September 17, 2025 • 40 mins
...Because you might just field the ball with your skull. This week’s new remarks include further reflections on the national calamity unleashed last week, leading into a reissue episode focused on a time the manager of the Dodgers, a chronic lie, told a self-protective, CYA fib that got away from him and nearly cost him his job. We also get a look back at slugging first baseman whose knee quit in spectacular fashion, and, in part one, a 1941 story about a “dumb” player which is revealed to have had the opposite meaning from the author’s intention.
The Infinite Inning is a journey to the past to understand the present using baseball as our time machine. Baseball, America's brighter mirror, often reflects, anticipates, and even mocks the stories we tell ourselves about our world today. Baseball Prospectus's Steven Goldman discusses the game’s present, past, and future with forays outside the foul lines to the culture at large. Expect history, politics, stats, and frequent Casey Stengel quotations. Along the way, we'll try to solve the puzzle that is the Infinite Inning: How do you find the joy in life when you can’t get anybody out?
The Infinite Inning is a journey to the past to understand the present using baseball as our time machine. Baseball, America's brighter mirror, often reflects, anticipates, and even mocks the stories we tell ourselves about our world today. Baseball Prospectus's Steven Goldman discusses the game’s present, past, and future with forays outside the foul lines to the culture at large. Expect history, politics, stats, and frequent Casey Stengel quotations. Along the way, we'll try to solve the puzzle that is the Infinite Inning: How do you find the joy in life when you can’t get anybody out?
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Well, hello there, and welcome to another infinite inning midweek
reissue episode. Let's get right to it. I appreciate that
in these reissue episodes you allow me the freedom to
speak to you a little more frankly, to wander about
to whatever topic suits us or suits the occasion than
I tend to do on the regular weekly new programs.
(00:47):
And given that freedom, I'm going to pick up pretty
much exactly where we left off. In last week's regular
full episode of this show, number three forty four, I
talked about the day that William McKinley was shot by
the assassin Leon Zolgosh. I was trying to make a
distinction between a crazy person who claims to be acting
(01:08):
for a cause and people legitimately trying to move that
cause forward, something that happens through the hard work of
activism and persuasion, not a sudden stroke of violence. Even
Adolf Hitler, as stubborn as he was, learn that fact
when he tried to overthrow the government of Munich in
nineteen twenty three and ended up in prison for not
(01:29):
nearly long enough in very comfortable circumstances, but still to
sum up a much longer discussion that ranged over a
lot of other stuff. Zolgosh said that he murdered McKinley
because he was an enemy of the working man. Whether
McKinley was that or he wasn't is totally beside the point,
because only a diseased mind would draw some kind of
(01:52):
through line, some sort of cause and effect thing that
says that you murder the author of the conduct you
don't like, and said conduct will magic cease, it will
disappear from the world, all because you knocked over this
one domino. You know, I can think of one very
narrow circumstance in which that might be true, and that's
if you come upon a fella who just hacked up
(02:14):
a bunch of people with a meat cleaver, and now
he is running at you with said cleaver. Then if
you shoot him, the bad conduct will certainly stop. But
that's very limited, very local, and very much an exception. Rather,
when you kill a leader, most people will just condemn
you as a jerk, and in select circumstances they will
make a martyr of the person that you killed. To
(02:36):
put it scinctly, nothing got better for the working man
or for labor as the result of McKinley's assassination. If anything,
they got worse and would continue to be worse for
decades because he had given people license to condemn those
most progressive forces who were agitating for improved conditions and
compensation for workers. And yeah, some of those people were
(02:58):
definitely nuts. It's not an endorsement of them. I talked
about anarchism last time and what an empty idea that
that is. But they weren't all anarchists either. Some of
them had good, wholesome ideas and they got tared with
that same brush as a result of Zolgosh's actions that
gave the forces of repression further license. And again, there's
just no if I do a then B happens kind
(03:21):
of connection between murdering a president and making anything better
for anyone. Today, as I speak these words, we learned
that the murderer who inspired that discussion of baseball on
September sixth, nineteen oh one, did what he did, at
least according to a tranch of text messages included in
the charging document, because he was quote sick of the
(03:42):
hate unquote his victim inspired the content of the victim's speech.
I to be honest, him not very familiar with it.
I had not spent any time thinking about this person
at all prior to last week. However, various reputable sources
have compiled a number of his quotes, and I urge
you to go read them and decide for yourself. But
again that said, it's totally irrelevant. While there are limits
(04:06):
on free speech. While the paradox of tolerance says that
we as a society should not be forced to allow
speech so free it causes our own destruction, in the
vast majority of cases, the right to free speech requires
us to endure thoughts that we despise and hope that
in the marketplace of thought, good ideas drive out bad.
(04:29):
Right now, that doesn't seem to be happening much, And
I'm not sure it's because of the vitality of one
set of ideas over another, so much as it's not
the invisible hand that's guiding that marketplace, but rather that
a different sort of hand, a very visible set of hands,
is leaning on it, or has fingers at its back,
and not in a nice message or tickling sort of way.
(04:51):
If the only option is McDonald's, it's not a dining
hall of ideas. That is, that is a different discussion.
The larger point here today is that there is no
logic in what the alleged perpetrator did. It's like saying
that if you kiss the cat, life will get better
for the mice, all the mice everywhere, via some magical
(05:12):
form of transference or that. And forgive me for saying this.
If you kill the cat, then all cats will cease
to behave like cats and spare the mice. That's not
how cats or people work. And yes, one of my
cats is sitting right here, literally beneath the microphone and
just gave me what I would consider by cat standards
to be a very dirty look. Now that's not to
(05:35):
say that assassins haven't changed history. What John Wilkes Booth
did to Abraham Lincoln might be a kind of exception,
not because it saved the South from losing the Civil War,
but because by replacing Lincoln with Andrew Johnson, he brought
in a president who wasn't interested in making changes to
the country that were necessary to cement the verdict of combat.
(05:56):
The opposite, he wanted to put everything back the way
it was as much as possible, which left a lot
of erstwhile traders back in positions of power doing what
they could to thwart progress wherever they could, and so
we got Jim Crow, and we got a great many
other problems that still vex us today. But I will
say this, if society wasn't ready to support those changes,
(06:18):
the ones that the radical Republicans were pushing at that time,
they wouldn't have happened. Even if the result of the
war was that the Northerners shot all the high ranking
Confederates afterwards, it would have required a more or less
permanent military occupation and no national reconciliation, which I'm not
sure we ever really got anyway, which is a different discussion. Again.
(06:40):
I feel like I'm saying that a lot today, as
is the permanently morally ambiguous question of whether a national
reconciliation was worthwhile given on whose backs and how much
pain had to be endured for it to happen to
the extent that it did. But now I'm getting very
far up field. And the point, the major point that
(07:02):
I want to make, is that change is about convincing
people to agree with your program, not punching them until
they are forced to say that they do. That's why
anyone who does what this young man did is to
put it simply nuts or simple or both. And that truth,
which I think is well understood by people who do
(07:25):
effort to change public opinion, is why I very much
doubt that anyone aimed him in the direction that he
ultimately went, just as no one and I discussed this
in the last episode aimed Leon zol Goosh. The episode
we're visiting this week goes back to the program's first
year and reflects on a sudden, career altering injury, and
(07:48):
then proceeds to discuss one of the game's most accomplished
weird pitchers and what happened when a leader, Leo de Rocher,
lied about him and that lie spun out of control.
It's a great story of how not to handle a clubhouse,
and maybe not any other situation either. The first story,
as you will hear momentarily, was inspired by then Yankees
(08:10):
rookie outfielder Dustin Fowler, whose career had barely started before
it was interrupted by a severe and seemingly preventable injury.
I didn't know back when I was first talking to
you about this whether his injury would be career ending
or not. It wasn't exactly, but it does seem like
it caused it to be truncated in a real way.
In fact, it's over now, and he's still only thirty.
(08:32):
It's been over for a while. In fact, now, a
lot of players have brief careers for any number of reasons.
So maybe his would have proceeded along roughly the same
lines regardless, but it's impossible to know for sure. The
only thing we do know for sure is that the
injury was real and severe, It was inflicted by a
feature of the White Sox ballpark, and that aspect of
(08:54):
it was clear enough that he subsequently sued the White Sox,
and as far as I can tell, the case has
not settled, but rather goes on seven years later in
its Jarndyce v. Jarndyce way. When we at Baseball Prospectus
wrote about Fowler in twenty eighteen, in the immediate aftermath
of the injury, we said before the injury, Fowler was
(09:17):
a well rounded lefty with good speed, and the classic
problem of well rounded outfielders everywhere is he just a tweener.
In his case, the concern is less about a lack
of power and more about whether he'll get on base
enough because of his aggressive approach. Now, By that time,
the Yankees, in their yankeesish way, had traded him to
(09:37):
the A's for Sonny Gray. The A's gave Fowler an
extended trial in twenty eighteen, and he was pretty terrible,
primarily because of the aggressive approach at the plate that
we described. Now, did the knee injury have anything to
do with that? Did it deprive him of a crucial
step on the base paths that would have let him
beat out some infield hits or play center well enough
(09:58):
to be a fourth outfielder despite his bad approach at
the plate. Again, impossible to say, but you would have
liked to have seen him get a clean chance to try.
That the White Sox had a hidden hazard in their
park deprived him of that chance. Now, before I turn
you over to my past self, I'd like to leave
you with a little baseball story I came across earlier today.
(10:20):
I'm not going to give you the precise version that
I saw from nineteen forty one, because the point of
the author seems to have been that people of color
are stupid. I do not believe that, as I do
not believe it universally about any group or collection of people.
I'd like to alter it in fact, so that it's
clear its point is that baseball players are resilient. That's
(10:43):
how I read the original, resilient or optimistic. That the
author was so prejudiced he missed the moral of his
own story. For all I know, it wasn't even his story.
The tale may be so old it has whiskers, it
doesn't matter. There's still some value to it. It goes
like this. A man happens to pass a ballgame in progress.
It's an informal neighborhood game, not a major league or
(11:06):
even minor league game, so he could just walk right
up to the players and ask how things were going.
What's the scar? The man asks the first baseman, ninety
four to nothing. The first baseman replies, getting beaten rather badly,
aren't you. The man says, no, sir. The first baseman replies,
we ain't been up to bat yet, and that's the
(11:27):
whole thing. So I ask, is the first baseman dumb
or just optimistic? And let me point out a special
irony of the author landing on one side or the
other of that question, As I said. This was printed
in October of nineteen forty one. Two months later, Pearl
harbor happened, the Japanese sank a whole bunch of our
(11:49):
ships and killed a great many Americans. For US, World
War two had finally begun, and we were getting beaten
rather badly, weren't we. It seems to me that the
first baseman's answer, no, sir, we ain't been up to
that yet, turned out to be a valid reply. That's
it for me for this reissue episode. You'll hear from
(12:10):
me occasionally the rest of the way if I have
to patch over any old breaks. And at the end
of the show, let's take a break. Now on the
other side, we'll get to that story of an ancient
but still very memorable career altering injury, and then we'll
make another stop at Brooklyn. I hope you enjoy those
old Dodger stories as much as I do telling them,
and as always, thank you for joining me for this
(12:32):
reissue episode of The Infinite Inning. I'll see you on
the other side, or shall I say my younger self
will because we're going time traveling.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Oh boy.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
The cruel nature of the Infinite Inning is that it's
a state of being where the road is shorter than
the journey is long. Maybe that sounds like a cheap irony,
but it seems like a fair analogy for the nature
of life. And time will never perfect this project, whatever
project we're talking about, whatever our individual projects are. We'd
like to keep trying to pursue the third out, but
(13:26):
there are more batters to face than there is time.
Paul Valari said that works of art are never completed,
only abandoned. So too our lives and whatever progress we
hope to make within them. I was deeply moved by
what happened last week to the young Yankees outfielder Dustin Fowler.
In case you missed it, the kid began the season
(13:46):
as a Yankees prospect, although not a particularly highly ranked one.
He was somewhere in the middle of the pack in
a deep farm system. He's just twenty two years old,
and he moved up through a combination of attrition in
his own good play, and finally got the call to
the majors. He lasted not quite half an inning in
his debut at Chicago against the White Sox. He didn't
(14:09):
get to bat in the first inning, and when he
went to right field for the bottom of the first,
he chased a slicing fly ball that went down the
foul line off the bat of Jose Abreu, and he
didn't quite judge the low fence and the guard rail
out there quite correctly, and he slammed into it with
his knee. Joe Girardi, the Yankees manager, said there was
an electrical box in there too. It's hard to see
(14:30):
that on the video, but in either case, he ruptured
his ptel attendant and he's gone for the year. His
major league debut, rookie season, and possibly his career all
becoming highly attenuated at once. It was deeply upsetting to
see someone achieve their dream and then have it snatched
away all at the same time. With modern sports medicine,
(14:52):
there's a good chance that Fowler can make it back
in a reasonable period of time, not this year, but
perhaps next year and then roughly the same shape that
you started in. But you don't know until it happens.
You don't know if the opportunity will be there, if
the ability will still be there, the mobility will still
be there, the emotional ability, the sense of confidence, the
(15:12):
poise that allows one to succeed in the high pressure
environment that is professional baseball. A great deal can change.
You can change when you've suffered a severe injury, and
what happens after isn't just about how that part of
your body that was hurt response to rehabilitation. I'm speaking
from personal experience to an extent in that you've heard
(15:33):
me refer to having had cancer on this program. And
I had when I was thirty two, ocular cancer, and
the treatment for that, to save my life, caused me
to be blind in one eye. And it's a small thing,
a really small thing. And given that people die of cancer,
I'm still here, and people lose more important things lungs
(15:55):
and chunks of their colon, and suffer all kinds of
other disabling or debility hating effects. But I can tell
you it's greatly affected my life, not just in the
sheer number of things I bump into, including people when
I'm walking down the street because I don't see them,
but in my reluctance to go places and do things.
And it's made me less social, it made me uncomfortable
(16:16):
in crowds. And don't get me wrong, I'm so grateful
to be alive when so many other people who've received
diagnoses like mine or not. But it turns out that
you can have feelings of depression and inadequacy just based
on something as small as a non functional eye. So
even if Fowler does come back and play at a
high level, and I really do hope that he does,
he might not be the same in some fundamental way.
(16:38):
Fowler's mishap and quick exit might put you in mind
of the story of someone like Moonlight Graham, the player
who was performed by an elderly Burt Lancaster with so
much twinkle he might have been using peds in the
movie Field of Dreams, not a fictional character. In nineteen
oh five, Graham played a fraction of the game for
the New York Giants and then never appeared in the
Majors again. But for some reason, I kept thinking of
(17:01):
Joe Houser, the young Philadelphia Athletics first baseman at the
beginning of the nineteen twenties. The parallel isn't perfect because
he got a few years in before his career went wrong,
but the comparison still seems apt. Very briefly, and I'm
not going to do the story justice just now. Howser
was a young first baseman out of Milwaukee. He was
called unser cho our Joe by the German population there.
(17:22):
And he came up with the A's in nineteen twenty two.
He was quite the hitter or left hander. He had
a lot of power. He finished second to Babe Ruth
in home runs in nineteen twenty four. He was a
distant second, but there's no shame in being second to
Babe Ruth in anything. In the brief time that he
was a regular in the major leagues, he was routinely
among the home run leaders. But it was all over
by the time he was twenty five. And here's why.
(17:43):
Just before the nineteen twenty five seasons started, which would
have been his fourth campaign, the A's played an exhibition
game and a batter hit a ground ball between first
and second. Hawser went to make the play and his
knee spontaneously and completely split in down the middle. No
one had touched him. There was no inciting incident. Obviously
(18:04):
there had to be some pre existing flaw there, but
it just broke. That was the end of his season.
He was fifteen weeks in the hospital. It had to
be sewed back together, essentially with wire. He could never
get re established in the major leagues, even though his
bat did recover. Some of it was the knee struggled
to regain flexibility. Some of it Howser blamed on Ty Cobb,
(18:26):
who was having his last year in the majors when
Hawser was making another run at playing time, and Howser
claimed that Cobb sabotaged him with batting tips that were
designed to make him fail. So he went back down
to the minor leagues and he just kept hitting. No
one cared. He hit sixty three home runs in nineteen
thirty for Baltimore of the International League. He hit sixty
(18:46):
nine and nineteen thirty three for the Minneapolis Millers, and
people talked about that the park had short fences and
so on, but fine, discount them. It doesn't matter. He
had the ability to play, and he could have helped
a major league team, but no one called. The other
knee went and still he kept playing. He played until
he was forty three years old. He lived until he
was ninety eight, and still no one called. Maybe the
(19:10):
scouts just had a view they couldn't be budged off of.
Maybe they thought that the kind of guy who had
let Ty Cobb argue him out of his swing wasn't
someone who was going to succeed. It's impossible to know
it this late date, but it's frightening. Imagine you're a
writer in possession of a great novel or's screenplay. Imagine
you're a holy man who claims he can perceive the
nature of the divine. Imagine you're one of the greatest
(19:33):
home run hitters of all time, with three hundred and
ninety nine in the minor leagues and another eighty in
the major leagues, and no one in the majors will
give you the time of day. The opportunity was there,
and it was gone, and you do everything you can
to earn it back, and it just will not be
restored to you. That isn't Moses being shown the Promised Land,
(19:53):
but being denied entry to it. That is the deafness
of an unfair world. And it scares the heck out
of me. I'm Steven Goldman and this is the Infinite
Inning Baseball Podcast.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Well, hello there.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
The tunnel under the Pow Camp was not discovered by
the Germans until it was too late, and now you're
closing in on the Swiss border just beyond the mountains
the refuge. That is episode eleven. I hope you packed
lightly a couple of minutes on the subject of fake
news a really fat, fascinating topic in that it's now
used to invalidate things you don't like. We get involved
(21:05):
in the liar's paradox, the idea that you can say
something like this statement is false and you're automatically tied
up in a conundrum because it is false, then it's true,
and if it's true, it's false. So we have this
way of messing with people's minds, and that's labeling something
as fake news. But baseball doesn't have that. Say you're
a Blue Jays fan and last night Aaron Judge hit
(21:26):
a home run against you. You can't really take that
fact and say fake news about it. Aaron Judge did
not hit a home run against my team, because it's
either in the box score or it's not. It's either
on the videotape or it's not. And unless you're going
to claim that someone has altered either of those things
in a massive conspiracy to boost Aaron Judge's home run totals. Actually,
(21:46):
Yankee Stadium is a massive conspiracy to boost Aaron Judge's
home run totals, but that's another story. Anyway, you can't
invalidate that fact just by calling it something fake. The
closest thing that we have to that is trade rumors.
And I would think that people like our own John
Hayman and Ken Rosenthal and so on, are responsible, but
that hasn't always been the case. And even when they
(22:09):
are responsible, it sometimes might as well be fake. Because
if you see a story that says, say, the Astros
covet Jose Kintana, well, okay, they covet him. I mean,
you may covet Jennifer Lawrence, but that's as far as
it goes. Similarly, you may read a story that says
the Astros have called the White Sox about Jose Kintana,
and you may have called Jennifer Lawrence, but she may
(22:32):
not call you back. So again, like people have conversations
all the time, they wish for things all the time,
they want things all the time, they may even ask
for them all the time, But the fact that they
have those feelings is not necessarily news. And yet even
that may be real. The closest thing I can think
of to a story like that that actually is fake
but did have an impact on the real world is
(22:53):
that supposedly the reason that Yogi Barra got to be
manager of the Yankees in nineteen sixty four is that
some board sports writers decide to start a rumor Yankees
considering Yogi Barra for manager, and waited to see how
fast it would bounce back to them along the Twilight
Bark the telephone line of sports journalism, and somehow in
the process of that happening, the Yankees sort of went, oh,
(23:15):
we're considering him, Well, I suppose we should get him
signed then, so he got to be manager for a while,
and even if he wasn't quite prepared for it, and
the circumstances weren't ideal in a lot of ways, they
did win the pennant. But that was something that began
as fake news and became real news. I don't think
it happens that way very often. And here's another thing
that doesn't happen. Baseball pioneered the idea of confronting your
(23:38):
accuser when it comes to the guy who's shouting fake news.
And it's really only happened once that I can think of,
but it's so enticing, it's so attractive as something that
should happen, that you should have the right to testify
on the behalf of the story that you're filing. One
(23:58):
way or another right or wrong. This happened in Brooklyn
in nineteen forty three. It is a long and elaborate story,
and I'm going to try to tell it quickly and
kind of boil it down to the essentials. I'm going
to do this from memory, or mostly from memory, So
forgive me if I fudge anything. It involves Leo de Rocher,
who is managing the Brooklyn Dodgers at that point. And
Leo was not a guy whoever exactly had a reputation
(24:23):
for let's say, sterling conduct or honesty. I mean, going
back to when he first came to the major leagues
as a shortstop with the Yankees, he was accused of
being a clubhouse chief and Babe Ruth and he got
into a fistfight because supposedly he stole Babe Ruth's watch
out of his locker, and he just kind of rolled
on that way, doing what he felt like doing and
not necessarily telling the truth. If he got caught, he
(24:43):
just deny it. Harold Parrott of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote,
on the charge of denying statements he'd unquestionably made. De
Rocher has been convicted before. Lippy's behavior is based almost
entirely on convenience. If it becomes inconvenient to have said something,
Leo just decides he never I did say it. Veteran
newspapermen have known this for years, but apparently Lippy's players
(25:04):
have just discovered it. Remind me to comment another time
on the defunct Brooklyn Daily Eagles habit in the forties
and fifties of its sports section referring to everyone by nicknames,
so that every story about a game is that Lippy
ordered Dixie to throw the ball to Google, and you
really have to have a code. It is not a
difficult code, but it's just so cute as to be
really annoying. Google. By the way, was Aggie Gallon a
(25:27):
really underrated player, kind of the Bernie Williams of the
thirties and forties. But I, as usual digress. Okay, So
nineteen forty three, the Dodgers are a really good team,
although they're being sat by World War Two. They won
one hundred games and the Pennant. In nineteen forty one,
they won one hundred and nineteen forty two, but they
finished second to the Cardinals, who want even more. Some
of the good players are starting to go into the military,
(25:48):
and they're patching with a lot of veterans. Arkie Vaughan,
the great Pirate shortstop, is playing for them in place
of Pee Wee Reese and Paul Wayner, who's forties in
their outfield. And they have some other veteran guys like
the aforementioned Roxy Walker, the first baseman Dolph Camille, and
pitchers like the rage filled Johnny Allen, and most essential
(26:08):
in this story, Bobo Newsom. Bobo on his own is
a long story, and there's so many things that we
could talk about with him. The fact that he changed
teams seventeen times, the fact that he played for the
Washington Senators five times, and the Browns three times, and
the Dodgers twice, and so on. That he called everybody Bobo,
(26:30):
including himself, so it was both a first and a
third person name. He was a two hundred game winner
and a two hundred game loser. Sometimes he was Max
Scherzer and sometimes he was Bud Norris. He lost twenty
games three times, but he also won twenty games three times,
although one of those times he had an ERA of
five point zero eight. He was an extraordinary player. The
thing that I love about him, perhaps most is that
(26:52):
he was virtually indestructible. I mean, not only did he
pitch into his forties, but he suffered injuries on the
field that were so horrific that would hospitalize any player today,
and yet he would stay in the game. This is
from and this is later in that year, nineteen forty three,
a description of a game that he pitched against the
Saint Louis Browns. Because by the end of the story,
(27:14):
although he starts with the Dodgers, I will tell you
ahead of time that he does not finish the story
with the Dodgers. The score was two to two and
the last of the fifth when pitcher Oscar Lefty Judd
of the Red Sox blasted a drive which chromed off
Newsom's left forehead, over Don Gutteridge's head, and into deep
right center field. Bobo slightly blocked the smash with his
glove hand, but only slightly, and it was fortunate for
(27:35):
him then that the ball hit him a glancing below.
He did not collapse or even fall to the ground.
He walked to the Browns dugout, sat on top of
the step for cold water applications, and was greeted with
wild cheers when he gamely returned, allow me to translate.
The Browns pitcher hit a four hundred foot line drive
off of the opposing pitcher's head, and the pitcher stayed
in the game. This seems like a good place to
(27:56):
take a quick break and allow you to go out
to the lobby and buy yourself a snack. I'd buy
it for you, honest, but I'm not there right now.
I'm in here in this box. On the other side
bore tales of Bobo being insensible to pain. That was
(28:20):
not unusual for Bobo. There was an opening day when
he was with the Senators when Franklin Roosevelt was in attendance,
and after Roosevelt signed a ball for him, he signed
a ball for Roosevelt, even though Roosevelt did not ask
for him to do that. He then went to the mound.
The Indians were the opposing team. He got ahead of
Earl Avril shouted, now, Bobo will strike you out with
a curveball. Avril, knowing this, was on top of the curveball,
(28:43):
and lined it up the middle off of Bobo's knee.
That was the first inning he stayed in and completed
the game. It was only after that he said to
the trainer, Bobo thinks his leg is broke, and indeed,
Bobo's leg was broken. He had pitched the entire game
that way. On another occasion, he was pitching against the
Yankees and Chapman laid down a bunt and the Senator's
third baseman, Ossi Bluegie, came in and made a great
(29:05):
play and was going to fire the ball to first,
but either he or Bobo did not realize that Bobo's
head was in the way, and at point blank range,
Bobo was sculled by his own third baseman, and all
the descriptions of the game say that he sort of
did a weird little dance. Wounded moose is the term
that's often used. He sort of stumbled around the and
fielled confusedly for a moment, but once again he stayed
(29:28):
in and he threw a complete game shutout. His jaw
had been broken in two places on yet another occasion.
I believe this was when he was pitching very successfully
for the Detroit Tigers. The throw from the first baseman
on a three one put out tailed into the runner,
leading the runner to run into Bobo's pitching hand. His
thumb was broken in two places, and again he stayed
(29:51):
in or in this case, at least he tried. It's
hard to grip your pitches when your thumb is swelling
and you can't really move it. Sometimes he's portrayed as stupid,
but I don't think he was stupid. I think he
was fair smart. I think he was amused. I think
he did a lot to entertain himself. I think he
did a lot to entertain others, and since he was
often stuck on tail end clubs, he kind of did
what he could to attract a crowd. He figured that
(30:12):
would make him more valuable. He even said as much.
By nineteen forty three, he's in his mid thirties. He's
pitching for the Dodgers. He's actually leading the team and
wins at this point in the season. But in mid
July there's an incident. The Dodgers have a kid shortstop
who they're trying to convert to catcher named Bobby Bragan.
Bragan would be in the game for forever as a
coach and manager in that kind of thing, but at
(30:33):
this point he's just struggling to hang on and he's
the battery with Newsome in this game in the early innings,
of the game, there's a three to two pitch with
a runner on third, and there's a cross up. The
catcher Bragan is expecting a fastball and Newsom through something else.
What it was is was the subject of the controversy.
(30:54):
The ball took a weird break and it bounced and
goes all the way to the backstop and the runner scores.
Now this turns out to be immaterial to the outcome
of the game, which the Dodgers eventually come back and win.
But in the moment, Newsom showed a lot of frustration.
He put his hands on his hips. At the end
of the inning, he threw his glove in the air,
and this was obviously embarrassing to the kid. Catcher Leo
(31:17):
de Rocher, who liked the kid very much, was really angry,
and there had been conflicts between him and Newsom already,
in part because Leo is a super type A person.
Newsom is kind of a super type Z person. He's
incredibly relaxed and mellow, and again not somebody who takes
coaching real well, possibly because he knows he cannot be killed.
(31:38):
There's a confrontation after the game in the clubhouse about
how Newsom had shown up Breagan and how Newsom had
thrown a spitter and crossed the kid up and he
did it just to make him look bad. And words
go back and forth, and at the end of it,
Derocer says to Newsom, you're suspended, and you're suspended indefinitely
for the season. If I can get Branch Tricky to
(32:00):
make it stick, all right, fine, This is like a
thing that happens tempers get overheated. Derocher would do this sometimes.
Newsome provoked people into it plenty of times. Not a
big deal, but Derosher made a mistake. The timing of
the argument is such that the rest of the players
don't witness it, they don't know about the suspension, and Leo,
(32:20):
still in the clubhouse, feeling his manhood a little bit
in this moment of leadership, starts bragging on the argument
and what he had told Newsom in earshot of a reporter,
and reporter asks is this for publication? And Leo is
okay with it, and eventually it finds its way into
the paper. The first of the players here about it
is when they read it over breakfast the next morning,
(32:42):
and they're outraged. It seems like an overreaction, and Leo's
been riding them hard, so they don't have a lot
of tolerance for this kind of dictatorial behavior. Particularly Arkie
Vaughn is incredibly upset by this. Players come in for
the game and there's a confrontation in the clubhouse. They
ask Leo, did you really say all that stuff? Did
you really suspend Newsom for the season, and he, desperate
(33:06):
cornered denies it. They don't buy it at all. They
do not buy it. Arkie Von turns in his uniform
and says he's done with the team, that Derochher is
a liar. He's not gonna play for a guy who lies,
because if Dorosher lied about Newsom, he could lie about him.
Dixie Walker also refuses to play, and suddenly the Dodgers
don't have a team. The umpire send a bat boy
(33:27):
in to say, you guys didn't show up on the
field for batting practice. We're ready to start the game.
Where are you? And Derochher actually has to say, well,
we'll see if we have nine guys. If we have
nine guys, we'll play. If we don't, we're gonna forfeit.
And there's an extraordinary scene as he goes down the
roster saying, Billy Herman, do you want to play? Yes
or no? Paul Wayner, do you want to play? Yes
(33:50):
or no? Now, the players have already gotten word from
Branch Rickey that if they refuse to play, they're not
only going to be suspended, they're going to be blacklisted.
So everybody but Arkie Vaughan goes along with it, stays
in his civilian clothes. He has literally given his uniform
to Leo de Rocher and told him to shove it
up his ass. Meanwhile, Derocher has called the sports writer
(34:10):
who was standing right there, his name was Tim Cohen,
and denied the story and called it a lie. He's
called it a lie to the players, He's called it
a lie to the reporter. The reporter, who was not
in the ballpark that day, it was his day off,
calls branch Ricky and says, I demand the right to
confront my accuser. And the next day, even though Leo
(34:30):
and Ricky they don't want this, there is another clubhouse
meeting in front of all the players and the assembled writers.
Cohen cross examines Leo de Rocher, even concluding with the
prosecution rests De Rocher is rapidly forced to admit that, yes,
it all actually did happen the way it was reported.
(34:50):
The crime is a small crime. It's that he looks petty,
and then, as usual, the cover up was the worst
thing that he lied, and it was one lie too
many for his players. At this point, the Dodgers hit
the All Star break and for a few days, Derocher's
job hung in the balance. His credibility is just shot. Ultimately,
(35:10):
Ricky decided to keep him on. However, that didn't leave
him with much ability to keep the players on, and
he had to clean house veterans start leaving town. Somehow,
Newsom goes through waivers instantly and winds up back with
the Browns, and perhaps not coincidentally, this was one day
before he was due to receive a rostering bonus. The Dodgers,
who are a close second to the Cardinals at that moment,
(35:30):
have a losing record over the rest of the season,
and they don't really get back to where they were
going until after the war. The biggest casualty is probably Vaughan,
who was so disgusted with Durocher that, although he did
finish the season, he immediately retired and stayed retired for
three years. He came back in forty seven after Leo
was gone. This directly impacted his Hall of Fame candidacy.
(35:53):
He made it in nineteen eighty five, but it was
long after he was dead. Now it wasn't something he
was faded to live to see in any case, because
he died young at forty in a voting accident. He
drowned in Crater Lake. Nonetheless, the missing time retarded his
career totals, and it took voters a while to look
around the counting stats to see the sheer quality of
(36:14):
the player. Regardless. Think about the drama of that scene,
but think also about the attempt to bring integrity to
the proceedings. Leo de Rocher had popped off at a pitcher,
done something too extreme, and then to cover it up
said fake news, and the reporter who wrote the story
(36:35):
went before him, went before his peers, went before the players,
defended himself, and it was revealed not to be fake news.
Leo was shown to be a liar. The revolt was
suppressed because players didn't have a lot of rights in
those days, and there really wasn't anywhere for them to
go with it anyway. Once Ricky decided to sustain Durocher
in his job, but shouldn't it be that way. I
(36:56):
don't know how he would do it at scale, but
there has to be a way, because you cannot convince
people in the culture at large, the society at large,
that a story is true when there are two sides.
There are always people who will have so open a
mind that they will consider both sides even when it
(37:16):
is literally impossible for both sides to have equal legitimacy.
Or they will have such a fealty to a voice
of authority that says fake news that they will say, okay,
must be fake news, because that guy wouldn't lie. He's
the voice of authority. This is a problem in people,
a cognitive problem that you might call, and other people
did call in other contexts the leadership principle. The only
(37:40):
way to show them the reality of a situation, the
accuracy of a situation, is to change the way they
perceive that story. And there's only one way to do that.
Get people's attention, lay it out step by step the
way Cohen did, and force them to process it further.
The denialists, the people who cry fake news. The impetus
(38:00):
should be as much on them to prove the veracity
of what they're saying as on the people presenting the
story in the first place, if not more so, they're
the ones who should be presenting evidence that what they're
saying isn't fake news. Derocher couldn't do that. The reporter said,
were you in this time and place? De Rocher had
to say yes, were you talking to this person? Derosher
had to say yes, and did you actually do this thing?
(38:22):
And Derocher had to say yes. And that was the
end of it. And you know what, for that, and
for many other reasons, Leo too didn't get into the
Hall of Fame until after his death. And it was
purely punitive. And I'm not saying that it was the
right thing to do, or that it was directly related
to that nineteen forty three incident, but it was part
of it. He damaged his credibility forever. And you know what,
(38:45):
that's a worthwhile thing. That is a great achievement, not
for Derocher but for everyone else, for all of us.
And if we had that in our lives, this would
be a better world to live in. Tunes Beard, we
have reached the end of another episode. So here was
where I used to tell you about where the guests
(39:08):
were on Twitter and how to follow me on Twitter.
But these reissues mostly issue the guest last week's show,
with Davey Johnson being the glaring exception. And as I
always say in this reissue episode, I am no longer
on Twitter, and neither are you. I hope you're not.
But you can follow me at Steven Goldman atbskui dot social.
This was so long ago. I list an old and
(39:29):
long defunct publication as my home. Grateful for the opportunity
at Infinite Inning at gmail dot com. Always happy to
hear from you. I'm sometimes a little tardy in responding,
but I will, I promise, and please rate us, review us,
subscribe at the podcatter of your choice and iTunes especially.
It helps to get the word out. No sponsor this week,
(39:50):
so we'll just say that we're brought to you by
the number twenty one. Our producer suffered a broken kneecap
in a whiffleball game when he told me he'd strike
me out on a herb ball. The thing is, I'm
partially blind. Anybody can strike me out, so I'd like
to think that the spontaneous fracturing of his knee was
an act of God, a punishment for his hubris and
general insensitivity to the Madley handicapped. Our theme song, The
(40:14):
Infinite Man, which you have heard throughout this episode and
in fact our hearing now, was co written by myself
in Doctor Richard Mooring. I tell you what he's up to,
but he's been on vacation. He doesn't love me enough
anymore to even send a postcard. Well, if I can
just get this Bathisphere to lift me off the muddy
bottom of the Challenger Deep, it's a long way up.
I'll be back next week with more tales and discussion
(40:35):
from inside the Infinite and thanks again for joining me
for this reissue. I'll see you this weekend for episode
three forty five, all new
Well, hello there, and welcome to another infinite inning midweek
reissue episode. Let's get right to it. I appreciate that
in these reissue episodes you allow me the freedom to
speak to you a little more frankly, to wander about
to whatever topic suits us or suits the occasion than
I tend to do on the regular weekly new programs.
(00:47):
And given that freedom, I'm going to pick up pretty
much exactly where we left off. In last week's regular
full episode of this show, number three forty four, I
talked about the day that William McKinley was shot by
the assassin Leon Zolgosh. I was trying to make a
distinction between a crazy person who claims to be acting
(01:08):
for a cause and people legitimately trying to move that
cause forward, something that happens through the hard work of
activism and persuasion, not a sudden stroke of violence. Even
Adolf Hitler, as stubborn as he was, learn that fact
when he tried to overthrow the government of Munich in
nineteen twenty three and ended up in prison for not
(01:29):
nearly long enough in very comfortable circumstances, but still to
sum up a much longer discussion that ranged over a
lot of other stuff. Zolgosh said that he murdered McKinley
because he was an enemy of the working man. Whether
McKinley was that or he wasn't is totally beside the point,
because only a diseased mind would draw some kind of
(01:52):
through line, some sort of cause and effect thing that
says that you murder the author of the conduct you
don't like, and said conduct will magic cease, it will
disappear from the world, all because you knocked over this
one domino. You know, I can think of one very
narrow circumstance in which that might be true, and that's
if you come upon a fella who just hacked up
(02:14):
a bunch of people with a meat cleaver, and now
he is running at you with said cleaver. Then if
you shoot him, the bad conduct will certainly stop. But
that's very limited, very local, and very much an exception. Rather,
when you kill a leader, most people will just condemn
you as a jerk, and in select circumstances they will
make a martyr of the person that you killed. To
(02:36):
put it scinctly, nothing got better for the working man
or for labor as the result of McKinley's assassination. If anything,
they got worse and would continue to be worse for
decades because he had given people license to condemn those
most progressive forces who were agitating for improved conditions and
compensation for workers. And yeah, some of those people were
(02:58):
definitely nuts. It's not an endorsement of them. I talked
about anarchism last time and what an empty idea that
that is. But they weren't all anarchists either. Some of
them had good, wholesome ideas and they got tared with
that same brush as a result of Zolgosh's actions that
gave the forces of repression further license. And again, there's
just no if I do a then B happens kind
(03:21):
of connection between murdering a president and making anything better
for anyone. Today, as I speak these words, we learned
that the murderer who inspired that discussion of baseball on
September sixth, nineteen oh one, did what he did, at
least according to a tranch of text messages included in
the charging document, because he was quote sick of the
(03:42):
hate unquote his victim inspired the content of the victim's speech.
I to be honest, him not very familiar with it.
I had not spent any time thinking about this person
at all prior to last week. However, various reputable sources
have compiled a number of his quotes, and I urge
you to go read them and decide for yourself. But
again that said, it's totally irrelevant. While there are limits
(04:06):
on free speech. While the paradox of tolerance says that
we as a society should not be forced to allow
speech so free it causes our own destruction, in the
vast majority of cases, the right to free speech requires
us to endure thoughts that we despise and hope that
in the marketplace of thought, good ideas drive out bad.
(04:29):
Right now, that doesn't seem to be happening much, And
I'm not sure it's because of the vitality of one
set of ideas over another, so much as it's not
the invisible hand that's guiding that marketplace, but rather that
a different sort of hand, a very visible set of hands,
is leaning on it, or has fingers at its back,
and not in a nice message or tickling sort of way.
(04:51):
If the only option is McDonald's, it's not a dining
hall of ideas. That is, that is a different discussion.
The larger point here today is that there is no
logic in what the alleged perpetrator did. It's like saying
that if you kiss the cat, life will get better
for the mice, all the mice everywhere, via some magical
(05:12):
form of transference or that. And forgive me for saying this.
If you kill the cat, then all cats will cease
to behave like cats and spare the mice. That's not
how cats or people work. And yes, one of my
cats is sitting right here, literally beneath the microphone and
just gave me what I would consider by cat standards
to be a very dirty look. Now that's not to
(05:35):
say that assassins haven't changed history. What John Wilkes Booth
did to Abraham Lincoln might be a kind of exception,
not because it saved the South from losing the Civil War,
but because by replacing Lincoln with Andrew Johnson, he brought
in a president who wasn't interested in making changes to
the country that were necessary to cement the verdict of combat.
(05:56):
The opposite, he wanted to put everything back the way
it was as much as possible, which left a lot
of erstwhile traders back in positions of power doing what
they could to thwart progress wherever they could, and so
we got Jim Crow, and we got a great many
other problems that still vex us today. But I will
say this, if society wasn't ready to support those changes,
(06:18):
the ones that the radical Republicans were pushing at that time,
they wouldn't have happened. Even if the result of the
war was that the Northerners shot all the high ranking
Confederates afterwards, it would have required a more or less
permanent military occupation and no national reconciliation, which I'm not
sure we ever really got anyway, which is a different discussion. Again.
(06:40):
I feel like I'm saying that a lot today, as
is the permanently morally ambiguous question of whether a national
reconciliation was worthwhile given on whose backs and how much
pain had to be endured for it to happen to
the extent that it did. But now I'm getting very
far up field. And the point, the major point that
(07:02):
I want to make, is that change is about convincing
people to agree with your program, not punching them until
they are forced to say that they do. That's why
anyone who does what this young man did is to
put it simply nuts or simple or both. And that truth,
which I think is well understood by people who do
(07:25):
effort to change public opinion, is why I very much
doubt that anyone aimed him in the direction that he
ultimately went, just as no one and I discussed this
in the last episode aimed Leon zol Goosh. The episode
we're visiting this week goes back to the program's first
year and reflects on a sudden, career altering injury, and
(07:48):
then proceeds to discuss one of the game's most accomplished
weird pitchers and what happened when a leader, Leo de Rocher,
lied about him and that lie spun out of control.
It's a great story of how not to handle a clubhouse,
and maybe not any other situation either. The first story,
as you will hear momentarily, was inspired by then Yankees
(08:10):
rookie outfielder Dustin Fowler, whose career had barely started before
it was interrupted by a severe and seemingly preventable injury.
I didn't know back when I was first talking to
you about this whether his injury would be career ending
or not. It wasn't exactly, but it does seem like
it caused it to be truncated in a real way.
In fact, it's over now, and he's still only thirty.
(08:32):
It's been over for a while. In fact, now, a
lot of players have brief careers for any number of reasons.
So maybe his would have proceeded along roughly the same
lines regardless, but it's impossible to know for sure. The
only thing we do know for sure is that the
injury was real and severe, It was inflicted by a
feature of the White Sox ballpark, and that aspect of
(08:54):
it was clear enough that he subsequently sued the White Sox,
and as far as I can tell, the case has
not settled, but rather goes on seven years later in
its Jarndyce v. Jarndyce way. When we at Baseball Prospectus
wrote about Fowler in twenty eighteen, in the immediate aftermath
of the injury, we said before the injury, Fowler was
(09:17):
a well rounded lefty with good speed, and the classic
problem of well rounded outfielders everywhere is he just a tweener.
In his case, the concern is less about a lack
of power and more about whether he'll get on base
enough because of his aggressive approach. Now, By that time,
the Yankees, in their yankeesish way, had traded him to
(09:37):
the A's for Sonny Gray. The A's gave Fowler an
extended trial in twenty eighteen, and he was pretty terrible,
primarily because of the aggressive approach at the plate that
we described. Now, did the knee injury have anything to
do with that? Did it deprive him of a crucial
step on the base paths that would have let him
beat out some infield hits or play center well enough
(09:58):
to be a fourth outfielder despite his bad approach at
the plate. Again, impossible to say, but you would have
liked to have seen him get a clean chance to try.
That the White Sox had a hidden hazard in their
park deprived him of that chance. Now, before I turn
you over to my past self, I'd like to leave
you with a little baseball story I came across earlier today.
(10:20):
I'm not going to give you the precise version that
I saw from nineteen forty one, because the point of
the author seems to have been that people of color
are stupid. I do not believe that, as I do
not believe it universally about any group or collection of people.
I'd like to alter it in fact, so that it's
clear its point is that baseball players are resilient. That's
(10:43):
how I read the original, resilient or optimistic. That the
author was so prejudiced he missed the moral of his
own story. For all I know, it wasn't even his story.
The tale may be so old it has whiskers, it
doesn't matter. There's still some value to it. It goes
like this. A man happens to pass a ballgame in progress.
It's an informal neighborhood game, not a major league or
(11:06):
even minor league game, so he could just walk right
up to the players and ask how things were going.
What's the scar? The man asks the first baseman, ninety
four to nothing. The first baseman replies, getting beaten rather badly,
aren't you. The man says, no, sir. The first baseman replies,
we ain't been up to bat yet, and that's the
(11:27):
whole thing. So I ask, is the first baseman dumb
or just optimistic? And let me point out a special
irony of the author landing on one side or the
other of that question, As I said. This was printed
in October of nineteen forty one. Two months later, Pearl
harbor happened, the Japanese sank a whole bunch of our
(11:49):
ships and killed a great many Americans. For US, World
War two had finally begun, and we were getting beaten
rather badly, weren't we. It seems to me that the
first baseman's answer, no, sir, we ain't been up to
that yet, turned out to be a valid reply. That's
it for me for this reissue episode. You'll hear from
(12:10):
me occasionally the rest of the way if I have
to patch over any old breaks. And at the end
of the show, let's take a break. Now on the
other side, we'll get to that story of an ancient
but still very memorable career altering injury, and then we'll
make another stop at Brooklyn. I hope you enjoy those
old Dodger stories as much as I do telling them,
and as always, thank you for joining me for this
(12:32):
reissue episode of The Infinite Inning. I'll see you on
the other side, or shall I say my younger self
will because we're going time traveling.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Oh boy.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
The cruel nature of the Infinite Inning is that it's
a state of being where the road is shorter than
the journey is long. Maybe that sounds like a cheap irony,
but it seems like a fair analogy for the nature
of life. And time will never perfect this project, whatever
project we're talking about, whatever our individual projects are. We'd
like to keep trying to pursue the third out, but
(13:26):
there are more batters to face than there is time.
Paul Valari said that works of art are never completed,
only abandoned. So too our lives and whatever progress we
hope to make within them. I was deeply moved by
what happened last week to the young Yankees outfielder Dustin Fowler.
In case you missed it, the kid began the season
(13:46):
as a Yankees prospect, although not a particularly highly ranked one.
He was somewhere in the middle of the pack in
a deep farm system. He's just twenty two years old,
and he moved up through a combination of attrition in
his own good play, and finally got the call to
the majors. He lasted not quite half an inning in
his debut at Chicago against the White Sox. He didn't
(14:09):
get to bat in the first inning, and when he
went to right field for the bottom of the first,
he chased a slicing fly ball that went down the
foul line off the bat of Jose Abreu, and he
didn't quite judge the low fence and the guard rail
out there quite correctly, and he slammed into it with
his knee. Joe Girardi, the Yankees manager, said there was
an electrical box in there too. It's hard to see
(14:30):
that on the video, but in either case, he ruptured
his ptel attendant and he's gone for the year. His
major league debut, rookie season, and possibly his career all
becoming highly attenuated at once. It was deeply upsetting to
see someone achieve their dream and then have it snatched
away all at the same time. With modern sports medicine,
(14:52):
there's a good chance that Fowler can make it back
in a reasonable period of time, not this year, but
perhaps next year and then roughly the same shape that
you started in. But you don't know until it happens.
You don't know if the opportunity will be there, if
the ability will still be there, the mobility will still
be there, the emotional ability, the sense of confidence, the
(15:12):
poise that allows one to succeed in the high pressure
environment that is professional baseball. A great deal can change.
You can change when you've suffered a severe injury, and
what happens after isn't just about how that part of
your body that was hurt response to rehabilitation. I'm speaking
from personal experience to an extent in that you've heard
(15:33):
me refer to having had cancer on this program. And
I had when I was thirty two, ocular cancer, and
the treatment for that, to save my life, caused me
to be blind in one eye. And it's a small thing,
a really small thing. And given that people die of cancer,
I'm still here, and people lose more important things lungs
(15:55):
and chunks of their colon, and suffer all kinds of
other disabling or debility hating effects. But I can tell
you it's greatly affected my life, not just in the
sheer number of things I bump into, including people when
I'm walking down the street because I don't see them,
but in my reluctance to go places and do things.
And it's made me less social, it made me uncomfortable
(16:16):
in crowds. And don't get me wrong, I'm so grateful
to be alive when so many other people who've received
diagnoses like mine or not. But it turns out that
you can have feelings of depression and inadequacy just based
on something as small as a non functional eye. So
even if Fowler does come back and play at a
high level, and I really do hope that he does,
he might not be the same in some fundamental way.
(16:38):
Fowler's mishap and quick exit might put you in mind
of the story of someone like Moonlight Graham, the player
who was performed by an elderly Burt Lancaster with so
much twinkle he might have been using peds in the
movie Field of Dreams, not a fictional character. In nineteen
oh five, Graham played a fraction of the game for
the New York Giants and then never appeared in the
Majors again. But for some reason, I kept thinking of
(17:01):
Joe Houser, the young Philadelphia Athletics first baseman at the
beginning of the nineteen twenties. The parallel isn't perfect because
he got a few years in before his career went wrong,
but the comparison still seems apt. Very briefly, and I'm
not going to do the story justice just now. Howser
was a young first baseman out of Milwaukee. He was
called unser cho our Joe by the German population there.
(17:22):
And he came up with the A's in nineteen twenty two.
He was quite the hitter or left hander. He had
a lot of power. He finished second to Babe Ruth
in home runs in nineteen twenty four. He was a
distant second, but there's no shame in being second to
Babe Ruth in anything. In the brief time that he
was a regular in the major leagues, he was routinely
among the home run leaders. But it was all over
by the time he was twenty five. And here's why.
(17:43):
Just before the nineteen twenty five seasons started, which would
have been his fourth campaign, the A's played an exhibition
game and a batter hit a ground ball between first
and second. Hawser went to make the play and his
knee spontaneously and completely split in down the middle. No
one had touched him. There was no inciting incident. Obviously
(18:04):
there had to be some pre existing flaw there, but
it just broke. That was the end of his season.
He was fifteen weeks in the hospital. It had to
be sewed back together, essentially with wire. He could never
get re established in the major leagues, even though his
bat did recover. Some of it was the knee struggled
to regain flexibility. Some of it Howser blamed on Ty Cobb,
(18:26):
who was having his last year in the majors when
Hawser was making another run at playing time, and Howser
claimed that Cobb sabotaged him with batting tips that were
designed to make him fail. So he went back down
to the minor leagues and he just kept hitting. No
one cared. He hit sixty three home runs in nineteen
thirty for Baltimore of the International League. He hit sixty
(18:46):
nine and nineteen thirty three for the Minneapolis Millers, and
people talked about that the park had short fences and
so on, but fine, discount them. It doesn't matter. He
had the ability to play, and he could have helped
a major league team, but no one called. The other
knee went and still he kept playing. He played until
he was forty three years old. He lived until he
was ninety eight, and still no one called. Maybe the
(19:10):
scouts just had a view they couldn't be budged off of.
Maybe they thought that the kind of guy who had
let Ty Cobb argue him out of his swing wasn't
someone who was going to succeed. It's impossible to know
it this late date, but it's frightening. Imagine you're a
writer in possession of a great novel or's screenplay. Imagine
you're a holy man who claims he can perceive the
nature of the divine. Imagine you're one of the greatest
(19:33):
home run hitters of all time, with three hundred and
ninety nine in the minor leagues and another eighty in
the major leagues, and no one in the majors will
give you the time of day. The opportunity was there,
and it was gone, and you do everything you can
to earn it back, and it just will not be
restored to you. That isn't Moses being shown the Promised Land,
(19:53):
but being denied entry to it. That is the deafness
of an unfair world. And it scares the heck out
of me. I'm Steven Goldman and this is the Infinite
Inning Baseball Podcast.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Well, hello there.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
The tunnel under the Pow Camp was not discovered by
the Germans until it was too late, and now you're
closing in on the Swiss border just beyond the mountains
the refuge. That is episode eleven. I hope you packed
lightly a couple of minutes on the subject of fake
news a really fat, fascinating topic in that it's now
used to invalidate things you don't like. We get involved
(21:05):
in the liar's paradox, the idea that you can say
something like this statement is false and you're automatically tied
up in a conundrum because it is false, then it's true,
and if it's true, it's false. So we have this
way of messing with people's minds, and that's labeling something
as fake news. But baseball doesn't have that. Say you're
a Blue Jays fan and last night Aaron Judge hit
(21:26):
a home run against you. You can't really take that
fact and say fake news about it. Aaron Judge did
not hit a home run against my team, because it's
either in the box score or it's not. It's either
on the videotape or it's not. And unless you're going
to claim that someone has altered either of those things
in a massive conspiracy to boost Aaron Judge's home run totals. Actually,
(21:46):
Yankee Stadium is a massive conspiracy to boost Aaron Judge's
home run totals, but that's another story. Anyway, you can't
invalidate that fact just by calling it something fake. The
closest thing that we have to that is trade rumors.
And I would think that people like our own John
Hayman and Ken Rosenthal and so on, are responsible, but
that hasn't always been the case. And even when they
(22:09):
are responsible, it sometimes might as well be fake. Because
if you see a story that says, say, the Astros
covet Jose Kintana, well, okay, they covet him. I mean,
you may covet Jennifer Lawrence, but that's as far as
it goes. Similarly, you may read a story that says
the Astros have called the White Sox about Jose Kintana,
and you may have called Jennifer Lawrence, but she may
(22:32):
not call you back. So again, like people have conversations
all the time, they wish for things all the time,
they want things all the time, they may even ask
for them all the time, But the fact that they
have those feelings is not necessarily news. And yet even
that may be real. The closest thing I can think
of to a story like that that actually is fake
but did have an impact on the real world is
(22:53):
that supposedly the reason that Yogi Barra got to be
manager of the Yankees in nineteen sixty four is that
some board sports writers decide to start a rumor Yankees
considering Yogi Barra for manager, and waited to see how
fast it would bounce back to them along the Twilight
Bark the telephone line of sports journalism, and somehow in
the process of that happening, the Yankees sort of went, oh,
(23:15):
we're considering him, Well, I suppose we should get him
signed then, so he got to be manager for a while,
and even if he wasn't quite prepared for it, and
the circumstances weren't ideal in a lot of ways, they
did win the pennant. But that was something that began
as fake news and became real news. I don't think
it happens that way very often. And here's another thing
that doesn't happen. Baseball pioneered the idea of confronting your
(23:38):
accuser when it comes to the guy who's shouting fake news.
And it's really only happened once that I can think of,
but it's so enticing, it's so attractive as something that
should happen, that you should have the right to testify
on the behalf of the story that you're filing. One
(23:58):
way or another right or wrong. This happened in Brooklyn
in nineteen forty three. It is a long and elaborate story,
and I'm going to try to tell it quickly and
kind of boil it down to the essentials. I'm going
to do this from memory, or mostly from memory, So
forgive me if I fudge anything. It involves Leo de Rocher,
who is managing the Brooklyn Dodgers at that point. And
Leo was not a guy whoever exactly had a reputation
(24:23):
for let's say, sterling conduct or honesty. I mean, going
back to when he first came to the major leagues
as a shortstop with the Yankees, he was accused of
being a clubhouse chief and Babe Ruth and he got
into a fistfight because supposedly he stole Babe Ruth's watch
out of his locker, and he just kind of rolled
on that way, doing what he felt like doing and
not necessarily telling the truth. If he got caught, he
(24:43):
just deny it. Harold Parrott of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle wrote,
on the charge of denying statements he'd unquestionably made. De
Rocher has been convicted before. Lippy's behavior is based almost
entirely on convenience. If it becomes inconvenient to have said something,
Leo just decides he never I did say it. Veteran
newspapermen have known this for years, but apparently Lippy's players
(25:04):
have just discovered it. Remind me to comment another time
on the defunct Brooklyn Daily Eagles habit in the forties
and fifties of its sports section referring to everyone by nicknames,
so that every story about a game is that Lippy
ordered Dixie to throw the ball to Google, and you
really have to have a code. It is not a
difficult code, but it's just so cute as to be
really annoying. Google. By the way, was Aggie Gallon a
(25:27):
really underrated player, kind of the Bernie Williams of the
thirties and forties. But I, as usual digress. Okay, So
nineteen forty three, the Dodgers are a really good team,
although they're being sat by World War Two. They won
one hundred games and the Pennant. In nineteen forty one,
they won one hundred and nineteen forty two, but they
finished second to the Cardinals, who want even more. Some
of the good players are starting to go into the military,
(25:48):
and they're patching with a lot of veterans. Arkie Vaughan,
the great Pirate shortstop, is playing for them in place
of Pee Wee Reese and Paul Wayner, who's forties in
their outfield. And they have some other veteran guys like
the aforementioned Roxy Walker, the first baseman Dolph Camille, and
pitchers like the rage filled Johnny Allen, and most essential
(26:08):
in this story, Bobo Newsom. Bobo on his own is
a long story, and there's so many things that we
could talk about with him. The fact that he changed
teams seventeen times, the fact that he played for the
Washington Senators five times, and the Browns three times, and
the Dodgers twice, and so on. That he called everybody Bobo,
(26:30):
including himself, so it was both a first and a
third person name. He was a two hundred game winner
and a two hundred game loser. Sometimes he was Max
Scherzer and sometimes he was Bud Norris. He lost twenty
games three times, but he also won twenty games three times,
although one of those times he had an ERA of
five point zero eight. He was an extraordinary player. The
thing that I love about him, perhaps most is that
(26:52):
he was virtually indestructible. I mean, not only did he
pitch into his forties, but he suffered injuries on the
field that were so horrific that would hospitalize any player today,
and yet he would stay in the game. This is
from and this is later in that year, nineteen forty three,
a description of a game that he pitched against the
Saint Louis Browns. Because by the end of the story,
(27:14):
although he starts with the Dodgers, I will tell you
ahead of time that he does not finish the story
with the Dodgers. The score was two to two and
the last of the fifth when pitcher Oscar Lefty Judd
of the Red Sox blasted a drive which chromed off
Newsom's left forehead, over Don Gutteridge's head, and into deep
right center field. Bobo slightly blocked the smash with his
glove hand, but only slightly, and it was fortunate for
(27:35):
him then that the ball hit him a glancing below.
He did not collapse or even fall to the ground.
He walked to the Browns dugout, sat on top of
the step for cold water applications, and was greeted with
wild cheers when he gamely returned, allow me to translate.
The Browns pitcher hit a four hundred foot line drive
off of the opposing pitcher's head, and the pitcher stayed
in the game. This seems like a good place to
(27:56):
take a quick break and allow you to go out
to the lobby and buy yourself a snack. I'd buy
it for you, honest, but I'm not there right now.
I'm in here in this box. On the other side
bore tales of Bobo being insensible to pain. That was
(28:20):
not unusual for Bobo. There was an opening day when
he was with the Senators when Franklin Roosevelt was in attendance,
and after Roosevelt signed a ball for him, he signed
a ball for Roosevelt, even though Roosevelt did not ask
for him to do that. He then went to the mound.
The Indians were the opposing team. He got ahead of
Earl Avril shouted, now, Bobo will strike you out with
a curveball. Avril, knowing this, was on top of the curveball,
(28:43):
and lined it up the middle off of Bobo's knee.
That was the first inning he stayed in and completed
the game. It was only after that he said to
the trainer, Bobo thinks his leg is broke, and indeed,
Bobo's leg was broken. He had pitched the entire game
that way. On another occasion, he was pitching against the
Yankees and Chapman laid down a bunt and the Senator's
third baseman, Ossi Bluegie, came in and made a great
(29:05):
play and was going to fire the ball to first,
but either he or Bobo did not realize that Bobo's
head was in the way, and at point blank range,
Bobo was sculled by his own third baseman, and all
the descriptions of the game say that he sort of
did a weird little dance. Wounded moose is the term
that's often used. He sort of stumbled around the and
fielled confusedly for a moment, but once again he stayed
(29:28):
in and he threw a complete game shutout. His jaw
had been broken in two places on yet another occasion.
I believe this was when he was pitching very successfully
for the Detroit Tigers. The throw from the first baseman
on a three one put out tailed into the runner,
leading the runner to run into Bobo's pitching hand. His
thumb was broken in two places, and again he stayed
(29:51):
in or in this case, at least he tried. It's
hard to grip your pitches when your thumb is swelling
and you can't really move it. Sometimes he's portrayed as stupid,
but I don't think he was stupid. I think he
was fair smart. I think he was amused. I think
he did a lot to entertain himself. I think he
did a lot to entertain others, and since he was
often stuck on tail end clubs, he kind of did
what he could to attract a crowd. He figured that
(30:12):
would make him more valuable. He even said as much.
By nineteen forty three, he's in his mid thirties. He's
pitching for the Dodgers. He's actually leading the team and
wins at this point in the season. But in mid
July there's an incident. The Dodgers have a kid shortstop
who they're trying to convert to catcher named Bobby Bragan.
Bragan would be in the game for forever as a
coach and manager in that kind of thing, but at
(30:33):
this point he's just struggling to hang on and he's
the battery with Newsome in this game in the early innings,
of the game, there's a three to two pitch with
a runner on third, and there's a cross up. The
catcher Bragan is expecting a fastball and Newsom through something else.
What it was is was the subject of the controversy.
(30:54):
The ball took a weird break and it bounced and
goes all the way to the backstop and the runner scores.
Now this turns out to be immaterial to the outcome
of the game, which the Dodgers eventually come back and win.
But in the moment, Newsom showed a lot of frustration.
He put his hands on his hips. At the end
of the inning, he threw his glove in the air,
and this was obviously embarrassing to the kid. Catcher Leo
(31:17):
de Rocher, who liked the kid very much, was really angry,
and there had been conflicts between him and Newsom already,
in part because Leo is a super type A person.
Newsom is kind of a super type Z person. He's
incredibly relaxed and mellow, and again not somebody who takes
coaching real well, possibly because he knows he cannot be killed.
(31:38):
There's a confrontation after the game in the clubhouse about
how Newsom had shown up Breagan and how Newsom had
thrown a spitter and crossed the kid up and he
did it just to make him look bad. And words
go back and forth, and at the end of it,
Derocer says to Newsom, you're suspended, and you're suspended indefinitely
for the season. If I can get Branch Tricky to
(32:00):
make it stick, all right, fine, This is like a
thing that happens tempers get overheated. Derocher would do this sometimes.
Newsome provoked people into it plenty of times. Not a
big deal, but Derosher made a mistake. The timing of
the argument is such that the rest of the players
don't witness it, they don't know about the suspension, and Leo,
(32:20):
still in the clubhouse, feeling his manhood a little bit
in this moment of leadership, starts bragging on the argument
and what he had told Newsom in earshot of a reporter,
and reporter asks is this for publication? And Leo is
okay with it, and eventually it finds its way into
the paper. The first of the players here about it
is when they read it over breakfast the next morning,
(32:42):
and they're outraged. It seems like an overreaction, and Leo's
been riding them hard, so they don't have a lot
of tolerance for this kind of dictatorial behavior. Particularly Arkie
Vaughn is incredibly upset by this. Players come in for
the game and there's a confrontation in the clubhouse. They
ask Leo, did you really say all that stuff? Did
you really suspend Newsom for the season, and he, desperate
(33:06):
cornered denies it. They don't buy it at all. They
do not buy it. Arkie Von turns in his uniform
and says he's done with the team, that Derochher is
a liar. He's not gonna play for a guy who lies,
because if Dorosher lied about Newsom, he could lie about him.
Dixie Walker also refuses to play, and suddenly the Dodgers
don't have a team. The umpire send a bat boy
(33:27):
in to say, you guys didn't show up on the
field for batting practice. We're ready to start the game.
Where are you? And Derochher actually has to say, well,
we'll see if we have nine guys. If we have
nine guys, we'll play. If we don't, we're gonna forfeit.
And there's an extraordinary scene as he goes down the
roster saying, Billy Herman, do you want to play? Yes
or no? Paul Wayner, do you want to play? Yes
(33:50):
or no? Now, the players have already gotten word from
Branch Rickey that if they refuse to play, they're not
only going to be suspended, they're going to be blacklisted.
So everybody but Arkie Vaughan goes along with it, stays
in his civilian clothes. He has literally given his uniform
to Leo de Rocher and told him to shove it
up his ass. Meanwhile, Derocher has called the sports writer
(34:10):
who was standing right there, his name was Tim Cohen,
and denied the story and called it a lie. He's
called it a lie to the players, He's called it
a lie to the reporter. The reporter, who was not
in the ballpark that day, it was his day off,
calls branch Ricky and says, I demand the right to
confront my accuser. And the next day, even though Leo
(34:30):
and Ricky they don't want this, there is another clubhouse
meeting in front of all the players and the assembled writers.
Cohen cross examines Leo de Rocher, even concluding with the
prosecution rests De Rocher is rapidly forced to admit that, yes,
it all actually did happen the way it was reported.
(34:50):
The crime is a small crime. It's that he looks petty,
and then, as usual, the cover up was the worst
thing that he lied, and it was one lie too
many for his players. At this point, the Dodgers hit
the All Star break and for a few days, Derocher's
job hung in the balance. His credibility is just shot. Ultimately,
(35:10):
Ricky decided to keep him on. However, that didn't leave
him with much ability to keep the players on, and
he had to clean house veterans start leaving town. Somehow,
Newsom goes through waivers instantly and winds up back with
the Browns, and perhaps not coincidentally, this was one day
before he was due to receive a rostering bonus. The Dodgers,
who are a close second to the Cardinals at that moment,
(35:30):
have a losing record over the rest of the season,
and they don't really get back to where they were
going until after the war. The biggest casualty is probably Vaughan,
who was so disgusted with Durocher that, although he did
finish the season, he immediately retired and stayed retired for
three years. He came back in forty seven after Leo
was gone. This directly impacted his Hall of Fame candidacy.
(35:53):
He made it in nineteen eighty five, but it was
long after he was dead. Now it wasn't something he
was faded to live to see in any case, because
he died young at forty in a voting accident. He
drowned in Crater Lake. Nonetheless, the missing time retarded his
career totals, and it took voters a while to look
around the counting stats to see the sheer quality of
(36:14):
the player. Regardless. Think about the drama of that scene,
but think also about the attempt to bring integrity to
the proceedings. Leo de Rocher had popped off at a pitcher,
done something too extreme, and then to cover it up
said fake news, and the reporter who wrote the story
(36:35):
went before him, went before his peers, went before the players,
defended himself, and it was revealed not to be fake news.
Leo was shown to be a liar. The revolt was
suppressed because players didn't have a lot of rights in
those days, and there really wasn't anywhere for them to
go with it anyway. Once Ricky decided to sustain Durocher
in his job, but shouldn't it be that way. I
(36:56):
don't know how he would do it at scale, but
there has to be a way, because you cannot convince
people in the culture at large, the society at large,
that a story is true when there are two sides.
There are always people who will have so open a
mind that they will consider both sides even when it
(37:16):
is literally impossible for both sides to have equal legitimacy.
Or they will have such a fealty to a voice
of authority that says fake news that they will say, okay,
must be fake news, because that guy wouldn't lie. He's
the voice of authority. This is a problem in people,
a cognitive problem that you might call, and other people
did call in other contexts the leadership principle. The only
(37:40):
way to show them the reality of a situation, the
accuracy of a situation, is to change the way they
perceive that story. And there's only one way to do that.
Get people's attention, lay it out step by step the
way Cohen did, and force them to process it further.
The denialists, the people who cry fake news. The impetus
(38:00):
should be as much on them to prove the veracity
of what they're saying as on the people presenting the
story in the first place, if not more so, they're
the ones who should be presenting evidence that what they're
saying isn't fake news. Derocher couldn't do that. The reporter said,
were you in this time and place? De Rocher had
to say yes, were you talking to this person? Derosher
had to say yes, and did you actually do this thing?
(38:22):
And Derocher had to say yes. And that was the
end of it. And you know what, for that, and
for many other reasons, Leo too didn't get into the
Hall of Fame until after his death. And it was
purely punitive. And I'm not saying that it was the
right thing to do, or that it was directly related
to that nineteen forty three incident, but it was part
of it. He damaged his credibility forever. And you know what,
(38:45):
that's a worthwhile thing. That is a great achievement, not
for Derocher but for everyone else, for all of us.
And if we had that in our lives, this would
be a better world to live in. Tunes Beard, we
have reached the end of another episode. So here was
where I used to tell you about where the guests
(39:08):
were on Twitter and how to follow me on Twitter.
But these reissues mostly issue the guest last week's show,
with Davey Johnson being the glaring exception. And as I
always say in this reissue episode, I am no longer
on Twitter, and neither are you. I hope you're not.
But you can follow me at Steven Goldman atbskui dot social.
This was so long ago. I list an old and
(39:29):
long defunct publication as my home. Grateful for the opportunity
at Infinite Inning at gmail dot com. Always happy to
hear from you. I'm sometimes a little tardy in responding,
but I will, I promise, and please rate us, review us,
subscribe at the podcatter of your choice and iTunes especially.
It helps to get the word out. No sponsor this week,
(39:50):
so we'll just say that we're brought to you by
the number twenty one. Our producer suffered a broken kneecap
in a whiffleball game when he told me he'd strike
me out on a herb ball. The thing is, I'm
partially blind. Anybody can strike me out, so I'd like
to think that the spontaneous fracturing of his knee was
an act of God, a punishment for his hubris and
general insensitivity to the Madley handicapped. Our theme song, The
(40:14):
Infinite Man, which you have heard throughout this episode and
in fact our hearing now, was co written by myself
in Doctor Richard Mooring. I tell you what he's up to,
but he's been on vacation. He doesn't love me enough
anymore to even send a postcard. Well, if I can
just get this Bathisphere to lift me off the muddy
bottom of the Challenger Deep, it's a long way up.
I'll be back next week with more tales and discussion
(40:35):
from inside the Infinite and thanks again for joining me
for this reissue. I'll see you this weekend for episode
three forty five, all new
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark
My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January of 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. My Favorite Murder is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including historic true crime, comedic interviews and news, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.