred degree weather. They will lose people. I'll
get back to that in a second, but I was
going to tell you something fun about those Orioles and
Blue Jays games since it was a blowout. The first
(12:24):
game of the double header that they played on Tuesday
was a blowout. The Jays had utility guy Ali Sanchez
pitched the bottom of the eighth. He was throwing looping,
sixty mile per hour curves and thirty five mile per
hour Ethis pitches. He gave up three hits and two
runs in his inning, but he also got three outs,
one on a strikeout on an ephis pitch. It brought
(12:46):
up childhood memories of Dave Laroche and his laalab with
the nineteen eighty one and nineteen eighty two Yankees. And
what that says to me is that baseball is a
game that's so hard that despite a pitcher who is
almost wholly unqualified being on the mound with the exception
that he could get the ball over, major league hitters
(13:06):
still made three relatively quick outs strikeout, fly out to
left grounder a second. The heat, though the heat is ludicrous,
and yes it's late July here in the Northeast, it's
not unusual. I get that. Still, we should have an
innate sense that this is not how it should be,
or at least not how it was when I observed
the world around me. Even just from my window, I
(13:29):
can see the loss of biodiversity from when I was
a kid. There are fewer birds, fewer bugs, and science
backs me up on that, but it isn't hard to
see if you're at all observant and you've been around
long enough, that's just common species. Since I was born,
we've lost big things. We've lost the job in tiger,
the Sumatrin tiger, the Yankee River dolphin, and too many
(13:49):
birds to list. Yesterday, our government, the government of buy
and for the people said it will revoke the findings
that gave the Environmental Protection Agency how how wink that
name the legal right to regulate greenhouse gases. The proposal would,
if finalized, amount to the largest irregulatory action in the
(14:10):
history of the United States. Lee Zelden, the EPA A administrator,
said He said the proposal would also erase limits on
greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks on the nation's roads.
The climate change deniers say that combating this stuff is
too expensive, the science too uncertain, It makes cars too pricey,
(14:31):
as if tariffs don't do the same thing. They claim
there aren't enough batteries to store solar and wind energy
for dark and calm days, when there is, and I've
seen it, and many of you have batteries in your
own homes. At this point, they say electric cars aren't
any good when they're kind of cool and when you
can't manage it on electrical loan. Hybrids are also solid.
(14:51):
But here's the thing, even if it is expensive, even
if you don't like looking at windmills, even if for
some reason you insist on gas your car instead of
charging it. Who says that what we have now is
so great. As I've said many times on the show,
I live approximately fifty miles from City Field, and I'm
using this just as an example. We could be talking
(15:14):
about any car trip in a heavily trafficked area. In
an ideal world, I could get on the road and
zip up there at sixty miles an hour and be
there in less than an hour. Or I would get
on an electric bus or train and go there directly
again at sixty miles an hour or even faster. Well,
the latter option doesn't really exist, so the drive under
(15:34):
most conditions requires a commitment of something more like two
and a half to three hours. And when you sit
and stop and go traffic, and we've all experienced this,
the air around you turns brown, The air around you
smells brown, the air around you tastes brown, and the
tissue inside your lungs turns brown. All of that to
(15:55):
go spend two hours hoping you'll see Pete Alonzo hit
a home run? Why is that so great? Not the
Alonso Park, the getting there and coming from Who voted
for that to be the way we live? Even if
the only cost was the sheer waste of time? Why
would we not embrace a better way if we could
have one in exchange for a couple of nickels each.
(16:18):
Even the poorest or cheapest among us might choose that
trade not only to maintain our way of life, but
to improve it while saving ourselves and the world around us.
Not to mention, yes, you also get faster trips to
the ballpark. That's all for me. You'll hear from me
again briefly at the end, as I just nuked all
(16:39):
the ending stuff, as there were some defects I couldn't fix.
So please join me after the break for a trip
back to the nineteen thirty one Brooklyn Dodgers and more.
(17:07):
In the nineteen thirty Rule five draft, the Brooklyn Dodgers
selected a journeyman pitcher, a thirty one year old right
hander named Clyde Day also called Pea Ridge Day for
the town in Arkansas where he was brought up. Pea
Ridge is right on the Missouri border, and it's claim
to fame, other than the screwballin Pea Ridge himself, was
(17:32):
that in eighteen sixty two it was the site of
a Civil War battle and an important one. Ten thousand
Union troops faced off against sixteen thousand Confederates who were
intent on taking back Missouri. The Union had driven the
Confederacy out of Missouri, sent them fleeing south, and the
(17:52):
Confederates were determined to come back well, despite a fairly
large numerical advantage, they didn't succeed in doing that, and
in fact their attack was not only repulsed, but they
were driven into retreat. And yet it was one of
those frustratingly incomplete Union victories the Boys in Blue failed
to close. This happened later too at Gettysburg, where the
(18:15):
Union failed to pursue the retreating Robert E. Lee, but
for better reasons, mainly that they were fought out. But
in this instance they simply misplaced the retreating Confederates. To oversimplify,
one of the Union generals thought the Confederate forces had
retreated right, when instead they retreated left and chased in
the wrong directions, and so they plumb got away. The
(18:38):
reason that I bring all of this up is that
in many respects Pea Ridge Day, like the Battle of
Pea Ridge that was his namesake, was frustratingly incomplete. Three
teams gave him major League trials, the Saint Louis Cardinals
in nineteen twenty four and twenty five, the Reds in
nineteen twenty six, and then finally the Dodgers in thirty
(18:59):
one one, And in so far as the bottom line
results go, he was ineffective. But in his Dodger stint
at least, well, it's hard to tell. He had a
four point five to five ERA in fifty seven point
one innings, not particularly good even for that high offense time,
and he gave up seventy five hits, which is a ton. Now,
(19:21):
what I don't know is whether that was the result
of the fact that his screwball was just very hittable
or that the Dodgers had an infamously bad defense. He
didn't walk a lot of batters, and he struck out
about five per nine, which is way high for the time. Thus,
on a fielding independent basis, he looks pretty good. But
(19:41):
the Dodgers didn't think so, and they traded him away.
They traded him to the Minneapolis Millers of the American
Association to get former Giants first baseman George High Pockets Kelly,
who was all washed up. I mean, High Pockets Kelly
was kind of washed up even when he was in
his prime. And he's in the Hall of Fame just
because well, Frankie Frish liked him. But nevertheless, that's what
(20:04):
they chose to do. But it wasn't just a desire
to get George Kelly on their team. And it wasn't
just the fact that they felt or realistically they saw
that pee Ridge hadn't pitched well. It was that peer
Ridge was kind of annoying. He drank, and so discipline
might have been an issue, although that was pretty typical
(20:25):
in those days. No, it wasn't that. It was that
he had a thing for hog calling. And if you
think that batters get upset when a pitcher shows them
up by being too demonstrative on the mound after getting
a big out, well imagine how they felt if after
a strikeout the pitcher reared back and went suee bicky, picky,
(20:48):
picky bicky, sooee. I dare to guess you might find
that a little bit annoying. But here's a more important question.
How would you feel if you were his manager. Maybe
you're not being shown up directly, maybe you're just embarrassed
to be in the presence of that, or maybe you
just get damned sick of it. Pee Ridge struck out
(21:08):
thirty batters that year, So even if he only gave
that hog call half the time, that was still fifteen
occasions when the Dodgers manager, Wilbert Robinson, Uncle Robbie had
to listen to that. And what must have been more
trying from a certain perspective is that the fans started
to pick up on it and say, you had a
(21:29):
big crowd for the Dodgers in those days. Ebbittsfield was
a small park and it was the Great Depression, so
they weren't totally packing them in. But maybe you had
twenty thousand and pe Ridge strikes out a batter, and
now all of them in Unison are making that noise.
And here's the thing. Fifteen times is probably a bit
on the low side, because according to all reports, he
(21:49):
did not restrict the activity to when he was on
the mound, but in fact, at the request of the league,
kept it eventually to when he was in the dugout
and somebody else did something that he approved of. So
say Babe Herman hit a triple or doubled into a
double play, as he famously did around that time, Well
then you'd hear Pee Ridge calling his porkers home. You
(22:12):
can imagine that that might be trying after a certain
amount of time, And in fact, Uncle Robbie, who was
kind of a goofy guy himself on occasion, finally put
an end to it. He told Day to cease and desist,
saying a man has no right to be sillier than
God intended him to be. I don't want to overstate
(22:34):
the profundity or potential profundity of what Uncle Robbie told
Pee Ridge, but I've often contemplated exactly what the inflection
point is on being sillier than God intended you to be.
I'm not particularly religious, but I'm familiar enough with the concepts,
and you get into all kinds of weird areas about
(22:55):
predetermination and free will, because we can only be as
silly as God intended us to be, and at no
point can we be sillier than God intended us to
be unless you believe that everything is a test, and
there's a separate rule of silliness, and we are always
bumping up against that barrier, and we can violate it
(23:17):
it will, but therefore we've failed the test, and we'll
be going to perdition, doomed eternally to suffer the torments
of hell, not because we were evil or mean, or
cruel or sinful, but because we were too silly. But
I don't think that that's the case, and I doubt
Uncle Robbie thought about it that deeply. I think he
was using God in place of a series of other
(23:39):
words or concepts by which he might have meant that
we earn our degree of silliness by our degree of
accomplishment or our degree of seriousness in other areas, And
that p Ridge was a distraction more than he was
an aid to the Dodgers and what the Dodgers were
trying to do, which was making a desultory effort to win.
(24:01):
Or maybe it wasn't as negative or as shaming as
all that, but that Uncle Robbie meant to say something constructive,
that meant something like this, that if our accomplishments do
not match our level of silliness, that we risk undermining
our own dignity to a fatal degree. It's not humor,
(24:24):
it's just a travesty of the self. After the Dodgers
dealt P Ridge away, things did not go well for him.
He was restricted to the minor leagues, and he developed
bone chips in his arm, and whereas that's a malady
that pitchers can have dealt with fairly easily. Today it's
perhaps not routine, but it's also not the same degree
(24:45):
of career risk as say, tearing your ulnar collateral ligament.
But in those days he couldn't get it treated. He tried,
but the treatments were not effective. Pitching for the Millers
in thirty two, he allowed almost eight runs a game,
seven point five to one. The numbers and I've consulted
a few sources don't seem to exist for runs and
(25:07):
earned runs, but he allowed one hundred and twenty one
in one hundred and forty five innings. And then the
following season, pitching for the old International League version of
the Orioles, he only got into six games before he
was released. According to Day's saber biography by Brian McKenna,
which I rely on here, Day was distraught at the
(25:29):
prospect of ending his pitching career. He invested something like
ten thousand dollars in a surgical treatment, which was unusual
for the day, and as I said before, it didn't work.
In the off season, Day owned a gas station and
raised and sold strawberries, and I don't think that means
he had a strawberry farm. I think it more likely
had a strawberry patch. So he was by no means set.
(25:52):
Ten thousand dollars was a great deal of money in
the early nineteen thirties in the depression, and I don't mocket.
What I marvel at is the degree to which he
clung to the remains of his career. He was not
a huge success. He was not a major league pitcher,
and sure he might have had a few more years
(26:15):
in the minor leagues, but he was never the most
effective pitcher down there either. He was popular, but not
for the right reasons. When he first went up to
the Dodgers, the Sporting News wrote, Day has been the
biggest drawing card in the American Association. He has been
an object of ridicule in all parks except the one
(26:36):
in Kansas City. One manager last season tried to have TJ. Hickey,
the league president, put a stop to Dais yelling, but
the American Association boss couldn't find anything in the rules
to prevent noise as long as the player did not
become abusive. And then the Sporting News said something which
was prescient. It said it may be that Wilbert Robinson
(26:58):
will not like so much noise in the afternoons when
he is trying to think, and will ask Pea Ridge
to keep quiet. And that's exactly what happened. And that
is the career to which Pea Ridge attached so much
importance that he vented what seems to have been a
significant amount of savings for the time on a cost
(27:19):
benefit basis, it's madness. On an emotional basis, we can
all understand it completely. In the spring of nineteen thirty four,
with his wife quite pregnant on the verge of delivery,
pe Ridge got the San Francisco Seals to extend an
invitation to spring training or to a trial, I'm not
sure which, and he headed west. He stopped off in
(27:41):
Kansas City to see a friend complaining of memory lapses,
and the friend took him to see a doctor. The
doctor suggested he rest up a bit before traveling on,
and he went back to the friend's apartment, where, in
the presence of the friend, he pulled out a hunting
knife and cut his own throat. Pea Ridge died there
in that apartment, about ninety days short of his thirty
(28:03):
fifth birthday. And what I wonder is if, in addition
to having been despondent and worried about the future, in
addition to most likely being some level of intoxicated, if
he looked back over things and thought back on Uncle
Robbie's words, a man has no right to be sillier
(28:25):
than God intended him to be, and realized in the
final analysis that he agreed with him. You know, at
that point, Uncle Robbie was seventy years old, and he
only had a few months to live himself, This huge
fat old man who had been a huge fat young
man on the great Baltimore teams of the early National League,
(28:47):
the ned Hamlin managed teams that had Wee Willie Keeler
and John McGraw and Dan Brewthers and so many other
great players. And he'd won a couple of pennants as
a manager too, and some more as a pitching coach
with the Giants before that. Well, in August nineteen thirty four,
he slipped and fell in the bathtub, fractured his skull,
(29:09):
broke his arm, and he'd had a stroke. And it's
not clear to me if the stroke caused him to
slip and fall, or the slip and fall, and the
resulting blow to the head caused the stroke, but either
way he was done for. But he lingered for a while,
and he was conscious and apparently calm, and as the
doctors or whatever passed for paramedics back in that day
(29:32):
were working him over, he said, don't worry about it, Fellas,
I'm an old Oriole. I'm too tough to die. And
you know that was silly too, But Uncle Robbie had
been an old Oriole. He could lay claim to that,
So I guess it was just the right amount of silliness.
(29:53):
Maybe not the amount of silliness God intended him to have,
but the amount of silliness he had earned. I'm Stephen
old Man, and this is the infinite inning. Well, hello there,
(30:43):
Dwight found Bertram naked on the roof. The driving rain
barely obscured him, a thin and ineffectual curtain that stabbed
and bit. What are you doing up there? Bert? Come
back inside. It's following me again. The demon runfel gazaar
that again. It's in your head, Bert, it's in your head. No,
(31:08):
he's real, you know he's real. Oh okay, look, let's
say he is real. If he is, If you're so afraid.
This is a hell of a way to hide from him.
You're out in the open, totally exposed. No, I'm not
hiding anymore. I want him to see me. I want
him to come and get me. Couldn't he see you inside, Bert,
(31:29):
where it's dry. No, if damnation be my fate, if
the demon's curses upon me, I won't run. We'll have
this over one way or another. Come run, thel Gazaar,
Come and face me. They waited half an hour, Bertram
shivering pitifully. He's not coming, is he? No, he is not.
(31:51):
I love him so much. I know you do, Bert,
I know. Come inside. I'll warm you up. In front
of episode sixty eight, welcome back to the show. That
Reine's kind of soothing. Maybe I should just keep it
going the whole time. I don't think anyone is pretending
that's easy. I don't think anyone wants to pretend that
(32:13):
they themselves are blameless enough to throw the first stone,
or that they want to throw stones at all, that
they want to be the ones who are leading the mob,
that Tarzan feathers this particular person and runs them out
of town. On that subject, after those two discussions, a
listener Len posted on the Facebook group this, which I
will read to you now. He wrote, It's hard to
(32:34):
argue with anything said regarding Osuna and Cano, but to
compare the two is apples and oranges. Assault is a
crime punishable by society, and if anyone is worthy of
judging a crime against society, it is a public jury
of peers. Peds are a crime against baseball, and is
therefore a baseball problem. Baseball is not responsible for handing
(32:57):
out jail time, as juries are not responsible for pea
infractions in baseball. That beds are punished more harshly than
assault makes perfect sense. In this way, one could argue
baseball has no business punishing crimes that are not baseball related.
I told Lynn I would respond to that here, but
before I do, two notes. First, some of what I'm
(33:18):
about to say I've written about before in different places
over the years. I guess many aspects of my thinking
haven't changed much over time. So if any of this
sounds familiar to you because you happen to have read
my work in the past, well thank you and forgive
me for the repetition. Second, one of the absolute best podcasts,
I said, Podcats. I imagine that is a thing podcats
(33:40):
about cats, a podcast about cats. Podcats, don't write in
telling me that it's out there. I'll find it anyway.
What I was trying to say is that one of
the very best podcasts out there is a movie history
show called You Must Remember This, which is by the
excellent Carina Longworth. I think ms Longworth is a baseball fan,
(34:02):
by the way I've seen her mention Ben Lindberg's effectively wild.
But that's beside the point. She's just a really good,
polished storyteller, and she does a lot of research. In fact,
she lays out how she does all her research in
the show notes for every episode. And I need to
bring her work up here because back on July sixteenth,
she published an episode that covers the story that I'm
(34:24):
about to very briefly recap, albeit in much greater detail
and with far greater expertise. So if you're interested in
hearing more about that about what you're about to hear
when you're done with this week's infinite inning, head over
to You Must Remember This podcast dot com. I'll drop
a link to that episode in the Facebook group to
(34:46):
which we've been referring this whole time. Roscoe Conkling our Buckle,
better known as Fatty Arbuckle, was a big pardon the expression,
Hollywood star in film's earliest days. He made dozens of
comedy shorts and I guess a couple of things that
qualify as full length films or two reelers or something.
As the nickname suggests, he was a big, broad, heavy
(35:08):
set guy with a derby hat who did pratfalls, and
he was very successful at that. From the early teens
until nineteen twenty one was a run at his peak
of about eight years. What ended that peak period, well,
in nineteen twenty one, our Buckle and some pals went
up to San Francisco and rented a hotel suite and
(35:31):
they had a big party. And after that party, which
apparently got kind of wild and drunk and sexy, an
actress named Virginia Repei died of a ruptured bladder. Before
I proceed, if there are any children in the room
who you'd prefer not hear this sort of thing, or
you yourself are sensitive or triggered or anything like that,
(35:55):
then just skip ahead a bit. I'll leave a very
brief gap here. You can send Junior out to the yard.
No one knows. No one knew then how Repay came
to suffer that injury. There were rumors that appeared to
have kind of come out of nowhere, that our Buckle
(36:15):
raped her with a coke bottle and caused the fatal injury.
Others said that, in his eagerness to get with her,
to lie with her in the biblical sense, that he
heaved his three hundred pound body on top of her,
and because of the impact, or perhaps due to a
pre existing condition, she simply burst. One of the reasons
no one knows is because no one was in the
(36:36):
room when it happened. Our Buckle himself was not alone
with her for very long at all, perhaps long enough
to cause injury, perhaps not. According to a witness who
may or may not have been reliable, Repay did regain
consciousness and pointed our Buckle and said he did it,
but did what was not said, And she was not
coherent after that or not awake, and shortly thereafter she died.
(37:00):
They didn't exactly rush to get her medical help either,
which at the very least is an act of negligence
or callous disregard. Our Buckle was tried three times the
first two times, the jury couldn't come to a verdict.
The third time, he was not only rapidly acquitted, but
the jury wrote a note of apology saying that he
never should have been put through this stuff in the
(37:21):
first place. I don't know whether he was innocent or not.
I don't think that Karina Longworth knows exactly either. But
her interpretation of these events, and particularly of those three trials,
is very much worth listening to, because she puts a
spin on them that I think is only available to
us now. I've never heard it before. And it's not
(37:44):
necessarily a shift in researcher as the result of research,
but a shift in perspective, which is to say that
it's not our Buckle who was on trial in the end,
but that his acquittal came as a result of putting
Repay the dead woman on trial, and there's a wrongness
to that that, all these years later will smack you
(38:06):
in the face. That's a necessary corrective. And here's why,
because as a result of the Arbuckle scandal, which got
a great deal of press, it was kind of this
is a tired comparison, but the OJ Simpson trial of
its day, the movie industry did its best to wipe
him off the face of the earth. No, I don't
mean they put a hit on him, but they removed
(38:28):
his films from circulation and refused to put them back
out again, and they banned him from further work to avoid,
they said, further discredit on the industry, or to give
the slightest added impetus to public outrage, which is to
say that they were avoiding censorship. They were avoiding moralistic
authorities coming in and saying, we've got to clean up
(38:49):
this Hollywood place. And this has generally been presented as
Fatty got a raw deal, Fatty got railroaded, Fatty got
punished for something he didn't do. He was the victim,
not Virginia Repay. And in this day and age, when
we're a little more sophisticated about victims and victimizers, it's
very difficult to feel any sympathy with that position or
(39:13):
be as dismissive of Repay, who, regardless of what version
you believe, Even if you believe some version of this
story that is super sympathetic to Fatty Arbuckle did anything
that even slightly suggests that she deserved to die. Sure,
what happened to him is not dissimilar to the blacklist
that came about in the late forties and early fifties
(39:35):
when those same moralistic authorities began shouting communists at Hollywood,
and that was both morally and legally reprehensible. But when
you're talking about a crime such as murder or rape,
how are you supposed to go to the theater and
plunk down whatever it was in those days, a dime
or two bits and laugh at a comedian. It's exactly
the same reason I think that Louis c. K is
(39:57):
no longer on public display and won't be for some time,
if not permanently. It's that unless you are a very
dull tool, indeed, going and trying even to laugh at
that guy, in succeeding in laughing at him, implicates you
in his crime, or at the very least tacitly excuses it.
(40:18):
Like our buckles films. Baseball is an entertainment. In nineteen
twelve through nineteen twenty, there was an outfielder in baseball
named Benny Koff. He's known to us now as the
Ty Cobb of the Federal League. He came up with
the Yankees nineteen twelve couldn't latch on there, And when
the Federal League became a thing, he went over there,
and it was kind of a Triple A league, and
(40:39):
he was better than a Triple A player, and he
just exploded on that league. And in the two years
that it existed, he hit three seventy the first year,
which led the league, also led in stolen bases with
seventy five yet forty four doubles, two hundred and eleven hits,
one hundred and twenty runs. In year two, he wasn't
quite as good, but still hit three forty two, which
again led the league in still fifty five bases. Likewise, well,
(41:00):
that league, for various reasons, goes belly up, as I
always say, a story for another day, and Kauf signed
with the Giants. Now the National League was a more
advanced league than the Federal League, and Cough therefore was
no longer the Tai Cob of anything. But he was
still really good. He hit three hundred each of his
first two years. By Baseball Reference, he was a four
(41:21):
win player the first year, a five win player the second.
But in nineteen twenty he got in legal trouble. He
owned a garage he was an auto repair, but the
prosecutor said it was also kind of a chop shop,
and that one evening he was out with a couple
of associates and he said, Hey, I got a customer
looking for a used Cadillac. How about we just take
that one parked right over there, And they did. They
(41:45):
changed a few superficial details and they resold it well.
The police tracked it down and figured out what had happened,
and he was indicted for a grand theft auto, not
exactly murder or manslaughter, but still baseball cared about this stuff,
particularly in nineteen twenty, which is as the Black Sox
scandal is still going on. Kauf was eventually acquitted, but
(42:06):
that wasn't good enough for the Commissioner of Baseball, Judge
Kennesaw Mountain Landis, who banned him for life. He said,
your mere presence in the lineup would inevitably burden patrons
of the game with grave apprehension as to its integrity.
kW fought Landis to the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court,
as it typically does with Baseball, found in his favor
(42:27):
but refuse to do anything about it. This is actually
a worse deal than our Buckle got because our Buckle
was able to kind of come back in through the
back door direct a few movies under an assumed name,
and right before his early death, even got in front
of the cameras at least once. But again, I don't
think that Landis was wrong, and for the same reasons
(42:48):
that this is a game, that this is an entertainment
and we can't ever unno what we know. As I said,
unless you're a particularly dull tool. The Chicago Cubs dogpie
at the end of the twenty sixteen World Series should
have been the happiest moment in the history of the game.
We almost didn't need baseball anymore after that. Just about
(43:08):
every major storyline that needed closure achieved it, except that
Erodis Chapman was in that dogpile, and at least for me,
I couldn't Unknow that it is undoubtedly naive to say
that every player about whom we know nothing of their
off field activities is as pure and white as the
freshly fallen snow. I know that's not the case, but
(43:31):
until they hurt someone, they do have that presumption, and
we can cheer for them without experiencing the kind of
cognitive dissonance that erupts when you're going, hooray Elmo, whoever
Elmo is. He's a DH for some team somewhere. When
Elmo hits a home run, knowing that because of Elmo's
off the field activities, we would hesitate to invite him
(43:54):
to our house or have him around our kids. So
to come full circle to the question that Len asked,
is there an argument that baseball has no business punishing
crimes that are not baseball related? Well, I think what
we've had is a confusion of terms. No, Roberto Osuna
or any other player who has committed an act of
(44:14):
domestic violence has not committed a crime against baseball in
the sense that what they did will possibly alter the
outcome of a bat or a game, whether by using
a cork bat, by juicing, by a consorting with gamblers,
or anything. That is not what they have done. But
(44:35):
they have committed a crime against Baseball's audience. And I
do think that baseball has a right and a responsibility
to respond at that point, because the audience is their
life's blood, because they are ultimately dispensable, and if they
are not pleasing to their customers, if the morality of
(44:55):
the game descends below the morality of the audience, then
there is no more Baseball, or at least there's a
very shrunken vestige of baseball that will remain in the
aftermath of its failure to act. And let me say
one thing further, that crimes against baseball and crimes against
Baseball's audience are one and the same thing. Do you
(45:18):
think that the owners of baseball give a damn about
who uses peds? They didn't until Congress threatened to call
them on it, just as from the founding of the
game through nineteen twenty they didn't give it damn about
who threw games or who bet on them, at least
or if they did very intermittently, and they winked and
nudged and turned a blind eye wherever they could. They
(45:41):
reacted to cheating when it became an existential threat, which
is to say, when it was a crime against the audience,
because they worried that the audience would no longer view
the games as legitimate competition. Matters of domestic violence are
exactly the same. They wouldn't care to police it, but
they've realized that it's the same kind of threat to
(46:01):
the participation of the audience, it's just a different vehicle.
Moll that over, if you would, We'll take a break
for thoughtful reflection and a word perhaps from our sponsors,
and then I'll be back at last. And by back,
of course, I meant this coming Friday for episode three
forty one, a brand new episode of The Infinite Inning.
(46:23):
Because that is all for this reissue. As always, should
you wish to follow me on social media, you can
at bluesky dot social that is Stephen Gooldman dot bsky
dot Social. I'll save the rest of the usual closing
nonsense for that episode. So once again allow me to
thank you for listening to this reissue episode of The
Infinite Inning. I hope you enjoyed it, as I hope
(46:45):
you enjoy our upcoming episode three forty one. I'll catch
you then, Stay cool, all right, lived turning
Well, hello there, and welcome to the twelfth in the
Infinite Inning reissue series. This episode going back almost exactly
seven years, I begin with the words a man has
no right to be sillier than God intended him to be.
I don't know that I ever believed those words, but
(00:46):
they are part of one of the stories that we
will revisit on this episode. I will get to that
in a moment. I have to confess that I'm having
trouble focusing today. I'm having a minor surgical procedure at
the end of the week. Of course, they're all minor
until someone says oops, But will hope that no one does.
That it's minor, but important and necessary. But I have
(01:10):
a disproportionate amount of anxiety. I have a lot of
anxiety all the time, and combine that with some legit
health problems, and it becomes very hard for me to
get out of my routine. My routine is what gives
me security and therefore frees me from anxiety. And then again,
people do say oops, or just strange things happen. Do
(01:32):
you ever think of the passing of the children's book
author Margaret wise Brown? You know, good Night Moon, Runaway bunny,
or is that Runaway Moon and good night Bunny? No?
Why would you? But she was on a book tour
in France. Her appendix popped, she underwent successful surgery from that,
she successfully recovered from that. They were about to release
her from the hospital. Someone said, how are you feeling.
(01:54):
She said, I'm feeling great. Look and she kicked up
a leg and that leg threw a clot and that
was the end of Margaret wise Brown. So I'm not
going to do that, no matter how much anyone begs.
It's too bad because she was pretty young, and if
you read about her in addition to reading her classic
kids books, it seems like she was a pretty neat
(02:14):
and adventurous person. The procedure is two days out, as
I say these words, and it's a good thing. It's
intended to deal with something that is problematic and disruptive
now and will only get worse in the future if
I don't confront it. So I consented to do this
thing for my own good. But you know what it's like.
It's like eating spinach, except they sedate you first and
(02:36):
then ask you to eat it, and then they wake
you up, and in many ways you feel worse than
when you started, and of course you hope that in
the long term that's no longer the case. But it's
that part in particular that I am not looking forward to.
Ryan Sandberg passed away yesterday. The great second basement. What
(02:57):
I have to go through is somewhat a to what
did him in It's not the same thing. And whereas
he had cancer, I don't just now, and certainly not
that flavor that I know of. It's not a cancer
thing at all, knock Wood. The lesson, though, any gentleman
in the audience, which I assumes most of you, is
that if you're of a certain age, keep your eye
(03:17):
on that part of your body. Actually it's hard to
keep an eye on it, and even keeping a finger
on it is awkward and uncomfortable and requires a certain
level of expertise. So just do your regular blood tests, okay,
nuff said. Sandberg's MVP season nineteen eighty four was huge
for me as a kid, learning to love baseball at
(03:39):
a level that would change my life. He and another
number twenty three, Don Mattingly Donnie Baseball and his performance
that year were a big part of what caused baseball
to flower open for me. Mattingly had to fight his
way off the bench that season because he began the
year stuck behind and out of place Ken Griffy Senior
at first base. Yankees manager Yogi Berra announced during spring
(04:03):
training that he saw Mattingly as a reserve. Once Mattingley
got in there, he won the al batting title, hitting
three forty three on two hundred and seven hits. At
that same moment, Sandberg had already had two full seasons
with the Cubs after coming over from the Phillies with
Larry Boa in the January nineteen eighty two deal that
sent shortstop Ivon DeJesus back East. His first two seasons,
(04:26):
he scored one hundred and three and ninety four runs respectively,
stole some bases, and played good defense, but he wasn't
as good a hitter relative to the league as say
Nico Horner has been the last four or five years.
Then came nineteen eighty four. He hit three fourteen with
a three sixty seven on base percentage and a five
to twenty slugging percentage, with thirty six doubles, nineteen triples,
(04:47):
nineteen home runs, thirty two steals. The Cubs, who hadn't
won a darned thing since nineteen forty five, took the
nl East. They then lost a five game NLCS to
a Padres team that on paper wasn't as good as
they were, So it goes, but Sandberg was good in
the series at least. I loved Mattingly because of his
precision at the plate and in the field. I loved
Sandberg because he could do a little bit of everything.
(05:09):
And those are still my favorite kinds of players, and
they're vanishingly rare. I know it's a cliche to say
that the best baseball was the baseball when you were
twelve or thirteen or fifteen, and yeah, that season was
in that ballpark for me. And yet some confluence at
that time of the trends in the game, the mix
(05:30):
of stadiums that were grass and turf, the baseball as
it changed from season to season, and just the mix
of talent coming into the league led to a lot
of these sorts of players being in the major leagues,
and you had this incredible diversity that kind of went
from the Steve Balboni type hitting about thirty home runs
(05:52):
for the Royals at that time, low on base percentage,
low average, slow slugger, And then you had Wide bogs
Off on his own island, and Tony Gwynn Off on
his and Sandberg and Eric Davis and Jan sam Well
and Darryl Strawberry, and there was just this plethora of
players who could surprise you at any given moment with
(06:15):
what they might do. And you may be able to
tell me, and you probably will tell me that, Hey,
look at Bobby Witt Junior. Hey, look at Trey Turner.
Hey look at Jeremy Pania or Jacob Wilson at least
this year, at least when they're healthy, and you might
be right. Heck sho hey Otani is his own version
(06:35):
of that, in his partially unprecedented way or mostly unprecedented?
Can you be mostly unprecedented? So losing Ryan Sandberg is
this weird refracted form of mourning Because I did not
know him personally, I can't compare myself to his family
or friends who are missing an active and daily presence
(06:56):
in their lives, and of course we empathize with them,
having unfortunately lost at times loved ones of our own.
For those of us who were merely fans and fans
of someone who last played a long time ago, we're
missing both a version of that person who was incredibly
ephemeral given the cruel aging curve of baseball, and of
(07:19):
course a time in our own lives, and a version
of ourselves and the way we received the world at
that time, which were sadly equally ephemeral. And if you're
like me and you have a high ability to time travel,
to re experience memories as if they were real, you
can get a visceral sense of what it was like
(07:41):
to see and hear and feel in that time. And
it is incredibly poignant at moments such as these when
Ryan Sandberg an artifact of that time for us again
as opposed to those who loved him in a daily
and intimate way. I'm not making a direct comparison to
the loss suffered by those people. He's an evocation, and
(08:04):
it's an evocation of something that whether people from that
period are here or not, are artifacts from that period
or here or not, you can't really go back there. Today,
we are going to be listening to excerpts from episode
sixty eight from about this moment. In twenty eighteen, our
first story was about the ill fated pitcher p Ridge Day,
(08:24):
and the quote with which I opened this reissue episode
is from that story. A man has no right to
be sillier than God intended him to be. I'm not
sure if time has proved that right or not. Thinking
of the way we live now, I think it's wrong.
Then in the second segment, well, I admit I made
kind of a hash of the re edit of the
(08:45):
show for this reissue, and I hope it's still listenable.
This was another episode in which we were coping with
issues involving who has the right to play Major League
Baseball after they transgressed against public morale? You know, back
when we had public morality. Should the player who was
caught using peds and serve his suspension be felt to
(09:07):
have had a blank slate? What about those players found
to have engaged in domestic violence? American justice seems to
be that you do the crime, you serve the time,
and then you're back to being a citizen in good standing.
In reality, it doesn't work that way in baseball or
out of it. But the question for baseball that we
argued about with various guests and various episodes is should
(09:29):
we let it go? Is it wrong to be uncomfortable
with letting it go for this re edit. We pick
up that discussion kind of in the middle, because once
again I brought this up on a previous reissue. I
didn't feel like rehashing a lot of the old names
who are now out of the game. I feel like
I just want to let them rest. I don't want
to hear those names again. You might recall that one
(09:50):
player we discussed was not drafted due to having pled
guilty to doing something horrible to a child when he
was a child. Another is still killing it in the
Mexican League at forty two, but has been out of
the American Majors for three years. He was caught using peds,
not terrorizing any of his family members, a very important distinction.
And the third player we discussed, Pitcher, has been out
(10:13):
of the major since twenty twenty, although he too is
still playing I believe in Japan. I just felt like
letting the names go and sticking with the issues. So
if you listen to the original sixty eight or those
clues give you sufficient context, you'll figure them out. What
I hope is that I left enough of the subsequent
story about suspected rapist Fatty Arbuckle, not a player, but
(10:34):
a movie star and suspected car thief and Giants outfielder
Benny Koff, to give you a sense of the story,
to give you a complete listening experience. I don't really know.
As I said earlier, I'm very distracted, but I hope
you're able to enjoy it or benefit from it. As usual,
our mission is to both entertain and edify. The temperature
(10:56):
in my part of the world today is ninety eight
degrees fahrenheit. It feels like one hundred and ninety six.
I watched a few minutes of some of the Blue
Jays Orioles games that are going on right now. They
were poorly attended, and that was probably the case because
of scheduling, but it was also just too hot for
fans to be out there. The Orioles had workers hosing
(11:17):
off the fans, and I still felt sorry for them,
and I felt worse for the players. We have seen
players become dehydrated or disoriented or nauseous on the field
from the effects of severe heat this summer. I still
remember and am somewhat traumatized by the day opening day
in fact, at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, when the plate umpire,
(11:40):
perhaps burdened by well, his own physicality, obviously, but also
a hot day simply turned from the plate and died.
And I start to worry, given current climate trajectories, at
what point this hole playing outside in the summer thing
just becomes non viable. I've read that Major League Soccer
is looking at a shift to a fall to spring
(12:03):
schedule that would match the European football calendar soccer calendar,
and I thought, are they nuts? These guys are going
to run up and down the field for an hour
in one hundred degree weather. They will lose people. I'll
get back to that in a second, but I was
going to tell you something fun about those Orioles and
Blue Jays games since it was a blowout. The first
(12:24):
game of the double header that they played on Tuesday
was a blowout. The Jays had utility guy Ali Sanchez
pitched the bottom of the eighth. He was throwing looping,
sixty mile per hour curves and thirty five mile per
hour Ethis pitches. He gave up three hits and two
runs in his inning, but he also got three outs,
one on a strikeout on an ephis pitch. It brought
(12:46):
up childhood memories of Dave Laroche and his laalab with
the nineteen eighty one and nineteen eighty two Yankees. And
what that says to me is that baseball is a
game that's so hard that despite a pitcher who is
almost wholly unqualified being on the mound with the exception
that he could get the ball over, major league hitters
(13:06):
still made three relatively quick outs strikeout, fly out to
left grounder a second. The heat, though the heat is ludicrous,
and yes it's late July here in the Northeast, it's
not unusual. I get that. Still, we should have an
innate sense that this is not how it should be,
or at least not how it was when I observed
the world around me. Even just from my window, I
(13:29):
can see the loss of biodiversity from when I was
a kid. There are fewer birds, fewer bugs, and science
backs me up on that, but it isn't hard to
see if you're at all observant and you've been around
long enough, that's just common species. Since I was born,
we've lost big things. We've lost the job in tiger,
the Sumatrin tiger, the Yankee River dolphin, and too many
(13:49):
birds to list. Yesterday, our government, the government of buy
and for the people said it will revoke the findings
that gave the Environmental Protection Agency how how wink that
name the legal right to regulate greenhouse gases. The proposal would,
if finalized, amount to the largest irregulatory action in the
(14:10):
history of the United States. Lee Zelden, the EPA A administrator,
said He said the proposal would also erase limits on
greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks on the nation's roads.
The climate change deniers say that combating this stuff is
too expensive, the science too uncertain, It makes cars too pricey,
(14:31):
as if tariffs don't do the same thing. They claim
there aren't enough batteries to store solar and wind energy
for dark and calm days, when there is, and I've
seen it, and many of you have batteries in your
own homes. At this point, they say electric cars aren't
any good when they're kind of cool and when you
can't manage it on electrical loan. Hybrids are also solid.
(14:51):
But here's the thing, even if it is expensive, even
if you don't like looking at windmills, even if for
some reason you insist on gas your car instead of
charging it. Who says that what we have now is
so great. As I've said many times on the show,
I live approximately fifty miles from City Field, and I'm
using this just as an example. We could be talking
(15:14):
about any car trip in a heavily trafficked area. In
an ideal world, I could get on the road and
zip up there at sixty miles an hour and be
there in less than an hour. Or I would get
on an electric bus or train and go there directly
again at sixty miles an hour or even faster. Well,
the latter option doesn't really exist, so the drive under
(15:34):
most conditions requires a commitment of something more like two
and a half to three hours. And when you sit
and stop and go traffic, and we've all experienced this,
the air around you turns brown, The air around you
smells brown, the air around you tastes brown, and the
tissue inside your lungs turns brown. All of that to
(15:55):
go spend two hours hoping you'll see Pete Alonzo hit
a home run? Why is that so great? Not the
Alonso Park, the getting there and coming from Who voted
for that to be the way we live? Even if
the only cost was the sheer waste of time? Why
would we not embrace a better way if we could
have one in exchange for a couple of nickels each.
(16:18):
Even the poorest or cheapest among us might choose that
trade not only to maintain our way of life, but
to improve it while saving ourselves and the world around us.
Not to mention, yes, you also get faster trips to
the ballpark. That's all for me. You'll hear from me
again briefly at the end, as I just nuked all
(16:39):
the ending stuff, as there were some defects I couldn't fix.
So please join me after the break for a trip
back to the nineteen thirty one Brooklyn Dodgers and more.
(17:07):
In the nineteen thirty Rule five draft, the Brooklyn Dodgers
selected a journeyman pitcher, a thirty one year old right
hander named Clyde Day also called Pea Ridge Day for
the town in Arkansas where he was brought up. Pea
Ridge is right on the Missouri border, and it's claim
to fame, other than the screwballin Pea Ridge himself, was
(17:32):
that in eighteen sixty two it was the site of
a Civil War battle and an important one. Ten thousand
Union troops faced off against sixteen thousand Confederates who were
intent on taking back Missouri. The Union had driven the
Confederacy out of Missouri, sent them fleeing south, and the
(17:52):
Confederates were determined to come back well, despite a fairly
large numerical advantage, they didn't succeed in doing that, and
in fact their attack was not only repulsed, but they
were driven into retreat. And yet it was one of
those frustratingly incomplete Union victories the Boys in Blue failed
to close. This happened later too at Gettysburg, where the
(18:15):
Union failed to pursue the retreating Robert E. Lee, but
for better reasons, mainly that they were fought out. But
in this instance they simply misplaced the retreating Confederates. To oversimplify,
one of the Union generals thought the Confederate forces had
retreated right, when instead they retreated left and chased in
the wrong directions, and so they plumb got away. The
(18:38):
reason that I bring all of this up is that
in many respects Pea Ridge Day, like the Battle of
Pea Ridge that was his namesake, was frustratingly incomplete. Three
teams gave him major League trials, the Saint Louis Cardinals
in nineteen twenty four and twenty five, the Reds in
nineteen twenty six, and then finally the Dodgers in thirty
(18:59):
one one, And in so far as the bottom line
results go, he was ineffective. But in his Dodger stint
at least, well, it's hard to tell. He had a
four point five to five ERA in fifty seven point
one innings, not particularly good even for that high offense time,
and he gave up seventy five hits, which is a ton. Now,
(19:21):
what I don't know is whether that was the result
of the fact that his screwball was just very hittable
or that the Dodgers had an infamously bad defense. He
didn't walk a lot of batters, and he struck out
about five per nine, which is way high for the time. Thus,
on a fielding independent basis, he looks pretty good. But
(19:41):
the Dodgers didn't think so, and they traded him away.
They traded him to the Minneapolis Millers of the American
Association to get former Giants first baseman George High Pockets Kelly,
who was all washed up. I mean, High Pockets Kelly
was kind of washed up even when he was in
his prime. And he's in the Hall of Fame just
because well, Frankie Frish liked him. But nevertheless, that's what
(20:04):
they chose to do. But it wasn't just a desire
to get George Kelly on their team. And it wasn't
just the fact that they felt or realistically they saw
that pee Ridge hadn't pitched well. It was that peer
Ridge was kind of annoying. He drank, and so discipline
might have been an issue, although that was pretty typical
(20:25):
in those days. No, it wasn't that. It was that
he had a thing for hog calling. And if you
think that batters get upset when a pitcher shows them
up by being too demonstrative on the mound after getting
a big out, well imagine how they felt if after
a strikeout the pitcher reared back and went suee bicky, picky,
(20:48):
picky bicky, sooee. I dare to guess you might find
that a little bit annoying. But here's a more important question.
How would you feel if you were his manager. Maybe
you're not being shown up directly, maybe you're just embarrassed
to be in the presence of that, or maybe you
just get damned sick of it. Pee Ridge struck out
(21:08):
thirty batters that year, So even if he only gave
that hog call half the time, that was still fifteen
occasions when the Dodgers manager, Wilbert Robinson, Uncle Robbie had
to listen to that. And what must have been more
trying from a certain perspective is that the fans started
to pick up on it and say, you had a
(21:29):
big crowd for the Dodgers in those days. Ebbittsfield was
a small park and it was the Great Depression, so
they weren't totally packing them in. But maybe you had
twenty thousand and pe Ridge strikes out a batter, and
now all of them in Unison are making that noise.
And here's the thing. Fifteen times is probably a bit
on the low side, because according to all reports, he
(21:49):
did not restrict the activity to when he was on
the mound, but in fact, at the request of the league,
kept it eventually to when he was in the dugout
and somebody else did something that he approved of. So
say Babe Herman hit a triple or doubled into a
double play, as he famously did around that time, Well
then you'd hear Pee Ridge calling his porkers home. You
(22:12):
can imagine that that might be trying after a certain
amount of time, And in fact, Uncle Robbie, who was
kind of a goofy guy himself on occasion, finally put
an end to it. He told Day to cease and desist,
saying a man has no right to be sillier than
God intended him to be. I don't want to overstate
(22:34):
the profundity or potential profundity of what Uncle Robbie told
Pee Ridge, but I've often contemplated exactly what the inflection
point is on being sillier than God intended you to be.
I'm not particularly religious, but I'm familiar enough with the concepts,
and you get into all kinds of weird areas about
(22:55):
predetermination and free will, because we can only be as
silly as God intended us to be, and at no
point can we be sillier than God intended us to
be unless you believe that everything is a test, and
there's a separate rule of silliness, and we are always
bumping up against that barrier, and we can violate it
(23:17):
it will, but therefore we've failed the test, and we'll
be going to perdition, doomed eternally to suffer the torments
of hell, not because we were evil or mean, or
cruel or sinful, but because we were too silly. But
I don't think that that's the case, and I doubt
Uncle Robbie thought about it that deeply. I think he
was using God in place of a series of other
(23:39):
words or concepts by which he might have meant that
we earn our degree of silliness by our degree of
accomplishment or our degree of seriousness in other areas, And
that p Ridge was a distraction more than he was
an aid to the Dodgers and what the Dodgers were
trying to do, which was making a desultory effort to win.
(24:01):
Or maybe it wasn't as negative or as shaming as
all that, but that Uncle Robbie meant to say something constructive,
that meant something like this, that if our accomplishments do
not match our level of silliness, that we risk undermining
our own dignity to a fatal degree. It's not humor,
(24:24):
it's just a travesty of the self. After the Dodgers
dealt P Ridge away, things did not go well for him.
He was restricted to the minor leagues, and he developed
bone chips in his arm, and whereas that's a malady
that pitchers can have dealt with fairly easily. Today it's
perhaps not routine, but it's also not the same degree
(24:45):
of career risk as say, tearing your ulnar collateral ligament.
But in those days he couldn't get it treated. He tried,
but the treatments were not effective. Pitching for the Millers
in thirty two, he allowed almost eight runs a game,
seven point five to one. The numbers and I've consulted
a few sources don't seem to exist for runs and
(25:07):
earned runs, but he allowed one hundred and twenty one
in one hundred and forty five innings. And then the
following season, pitching for the old International League version of
the Orioles, he only got into six games before he
was released. According to Day's saber biography by Brian McKenna,
which I rely on here, Day was distraught at the
(25:29):
prospect of ending his pitching career. He invested something like
ten thousand dollars in a surgical treatment, which was unusual
for the day, and as I said before, it didn't work.
In the off season, Day owned a gas station and
raised and sold strawberries, and I don't think that means
he had a strawberry farm. I think it more likely
had a strawberry patch. So he was by no means set.
(25:52):
Ten thousand dollars was a great deal of money in
the early nineteen thirties in the depression, and I don't mocket.
What I marvel at is the degree to which he
clung to the remains of his career. He was not
a huge success. He was not a major league pitcher,
and sure he might have had a few more years
(26:15):
in the minor leagues, but he was never the most
effective pitcher down there either. He was popular, but not
for the right reasons. When he first went up to
the Dodgers, the Sporting News wrote, Day has been the
biggest drawing card in the American Association. He has been
an object of ridicule in all parks except the one
(26:36):
in Kansas City. One manager last season tried to have TJ. Hickey,
the league president, put a stop to Dais yelling, but
the American Association boss couldn't find anything in the rules
to prevent noise as long as the player did not
become abusive. And then the Sporting News said something which
was prescient. It said it may be that Wilbert Robinson
(26:58):
will not like so much noise in the afternoons when
he is trying to think, and will ask Pea Ridge
to keep quiet. And that's exactly what happened. And that
is the career to which Pea Ridge attached so much
importance that he vented what seems to have been a
significant amount of savings for the time on a cost
(27:19):
benefit basis, it's madness. On an emotional basis, we can
all understand it completely. In the spring of nineteen thirty four,
with his wife quite pregnant on the verge of delivery,
pe Ridge got the San Francisco Seals to extend an
invitation to spring training or to a trial, I'm not
sure which, and he headed west. He stopped off in
(27:41):
Kansas City to see a friend complaining of memory lapses,
and the friend took him to see a doctor. The
doctor suggested he rest up a bit before traveling on,
and he went back to the friend's apartment, where, in
the presence of the friend, he pulled out a hunting
knife and cut his own throat. Pea Ridge died there
in that apartment, about ninety days short of his thirty
(28:03):
fifth birthday. And what I wonder is if, in addition
to having been despondent and worried about the future, in
addition to most likely being some level of intoxicated, if
he looked back over things and thought back on Uncle
Robbie's words, a man has no right to be sillier
(28:25):
than God intended him to be, and realized in the
final analysis that he agreed with him. You know, at
that point, Uncle Robbie was seventy years old, and he
only had a few months to live himself, This huge
fat old man who had been a huge fat young
man on the great Baltimore teams of the early National League,
(28:47):
the ned Hamlin managed teams that had Wee Willie Keeler
and John McGraw and Dan Brewthers and so many other
great players. And he'd won a couple of pennants as
a manager too, and some more as a pitching coach
with the Giants before that. Well, in August nineteen thirty four,
he slipped and fell in the bathtub, fractured his skull,
(29:09):
broke his arm, and he'd had a stroke. And it's
not clear to me if the stroke caused him to
slip and fall, or the slip and fall, and the
resulting blow to the head caused the stroke, but either
way he was done for. But he lingered for a while,
and he was conscious and apparently calm, and as the
doctors or whatever passed for paramedics back in that day
(29:32):
were working him over, he said, don't worry about it, Fellas,
I'm an old Oriole. I'm too tough to die. And
you know that was silly too, But Uncle Robbie had
been an old Oriole. He could lay claim to that,
So I guess it was just the right amount of silliness.
(29:53):
Maybe not the amount of silliness God intended him to have,
but the amount of silliness he had earned. I'm Stephen
old Man, and this is the infinite inning. Well, hello there,
(30:43):
Dwight found Bertram naked on the roof. The driving rain
barely obscured him, a thin and ineffectual curtain that stabbed
and bit. What are you doing up there? Bert? Come
back inside. It's following me again. The demon runfel gazaar
that again. It's in your head, Bert, it's in your head. No,
(31:08):
he's real, you know he's real. Oh okay, look, let's
say he is real. If he is, If you're so afraid.
This is a hell of a way to hide from him.
You're out in the open, totally exposed. No, I'm not
hiding anymore. I want him to see me. I want
him to come and get me. Couldn't he see you inside, Bert,
(31:29):
where it's dry. No, if damnation be my fate, if
the demon's curses upon me, I won't run. We'll have
this over one way or another. Come run, thel Gazaar,
Come and face me. They waited half an hour, Bertram
shivering pitifully. He's not coming, is he? No, he is not.
(31:51):
I love him so much. I know you do, Bert,
I know. Come inside. I'll warm you up. In front
of episode sixty eight, welcome back to the show. That
Reine's kind of soothing. Maybe I should just keep it
going the whole time. I don't think anyone is pretending
that's easy. I don't think anyone wants to pretend that
(32:13):
they themselves are blameless enough to throw the first stone,
or that they want to throw stones at all, that
they want to be the ones who are leading the mob,
that Tarzan feathers this particular person and runs them out
of town. On that subject, after those two discussions, a
listener Len posted on the Facebook group this, which I
will read to you now. He wrote, It's hard to
(32:34):
argue with anything said regarding Osuna and Cano, but to
compare the two is apples and oranges. Assault is a
crime punishable by society, and if anyone is worthy of
judging a crime against society, it is a public jury
of peers. Peds are a crime against baseball, and is
therefore a baseball problem. Baseball is not responsible for handing
(32:57):
out jail time, as juries are not responsible for pea
infractions in baseball. That beds are punished more harshly than
assault makes perfect sense. In this way, one could argue
baseball has no business punishing crimes that are not baseball related.
I told Lynn I would respond to that here, but
before I do, two notes. First, some of what I'm
(33:18):
about to say I've written about before in different places
over the years. I guess many aspects of my thinking
haven't changed much over time. So if any of this
sounds familiar to you because you happen to have read
my work in the past, well thank you and forgive
me for the repetition. Second, one of the absolute best podcasts,
I said, Podcats. I imagine that is a thing podcats
(33:40):
about cats, a podcast about cats. Podcats, don't write in
telling me that it's out there. I'll find it anyway.
What I was trying to say is that one of
the very best podcasts out there is a movie history
show called You Must Remember This, which is by the
excellent Carina Longworth. I think ms Longworth is a baseball fan,
(34:02):
by the way I've seen her mention Ben Lindberg's effectively wild.
But that's beside the point. She's just a really good,
polished storyteller, and she does a lot of research. In fact,
she lays out how she does all her research in
the show notes for every episode. And I need to
bring her work up here because back on July sixteenth,
she published an episode that covers the story that I'm
(34:24):
about to very briefly recap, albeit in much greater detail
and with far greater expertise. So if you're interested in
hearing more about that about what you're about to hear
when you're done with this week's infinite inning, head over
to You Must Remember This podcast dot com. I'll drop
a link to that episode in the Facebook group to
(34:46):
which we've been referring this whole time. Roscoe Conkling our Buckle,
better known as Fatty Arbuckle, was a big pardon the expression,
Hollywood star in film's earliest days. He made dozens of
comedy shorts and I guess a couple of things that
qualify as full length films or two reelers or something.
As the nickname suggests, he was a big, broad, heavy
(35:08):
set guy with a derby hat who did pratfalls, and
he was very successful at that. From the early teens
until nineteen twenty one was a run at his peak
of about eight years. What ended that peak period, well,
in nineteen twenty one, our Buckle and some pals went
up to San Francisco and rented a hotel suite and
(35:31):
they had a big party. And after that party, which
apparently got kind of wild and drunk and sexy, an
actress named Virginia Repei died of a ruptured bladder. Before
I proceed, if there are any children in the room
who you'd prefer not hear this sort of thing, or
you yourself are sensitive or triggered or anything like that,
(35:55):
then just skip ahead a bit. I'll leave a very
brief gap here. You can send Junior out to the yard.
No one knows. No one knew then how Repay came
to suffer that injury. There were rumors that appeared to
have kind of come out of nowhere, that our Buckle
(36:15):
raped her with a coke bottle and caused the fatal injury.
Others said that, in his eagerness to get with her,
to lie with her in the biblical sense, that he
heaved his three hundred pound body on top of her,
and because of the impact, or perhaps due to a
pre existing condition, she simply burst. One of the reasons
no one knows is because no one was in the
(36:36):
room when it happened. Our Buckle himself was not alone
with her for very long at all, perhaps long enough
to cause injury, perhaps not. According to a witness who
may or may not have been reliable, Repay did regain
consciousness and pointed our Buckle and said he did it,
but did what was not said, And she was not
coherent after that or not awake, and shortly thereafter she died.
(37:00):
They didn't exactly rush to get her medical help either,
which at the very least is an act of negligence
or callous disregard. Our Buckle was tried three times the
first two times, the jury couldn't come to a verdict.
The third time, he was not only rapidly acquitted, but
the jury wrote a note of apology saying that he
never should have been put through this stuff in the
(37:21):
first place. I don't know whether he was innocent or not.
I don't think that Karina Longworth knows exactly either. But
her interpretation of these events, and particularly of those three trials,
is very much worth listening to, because she puts a
spin on them that I think is only available to
us now. I've never heard it before. And it's not
(37:44):
necessarily a shift in researcher as the result of research,
but a shift in perspective, which is to say that
it's not our Buckle who was on trial in the end,
but that his acquittal came as a result of putting
Repay the dead woman on trial, and there's a wrongness
to that that, all these years later will smack you
(38:06):
in the face. That's a necessary corrective. And here's why,
because as a result of the Arbuckle scandal, which got
a great deal of press, it was kind of this
is a tired comparison, but the OJ Simpson trial of
its day, the movie industry did its best to wipe
him off the face of the earth. No, I don't
mean they put a hit on him, but they removed
(38:28):
his films from circulation and refused to put them back
out again, and they banned him from further work to avoid,
they said, further discredit on the industry, or to give
the slightest added impetus to public outrage, which is to
say that they were avoiding censorship. They were avoiding moralistic
authorities coming in and saying, we've got to clean up
(38:49):
this Hollywood place. And this has generally been presented as
Fatty got a raw deal, Fatty got railroaded, Fatty got
punished for something he didn't do. He was the victim,
not Virginia Repay. And in this day and age, when
we're a little more sophisticated about victims and victimizers, it's
very difficult to feel any sympathy with that position or
(39:13):
be as dismissive of Repay, who, regardless of what version
you believe, Even if you believe some version of this
story that is super sympathetic to Fatty Arbuckle did anything
that even slightly suggests that she deserved to die. Sure,
what happened to him is not dissimilar to the blacklist
that came about in the late forties and early fifties
(39:35):
when those same moralistic authorities began shouting communists at Hollywood,
and that was both morally and legally reprehensible. But when
you're talking about a crime such as murder or rape,
how are you supposed to go to the theater and
plunk down whatever it was in those days, a dime
or two bits and laugh at a comedian. It's exactly
the same reason I think that Louis c. K is
(39:57):
no longer on public display and won't be for some time,
if not permanently. It's that unless you are a very
dull tool, indeed, going and trying even to laugh at
that guy, in succeeding in laughing at him, implicates you
in his crime, or at the very least tacitly excuses it.
(40:18):
Like our buckles films. Baseball is an entertainment. In nineteen
twelve through nineteen twenty, there was an outfielder in baseball
named Benny Koff. He's known to us now as the
Ty Cobb of the Federal League. He came up with
the Yankees nineteen twelve couldn't latch on there, And when
the Federal League became a thing, he went over there,
and it was kind of a Triple A league, and
(40:39):
he was better than a Triple A player, and he
just exploded on that league. And in the two years
that it existed, he hit three seventy the first year,
which led the league, also led in stolen bases with
seventy five yet forty four doubles, two hundred and eleven hits,
one hundred and twenty runs. In year two, he wasn't
quite as good, but still hit three forty two, which
again led the league in still fifty five bases. Likewise, well,
(41:00):
that league, for various reasons, goes belly up, as I
always say, a story for another day, and Kauf signed
with the Giants. Now the National League was a more
advanced league than the Federal League, and Cough therefore was
no longer the Tai Cob of anything. But he was
still really good. He hit three hundred each of his
first two years. By Baseball Reference, he was a four
(41:21):
win player the first year, a five win player the second.
But in nineteen twenty he got in legal trouble. He
owned a garage he was an auto repair, but the
prosecutor said it was also kind of a chop shop,
and that one evening he was out with a couple
of associates and he said, Hey, I got a customer
looking for a used Cadillac. How about we just take
that one parked right over there, And they did. They
(41:45):
changed a few superficial details and they resold it well.
The police tracked it down and figured out what had happened,
and he was indicted for a grand theft auto, not
exactly murder or manslaughter, but still baseball cared about this stuff,
particularly in nineteen twenty, which is as the Black Sox
scandal is still going on. Kauf was eventually acquitted, but
(42:06):
that wasn't good enough for the Commissioner of Baseball, Judge
Kennesaw Mountain Landis, who banned him for life. He said,
your mere presence in the lineup would inevitably burden patrons
of the game with grave apprehension as to its integrity.
kW fought Landis to the Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court,
as it typically does with Baseball, found in his favor
(42:27):
but refuse to do anything about it. This is actually
a worse deal than our Buckle got because our Buckle
was able to kind of come back in through the
back door direct a few movies under an assumed name,
and right before his early death, even got in front
of the cameras at least once. But again, I don't
think that Landis was wrong, and for the same reasons
(42:48):
that this is a game, that this is an entertainment
and we can't ever unno what we know. As I said,
unless you're a particularly dull tool. The Chicago Cubs dogpie
at the end of the twenty sixteen World Series should
have been the happiest moment in the history of the game.
We almost didn't need baseball anymore after that. Just about
(43:08):
every major storyline that needed closure achieved it, except that
Erodis Chapman was in that dogpile, and at least for me,
I couldn't Unknow that it is undoubtedly naive to say
that every player about whom we know nothing of their
off field activities is as pure and white as the
freshly fallen snow. I know that's not the case, but
(43:31):
until they hurt someone, they do have that presumption, and
we can cheer for them without experiencing the kind of
cognitive dissonance that erupts when you're going, hooray Elmo, whoever
Elmo is. He's a DH for some team somewhere. When
Elmo hits a home run, knowing that because of Elmo's
off the field activities, we would hesitate to invite him
(43:54):
to our house or have him around our kids. So
to come full circle to the question that Len asked,
is there an argument that baseball has no business punishing
crimes that are not baseball related? Well, I think what
we've had is a confusion of terms. No, Roberto Osuna
or any other player who has committed an act of
(44:14):
domestic violence has not committed a crime against baseball in
the sense that what they did will possibly alter the
outcome of a bat or a game, whether by using
a cork bat, by juicing, by a consorting with gamblers,
or anything. That is not what they have done. But
(44:35):
they have committed a crime against Baseball's audience. And I
do think that baseball has a right and a responsibility
to respond at that point, because the audience is their
life's blood, because they are ultimately dispensable, and if they
are not pleasing to their customers, if the morality of
(44:55):
the game descends below the morality of the audience, then
there is no more Baseball, or at least there's a
very shrunken vestige of baseball that will remain in the
aftermath of its failure to act. And let me say
one thing further, that crimes against baseball and crimes against
Baseball's audience are one and the same thing. Do you
(45:18):
think that the owners of baseball give a damn about
who uses peds? They didn't until Congress threatened to call
them on it, just as from the founding of the
game through nineteen twenty they didn't give it damn about
who threw games or who bet on them, at least
or if they did very intermittently, and they winked and
nudged and turned a blind eye wherever they could. They
(45:41):
reacted to cheating when it became an existential threat, which
is to say, when it was a crime against the audience,
because they worried that the audience would no longer view
the games as legitimate competition. Matters of domestic violence are
exactly the same. They wouldn't care to police it, but
they've realized that it's the same kind of threat to
(46:01):
the participation of the audience, it's just a different vehicle.
Moll that over, if you would, We'll take a break
for thoughtful reflection and a word perhaps from our sponsors,
and then I'll be back at last. And by back,
of course, I meant this coming Friday for episode three
forty one, a brand new episode of The Infinite Inning.
(46:23):
Because that is all for this reissue. As always, should
you wish to follow me on social media, you can
at bluesky dot social that is Stephen Gooldman dot bsky
dot Social. I'll save the rest of the usual closing
nonsense for that episode. So once again allow me to
thank you for listening to this reissue episode of The
Infinite Inning. I hope you enjoyed it, as I hope
(46:45):
you enjoy our upcoming episode three forty one. I'll catch
you then, Stay cool, all right, lived turning
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