Infinite Inning Reissue 14 (209): Baseball Before Vaccines

This week’s new remarks are occasioned by the Florida surgeon general’s decision (which he may or may not have the power to enforce) to repeal all vaccine mandates in the state. Then we return to the first time the Pirates traded a future MVP and revisit the sad story of Cardinal catcher Bill DeLancey.

Apologies for the lack of a farewell note--the mixdown was being very wonky and I couldn't get through it without it crashing

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, and welcome back to the Infinite Inning
reissue series, in which we go back to prior episodes
of the Infinite Inning, some that have been out for years,
and we clean them up a bit, I hope, and
revisit some topics that may still resonate for those who

(00:46):
came in later but don't really feel like splunking through
the archives. And I have been told this by some
longtime listeners. They enjoy going back and having me do
the sorting for them. That's sort of an ancient gray
Hound commercial. Remember that, leave the driving to us, Well,
leave the furiating to me. And who am I? I

(01:06):
happen to be Stephen Goldman, your host for as always,
a trip back to the past on a mission to
better understand the present. This episode in which we undertook
that journey was number two hundred and nine, and it
is now about four years old, having come out in
December of twenty twenty one. In fact, it is so

(01:28):
old that I have to draw your attention to two
things that I say in the course of my introduction,
which may cause a bit of confusion. Now, heck, there
may be more than that, in fact, but there are
only two that I'm aware of ignorance. Is no excuse,
thunders your inner prosecutor. Well, I throw myself upon the
mercy of the court. That goes well for some people,

(01:50):
not so well for others. The first is that I
mentioned that at that time baseball was in lockdown. Well
it isn't now, it may yet be again about a
year from now. A little more than that. They seem
to be planning that for twenty twenty six, So I
guess we have to steal ourselves. But I have some
plans for that period anyway, and I very much hope

(02:11):
I'll be well positioned to entertain you in other ways.
Not that this program is about new baseball, but of
course new baseball sometimes feeds our exploration or prompts it
of old baseball. The second thing is I made an
admiring reference to Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, And yeah, that
was before Neil Gaiman was revealed to be a somewhat

(02:36):
problematic person. I met him one time at his signing,
this was maybe before he was a superstar, and had
a brief conversation with him that I've looked back on fondly,
and now I feel weird about that. I still admire
a lot about the series, so I'm going to leave
that part of the discussion in. But to be honest
with you, I had bought a revised version, not revised,

(02:57):
but reprinted, recolored, improved, right before all that happened, and
it was just waiting for the right day, the day
that the mood struck when I would reread a series
that I had already read so many times before, including
when it had first come out, and I still haven't
found that day. I don't know when that day is coming,
because I don't know how I will feel about it

(03:20):
in light of later revelations. Let me tell you why
I selected this particular episode for our reissue this week. Normally,
the way my personal schedule works out is that I
do these episodes, these reissues, usually on Tuesday or earlier
on Wednesday, and then I write my Baseball Prospectives weekly column.

(03:42):
You could look it up over the remainder of Wednesday,
often finishing quite late. Fortunately for me, I'm on East
Coast time, and we have some BP editors who are
on West Coast time, so no one is really inconvenienced,
at least as far as I know by my keeping. Well,
West Coast hours myself. Some weeks, I know what I

(04:04):
want to write from the get go. There's something very
obvious that is motivating me to put my pause on
the keyboard and write fifteen hundred or two thousand words.
Two of the last three weeks haven't been like that,
in fact, and I hate when I do this, but
it is part of the process if you write. Sometimes
I started on a given subject and was bored to tears,

(04:28):
And if the author is bored, there's a pretty good
chance that the readers are going to be bored too.
I made a kind of haphazard attempt to change a
current events baseball story into more of a personal or
confessional essay. But I was still bored because who cares
about me, well, not me, to be honest, and so

(04:49):
I accepted, in true baseball prospectives fashion, that that time
was a sunk cost. I did sort of a mental
k turn and I got out of that blind alley.
But then I was bereft of a and for a
dangerous moment, I thought about getting in touch with my
editor in chief, Craig Goldstein, and saying I don't have anything.
I'm just gonna bail today. Okay, Editors love it when

(05:11):
you do that, and you can't. You can't stay in
my line of work and do that very often, if
at all. Early in my career, roughly around the time
that I met Neil Gaiman. I'm not saying these events
are are linked or anything, an editor said to me
that blown deadlines are for near fatal illnesses and deaths
in the family, and I really have adhered to that
all across my career, because a writer is only as

(05:35):
useful as he is reliable. Yes, you have to be good,
but if, say, you're also getting drunk and missing deadlines,
then they can't use you after a while. The reason
for this ethos, I suppose, is the same in every
profession that requires workers to deliver something on a given schedule,
on a reliable schedule, whether it's stories about the Shadow

(05:56):
for a pulp magazine or widgets for a cell phone.
The pulp magazine is more applicable to what we do
at baseball perspectus, But it would have been more obvious
then because the magazine would have gone out on time.
If Walter Gibson had just not turned in a fifty
thousand word Shadows story that week. You cannot imagine how greatly.
I honor Walter Gibson for keeping that schedule for as

(06:19):
long as he did. Well, we don't have it that
rough and on a website, I suppose it's less obvious
when something is missing. And yet the people who make
the publication have expectations, the readers have expectations, and I
have expectations for myself. So I was sitting here still
trying to figure out what I was going to write,
when I saw a story that resonated with The Infinite Inning.

(06:43):
And it's something that if you read it, you'll see
I referred to this show, not just this specific episode,
but The Infinite Inning in general, because today, as I
say these words, the Surgeon General of Florida and the
Governor of Florida announced that they intend to suspend all
vaccine in the state, including for children who will no

(07:03):
longer be expected to be vaccinated for things like chicken pox,
which I personally had at the late age of sixteen
or seventeen, and it was pure fun. Let me tell
you not to mention measles, mom's rubella and so on.
There was no vaccine for chicken pox when I had it.
I was sitting in a study hall, I looked up
to see a girl not too far across the room.

(07:23):
Said girl sporting a fairly spotty complexion. At that moment,
that was not just teenage Acne, who had turned to
a friend of hers and said, yeah, I have chicken pox,
but I figure everyone has already had it, so I
came to school anyway. Well I had not had it,
and I started edging my desk away rapidly, in almost

(07:43):
comedic fashion. But it was too late. Jill, if you're
out there, you know who you are, and I'm going
to settle up with you one day. So in Florida,
at least following Texas's lead to some extent, we are
returning to not a pre twentieth century way of doing
business or a nineteenth century way, but an eighteenth century way.

(08:04):
Pre We're practically back to Shakespeare, because I can show
you arguments from when Benjamin Franklin was young and the
guy was born in seventeen to ought six about vaccinations
for smallpox and whether they were a good idea or not.
We have been litigating this stuff for better than three
hundred years, and among the many reasons that life expectancy

(08:27):
is so much higher than it was in seventeen oh
six is because we have vaccines, because we have antibiotics,
and yeah, we ask everyone to use them. Those who
don't are free riders on everyone who does. As I
explain in the piece, the reason that this is an
infinite inning story is because since we talk about so

(08:51):
many nineteenth and early twentieth century ballplayers on this show,
I have had to say so often that a given
player die of a disease like tuberculosis, a communicable disease,
that we can now prevent some of them years later,
some of them at mid career. I've had to do
it so often I feel self conscious about it. But

(09:12):
this episode is largely about a player who suffered in
exactly that way. Episode two oh nine begins with the
story of an ill considered trade between the braves and
the pirates, but then in the second half contains a
rather lengthy story from the nineteen thirties, which is late
for this sort of thing, regarding a Cardinals, a branch
Ricky prospect who suffered very badly from contracting the disease,

(09:37):
and the consequences for both his career and his life
were significant severe final I returned to him in the
piece as well, as other players who suffered from tuberculosis
who we've talked about here, including of course Christy Mathewson
and Addie Joss. I don't want to go on too
much longer because I'm going to spoil both the column

(09:58):
and the reissue episode. I just want to say this much,
and I've said things like this before, but they're worth reiterating,
especially here in twenty twenty five. In this regards Florida's
Surgeon General analogizing vaccine mandates to slavery, which I take
to mean that anyone telling you that you're required to

(10:20):
do something with your body is treating you as a slave.
And the irony of people who feel that a woman's
reproductive health is everyone's business but the woman's would be
hilarious if it weren't so tragic. And yes, from a
pure libertarian point of view, your right to do what
you want, how you want when you feel like it

(10:41):
is being limited by vaccine mandates. But guess what. We
also don't let you run through red lights. We don't
let you sniff cocaine or sell it, and I don't
know how you run your household, but we don't let
the kids leave roller skates on the stairs because someone
is going to die. And speaking of those kids, every
single state makes them go to school. Now they may

(11:03):
be homeschooled, and increasingly states may not check on those kids,
so they're not learning anything and they're not prepared to
be an asset to our nation. It's your kid, isn't it.
Doesn't the parent always get the final say, what they read,

(11:24):
what they see, and what shots they take. Why can't
you run red lights which don't apply to you as
a sovereign citizen with that same child junior strapped to
the hood. That's illegal. Why do we have regulations that
say that workers at Chipotle cannot go to the bathroom,
wipe themselves with their bare hands, and then prepare your burrito?

(11:46):
And the short version, without my going on for another
fifteen minutes, is we have experience with all this stuff,
and it's deleterius to the community. It is bad and
it is dangerous. Look up typhoid Mary, same idea. Yeah,
if she was shedding via her body bacteria everywhere, isn't
that her business? And so once again we're down to

(12:09):
that age old question of my rats versus your rats.
What happens when the right that you want to exercise
in dangers my right to live, or vice versa. What
happens when you sending your unvaccinated kid to school causes
my child to become dangerously ill, which unfortunately I've had

(12:29):
experience with with my own kids with lifelong implications. And
I can tell you no one did that on purpose.
It wasn't one of these things you can be vaccinated for.
But I regret that every single day of my life
and worry and mourn what might have been for my
child that would be different if they had not been
affected in that way. And you know the answer, right,
It's the same reason that you can't run naked onto

(12:51):
the field during the next Red Sox at Yankees game,
no matter how badly you want to, because no one
wants to see that, just like they don't want to
experience tuberculosis or a month's measles or rubella at your hands.
And if I may quote so august An authority as
mister Spock, the needs of the many outweigh the needs
of the few or the one. Without that understanding of

(13:15):
how communities function well, they don't, and a nation goes
to hell. That's all for me for this reissue episode.
You may hear from me as I paper through some
old breaks and again at the end. We'll take a
quick break now and on the other side, one of
the first times, not the last, that the Pirates traded
a future MVP. We are in deepest December. Baseball is

(14:01):
in a lockout, you might have heard. So I hope
you will have a little patience if we get away
from baseball a bit on this week's show, as we
sometimes do here on the program, not completely. My first
story is about managers, and my second, longer tail will
be about a ballplayer, a secretly great catcher of the past,

(14:22):
if the hype is to be believed. Our conversation, though,
only has as much to do with baseball, as everything
has to do with baseball, as ballplayers are people and
succeed and fail at about the same rate we do
in non baseball endeavors. Actually, here's a good question. Do
they succeed and fail at a higher or lower rate

(14:44):
than we do on the field? If a player hits
two fifty, is he doing better than most of us
do in our life decisions? Our equivalence to it bats
I can't pour a cup of coffee without spilling something,
so it's possible. This week, the Meds and A's hired
new managers, Buck Showalter and Mark Kotze, respectively. They are

(15:07):
all dressed up with nowhere to go until the lockout
is over. All thirty jobs have now been filled. It's
been such a slow, stentorian march away from the end
of the season that I've almost lost track of which
positions have changed. I think it's the Cardinals replaced Mike

(15:28):
Schilt with Oliver Marmel. The Padres canned Jace Tangler. That's
a really impolite way of putting it's a lot too blunt,
but mister Tinkler has been defenestrated that's still pretty rough
and replaced with Bob Melvin, which led to the A's
replacing Melvin with Kotze, and of course Buck Showalter takes

(15:50):
over for Luis Rojas with the Metropolitans. He's now the
Yankees third base coach Rojas that is. I think that's
the lot. I used to get excited these sorts of
things because of the potential change of approach they'd bring,
But since the golden age of managers, the John McGraw days,

(16:11):
they are more vehicles for the dictats of the front office.
And that is particularly true in the modern era of
baseball thinking, when things like just slow motion and replay,
not to mention advanced metrics and other forms of really
looking at the game in the granular way, have debunked
a lot of the tools that managers used to use.

(16:34):
Think about Gene Mock. Gene Mock, in a lot of
ways was a very successful manager in that he had
a career in the major leagues that lasted almost thirty years,
and yet although he did make a couple of postseasons,
he never won anything. And you go back to his
record and you say, okay, he was famous for being

(16:55):
a one run guy, for being a small ball guy.
And then you realize that there were periods, years, seasons
in which, even managing the Angels with the designated hitter,
that he was bunting two hundred percent more often than
any of his contemporaries, And you say, how much did
that cost those teams? Today they would handcuff him to

(17:20):
the bench, they'd see his hands about to go up
to give the sign, and some coach would sap him
with a blackjack. I have such a great job. So
as a result of that very warranted fear of being
bonked over the head. Today, they do a lot less
In any given year. There are exceptions coaches who seem

(17:42):
to exceed or underperform the boring norm. Gabe Kapler was
that guy this year. The manager who had a magical
ability to press the right button. I want to see
him do it two years in a row, though. Remember,
repeatability is the litmus test of any scientific experiment. If
you can't redo it, maybe you can't trust your results.

(18:05):
Baseball Reference lists eight hundred and twenty eight managers going
back to the nineteenth century. If you look at that
list alphabetically, you see right towards the top one season
wonder Doug Allison, a catcher born in eighteen forty six.
Doug was a veteran of the Union Army, although I
don't think he saw combat. He managed the eighteen seventy

(18:26):
three Elizabeth Resolutes of the National Association and they went
three and twenty. This is so early in professional baseball
that I doubt anyone had Buck Showalter like expectations of
a twenty six year old player manager coaching a team
that dwelt in the Salt Marshes of New Jersey. But
you never know. I mean, the Mets play in Willett's Point,

(18:48):
And how different are the chop shops of Willet's Point
from the salt marshes of New Jersey? Youwer birds, there's
one example right off the top. You've never seen a
plover at ten a Mets game or a belted Kingfisher.
You thought that was a laughing gull, But no, those
were just the Mets fans, and they weren't laughing, they
were crying. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. The

(19:10):
resolute says I just indicated, played in Elizabeth, New Jersey,
by the way, which I regret to say, is roughly
coterminous with the ominous industrial landscape that most people who
fly into Newark Airport and then just look south or
travel directly south on the Turnpike experience. As soon as
they get to the Garden State. They take in these

(19:32):
massive chemical refineries and a sky that is slight colored,
even if it's a bright and sunny day, and they
might take a deeply invigorating width of the odors that
emanate there from and they say garden, what garden? And
that's a bit unfair to Elizabeth, which is a thriving

(19:54):
city with a growing Latino population. Yeah, it's kind of
parked on the Arthur Kill, which is surrounded by those refineries,
and you kind of expect it to burst into flames
like the Kuyahoga did back in the day, or that
maybe you could just walk across it, not because you
have messionic powers, but because it has a density like

(20:15):
a well set pudding. And we all know, whether we
like it or not, that almost every state, probably every
state has some spot that's like that, but only we
make a point of showing ours off as soon as
you arrive. And that mess has been there over one
hundred years, which means that when Doug Allison played there,

(20:38):
it hadn't happened yet. That's how long ago it was.
The city was just industrializing at that time, with the
Singer Sewing machine company building a big plant the same
year that Grand Army of the Republic Doug arrived. The
Elizabeth Resolutes didn't last long, but Singer was a major
employer in the town for one hundred and nine years,

(21:00):
which is to say it was a much bigger deal
that they arrived than it was that Doug showed up.
That's my whole point in bringing up deer departed Doug
who left US in December nineteen sixteen. Of the eight
hundred and twenty eight managers, four hundred and ninety eight
or sixty percent, managed at least one hundred and fifty

(21:21):
games in the major leagues, or approximately one full season,
very close to one under the pre expansion schedule. Of those,
one hundred and eighty three or thirty seven percent, a
little over a third made it all the way to
the postseason at least once. And that's a very good
percentage for baseball. You hit three thirty three in baseball,

(21:43):
you win MVP Awards, they give you a plaque at
the Hall of Fame. So baseball managers hit three seventy. Conversely,
almost two thirds of them failed, failure being what baseball
creates best. And I think we all know that those
are the odds. I think general managers and owners know
that they may convince themselves otherwise. But to look at

(22:07):
the history of all of those hirings and the inevitable firings,
is to see people sell the optimistic version and then
accept the pessimistic version, which, at the risk of sounding cynical,
is the accurate version. Billy Herman, the Hall of Fame

(22:29):
second baseman is actually a great example of this. He
got to manage twice, once with the Pittsburgh Pirates in
the late nineteen forties, once with the Boston Red Sox
in the mid sixties. It was nineteen sixty four, the
year of the Beatles in Billy Herman. Between those two
teams he got all of three full seasons, and his

(22:49):
record is like a modern version of deer departed Dougs.
No one really goes to and twenty three or the
equivalent thereof during a full season. In modern baseball. There
are too many breaks on things such as the draft
and free agency to prevent teams from going into that
total freefall most of the time. But his team's lost

(23:10):
one hundred, ninety two and ninety games. Herman took over
the Pirates for the nineteen forty seven season. They had
last won a pennant twenty years earlier. That was the
team that got swept by the nineteen twenty seven Yankees.
In the years since, the team had generally been good,

(23:30):
posting winning seasons in fourteen of nineteen campaigns. They just
weren't quite able to get the last couple of pieces together.
Barney Dreyfus, Hey Barney passed away and his heirs really
couldn't run the team as well as he did. Also,
there was a War two and they just started slipping

(23:50):
backwards in nineteen forty six, and this is with all
their players back. They went sixty three and ninety one.
They had actually been better with all the four Fuys.
And after that campaign they fired Frankie Frish, their manager
for the previous several years. The managing owner, Frank McKinney,
who had just bought the team from the heirs of

(24:11):
mister Dreyfus, was keen on getting Herman as manager for
reasons that aren't really clear. He hadn't managed in the
majors to that point. He had spent two years in
the service, so although he had played very well in
nineteen forty six, it's not exactly as if he had
been impressing people with his coaching acumen. He just hadn't
been around. There were four owners in that partnership, McKinney,

(24:34):
John Gallbreath, who would have the team for much longer
in the end, Thomas Johnson and Bing Crosby, Yes Harry
Lillis Crosby, the crooner. Herman was McKinney's guy, and it's
just hard to imagine what the conversation must have been like.
As they were casting around for replacements for the Fordham Flash,
somebody must have said, Joe McCarthy's available. Boo booooo boo

(24:57):
boo boo No Herman, Kenny replied, but why boo boo?
Well he did hit two ninety eight this year, but
what does that really mean in terms of knowing how
to run a team. In any case, his argument won
the day. I'm not sure how tampering rules work back then,
but the way Herman told it, years later, McKinney called

(25:19):
him and said, I really want you as manager, and
Herman said, great, How are you gonna get me away
from Boston? That's who he had been playing for. He
was still an active player under contract. Gonna swing a
trade with the Braves for your services, says McKinney. Great,
says Herman, Gonna trade our best player to get you. No, no, no,

(25:41):
says Herman. It's gonna be great, says McKinney. And Herman says, no,
it won't because I'm thirty eight years old. Have you
ever seen a thirty eight year old second baseman named
date fresher specimens out of the Siberian perma frost, but
too late. On September thirtieth, nineteen forty six, the Pirate
swap third baseman and outfielder Bob Elliott, as well as

(26:04):
a reserve catcher to the Boston Braves for Herman, pitcher
Elmer Singleton, outfielder stan Winzel, and shortstop Whitey Weidelman. Elliott,
already a three time All Star and two time top
ten MVP finisher at that point, hit a great two
ninety five with a three ninety eight on base percentage
and four eighty five slugging in five years with the Braves,

(26:27):
and won an MVP award in nineteen forty eight. Herman
got Hurt, played a total of fifteen games as a
Pirate's player, managed them for up to the last week
of the nineteen forty seven season, at which point he
resigned under pressure, but that was all in the future.
As of his hiring in October nineteen forty six, Billy Herman,

(26:50):
the new Pirate manager, faces one of the best opportunities
in Big League Baseball, said the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, coming
here to take charge under the agis of a new
owner which intends to plow back profits in order to
get the team out of the second division doldrums. Herman
will be given the sort of cooperation which every manager,
new or old needs to produce a winner. Like many

(27:12):
another baseball man, Herman has the technical know how. There
are a couple of assumptions in there which were dangerous
to make and prove not to be true. One, Herman
did not get the cooperation. He was McKinney's pick, not
general manager Roy Hamies, and Hamy did not want him
at all. Second, he in no way displayed the technical

(27:33):
know how, particularly when it came to the bane of
all freshmen managers, when and how to make a pitching change.
Within eleven months he was gone. We've talked to Billy
at some length. McKinney said, he's not apologizing and we
are not indicting him, but we felt that some changes
should be made. Bill felt it would be in the

(27:55):
best interests of all concerned if he resigned. We still
have the greatest respect for his ability and his managerial strategy.
So in less than a year they had gone from
trading an all star and future MVP a guy who
wouldn't look totally out of place on the wall up
in upstate New York, just to get this guy's butt

(28:15):
on the bench to saying, well, I still respect him.
That's why you have to temper your enthusiasm when a
manager is hired. It's at this point in this kind
of story where I usually say, not even a a
Weaver could have won with this roster. I'm not totally
sure of that. I mean, it wasn't a championship team,
no matter what, but it had the bones of a
five hundred team with some good luck. The Pirates had

(28:38):
a bad offense, a bad defense, and bad pitching. But
by bad, I don't mean that bad. I don't mean
abjectly miserable. I just mean below average. And it seems likely, well,
let me put that a different way. It seems possible
that a better manager could have gotten a little more
out of them. And indeed, the very next season, nineteen

(29:01):
Billy Meyer, Herman's replacement, picked up a manager of the
Year award for going eighty three and seventy one with
a very similar roster. So to a certain extent, Hamy
who said, apparently off the record or temporarily off the record,
given that I'm here telling you about it. I don't
believe Herman has the stuff to be a big league manager.

(29:21):
If we give him another chance in nineteen forty eight,
we would just be postponing the inevitable and go suffering
through another season. It's best to get it over now
fair enough, and I'm sure he felt validated when the
team improved and Billy Meyer picked up that award, But
it's important to note that that's as good as it got.

(29:41):
The Pirates had some very bad seasons in their immediate future,
with not just Meyer but Fred Haney, who would later
win a World Series with the Braves, and then Bobby Breakin,
and all they did was lose miserably. It just didn't
matter who the manager was when the team was Ralph Kiner,
Murray Dixon, and I don't have a third guy, Joe Garagiola.

(30:05):
And that's why our attention is better placed not on
managers being hired, but on general managers. On Hami. In
this example, Hami worked in the Yankee system under director
of player Development George Weiss. After a stint as American
Association President, he returned to the Major's as general manager
of the Pirates. He held that position from nineteen forty

(30:27):
six through nineteen fifty, and as I just suggested, when
the team stagnated, he was replaced by branch Rickey, under
whom things got even worse, But they eventually did start
to rebound after he left, and eventually many of his
acquisitions would be part of the nineteen sixty championship team.
After a few years back with the Yankees as Weiss's assistant,

(30:47):
Weiss had become general manager of the Yankees at the
exact moment that Hami had become general manager of the Pirates.
He was hired as Phillies general manager in nineteen fifty four,
and he took that team from seventy seven and seventy seven,
two sixty four and ninety in a few short years,
and was fired after the nineteen fifty nine season. The

(31:08):
team bottomed out two years later, losing one hundred and
seven games, but rebounded under his replacement, John Quinn. Finally,
the Yankees took him back, forcing Weiss into retirement after
the nineteen sixty season and hiring Hamy. Amy had the
team from nineteen sixty one through nineteen sixty three, and
it went to the World Series all three years, but

(31:30):
to borrow from Barack Obama. He didn't build that. That
was Weiss's construct. Amy was forced out for Ralph Halk
so that Yogi Barrack could become manager, or more because
Halk needed an escape up to the front office and
Barrow was sort of the fall guy. But ask yourself
what happened to the Yankees. As soon as nineteen sixty five.

(31:52):
Amy's managers with the Phillies were Steve O'Neill, Mayo Smith,
and Eddie Sawyer, and they're an instructive bunch too. Was
the manager of the World Series winning nineteen forty five Tigers.
Didn't help the Phillies. Smith would win the World Series
with the nineteen sixty eight Tigers. Didn't help the Phillies.
Sawyer had helped the Phillies, But in nineteen fifty, when

(32:14):
you want a pennant with the whiz Kids, maybe O'Neil
and Sawyer had forgotten their magic touch by the time
they got to Philadelphia and worked with Roy. Philadelphia may
in fact have that effect on people. Or maybe Smith
hadn't found his magic touch yet, or perhaps just perhaps
the outcomes of those teams had less to do with

(32:35):
the waiter serving the meal than it did with the
chef cooking it. Maybe the chef left out a key
ingredient that reminds me of a lesson contained it in
a very old waiter joke, one of the one of
the ancient there's a fly in my soup lineage of humor,
if you can call them humorous. It goes like this.

(32:57):
For twenty years, the same customer visited a restaurant and
without fail, always ordered the same dish, borshed. And all
that time he never once complained about the food or
service the model customer. One evening, when the waiter had
served the customary plate of borshed, the customer called him

(33:17):
back to the table. Waiter, taste this borshed? Why what's
the matter with it? Just taste it. Listen, it's too cold,
it doesn't taste straight. Whatever. I'll take it back and
bring you another serving. Taste the borshed. Why should I taste?
You don't want it. You don't want it, so I'll
bring you a change. Why should I argue with a

(33:39):
good customer? The customer, his face dark with fury, stood
up for the last time. Taste The bushed, intimidated. The
waiter sat down, all right, all right, if you insist,
he looked around, where's the spoon? Aha? Exploded the customer.

(33:59):
A missing shortstop, it turns out, is much like a
missing spoon. And here's a second lesson for you. Gags
like that will not only cost you a pennant, they
earn you a one way ticket to the infinite inning. Well,

(34:51):
hello there, and happy holidays. If holidays you are indeed celebrating,
and why not happy birthday to you do even if
it's not your birthday. You know, sometimes I have this
conversation with my wife. I'll say, you know, Steph, I
saw this baseball book online, this rare old baseball book.
I'd really like to have it for my library, but
they're charging one hundred and fifty dollars for it, and

(35:13):
I usually don't spend that much. And She'll say, well,
what are you gonna do? And I'll say, well, it
is my birthday. I recommend this solution to a lot
of problems. Say you are out at a restaurant, I
mean when we are not being inundated by a virus,
and you finished a sumptuous meal and then the waiter
hands you the dessert menu and you might say, well,

(35:36):
I really shouldn't patting your tummy. But it is my birthday.
Doesn't matter what day of the year it is. No
one's gonna call you on it. It's just a lie
that you can tell yourself that permits all sorts of
outrageous behavior, self indulgent behavior. Really, it is my birthday.
And then you order the black forest cake, maybe two slices,
seven layer cake. Can you get a good seven layer

(35:59):
cake anymore? When when I was a kid, that was
the in cake. Every diner had a seven layer cake.
Every high end, four star, five star Michelin Guide restaurant
had a seven layer cake. Now no one has seven
layer cake. Then again, I wouldn't know. I haven't left
this room in two years. But seriously, watch the Great

(36:20):
British Baking Show. Every year they'll make a Charlotte Rousse
before they make a seven layer cake. And now that
I've got you running to the refrigerator to claw through
the detritus of previous meals and see if you've got
any Charlotte Rooss leftovers, allow me to thank you for
attending this the second to last Infinite inning of twenty

(36:40):
twenty one. As I said mere moments ago, this is
the second to last episode of twenty twenty one. I
intend fate willing to be here in twenty twenty two,
which would be let's see, we began the show in
twenty seventeen, so seventeen eighteen ninety two. I am counting
on my fingers. Your six is? Is that possible? I

(37:01):
have grown not only old, but nearly blind in the
service of my country. George Washington said that he deserved
to say it it was a big moment. I do
not deserve to say it. Actually had already grown blind
by the time I showed up here. But I'll take
the sympathy anyway. It is my birthday, after all. My
intention for next week's final show of the year is

(37:22):
to repeat the experiment I did at this time in
twenty twenty and tell you a fictional version of baseball history.
I should say, some baseball historical fiction. That would be
the human English way to put it. And in a sense,
this story is a sequel to last year's. Last Year's,

(37:43):
which appeared in episode one sixty seven, if you want
to check it out, was a story of a young
Babe Ruth and a very young Louis Armstrong meeting in
New York circa nineteen twenty two, this one will be
a tale of lou Garrick. That one, in the end
was light. This one is kind of dark. So I
hope you enjoy that, assuming I get through it. I

(38:06):
sort of frightened committing to this in public. There's a
whole lot of reading and doing voices and things, and
as you know, as you just heard, I do not
do voices well. I barely do my own voice well.
And here's another thing I don't do well. Transition into
a break. But it is time for that one more
story for you. As I said, a catcher who at

(38:26):
least one person insisted was one of the greatest of
all time. I suspect you might not agree, but I
have reasons for talking to him at this particular time
and place. So please wait a second. Did I say
talking to him, I mean talking about him. This is
not a seance. Come in, Joe Demaggio, send us a sign.

(38:47):
Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? Maybe we don't want
to know. Okay, So, as I was saying, stand by,
hang fire for just long enough for us to endure
this brief intermission, because as it was time to take
a break now In twenty twenty one, so it is
time to take a break in twenty twenty five. I'll

(39:07):
see on the other side or past me. Will you
know how it is? You know, when you've been doing
this show as long as I have, or a show
as long as I have, you start to have this
feeling of deja vous at times, because there are certain

(39:29):
things and I find this appropriately enough in my marriage too,
in all of my friendships, there are certain stories that
are important to you, certain things that in your life
consistently stimulate you to expression over and over again. And
so you have this sense I told you this story right,
or I said that before. I'm pretty sure I mentioned

(39:49):
this before, and then I start saying that so often
I might have mentioned this before, maybe I told you
this one that I feel boring saying that. And I
know that this happens to people. You can see it
sometimes on shows that satirize other shows. John Oliver does
this all the time. He'll pick someone on CNN or

(40:11):
MSNBC or Fox who has certain crutches when they talk
or bring up the same topic again and again, and
he'll put together a clip reel of dozens of occasions
of them bringing up the same thing over and over again.
Just this week, I was listening to Paul Shecher and
Amy Nicholson talk about the movie Love Actually on their

(40:34):
Unspooled podcast, which I rather like. I recommend it if
you're into discussions about movies, and Love Actually is an
easy target, you know, I admit, I confess that when
I first saw that movie, I liked it. And then
when you walk away from it, when you get five
minutes from it, the flaws, some of which are obvious
when you see it, but you still leave with a

(40:56):
good feeling. And then you look at it more closely
or really just get away from the visceral feeling of
Love Actually, then you start to realize it's awful. I
did not realize this because I was never a big
watcher of his shows, but the defrocked MSNBC host Chris
Matthews apparently had an almost unhealthy obsession with the film,

(41:18):
and so he'd be talking about whatever the news subject
of the day was, the Congress can't pass that bill.
It's kind of like Love Actually, And he just did
this again and again, and they ran a good I
don't know, thirty seconds of him invoking this really when
you get down to it, trite story that again, still
has some good vibes and some amusing parts if you

(41:42):
don't question them too closely. And I bring all this
up because I'm about to mention a panel from Neil
Gaman Sandman. And I feel certain because it's something that
weighs on me in its way. It is part of
sort of the attic of my mind, the junk that's
stuffed in there. And I don't mean to insult by
saying junk, but just the the conjuries of random, accumulated

(42:05):
inputs that I've experienced in my life. I feel certain
that somewhere in the previous two hundred and nine episodes
I've mentioned it, but maybe I haven't. There is a
panel in an early issue of Neil Game and Sandman
that sums up some of the unfairness of life. It
came to me twice recently. Again, it comes to me often,

(42:25):
but once in a kind of benign way, and then
more seriously in recent days. If you haven't read Sandman,
and there's going to be a Netflix adaptation next year,
and there's an audible adaptation. If you're into listening to well,
you're obviously you're listening to me. You're into listening to podcasts,
but into stories that are dramatized. It's like an old

(42:48):
radio show. It's very good and they have just completed
their second season, so you can get a good chunk
of it if you subscribe to Audible. And no, I
do not get a kickback for that. I would like
to get a kick I would like a kickback for something.
I think the Seven Layer Cake people should really reach
out to me after this episode, don't you well. Sandman
posits that there are a handful of anthropomorphosized beings. Gods

(43:12):
isn't quite the right descriptor. They kind of transcend gods
who personify and rule over key aspects of our lives.
There's desire despair, they go hand in hand. The titular
character is Dream. He's never called Sandman. We just understand
that that's one of the ways he's been described over
his long existence. His younger sister is Death, and contrary

(43:33):
to how death is always depicted in most stories, Gamon's
Death is a no drama goth girl and in this
important story in the series early on, Dream accompanies her
on her rounds as she takes people, and in the
course of that tale, he sees her usher many people
out of this life. And at one point, painfully, she

(43:56):
visits a newborn and as she picks up the newborn,
the newborn says, that's it. That's all I get. Recently,
my wife was flipping channels or I was, I don't know,
and I landed on an episode of Nature on PBS.
And that show has been running for years and years,
and I used to watch it sometimes on rainy afternoons
and inevitably fall asleep. That's because the narrator that they

(44:20):
used for the first I don't know fifty decades of
the yes, it's been running for five hundred years, had
this somnolent approach and this just very dry tone. The
zebra cautiously approaches the Okapi. It has confused them. From
the back, it looked like a potential mate, but from

(44:41):
the front, oh my god. Fortunately they've since mixed it
up and got a jolt of electricity into the narrators.
And in this recent episode, the show was detailing the
short life of an African watering hole. It is for
a good chunk of the year, a dry divot in
a plane and and seasonally it fills up hosts an

(45:03):
abundance of life and then dries up again. Frogs lay
their eggs in it. The eggs hatch and become tadpoles,
and all these other critters eat the tadpoles, including what
seemed like a pretty scary spider that dangles over the water.
And as a tadpole comes up near the surface, no
more tadpole, And I said to the TV as the

(45:24):
tadpole disappeared into the spider's clutches. That's it. That's all
I get. And you start realizing that it's not just
a panel in Sandman. It's not an unusual thing. It's
kind of universal. And I don't know why. I guess,
being baseball minded, it put Bill Delancey in my mind.

(45:45):
Glancey was a catcher. He was born in Greensboro, North Carolina,
in nineteen eleven. He died in Phoenix in nineteen forty
six and is buried there. Some very simple math will
tell you he got only thirty five years on this planet,
more than some, less than others. And Bill could play.

(46:07):
He was a left handed hitting catcher. Here's a kind
of fun trivia question. If I ask you the name
of the leading left handed hitting catcher of all times
in terms of games caught. Who would you have guessed? Now?
I would have said Yogi Bearra and flashed a smug smile,
put it in the form of the question, who is
Yogi Barra? But he wasn't. He was number three, the

(46:29):
left handed hitter who caught the most games. I would
not have come up with this in a million years. A. J. Pierzinsky.
Bill Dickey was second and four games behind him was
all Yogi. Would you have gotten that one? That's total games.
Only ten catchers in modern history have played two thousand
or more games. They wear down faster than that. As

(46:51):
you know, I'm not just talking games caught, although that
is the vast majority of what we're referring to, but
also occasional appearances at first base or left fielder designated hitter.
The list is Pad Rodriguez, Carlton Fisk, Ted Simmons, Gary Carter,
Bob Boone, Johnny Bench, Yachti Molina, Yogi Barra, Jason Kendall,
and Pierzinski. I'm not sure if any active player aside

(47:14):
from Molina will have that kind of endurance. Maybe Salvador Perez.
He's got oney one hundred or so games under his
belt heading into his age thirty two season. Of course,
they have to keep playing full seasons, and there's the
possibility that having not gotten one in in twenty twenty,

(47:35):
that we might not get another one in in twenty
twenty two, both given the current trajectory of the pandemic.
Although hopefully by late March early April things will be
looking better, hopefully finally, but also of course, due to
the inevitable lockout. Bill Delancey didn't play anything like two

(47:57):
thousand games or one thousand. He started playing professional baseball
in nineteen thirty at eighteen years old, and was signed
by branch Rickey's Cardinals chain in nineteen thirty one, when
he was twenty. Playing for the Springfield Cardinals of the
Class C Western Association, he hit three twenty nine with
a four to fourteen slugging percentage, No, that's not right,

(48:19):
a four to fourteen one base percentage and a slugging
percentage of nearly six hundred, with twenty nine doubles twenty triples.
You like it when your catcher hits twenty triples, eighteen
home runs and one hundred and ten RBIs This was
very good by the standards of the Western Association. The
Major League Zan Europa of the Moons of Jupiter League.

(48:41):
I don't know if he was truly an Adli Reutchman
at that moment, but it looks like he was an
Adlie Rutchman, especially because the next year he was promoted
to Columbus of the American Association High Miners, and despite
being only twenty one way under the average age of
the league, he hit two eighty five with a three
seventy six on base percentage and a five twenty seven

(49:04):
slugging percentage, seventeen doubles, eleven triples, twenty one home runs
in one hundred and twenty three games. Parenthetically, almost every
week on this show, I get to say something to you,
like the Springfield Cardinals of the Class C Western Association,
and I get a thrill from it every time. And
you know why. I think it's because, even though it's

(49:25):
just the information, this is where the player was. This
was his level of competition. I'm doing a little homage
to Charles Schultz and Charlie Brown's favorite ballplayer, Joe Slobotnik.
When he talked about Schlobotnik or Charlie Brown, did Schultz
tended to mention his level, So, for example, On July thirtieth,
nineteen sixty four, Charlie Brown tels Schroeder that Schlobotnik has

(49:47):
been sent down to Stumptown of the green Grass League.
At other times it's Hillcrest of the green Grass League
or the Waffletown Syrups. Schlobotnik managed the waffle Town Syrups
but was almost immediately fired for calling a squeeze play
with no one on base. I think the general manager
was Roy Hamy. I need a waffle Town Syrups. Jersey
Bill Delancey got his first cup of coffee in the

(50:10):
majors in September nineteen thirty two, but he was blocked
for a year because the Cardinals had some good catchers.
He finally made it up for good in nineteen thirty four,
backing up at least initially a veteran catcher Virgil Spud Davis.
Spud could really hit, but over the course of that season,
Delancey ate into Spud's potato because he could hit two

(50:34):
and he was the better defender. When the Cardinals came
from behind to beat the Giants to the National League
pennant last day of the season, it was Delancey who
started every game of the World Series, which they won.
In the regular season, he played ninety three games. He
hit three sixteen for fourteen on base percentage slugged five

(50:54):
sixty five. His World Series was less successful on a
personal basis, but the Cardinals won, and forever after Delancey
was part of it. The Gas House Gang Frankie Frish, Rippercollins,
Leo du Rocher, Pepper, Martin, Ducky, Medwick, Dizzy, and Paul Dean.
That last Paul Dean not really all that Daffy, even

(51:15):
though Papers tried to make that nickname stick. Was key
to Delancy breaking into the lineup. Bill and Paul had
been a very successful battery in the miners, and Paul
wanted Bill Delancey to be his personal catcher. Eventually Dizzy
insisted on throwing to him, as well as owner Sam Breeden.
Lady remembered Delancey was a hard hitter who had an

(51:36):
accurate arm and brashness that enabled him to take charge
of a pitcher and a ball game even when he
was fresh out of the bushes. So you have a
catcher who can hit and is a good handler of pitchers.
The preference of a future Hall of Famer and his brother,
and he was only twenty two and yet at that moment,
as they dog piled on the field at the end

(51:59):
of the World Series, his career was almost over. He
played more often in nineteen thirty five, but that fall
something went very wrong. The way Delancey told it, it
was a damp October day. Two weeks after the nineteen
thirty five season closed, we were visiting the Missus folks
at Westville, Illinois, and some of the boys wanted to

(52:21):
play ball. It pleased them when I joined them justin
street close, you know. I pitched for my side, went
sixteen innings. Then someone suggested we go doveshooting. An hour
after turning in, I was in bed, violently ill, with
a temperature of one hundred and four. A pain developed
in the right side of my chest. The run up

(52:41):
to that it seems innocuous. Right. He played some ball,
he did some hunting. But I often think of the
day that Franklin Roosevelt manifested his polio, which is caused
by a virus. You've heard of viruses, right. It was
August tenth, nineteen twenty one. He was at his vacation
home at Camp up A bellow into Brunswick, Canada. He

(53:02):
went swimming, then came inside, and on his way to
changing out of his wet clothes, he oh, the mail came.
I got some mail. So he sat down and sorted
through it. Maybe he got a chill. Maybe the exertion
of the swimming or the sorting of the mail while
being damp, had something or nothing to do with this

(53:23):
virus manifesting itself in his body. And yet I'm sure
over the rest of his life, over the what twenty
four roughly more years that he had to live, he
thought many times, what if I hadn't gone through the mail,
What if I had dried off right away. I'm no doctor,
but I suspect that would have been a red herring,

(53:44):
just as the stickball, the street baseball, and the hunting
trip was a red herring. For Bill Delancey. He was
hospitalized with what it first was thought to be a
transient lung infection, just maybe a chance so the flu.
The doctors didn't think it was any more serious than that,

(54:04):
not for a young man. Doctors are not always right though.
On first impression. He was suffering from what at first
appeared to be pneumonia and a resultant case of pleurisy,
an infection of the lungs, and his lungs were filling
with fluid, drowning him. Doctors, it was said, had trained

(54:24):
several pints of fluid from his right lung. I hear that,
and I look down at my own chest, and I
think about the relative size of one's lungs and the
size of a pint. When I was in school, I
mean elementary school up through high school, at lunch, you
would buy a half pint of milk. I'm guessing a
lot of you did the same. You could get chocolate

(54:45):
milk too. Do you not seven layer cake, but you
could get chocolate milk. Do you remember those little half
pints For an adult, it's probably like two SIPs. Still,
multiply that volume by whatever your definition of several pints is,
and think of your chest and how little of it
it would take to fill up that entire volume. Not

(55:07):
that many. So he was clearly in a mortal situation,
and his condition was up and down for a while.
He was in the hospital for months, all of November
and on through December. During the winter meetings, there were
articles saying that he was on the trading block as
if the writers weren't aware that the only block he

(55:28):
was on was the one in which your soul is weighed,
the chopping block, the grim Reaper standing nearby and sharpening
up his scythe As of December sixteenth, doctors had drained
his right lung fourteen times, and we're starting to say
things like, hey, he might not be in shape to

(55:49):
play come spring. He might not be in shape to
play ever, and he wasn't. His lungs were done. Bill
Delancey said, Team Doctor is a pretty sick boy. The
Cardinals wrote him off for this season, hyping a young
catcher named Well. This is kind of the funny part

(56:09):
in all this. No one was sure what his name was.
Baseball Reference lists him as Bruce Ogrodowski, but papers at
the time called him Ambrose O Grodowski, which was his
birth name and something we could have used. There have
been very few Ambroses in Major League history. One writer,
clearly talking to branch Ricky on the phone and misunderstanding

(56:30):
what he was saying, typed him up as not Ambrose
but Hank, and his last name as oh Grodowski with
an apostrophe, as if he were Irish. Fair play on ya, O. Grodowski.
He was apparently some kind of Irish Polish hybrid in
this writer's mind, the green kill basa of Dublin. I
am thinking parenthetically, if any of you out there listening

(56:52):
happened to be an Irish and Polish couple, I don't
care which partners, which I'm begging you pro create need
the green kill basa in baseball. And because it's unlikely
that any single baby is going to grow up to
be a ballplayer, you're going to have to have many
children to increase the odds. So get to it. I'll wait.

(57:15):
Oh Grodowski will receive a great deal of serious attention
in spring training, Ricky said, I think it's possible he
may develop into one of the best catchers in the
major leagues. He is a splendid receiver, has a fine
throwing arm, and is a fairly good hitter. You hear
that limp last part. It was a hint. As it
turned out, Ambrose, Oh Grodowski couldn't play. The Cardinals gave

(57:38):
him one hundred and eighty four games, split about evenly
between nineteen thirty six and nineteen thirty seven, and he
hit two thirty one with a two sixty three on
face and a three eighteen slugging with four home runs
and about one full season's worth of plate appearances. That's
a fifty seven ops plus and that was it. He
was done in the majors. He went off to the
Pacific Coast League and spent seven years with the playing

(58:00):
for lefty o'douel. It was odul and o Grodowski, and
they were both caught by batman and arrested by Chief O'Hara.
Spring training nineteen thirty six found Delancey in Arizona, not
to work out with the team, but taking in the
dry desert air. It was expected he remained there for months.
In fact, he never left. Well that's a slight exaggeration,

(58:24):
as you'll see in a moment. He was placed on
the voluntarily retired list while he recuperated, and he was
in extremely bad shape, not just bad baseball shape, but
he wasn't able to get out of bed or even
sit up for very long for the inability to breathe. Now,
like all of us, branch Rickey could be a mixed bag.
He had his good deeds, which we all know about,

(58:46):
and his baseball brilliance, which we also all know about.
But he was also a bit of a used car
salesman when it came to negotiating with owners and general managers.
You heard some of that just now with his description
of O. Grodowski. What a splendid player he was. He
wasn't even replacement level. And while I don't think Ricky
had perfect foreknowledge of that, because if he had, he

(59:08):
wouldn't have given him as many chances as he did.
But he had to have some sense that he wasn't
a coming Johnny Bench either. Whatever. The nineteen thirty five
analogy is Mickey Cochran basically, or more aptly, Bill Delancey.
So whereas he liked to come off as a very
moral man, and I think to a large extent he was,

(59:28):
he also wasn't above taking advantage of other people who
might want to do business with him. And of course
some of his good deeds did have a self aggrandizing element,
so big surprise. No one is perfect. But having said that,
I think this next bit I'm about to tell you
speaks very highly of him. As Bill was out in

(59:49):
Arizona just trying to breathe, Ricky wrote to Bill's wife Francis, saying, listen,
write me frequently. Don't tell him you're doing it, Just
write me, let me know how he's doing. So, Francis
wrote back to Ricky, saying, mister Rickey, he's depressed, really
really depressed. He's saying things like if I can't play

(01:00:10):
ball again, what's the use of living. I don't want
to be an invalid for life. She posts that letter
to Saint Louis, and the next thing she knows, ding
Dong Branch Rickey is at the door in Phoenix, Arizona.
He asks Francine to go for a walk while he
talks to Bill privately, and ends up sitting with him
for five hours. Now. I don't know exactly what Ricky

(01:00:34):
said to Bill Delancey, but based on ensuing events, it's
safe to infer that he promised Bill that no matter
what happened, the Cardinals would take care of him and
have a place for him in baseball. There wasn't a
team in Phoenix at that moment, but Ricky must have
known that the Arizona Texas League was about to be formed.

(01:00:56):
And Ricky told Bill, if not that minute, then and
later that and this is a quote, he was very
much interested in Phoenix, and I would want your identification
builds identification with any prospective club that the Cardinals might
place there. In other words, Ricky said, you and I
will take care of Phoenix in any league which will

(01:01:17):
be formed. Delancey's mood improved, and so did his health.
Rancine bought him a bulldog to train and he bonded
with it. That helped too. He started walking the dog,
which meant he was out of bed. That was another
milestone on the road to recovery. He raised some horses
and started riding. And that's an incredible thing, given that
for eight months he was confined to bed, and for

(01:01:40):
half that time he could only sit up in bed
at about thirty minutes total for the day, a few
minutes here, a few minutes there, and so that he
was moving it all was just a huge, huge thing. Now.
He wasn't ready, even given all that, able to play again.
But in nineteen thirty seven, when Ricky gave him a

(01:02:01):
chance to manage the Class D Low Minor League Albuquerque Cardinals,
and he did that for three years, only taking the
addit bad. It wasn't like he was all better. It
just happened that the Cardinals had a farm team where
Delancey could work and baby his lungs at the same time,
but Ricky didn't have to put him there. Of course,
he won two pennants in three years, albeit without much

(01:02:23):
in the way of future major league talent. I guess
that's more impressive. Actually, I should qualify that I don't
know if it was future major league talent, because if
you were in the low minor leagues in nineteen thirty seven,
if you were seventeen years old or so at that point,
you were going to serve in the military in World
War Two and have your career badly disrupted, if not
ended all together. And that happened to a lot of

(01:02:46):
the players that Delancey had on those Albuquerque teams. Delancey
was still in his twenties, and he kept working hard,
hoping that he could come back somehow. He started walking,
got up to about ten miles day to build his endurance,
and in nineteen forty, after four years away from the
major leagues, he said he was ready to come back.

(01:03:09):
I figure, I'm still good for a few more games
than the majors. It was a tall order, though, not
just due to his health and his long atrophying layoff,
but because the Cardinals were pretty well set behind the plate.
They had Mickey Owen, who wasn't much of a hitter
but had a very good defensive reputation. They had Don Pagett,
a former outfielder with great hitting ability, who Ricky was

(01:03:32):
stubbornly trying to wedge behind the plate. I told that
story back in episode one forty six. They also had
Walker Cooper, twenty five years old, just coming up. He
would turn out to be an all star level catcher
for both the Cardinals and the Giants. So Delancey was
trying to push his way into the picture as a
third catcher, and that's all that anyone thought was realistic

(01:03:53):
for him, even Bill himself. I don't say that I'll
be able to stand up under the grind as I
did in nineteen thirty four, he said, but I think
I can do a fair job of relief receiving and
also take a starting turn every so often. There's always
a lot of catcher can do around the ballpark, and
I'll be able to make myself useful. He wrote Sam Breeden,

(01:04:14):
the owner, saying, just don't expect too much of me,
and you might get a pleasant surprise. Well, how do
you say no to that. Breeden didn't, branch Ricky didn't.
Everyone knew that asking him to catch regularly or semi
regularly would be too debilitating, possibly dangerous. But they put
de Lancey on the team, and he mostly sad. He

(01:04:35):
didn't start a single game. He was like one of
those Rule five picks who you have to stick on
the roster but can't risk playing. He got eighteen at
bats in the whole one hundred and fifty four game season,
and I think everyone was fine with that. Maybe it
handicapped the team in some sense, but it was the
better thing to do, the humane thing to do. Just

(01:04:56):
like all of us, sports writers can be really irresponsible
in the things that they write, the wishful thinking that
they enable, the rumors they passed along that may Saint
Louis sportswriter Jay Roy Stockton wrote that if the Cardinals
fired their then manager Ray Blades, Delancey would be in
line to take over Bill if his health holds out,

(01:05:18):
should be back next year as the potential number one catcher.
He is still young, but four years of illness and
months in the Valley of the Shadow made for a
remarkable change in Delancey. He grew up in those four years,
and he's old enough now to be considered as a
leader of men. Breeden and Ricky might even be thinking
it over were they. I very much doubt it. Being

(01:05:39):
a major league manager has a grinding aspect to it too,
And when they did indeed fire Blades in June, they
replaced him with a much more experienced choice, Billy Southworth,
And so it was all wishful thinking, including Delancy's chances
of being a starter. Somewhere along the line, Delancey's diagnosis
seems to have changed from gosh, but he has a

(01:06:01):
really persistent lung infection to it's tuberculosis and it's not
going away. He knew that as of June nineteen forty,
when he was quoted as saying he was determined to
lick this TV thing, but no one did lick it.
Not back then. He never played After nineteen forty. Delancey's
final career line was two hundred and nineteen games, six

(01:06:24):
hundred and eighty six played appearances. He hit two eighty
nine with a three eighty on base four seventy two slugging.
That's a one twenty two ops plus. He had about
one hundred and sixty two games of played appearances at
least assuming you hit leadoff, and he had thirty two doubles,
ten triples, nineteen home runs, drew eighty five walks. Bob Brogue,
the longtime Saint Louis sportswriter, told Peter Golenbach for his

(01:06:47):
book on the Cardinals, I always ranked Delancey as one
of the three greatest catchers ever to play the game,
even though he only played parts of four years in
the big leagues. He was a knock kneed left hander,
had a good throwing arm, and he could say to Dean,
you big expletive, don't you jake on me? Diz loved it. Well,
maybe Diz did, but the ability to keep Dizzy Dean

(01:07:09):
on task does not necessarily make one an all time
great player. Delancey played two and a half seasons, and
one was excellent, the other merely good. And as for
the rest, we can't say. As much potential as he had.
As much as Brogue would have liked him to play
another twelve years and have seven or eight of them
be great, it just didn't happen in this universe. And

(01:07:31):
what Brogue was doing was romanticizing someone he felt bad about,
as a way of heightening his story to the level
of tragedy. But it didn't need that help. It already
was tragic. The next year, Ricky sent De Lancey to
manage Pocatello of the Pioneer League. He did play a
bit there, but he was basically done at twenty nine

(01:07:53):
years old. He managed one more year after that for
yet another Cardinals team, this time the Class d Ashville Tourists,
and then he went home, but not holy for good.
He worked as a sporting good salesman, and as there
was a war on as the commissioner of a servicemen's league,
he still wanted to be around the game, so in
August nineteen forty five, he strapped on a chest protector

(01:08:17):
and started umpiring semi pro games in Phoenix. He even
umpired an exhibition between the Browns and the Cubs. But
just like FDR's damp Mail, that might have been pushing
too hard. By March nineteen forty six, he was again
confined to bed. He never got up again. He died
on his thirty fifth birthday, November twenty eighth, nineteen forty six.

(01:08:42):
And I think again, that's it. That's all I get,
and Bill got quite a lot really, if you think
about it. He got thirty five years, a wife, Francine,
two daughters, Doris Ann and Mary Jane. Mary Jane was
just one year old when he died. She might still
be around, to hope she is. Got to be a
cardinal and be part of the gas House Gang, a

(01:09:02):
team that people still write books about and celebrate, and
he won a World Series. It's not nothing. It's less
than some get, and a lot more than some others do.
You and I could get less than that. We could
do none of the things that Bill Delancey got to do.
Never find love in our lives, never know the joy
of having children, never feel the sense of accomplishment that

(01:09:26):
comes with beating the Detroit Tigers in the World Series.
Not that the Tigers have held up their end of
that bargain lately, but hey, they might any day now.
They're getting better all the time. This year they added
thirty wins over what they had done in twenty nineteen,
and if they do that again in twenty twenty two,
they'll win one hundred and seven games. They won't, but
wouldn't you like to be around just in case they do?

(01:09:48):
A lot has changed lately, and this is a year
end version of what I've been saying to you what
since early spring twenty twenty. I even said it last
week as the real of this latest wave of the
virus became painfully apparent. We're not shutting down again, not
because we shouldn't, but because no one wants to do it.
It's too hard. I don't want to make this political

(01:10:12):
this time, so I'm not going to. I just want
to say we've all had time robbed from us in
certain ways. Things we would have done since twenty twenty.
People we would have seen, events, we would have attended,
vacations we might have taken, even work trips that we
might have gone on. There are things that have been

(01:10:33):
stolen from us that will never get back. A friend
of mine, his SUN, graduated high school at the end
of twenty twenty. Did he get a senior problem? No,
he did not. Is that the worst thing that's ever
going to happen to him? I hope it is, because
it's not that bad, right, But that's kind of on
a small scale. What's happening to us in myriad ways
throughout our lives. Maybe you miss going to target sometimes

(01:10:57):
it's fun to go to target. As you'll hear me
say it Coss in just a few minutes. Someone once
told me that they wish they could disappear someone that
they ostensibly loved or at least liked for long periods
of time, something that flummixed me at the time. Well,
now we've all had the experience of our friends and
loved ones being functionally vanished except on the other side

(01:11:20):
of a zoom call. None of us want to go
back there. So even though it is political, it can
be political, it's about education in some ways. I don't
want to hammer on that. I just want to say
that I get it, and that you're at this sentimental
time of the year. I am asking you, if you
are vaccinated, be careful out there break through infections reputedly mild.

(01:11:42):
But who needs it. I'm not ready to stake my
life on that. Don't use stake yours who needs it,
who enjoys a bad cold. But if you aren't vaccinated,
or if you have a loved one who has thus
far refused, and please please exert every kind of pressure
on them to take that step. I want them to
be here with you, just as I want you here

(01:12:03):
with me so that we don't suffer what Bill Delancey
did by the random invasion of a germ into his body,
which cost him his career and ultimately his life. None
of us want to prematurely vanish into the past, into
the Infinite Inning. We have come to the end of

(01:12:26):
another episode and nearly our run for twenty twenty one
one more to go. You can as always, this is
when I used to tell you how to follow the
guest and me on Twitter. I am no longer on Twitter,
and neither are you. However, you can follow me at
Stephen Gooldman dot b Skuy dot Social ganged novel and

(01:12:46):
certainly my novel has been ganged or if not ganged, gankd.
You can write us at Infinite Inning at gmail dot com,
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(01:13:08):
dot com, slash Stores, Slash d hyphen Infinite hyphen Inning
original soundtrack available at casual observer music dot bandcamp dot com. Finally,
should you find yourself with a moment to spare, please
go to the podcature of your choice and rate, review,
and subscribe. And if your podcaster doesn't let you do
those things, start a podcast about your pets without telling

(01:13:29):
your pets that they're in a podcast about them. Our
theme song, which you are hearing now and have been
listening to you throughout the episode, was a co composition
of myself and doctor Rick Mooring, who says in the
nineteen thirty three film Moonlight and Pretzels Yep Harberg and
Jay Gourney offered the musical suggestion let's make lovelike crocodiles.
In my opinion, this description of relationships has never been

(01:13:52):
exceeded in the history of man. Well, if I can
just break away from all these