Infinite Inning Reissue 13 (041): The Yankees, the Senators, and the Circle of Cows

In this week’s new remarks, we consider a revival of the baseball musical Damn Yankees which may let the bigoted owners of the original Washington Senators off the hook for destroying their franchise, with a quick look at the Homestead Grays’ residency in the District of Columbia. In the reissue part of the show, we return to “The Turtle Who Was Hated By God,” which is exactly what it sounds like, make a quick stop with a catcher who was heavily into OBP, and finally view racist mascots through the lens of the 17th century Pequot War.  

The Infinite Inning is a journey to the past to understand the present using baseball as our time machine. Baseball, America's brighter mirror, often reflects, anticipates, and even mocks the stories we tell ourselves about our world today. Baseball Prospectus's Steven Goldman discusses the game’s present, past, and future with forays outside the foul lines to the culture at large. Expect history, politics, stats, and frequent Casey Stengel quotations. Along the way, we'll try to solve the puzzle that is the Infinite Inning: How do you find the joy in life when you can’t get anybody out? 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:26):
Well, hello there, everybody. This is Steven Goldman, back again
with another reissue episode from early in the eight year
run of the Infinite Inning podcast. New episodes, of course,
are still being produced. There was a new one out
this week. I wouldn't want anyone to think that we're
only about the bank issues around here, but for today,

(00:46):
we are going back to episode forty one. And yes,
this is the first reissue episode out since I was
forced to pause my work for recovery from surgery. I
discussed that extensively in our newest episode, episode three forty one,
and I won't dwell on it here. I look forward

(01:06):
to when it is so far into the past that
it's no longer relevant for me to bring it up.
And of course you'll forgive my selfishness here for me
to stop feeling the after effects of the damn thing,
which are getting better day by day. But I'm not
completely back to normal yet, and I have so many
follow ups this month, not just reuniting with the surgeon

(01:29):
to see how things are going, but for all the
normal stuff that you need to maintenance in order to
stay happy in this world. For example, I have an
old filling that needs replacement, so that's an afternoon shot
at the dentist's office. I need to follow up on
my cancer recovery, which I'm actually doing too early tomorrow morning.
By next month I mostly mean September actually, And it's

(01:51):
just how are you going to get your work done?
How are you going to keep a show like this
on schedule if you're constantly being tilted back in some
chair or another so a doctor can shove his tools
into your mouth or into your eye. I'm sorry. I
know that's triggering for a lot of people. That happens
to be the flavor of cancer that I have been
lucky enough to survive thus far, but it really does

(02:13):
bother people. I have a cousin who's a doctor, and
I'm sure he's seen more disgusting diseased body parts than
I can possibly imagine, and yet he once told me,
you can talk to me about anything, but not eyes.
It's something about eyes just really gets me and I empathize.
Of course, you've now precluded yourself from being helpful or
comforting to me, So thank you very much. I'm throwing

(02:34):
off a salute as I say those words. So let's
get down to business today. We revisit episode forty one.
As I said a moment ago titled The Turtle Who
Was Hated by God, and as you'll hear me say
when I start the Way Back Machine, the title tale
is not a baseball story, but it is very much
an infinite inning story. The second tale returns to Chief Wahoo,

(02:57):
the defunct symbol of the Cleveland Indians now Guardians. Our
current president recently insisted that such symbols should be restored
and be a part of our culture. Anything bullying of
non white minorities he prefers. Both of those stories are
examples of what I do, of finding some nugget in
American history and extrapolating from it. There is a turtle

(03:22):
who may feel, like all of us do sometimes that
life is like being the nineteen eighty eight Orioles on
a twenty one game, losing streak just all the time,
banking defeat after defeat, and trying to keep smiling through
or whatever a turtle does with draws, I guess. But
even a turtle can only do that for so long.
If it's not going to starve, he has to stick
his head out again and keep kicking, or sink and drown.

(03:45):
Then we have Chief Wahoo who takes us back not
only to Cleveland one hundred and twenty years ago, but
even further back, hundreds of years back to colonial New England.
If you've heard the story before, I hope you enjoy
hearing it again. And if you haven't, well, welcome to
my mind, and welcome to America and a couple of
persecuted groups, Native Americans and turtles. There's also a few

(04:08):
minutes for reasons I no longer recall about a catcher
who was in both the major leagues and start in
the Pacific Coast League, Johnny Passler, and I suppose he
was part of a persecuted minority too, that of high
on base percentage no power catchers. Take that for what
it's worth. Related, I happened to be listening to Monday's

(04:28):
Yankees game. It was a Nationals, a Yankees game, and
the broadcasters, Susan Waldman and Dave Simms were reacting to
the nuts being at Yankee Stadium by wondering aloud about
the decline and fall of the original senators. How did
that happen? They asked? And when broadcasters do that, it
makes me nuts, because often I know it used to
be that I could reach out to people at YES

(04:50):
because I worked for YES. And on more than one
occasion I sat next to Susan Waldman in the Yankees
radio booth. This was before she was doing color and
she was just doing I guess, the pre and postgame
stuff that she used to do. She was always very
friendly to me, maybe a little cantankerous at times. She
endorsed my book Forging Genius, my biography of Casey Stengle,

(05:11):
and that was great, very helpful. She said, no one
had ever asked her to do that before. But that's
getting to be a long time ago now, and for
reasons that well, I sort of regret. I guess I
let all those contacts drop a long time ago. There
was a time in my life when I found myself
walking on air, and if I were going to get
to the other side of the canyon and not plummet
like Wiley Coyote, I had to let go of what

(05:32):
I brought with me. It didn't seem like there was
very much choice at the time, and the only thing
I got to take was myself. Maybe I'll say more
about the decline and fall of the Senators when we
do our next new episode, Number three forty two this Friday.
But for now I want to dwell on just one
aspect of that conversation, and maybe I'll cover it by

(05:53):
accident anyway. Waldman, who used to do Broadway Feeder, noted
that there's an upcoming revival of the nineteen fifty five
Broadway baseball musical Damn Yankees, and it will star Jordan
Donica as Joe Hardy, and that choice is fascinating, wonderful,
and a historical Jordan Donica is really good. Let me

(06:15):
just leave that there for a minute. But for those
who have not seen the nineteen fifty eight movie or
one of the many revivals of the show, Damn Yankees
hit the boards at the simultaneous height of the Yankees
dynasty of the nineteen fifties and the nadir of the
Senator's existence. Going back to nineteen forty seven, the Yankees

(06:37):
had won all but two pennants, and the Senators had
won none, had won none, in fact, since nineteen thirty three,
and would win none until after they had relocated to Minnesota.
They had twice lost one hundred games in that period,
including in nineteen fifty five, the year that Damn Yankees premiered.
The show is based on a novel by Douglas Wallap.

(06:59):
I have a copy around here somewhere called The Year
the Yankees Lost the Pennant, and it fantasizes about a
Senators fan, a middle aged Senators fan, Joe Hardy, who
sells his soul to the devil and in return is
transformed into the young Slugger the Senators need to overtake
the Yankees Shoeless Joe from Hannibal Mo. Parenthetically, Casey Stangle

(07:21):
was asked if he had seen the show, and he
grumbled something about not going to see no show where
someone made a million dollars talking about my team losing.
One joke on the production is that one slugger would
not have made the difference for the nineteen fifty five
Senators nor most other editions of the club after nineteen
thirty three. That year, they had royceivers, ed Yost, Mickey Vernon,
and Pete Runnolds in the lineup, and that group, at

(07:43):
one time or another, just not nineteen fifty five would
win collectively four batting titles, two on base percentage titles,
and one home run title. None of that came in
nineteen fifty five, But they weren't that bad then either,
So whereas one more hitter certainly wouldn't have hurt, they
could have done more with a quartet of good starting pitchers.
They had a twenty game winner on the way down

(08:06):
in Bob Porterfield, a former Yankee, and another on the
way up in Camillo Pascual, and a few others who
had or would have in the future good seasons. For example,
rookie Ted Abernathy would have an all time great relief
season for the nineteen sixty five Reds, something like a
six or seven wins above replacement season. Most relievers don't

(08:28):
get anywhere near that, especially nowadays when they're limited to
fifty or sixty innings. So more so than the offense,
the pitching staff was pretty desperate. But no, Joe Hardy
doesn't become the new Walter Johnson. He becomes this Ruthian
figure that the Senators never had in real life. They
had a number of excellent hitters, and I just named
a quartet of them without even bringing up Sam Rice

(08:50):
or Goose Goslin or anyone like that. But the park
wouldn't allow for the establishment of a Ruth or a
Garrick or a Fox or a Greenberg, and then ownership
was cheap, so they wouldn't have been able to acquire
one anyway. That musical had a lot of Broadway Hall
of Famers involved with it. Speaking of Hall of Famers,
George Abbott wrote and directed it, Bob Fossey was the choreographer,

(09:13):
and Gwen Verdon his future wife. I believe this is
how he met her, starred as the Devil's thirst trap
Lola and I could talk more about the cast, which
included the wonderful Ray Walston as mister Applegate the Devil,
but I'll limit myself to mentioning that the songs were
written by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross were kind of
a good story, but a sad story. They teamed on

(09:34):
two hit shows, The Pajama Game with its breakthrough song
Hey There You the Stars and You're Right and Damn Yankees,
at which point Ross promptly died of cancer at the
age of twenty nine, and that was that. Unfortunately. Can
I just add I have a soft spot for one
of the songs from The Pajama Game because it too
became a hit outside of the show, and my father,

(09:55):
when I was young, used to just randomly humm it
or sing a few lines from it. Hernando's high by away,
just knock three times and whispered low that you and
I were sent by Joe. You never sang any more
of it than that, So for a long time I
had no idea what he was on about. Who the
hell is Joe Pop? The best songs about baseball in

(10:17):
Damn Yankees are heart as in you Gotta Have It
and the Game, which, unfortunately today sounds like a payin
to date rape. But back then, given the values of
the time, again, you can't go back. But it was
a jokey song about a bunch of players wanting to
hook up, but they're all too distracted by baseball. I quote.

(10:38):
There was that waitress back in Kansas City, built for comfort,
dumb but pretty man. Her perfume sure smelt sweet. Got
her up to my hotel suite, she killed a pint
of gin. More or less, the lights were low, and
she slips off her dress. But then I thought about
the game. Oh yes, I thought about the game. Though
I got the lady h I just left her high

(11:01):
and dry because I thought about the game. I don't
mean to sound naive or precious or anything. But this
sort of thing is just shot through the culture, particularly,
I feel like in the nineteen fifties, the idea that
this is the way the mating game was played. A
woman would only give up her virtue if you got
her so drunk that her inhibitions fell away, or much

(11:24):
more troubling, that she was too blitzed to know what
was going on. And that was something that a male,
a young male on the make, was supposed to plan on.
I called it date rape a few minutes ago, and
in many cases it probably wasn't, and in many cases
it well was, but only Moly, it just seems like
it was accepted. It's just a big joke. Back then.

(11:46):
The man got a triumph and the woman woke up
with a hangover and a lot of regret, but not
recourse to prosecution. It is really disgusting, and no matter
how fast we're rowing backwards right now, culturally, it is
far better so live in a world where that kind
of behavior is not condoned. And if you think about it,
it's only possible because first we destigmatize sexual relationships between people,

(12:11):
consensual ones, obviously, and we remove the moral opprobrium from it,
and then birth control comes into the picture, and so
the decision for a couple whether to do it or
not do it was based on mutual desire and appreciation
and affection and not simply being afraid we're not wanting
to get into a family. Way before that, though, it

(12:33):
was simply men have needs, women refuse to gratify those needs. Therefore,
males must resort to subterfuge, which is another way of
males objectifying women, which means that a mature relationship between
a man and a woman is impossible, which is why
many of us would not want to model our marriages
on our grandparents' marriages. Think about what becomes possible if

(12:54):
the rules are changed to or the understanding of it
is changed to men have needs and women have needs.
When as and if both parties to a relationship are
on the same page about gratifying those needs, then they
can hit the sack without the need of intoxicants to
anesthetize one or the other, unless, of course, they choose

(13:15):
to use that as a relaxant, which is a different story.
To get back to the senators. They were so busy
thinking about the game that they won three pennance in
nine years. The nine years being nineteen twenty four in
nineteen thirty three and won championship, which is better than
say the Yankees have done since two thousand and nine.
The reasons they dropped off after that are pretty simple,

(13:37):
and as I said, we can perhaps talk about them
again on the next regular episode, But the one I
want to highlight here is that they just would not integrate.
There's a good book about this called Beyond the Shadow
of the Senators that, unless I'm misremembering, was edited by
my good friend and frequent podcast partner here, Cliff Querkoran,

(13:58):
and it's about how Senators owner Clark Griffith was making
more money renting out his part to the Homestead Grays
of the Negro Leagues than he was from his own club,
so he had a financial incentive to be a racist.
He very likely was a racist anyway, but now he
was being paid to be one. And yet retrospectively we

(14:19):
learned that he approached some of the Grays about integration.
The Grays played most of their home games at Griffith
Stadium from about nineteen forty through nineteen forty eight. Even
though they were technically a Pittsburgh team at that time,
they had Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, Bouocham Wilson Cool, Papa Bell,
Ray Brown, all these Hall of Famers or future Hall

(14:39):
of famers once the Hall stopped being racist. This was
the antithesis of the Senators. How did Gibson hit all
those home runs while playing in that tough park? Were
the opposition pitchers that bad? Or was he that good?
In nineteen forty three, Gibson, as Baseball Reference has it
right now, hit home runs in sixty nine games. To

(15:02):
that point in Senator's history, only two players, Zeke Bernera
and Al Simmons, had hit twenty home runs. They both
popped out at twenty one actually in a one hundred
and fifty four game season two in nineteen forty four,
with the American League both leagues using a dead ball

(15:23):
due to the war effort. They hit one home run
at home all year long. So the Senators would have
been much better off had they integrated with players who
were basically at hand. At some point, this would have
been in the late thirties or early nineteen forties, Griffith
asked Leonard and Gibson to visit him in his office
after a game, Would you guys like to play in

(15:46):
the major leagues, he asked them. Uh, yeah, they replied,
do you think you'd be any good in the major leagues? Yeah, well,
Griffith said, we think so too. Problem is, no one
wants wants to be the first to hire black players.
Ain't going to be me. So I'm afraid we're both
that a luck. I just wanted to see how you'd react.

(16:06):
Thanks for covin By, As Snyder wrote Brad Schnyder, the
author of In the Shadow Beyond the Shadow of the Senators,
for Griffith, renting his ballpark to the Grays was not
an act of altruism. The Senator's owner profited handsomely from
the relationship, hiring out the Senator's ticket takers and ushers,
reaping all the profits from concessions, and taking twenty percent

(16:28):
of the gross gate receipts. For example, the April nineteenth,
nineteen forty two exhibition game between the Grays and Eagles
drew four thousand, seven hundred and fourteen fans, with ticket
selling for seventy five cents and fifty cents. The game
grossed threey, one hundred and seventy six dollars and sixty
six cents. The Senators received twenty percent of the gross

(16:51):
profits or six hundred and thirty five dollars and thirty
three cents for stadium rental, plus sixty two to fifty
in expenses for ticket sales, ushers and cleanup. After subtracting
additional expenses, and ten percent of the net profits for promotion,
each team that played netted one fifty nine dollars in
eighty four cents. Thus, the Grays took home one thousand

(17:14):
dollars and Griffith nabbed nearly seven hundred dollars merely for
lending them his ballpark. The relationship, though exploitative, was symbiotic.
The larger the crowds at Grays games, the better Griffith
and the Grays Bared Snyder observes that in nineteen forty three,
Griffith made one hundred thousand dollars from the Grays. Now

(17:36):
that sounds like nothing now, but we're talking a different
version of the dollar in the American economy. Similarly, the Yankees,
also very hostile to integration, made about the same amount
of money from Negro League's rentals of Yankee Stadium and
minor league parks in Newark. Kansas City and Norfolk Clark.
Griffith was ahead of his time when it came to

(17:57):
playing players from Cuba. Provide did they were light skinned.
This was not only because he had an inn in
Cuba via the scout Joe Cambria, but because they were
hungry and therefore cheaper than white Americans. Black players would
have been cheaper at first, too, just because they were
so hungry to compete, but he wouldn't do that. As

(18:18):
Black journalist Sam Lacy, one of the most consistent agitators
for integration, wrote, can there be any doubt that it's
simply a case of anything but a gentleman of African extraction.
Griffith died in nineteen fifty five. The Senators had only
broken their own color line in nineteen fifty four, seven
years after Jackie Robinson. The player was naturally not an

(18:43):
American but a Cuban. That was the last screw you,
buddy to African Americans and anyone who cared about good baseball.
The player, Carlos Paula, was already overaged for a prospect,
Although he hit decently in nineteen fifty five, averaging two
ninety nine with a thirty two on base percentage and
a four to forty seven slugging percentage. But he also

(19:05):
fielded nine to thirty five in right field, which is hard.
That's ten errors in eighty games, and he was gone quickly.
The Senators didn't have a player of color born on
this continent until they traded for catcher Earl Batti, born
in Los Angeles in April of nineteen sixty. And then
they moved because, as Griffith's nephew Calvin freely admitted, Washington

(19:29):
had become a majority black city and they did not
like that. Batty made five All Star teams as a
Minnesota twin. He didn't have a long career because his
skills dropped off pretty quickly after he turned thirty and
he retired young, but he was still probably the second
best catcher into his history, after Joe Mauer. The reason
that I bring all of this up, the reason that

(19:49):
Susan Waldman sent me off on this journey, is the
actor Jordan Donica, scheduled to play Shoeless Joe from Hannibal
mo I happened to catch him as lance Lot in
a recent revival of Camelot at Lincoln Center, and he
was fantastic easily the best part of the program, although
I enjoyed Philip Assou as Guinevere as well. What bugs me,

(20:13):
and I want to be very clear about how and
why this bugs me, is that Danica is a man
of color. Now this forthcoming production, which will hit Washington shortly,
they have updated the production to take place during the
Yankees dynasty of nineteen ninety six to two thousand and one,
not nineteen forty seven to nineteen sixty four, So maybe

(20:35):
they have ducked this issue. I sort of hope they
haven't ducked it, because it makes for a more powerful story.
My point, to be super clear is I don't care
who plays who. I'm not one of those whining, winging
fanboys who claims that their childhood is ruined because there's
a Ghostbuster's remake starring women, or a Star Wars show

(20:56):
starring a person of color or a female person of color.
Oh no, are the new Harry Potter Kids not Lily
White Good. It's a big world. Our art should reflect
that big, beautiful, varied world. It's like insisting that every
animal documentary be about cows. Can't we see something about
kangaroos this time? Just this one? Time, Brad, No, my

(21:18):
childhood is ruined. They were always only cows, but this
one's about predators on the African veld. No, they should
be cows, the cow king, like Elton john sang when
we were kids. It's the circle, the circle of cows.
I have no patience for that. It's pathetic and I
revile it. So what I would object to is retroactively letting.

(21:40):
I realize no one cares, but it's important. It matters,
especially today, retroactively letting the Washington Senators, and specifically Clark
and Calvin Griffith, off the hook for the cynical racism
that played such a big part in destroying their franchise
by not acknowledging that a black Joe Hardy would have

(22:00):
been impossible as of nineteen fifteen, nineteen twenty five, nineteen
thirty five, nineteen forty five, and nineteen fifty five. As
I said, the producers of this new show, the writers,
the directors, what have you. They probably ducked the issue
by changing the timeline of the story. And I so
wish they hadn't. I wish they had taken it head on.

(22:21):
Then you gotta have heart, would have had a much
deeper meaning and represented a much greater challenge when your
way is blocked by bigots, get your chin up off
the floor. They'll never open up this bigots. Yes, they're
always slamming doors. But there's nothing to it but to
do it, you gotta have heart. That's all for me.

(22:43):
For this reissue episode, you'll probably hear from me again
as I work in new breaks for old and again
at the end of the show. I very much hope
that you will enjoy The Turtle who is Hated by
God and other stories. The story I'm about to tell

(23:20):
you is not a baseball story, but it is an
infinite inning story. And by that I mean, for those
of you who have not heard me talk about our
animating metaphor here, the infinite inning is that place in
life where, try as you might have the best intentions
you can muster put everything you can on the ball,

(23:41):
you cannot get the third out. There is no escape.
Having said that, having admitted that the infinite inning exists,
I think that envy and bitterness are among the most
wasted of human emotions. I disinclude hate. I'd like to
talk about hate another time, and I don't mean political
hate or race hater or any of those other primitive emotions,

(24:02):
but things where people have really wronged you and you
don't let it go. I think about that a lot,
because there's this cliche hating somebody is letting them live
in your brain rent free, and it bugs me because
maybe I'm okay with that. Maybe I'm okay with letting
someone live in my brain rent free because it's not
yet time for me to kick them out, and only

(24:23):
I can say when that time will be. But anyway,
this isn't that story. I was talking about envy and
bitterness and the feelings that get you when you see
someone else succeed and you haven't achieved what you want
to achieve in life. I feel like I may have
quoted the following to you before in one of the
Foregoing forty episodes, and if so, forgive me. But I

(24:44):
guess there are subjects that, like all of you, I'm
working my way through on a recurrent basis. Gorvid Dahal,
who's kind of a bastard but one of my favorite authors,
once said that when a friend succeeds, a little part
of me dies. I don't feel that way. I think
I I am sincerely happy for my friends when they
do well. At the same time, we all in our

(25:05):
lives have moments where we say, why didn't that happen
for me? Why doesn't the world love me and want
me and desire me as much as Bob? Why is
Bob making the big salary? Why does Bob live in
the big house with the cool car? And I don't
want to get into our hypothetical Bob here, and whether
Bob is more or less skilled than we are, or

(25:27):
is better at networking or backstabbing for that matter, than
we are, or any other quality of Bob, because in
the end, Bob's life is Bob's life, and it has
not a damn thing to do with us, and we
cannot be grudge Bob his success. We can only try
to create our own Casey Stangele said that people make
their own luck, that some people will have bad luck

(25:49):
all their lives. I think about that a lot, because
it's true. I do believe that when you have the thing,
the skill, the talent, the product, the means of escape,
the key out of the infinite inning, that the world
will beat a path to your door for your better
mouse trap. I don't know when that will be, and
the infinite inningness of it all. May be that some

(26:12):
of us don't have the talent, or the skill, or
the ability to network, or to backstab or hell to
succeed on a completely ethical basis, and Bob may succeed
on a completely ethical basis. Again, Bob is hypothetical. I'm
not drawing a portrait of anybody. Any similarities between Bob
here and a person in your life or mine are

(26:33):
purely coincidental. I swear to this on a stack of
baseball encyclopedias. I even swear to it on a stack
of great Brain books, which may have had as much
influence on my life as Bill James did, not necessarily
a good influence. What I'm trying to say in my
own awkward and limited way is that envy is a
waste of time and energy when you could invest the

(26:54):
same energy in hope. But then again, there's this story. Again.
It's not a baseball story, but it is a gift
of baseball because I found it in the June third,
nineteen forty eight Oakland Tribune, and I was looking for
some Pacific Coast League story. I don't even know what
At this stage. The Oakland Oaks won the Pennant that year,
and it was a Casey Stengle team. But I've been

(27:14):
done with that research for a long time. Anyway, I
was looking at that quite recently. It doesn't even have
anything to do with Oakland. It's set in Maine, East
new Portland, Maine. As a matter of fact, it's just
an ap story they happened to publish. But I read
it and I felt crushed for the protagonist. The newspaper
story thinks the protagonist is one person. I think it's another.

(27:37):
I think you'll agree with me. It's very brief. I'm
just going to read it to you. Headline, Man and Turtle,
twenty Years of Friendship, East new Portland, Maine, June third,
Associated Press. Harold E. Atwood and his jackknife have a
date in nineteen fifty eight with an old acquaintance, a
turtle first encountered twenty years ago. In the spring of

(27:59):
nineteen twenty eight, Atwood and a companion carved their initials
and the date on a turtle they found in Weymouth Brook.
Ten years later, Atwood found the same shellback plodding around
George Eifort's farm, two miles from the brook. He carved
thirty eight, and once more released his old friend. Recently,

(28:21):
Atwood had another encounter with mister Turtle at Newall Brook,
two miles farther from Weymouth Brook. If the itinerant recognized Atwood,
it probably knew what to expect and got it nineteen
forty eight. Imagine yourself in this poor animal's position. He's
fortunate to be alive, but nevertheless he's been assaulted. Working

(28:45):
against him is the fact that he moves very slowly.
Working in his favor is the fact that he's very
long lived, and so, having been caught once and disfigured
by an ape child, can calculate a plan of escape,
and over ten years he moves two miles, two grueling

(29:08):
miles away from the spot at which he was captured. Unfortunately,
while to a turtle two miles may be equivalent to
our thousand miles, it doesn't work the other way around.
So he's captured again and again has to endure the pain, or,
if not the pain, the humiliation of having himself scarred

(29:29):
marked as if he were a tree by this same jerk.
And so the turtle thinks, I see the flaw in
my plan. I didn't go far enough. So he doubles
the distance. He moves another two miles, again, the same
as us walking one thousand miles on foot, and it
doesn't work. He's captured again. He's disfigured again. It's been

(29:53):
twenty years, and he cannot get away. Here he is
lifted in the air again, that strange weightless feeling, and
he rolls one small eye slowly upwards, just in time
to see the midday sun flash brilliantly off the side
of the knife as it descends slowly downwards towards his shell.

(30:16):
There's an early Stephen King's story called Sometimes They Come Back.
You might have heard of it. It was turned into
a series of B movies at one point. I haven't
seen those, and I have no desire to because I
really dislike this story, and I dislike it because it's
so effective. I mean, up to a point. The ending
kind of Peter's out and I think later in his career,
when he was even more pessimistic, he would have put

(30:39):
a darker end on what is already a very dark story.
The story imagines a really perfect nightmare, and it's this.
We all had moments in our childhood when we were
helpless at the hands of others, bellives or the neighborhood psychopath.
There was one in my school that they kept trying
to mainstream even though he kept hurting the other children,

(31:01):
and up through about fifth grade, they would bring him
back and say, no, really, he's much better now. And
if we had had the vocabulary at that age to say, hey,
missus guide's counselor, you're doing something really irresponsible right now,
because unless you're willing to vouch to all of us
eleven year olds that Brad there is on some heavy
antipsychotic medications that are going to have him pretty much

(31:23):
comatos throughout today's lesson, we are not going to be
learning anything the rest of us eleven year olds because
we will be too busy trying to stop him from
biting us. And here's the scary thing about Brad. Sometimes
I wouldn't encounter him in the relatively safe environment of
the classroom where there were others to restrain him. I

(31:43):
might encounter him walking home. And in moments like that,
I knew how Little Red Riding Hood felt encountering the wolf.
And know the story does not function as a sexual metaphor.
In this telling, Thank You King tells a story about
a man who was physically and emotionally brutalized by teen

(32:04):
criminals when he was a kid. Twenty years later, he's
an English teacher, and the same kids reappear in his classroom,
except they're still the age they were, and they are
bent on finishing the job they began years earlier. And
of course it's not a realistic story, but at the
same time, it seems so plausible that the helplessness we

(32:26):
felt then might return for us. And though we pretend
that we're adults now, that we are secure in our
ability to defend ourselves, to rise to the occasion, and
of course that in our civilized adult world adults do
not behave towards one another as kittie predators do to
their prey. But it's not impossible childhood trauma, because of

(32:49):
the way time dilates for a kid really can be
the most infinite of innings. The idea that we could
get sucked back to that place is terrifying. That turtle
from nineteen forty eight, for all I know he's still around.
That's what he was living through. And so although I
began this little talk by saying that one should let

(33:11):
go of one's bitterness and resentment and embrace hope. There's
also this other truth that sometimes they come back, that
this low moment will recur, and that the author of
our miseries will reappear once again with his pocket knife
to sign a bloody autograph on our backs. Will you
maintain hope? Then, when we learn that we are not adults,

(33:35):
that we are not free agents, that we are nothing
more than turtles in the hands of an angry god.
I'm Steven Goldman and this is the Infinite Inning Baseball Podcast. Well,

(34:25):
hello there. The talking cat in the Kelly Green outfit says,
your highness, I bring word from General Morello of the
Arboreal Tribe. They're holding out against the Gray Legions, but
their situation is desperate. If Castle defiance falls, we are
all in for chocolate terror at the hands of Lady
Grimstaff and the feldspar Night. Will you help us, your highness?

(34:48):
And you say, your highness, no, I'm your hairiness, Harry Bish.
I'm an accountant with the Consolidated Waste Disposal And you
are interrupting my audit of episode forty one. But tell me,
can you sing? Because we're gonna make a lot of
money together welcome back to the show. This thought isn't

(35:09):
really connected to anything, but that talk about looking things
up in the Oakland Tribune before got me thinking about
a catcher named Johnny Basler. And I don't have a
long story to tell you about Johnny Bassel. I don't
know a ton about Johnny Bassler except that Johnny Bassler
was really cool and I wish he were around today.
You know, in the first edition of Bill james Historical

(35:29):
Baseball Abstract, the very first version, he had player comps
for some of the old timers, and these weren't the
kind that are generated via Pakota or zips or any
of those things. These were just kind of impressionistic, basically,
what did those guys seem like to Bill James? And
very memorably under Yogi Barra, he wrote that Yogi Barra

(35:50):
was kind of a combination of Gary Carter and a dwarf,
And I think I think that's about right. The funny
thing about that is, you know that book was thirty
some years ago and Gary Hard was an active and
living Unfortunately he's no longer with US ballplayer at that time,
and so the comparison would have resonated with people now
people would be saying, wait, you're comparing someone we never

(36:11):
saw to someone we never saw. Johnny Bassler is a
little different because when you're comparing Carter and Barra, you're
comparing a Hall of Famer to a Hall of Famer.
I'm going to compare two guys who are not. But
I would say that Johnny Bassler was kind of a
combination of John Jaso and a dwarf. Basslor played over
eight hundred games in the major leagues, mostly for the Tigers.
He was only five to nine left handed swinger, and

(36:33):
he was a good hitter in his way. He had
a THREEHO four career lifetime average, and yeah, the twenties
were a high average time, but not everybody hit three
ZHO four and certainly not everyone had a four to
sixteen career on base percentage. Because Basslor added to that
batting average by just walking a ton proportionately to his
playing time. The problem, I think, and I don't know

(36:54):
what his glove was like, but offensively, the problem was
he was almost incapable of hitting a home run. He
hit a grand total of one in those eight hundred
eleven major league games he played, and so when you
look at him on Baseball Reference or in the Encyclopedia,
you see that his career slugging percentage was only three
sixty one, and in the Pacific Coast League, where he

(37:16):
played forever both before and after his time in the majors,
he hit only five more home runs. He played mostly
for the Hollywood Stars in the twenties and thirties after
the majors, and he had a career lifetime average in
the Pacific Coast League of three twenty one. He was
still good enough to play until he was forty two,
and his career didn't end for lack of playing ability

(37:38):
so much as the fact that he had an actual
heart attack. He was so well thought of as a player,
in fact, that he was part of the inaugural class
of the Pacific Coast League Hall of Fame in nineteen
forty three, even though his lifetime slugging percentage in the
minors was three eighty one. Don't take that as me
belittling him at all, though. Consider him at his major

(38:00):
league best nineteen twenty two. He hits three twenty two
with a four to twenty two on base three sixty slugging,
fourteen doubles, no triples, no home runs, finishes sixth in
the MVP voting. Next year two ninety eight, four, fourteen,
three forty five, somehow hit three triples. People must have
fallen down, finished seventh in the MVP voting. And then

(38:20):
in nineteen twenty four his best season, played one hundred
and twenty four games, hit three forty six with a
four to forty one on base four twenty two slugging.
Because he added that one home run, finished fifth in
the MVP voting. Parenthetically, the one home run came at
Yankee Stadium off a very good pitcher, the right hander
sailor Bob Shockey, four time twenty game winner. But Babe

(38:42):
Ruth also homered in the game, so probably nobody noticed
what Bassla had done. Anyway, no great import here except
that I like to point out the billboards on the
side of the road when I see him, And it's
just fun to know about guys like this and to
think about what they might have accomplished had their major
league careers been a little longer. But you could do
really well in the PCL in those days, make more

(39:03):
money and play before more fans than you could in
the majors. Let's take a quick break before we get
to our second and final story of this reissue episode,
You Don't Mind, Do You? A listener asked me to

(39:26):
comment on some news from the past week, which was
that Jim Tomay announced that he would prefer that his
Hall of Fame plaque have the Indians block C on
it rather than the Chief Wahoo logo. This seems utterly
uncontroversial to me and praiseworthy on Tomay's part, because Chief

(39:49):
Wahoo has long been an abomination, and I'm glad that
going forward the Indians will largely be scrapping it, except
to maintain some sales of the logo so that they
can can keep the trademark. I've written about this issue before.
I don't know where, I don't know when, and sometimes
I even write up pieces on things that I end

(40:09):
up scrapping for one reason or another. But if any
of this sounds familiar to you or you've read it before,
forgive me. My thinking is my thinking, I guess, and
although hopefully my thinking in many areas evolves over time,
in other ways, I tend to conceive things in the
same way, and this is one where I haven't changed.
We could talk about this for a very long time
there's a lot of ink that has been spilled on

(40:30):
this issue, and it's a hard issue to get to
the bottom of because it requires a certain empathy and
a certain understanding that even if a large number of
people look at an image and see it as harmless,
that if one person of the group being depicted sees

(40:53):
it and feels demeaned by it, then that is one
person too many. And even here there are complexities. People
choose to get offended by all kinds of stuff, some
of which many of us might call art. But this
isn't necessarily art. This is a caricature on a baseball
cap of a specific ethnic group. And so you can't

(41:14):
make the same arguments about this pro orcon that you
would make about say a Robert Maplethorpe picture. One of
Maplethorpe's sexualized photographs might scandalize you in terms of what
is permissible to view in public, but he's not calling
out an entire racial group. Wi who does even if
some people look at it and just see a cartoon.

(41:35):
And so if you're a Wahoo proponent, you have to
be able to get past that first initial reaction. What
it's just a picture. You can draw me, I don't
mind if you draw me, But of course they're not
drawing quote unquote you. They're drawing an entire racial group.
And the team is named after the entire racial group,
albeit the dumbass name that Christopher Columbus dropped on them,

(41:56):
or dropped on the initial group of them that he
ran into before he arranged kill them all. Bring me
your gold. We have no gold, segnor then I will
cut off your hands. Now bring me your gold or anyway.
It's impossible to grapple with all of the Chief Wahoo
arguments that come up without being here another year, But
I will mention that two arguments made by proponents of

(42:17):
Chief Wahoo bother the hell out of me because they're
boneheaded on the surface. One is it's traditional. Well great,
it's a tradition that's like eighty something years old. It's
one human life span. It's not a tradition. Second of all,
a tradition is a dumb thing that you've always done
that you haven't stopped to think about whether you should
still be doing it. Does it still have value? Does

(42:39):
it still mean what it meant when it started? Is
it still useful? Does it have utility? Does it injure anybody,
And as with many traditions, if it doesn't meet those criteria,
you throw it out. And for God's sake, it's a
baseball cap. If it does injure anybody, you stop, because
there are more important things. Second, proponents of the logo
are always saying, we've conducted a survey of many people

(43:02):
who identify as Native American and they say that they
are not bothered by Chief Wahoo at all. Well, great,
good for you, glad you paid for survey. I'm glad
you've found some people who are tough enough to say that,
darn it, they're not offended by the cartoon. It doesn't matter.
You don't need other people to tell you what's right
and wrong. And you know, you know, unless you are

(43:25):
a brain dead idiot, that throughout time we caricature people
we want to make fun of. We're this a visual medium.
I would now whip out some political cartoons from after
the Civil War that would curl your hair. They are
so rancid with racist imagery and racist dialogue and the

(43:46):
targets in them. African Americans, Irish Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans,
Catholic Americans, all of them are drawn in a way
to be exaggerated in their features, exaggerated in their habits,
and he perceived negatives or exaggerated and inevitably, the point

(44:07):
of the depiction is to reassure the reader, who I assume,
in ninety nine point nine percent of cases was a
white Protestant American, that the races depicted were in some
way inferior or threatening, or so hopelessly primitive that they're
beneath contempt. It is said that when Bill Veck commissioned

(44:31):
the logo, he asked for something and this is a
quote that would convey a spirit of pure joy and
unbridled enthusiasm. And again, great, I'm glad that was the intention,
and the character might even be defensible on that basis,
had the Cleveland team invested in creating a character that

(44:55):
had depth and nuance and humanity and not just created
a name aimless quote unquote Indian wearing a shit eating
grin who represents all quote unquote Indians on a team
named the Indians. It's so generic that it becomes specific.
It seems astounding that a people, a race that was

(45:17):
on this continent before us, that we negotiated with and
embraced and rejected, and fought and cajoled and chased all
the way across the bloody continent and up to Canada
and down to Mexico. In some cases could become a
figure or figures of unbridled joy and enthusiasm in what

(45:39):
are apparently vexed words. That is a process that happens,
I think inevitably over time with victors and the vanquished.
First your antagonist is a figure of respect, then fear
than anger, and then once it's all over, people that
you can safely laugh at, make mascots up. There's a

(46:00):
warning in that. Again, I don't think it's conscious, so
I just think it happens. In the late sixteen hundreds,
our pilgrim forefathers or their immediate descendants got involved in
something called King Philip's War. And King Philip was not
a king of Spain or anything. He was a Native American.

(46:21):
He was a chief of the Wampanoag tribe, and his
actual name was Meticom or Metacomet. He was a son
of massa Zoit, who was the chief that famously helped
the Pilgrims get through their first harsh winter. The thing
is that that amity that first Thanksgiving that we all
supposedly celebrate. It didn't last very long. They didn't keep
inviting the natives. They were either people to trade with

(46:44):
or to be avoided. They were also in decline due
to disease, disease that happened to come from said colonists.
They were being crowded out because the New England colonies
had a crazy high birth rate. And also they fought
among themselves. Although Daniel Snyder would have you think of
them all as Redskins, reductively and disgustingly enough, they identified

(47:06):
more with different tribal units, tribal units that had their
own issues of diplomacy and war and reconciliation. And it
didn't help that Meticom was apparently not an easy guy
to get along with to begin with. He was a
little erratic, and without getting into the genesis of the
whole thing, what Meticom tried to do was unite all
the tribes against the colonists, drive them out. But what

(47:30):
he really succeeded in doing is uniting all of New England.
Because it's not like all the colonies got along either.
It's not like all the states get along now, so
you get the idea, but he brought them all together
in a war against him, and some of the tribes
who didn't like him aligned with the New Englanders. The
ensuing war lasted three years. It was incredibly bloody. A

(47:52):
lot of people died on both sides, including Medicom, who
was shot dead while hiding in a swamp. You always
know a guy's war didn't go when he ends it
by cowering in a swamp or a bunker. That's not
quite the same thing as the winners stand. And here's
the thing about that. Medicom was a scary guy. But
Medicom had an afterlife, and the afterlife is what concerns

(48:14):
us here. He was a frightening man, a deadly threat
until that moment in the swamp. After that moment, though,
the New Englanders retrieved his body, removed his head, and
they put it on a pole on the gates to
Fort Plymouth, where it remained for twenty years. Obviously, Medicom

(48:36):
himself was beyond punishment, so the head was meant as
a warning. Who was it a warning to well, anybody
else on the Native American side of the line who
might get an idea to try to pick up where
Medicom left off. A bit earlier, there was another war
between the colonists and the New England tribes. It was

(48:57):
called the Pequot War. That really went badly for the Pequots,
who were either massacred or sold into Caribbean slavery. And
so as recently as nineteen hundred it was still being
debated as to whether or not there were as many
as one hundred people of Pequot descent left. You probably
knew that if you were a Native American hanging around

(49:19):
the Massachusetts area in the sixteen hundreds. So you looked
at Medicom's head, you thought back to your history, and
you stayed on your side of the fence. Chief Wahoo
is a descendant, not intentionally, but nevertheless is a descendant
of Medicom, or specifically the part of Medicom that spent

(49:42):
the first twenty years of his afterlife greeting visitors to
Fort Plymouth. The dim echo of his skull, that is,
the Wahoo version of things, is reflective of a later
generation of Native Americans and the closing of the Indian
Wars that occupied the United States from really its founding,

(50:02):
but particularly after the Civil War and the explosive growth
of railroads through about eighteen ninety. Note that Geronimo surrendered
for the last time in eighteen eighty six, and Sitting
Bowl was murdered in eighteen ninety. The Wounded Knee massacre
was that same year. And so when do the braves

(50:23):
become the braves nineteen twelve? When do the Indians first
become the Indians? Nineteen fifteen, twenty or so years ago by?
And what once was a partner in conflict was now
a figure of pure joy. And if you don't believe that,
if you don't believe that that's the psychological process at work,
then ask yourself. What would it have meant if someone,

(50:47):
some early ball club like the original Cincinnati Reds had
put a Chief Wahoo logo or any Indian logo of
any kind, any Native American reference on their caps uniforms
when the league was founded in eighteen seventy six. You
know what happened that year, little Bighorn, It would have
meant something very very different, and it would have been

(51:11):
in very different taste, bad taste in fact. But to
the opposite side. I'll leave that here. There's so much
more to say, thousands and thousands of words more to say,
but others have said them, they'll keep saying them. Look,
it's Jim Toma's plaque. Mind your damn business, and to
borrow from the hippocratic oath. For God's sake, do no harm.
That's the least that we can do in life. By

(51:34):
Oscar Wilde's most cutting remark, we have reached the end
of another show. This is where I used to tell
you how to follow the guests on Twitter, and me too,
But neither you nor the guests are on Twitter. Well
I don't know about the guests actually, but you're not
on Twitter. It's all bots nowadays. Or maybe you are
and you're not a bot, but you like conversing with bots.
Either way, you can follow me on Blue Sky at

(51:55):
Steven Goldman dot b Sky. Thank you. You can also
write us Infinite Inning at gmail dot com and rate
us rate us rate us by which I mean me
and who goes around crying rate me. I mean this
is not a dating app anyway, Rate us at the
podcatcher of your choice. It is greatly appreciated. We have
a sponsor now, but nonetheless, this episode is brought to

(52:18):
you by the number thirty five. Our producer is Deco
Modern our theme song, which you are hearing now and
have been hearing throughout the episode, was co authored by
myself and doctor Richard Mooring, who we talked about extensively
earlier in the episode. You know, when we were talking
about sidekicks in the Breakfast Club, I was reaching for

(52:38):
the words Judd Nelson, but what my brain kept sending
me was jud hirsh which is a very different thing,
and in any case, neither really applies to Rick, who
was more of an Amelio Estevez. If Emilio Estevez had
a huge brain, it's hard to figure out. Well, if
I don't get hired to write a revival of the
Uncle Wiggily series and get carpal tunnel syndrome, type the

(53:00):
word rheumatism over and over again, I'll be back. That's
all for this reissue episode. Thanks for listening, and I'll
look forward to seeing you over in episode three point
forty two, coming later this week. Keep your inning infinite
until then, Okay,