October 1, 2025 • 33 mins
We revisit an early episode about two great ballplayers who sickened at midcareer and, sadly, could not come back in any sense. What can we learn from them? This week’s new remarks expand on that theme, the government shutdown, and on the idea of the Infinite Inning podcast itself.
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 back to another Infinite Inning
reissue episode another one. You know, when Bob Dylan's what
was it third or fourth album came out and it
had been titled Another Side of Bob Dylan, he kind
of wondered if that was someone's idea of a subtle
insult in this case, No, it is not my intention
(00:47):
to insult myself and certainly not you. It is simply
just like our weekly new episodes, the next one in
a series. I two am the next one in a
series after many previous piece people who responded to the
name Goldman. Although I learned recently that there has been
so much kind of well fleeing tyranny in my background
(01:09):
on the paternal side, I'm not sure they were all
called that. Actually, countries and nationalities got changed, and so
sometimes arbitrarily by immigration control types, so did names. But
in any case, I am, as ever Steven Goldman, your
host for this trip back to a trip back to
the past with the goal of better understanding the present,
(01:29):
the time machine, as ever being baseball, I'm going to
keep today's new remarks as brief as I can, and
actually story time is kind of brief too. These were
tightly told stories, unusual for me, I know, but there
is so much playoff baseball this week. I can't keep
up with it all, and I expect the same as
true of you. On our last reissue, I think between
(01:50):
my remarks and the length of the stories from the
original episode, the reissue came in around an hour. Well,
we're not going to do that this time. We go
back this week to the first months of the show
with episode number seven and a couple of brief but
dark stories of players in medical decline, the forgotten Austin
(02:12):
McHenry who never got a movie about his life, and
the not at all forgotten Lou Garrick, who did. I'm
not saying that's the only difference. It's a difference. I'm
reluctant to go back to a show this early in
the run because I didn't know what I was doing
yet if I've ever learned so. My voice is bad,
my mic technique is bad, the sound is bad, and
(02:34):
for me, it is as the kids say nowadays, caringe.
Here's another thing that's different. You'll hear me apologize for
doing what I do on this show, which is to
explain the world around us through the lens of baseball.
I did that because, as I explain, I had been
conditioned to be ashamed of it. I'm not anymore. It
(02:55):
is the essence of what I do and what I
care about, and the only thing I have to offer
the conversation that you couldn't get from one hundred other
people in other ways, not necessarily better or worse, but
broadly the same mor baseball commentary. I dress it up
a little differently when I do that, But yawn, I say,
do you hear me?
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Yawn?
Speaker 1 (03:15):
Since I think in these terms as much as I
would like not to, as I would be happier not
to to just be thinking about, well, Albert who holdsby
you made the manager of the Angels. That'll make a
huge difference. Yuk, yuk, yuk. And I recognize there's a
place for that. And again, I've buttered a lot of
bread for myself and my family making money writing that
(03:37):
sort of thing. But I've always done a little bit
of this, and over time I've been fortunate enough to
have the opportunity to do a lot of the kind
of mixed commentary that I do, of coloring outside the lines,
and I have to thank you for that whether you
simply listen and let the ads go by when you
are listening, or you support the show via Patreon, you're
(03:58):
showing that this is something you can about, that it's
worth doing, and that you are not offended by a
kind of commentary that includes both sports and the world
that surrounds sports and utilizes sports to examine the wider
world rather than simply be concerned with the wins and losses,
or the home runs and the stolen bases within the
(04:20):
sport itself. We've done a lot of both on this show.
I enjoy doing both, but when we are in a
time of crisis as now, the call to do the
fullest version of what I like to do, which is
talk about American tradition and history and culture and law
and just sweeten it with a bit of Babe Ruth
to make it all more palatable. Because Babe Ruth lived
(04:43):
through all of this too. It's very hard for me
to resist it, and in fact, I feel like it
would be wrong of me not to utilize what little
platform I have to speak to you about these things.
I'd be holding back the best part of myself out
of fear that I would lose you. And there are
a lot of you to lose. I keep obsessing about
these numbers lately. Pre war Germany had a population of
(05:06):
sixty four million. In the last Freeish election Germany had
before the takeover, when the population wasn't being wholly intimidated,
who are you going to vote for a Klaus Thunk?
The Nazi Party got a third of the vote, So
like twenty one million people. That's a ton of people.
In raw terms, they were vastly outnumbered. But think about
(05:27):
how many bodies that is. If you add up the
total twenty twenty five attendants of the Yankees, Blue Jays,
Red Sox, Astros, Angels, Mariners, Tigers, and Rangers, you get
about that number twenty one million. Imagine then that approximately
six hundred and fifty full modern ballparks of people. That's
(05:51):
eight teams times eighty one games went for the Nazis.
It's hard to visualize that. If you've ever sat in
a sold out ballpark for concert venue and said to yourself,
so that's what it looks like to put five thousand
people in the same place, never mind forty thousand. You
know how hard it is to conceive of it, even
when you're in the middle of it. Have you ever
(06:13):
walked through the postgame parking lot after an NFL game?
What happened to this place? Did they fight a battle
out here? When I was inside? Eighty thousand people happened
to it. That's about the seating capacity of my local
NFL stadium. Eighty thousand drunk, rowdy consistently disappointed people. Two teams,
so sixteen dates a year. They just passed through that
(06:36):
parking lot like a horde of depressed and angry locusts.
As they passed, they consume all hope and joy and
poop out fast food wrappers and empty beer bottles. It's
the circle of life. So the Nazis started with twenty
one million adherents, and within that you no doubt had
different levels of enthusiasm, from gung ho hardcore fascists to
(06:56):
people who held their noses and voted for them by
one ration now or another. And here's where I'm going
with this. The United States has a current population estimated
of over three hundred and forty million. So even if
ten percent of US are sympathetic with hardcore Nazism, it's
nothing like a majority. It's not big in mathematical terms,
(07:18):
but in raw people. It's thirteen million more Nazis than
the Nazis had at the outset. I feel like that's
emblematic of what we're up against. In both cases, the
key to survival, to blunting the minority from consuming the majority,
is to speak out. I keep using these words on
every show, both the re issues and the regular episodes.
(07:40):
Educate and persuade, argue. As futile as it is in
the vast majority of cases, it's the only way. It
doesn't happen with the blow of a fist or the
barrel of a gun. It happens when we reach not
the unconverted. You cannot convert the unconverted. You cannot convert
a Nazia. Their position is definitionally inflexible. What we must
(08:04):
hope to do is convert the people who are lulled
into a false state of indifference and to galvanize the ungalvanized.
And that means keeping up a constant level of chatter
about the threat that we are under from that angry minority.
And again, every individual who does this matters, because mass
(08:27):
media is in the bag for the other side. I've
cited this World War II Union ad before. I probably
played it right here on the show, touting at the
time the great numbers. The factories were hitting and churning
out war materiel, and one voice would say something like,
last quarter, we made a thousand artillery pieces. And then
another voice says, just a whisper, wait till we shout.
(08:49):
And then the first narrator says, and we made five
thousand fighter planes. Just a whisper, wait till we shout. Well,
we have not shouted yet, and we might not. But me,
I'm gonna go down talking in the best way that
I know. How about the topics that I care about, which,
as I said, consists of two mirrors reflecting one another,
(09:09):
America and the Great American Game. As I record these words,
the government has been shut down, the federal government, i
should say, because the two political parties in Congress have
failed to negotiate to a conclusion satisfactory to each other
regarding budgetary matters. Politics is supposed to be the art
of the possible, the art of compromise, but we are
(09:29):
well off that map these days. One of the sticking
points for the Democratic Party are subsidies to the Affordable
Care Act, or Obamacare, that were phased out in the
prior budget. If you get your medical insurance through work,
you might not care about this, but all of us
are going to be out of work at some point.
Few jobs are for life these days, and you just
(09:51):
might care about the existence of the Affordable Care Act. Then,
over twenty four million Americans, or about six percent of us,
get healthcare via the ACA exchanges without the tax credits
that were phased out the subsidies, lower income people and
healthier people will drop out of the plans due to
(10:12):
not being able to afford or not wanting to afford
the higher bills, leaving a sicker, older, less healthy pool
for insurers to cover, and that means a subsequent rise
in premiums, this time from the insurers. There's a healthcare
data analyst on Blue Sky named Charles Gaba. I believe
I'm pronouncing that right. Could be Gaba. Maybe he's a
(10:33):
Ramones fan, I don't know. He's been calculating how different
plans in different states would be priced without the subsidies
compared to now, For example, using Ohio Bellweather states it's
not anymore, but still As an example, he figures a
family of four with two adolescent children on a silver
level plan would go from paying eight hundred and ninety
(10:54):
three dollars a month right now to one thousand, eight
hundred and thirty dollars a month next year. In California,
that family would go from nine hundred and twenty one
dollars a month to two thousand, one hundred and fifty
one dollars a month. And in my beautiful, glorious home state,
which I appreciate more and more as each day goes by,
they would go from nine hundred and twenty one dollars
(11:16):
a month to one thousand, seven hundred and thirty three
dollars a month. That is a lot of baseball games
that those parents can no longer afford to treat their
kids to seeing. More realistically, of course, it's not baseball
games that they'll forego. It's basic necessities. And if you
don't have those, then you're less healthy, and a vicious
(11:36):
cycle ensues. And those kids, if they're not healthy, they
don't do as well in school, and then they are
not as good economic contributors to the United States of
America when they're of age. Our Secretary of Defense just
gave a big, big speech to some big big generals
and admirals about how all our soldiers should be big, big,
and muscular. They weren't in the Second World War. You know,
(11:58):
they were undersized with bad Why because they were children
of the Great Depression and they hadn't been eating Kobe
beef when they were little. Nothing in the world is
one thing. Every game of baseball has four bases. You
can't cover three and assume the last one's going to
be okay. It all intersects. You can't be mean and
uncharitable to some percentage of your population, even if it's
(12:20):
five or six percent. Again, we're talking in the millions
of people here, and then expect when you call on
the totality of that population for some national emergency or
again just to keep the economy going on a regular
daily basis, that everyone is going to be able to help.
They're going to fail the government because the government failed them. Now,
I would argue that medical care is a human right.
(12:41):
If you wouldn't let a stabbing victim bleed out in
the street because they can't afford to pay the er bill,
you shouldn't let the same person die of cancer in
six months when treatment might have gotten them another six years.
That's just morality. It's mine. It doesn't have to be
yours or anyone else's. But if you want to be
purely patriotiotic and capitalistic and cynical about it, every single
(13:04):
person in this country is an economic unit. Every one
of us contributes to some extent to the economy to
a greater or lesser degree. Again, this is just basic
capitalism today. Prior to this recording, I went out and
I got a haircut, and yes, it does look good,
thank you. I spent part of my gas tank to
get there, which means eventually I'll buy more gas, which
(13:26):
of course means wages for the guy. In my state,
we don't pump our own gas, it's weird, so that
means a wage for the guy who pumps it. It
means profits for the gas station. It means profits for
the oil company. As much as we don't love oil
companies necessarily, I paid for my haircut, of course, and
I tipped the stylist, and I use my credit card,
which means a premium goes to the credit card company.
(13:47):
The stylist will now take my tip plus their wages
and go to the target about a blockdown from the
barber shop or the stylist place, whatever you call it
and buy a bunch of things that they need at home,
and we all got thoroughly rolling along. If you're broke,
you're not doing any of that. If you're sick, you're
not doing that. If you're dead, you're not doing that.
(14:08):
That's why preventative healthcare, by the way, isn't just about
preventing illness. It's about preventing people from going out of
the ballgame, from having to hobble out to the dugout
because the pitch hit them on the hand and they
can't play anymore. And we know that, we've known it
for a long time. And so sometimes the government, which
is just a big money redistribution machine, gives cash to
(14:31):
our poorer brothers and sisters so that one they don't starve.
Starvation is un American, and two so they can be
productive for the United States. The loaf of bread they
get may be free to them, but it's not free
to the baker. He got paid. Whether the money came
out of the recipient's wallet or out of the federal treasury.
(14:53):
Either way, it still spends for him and he or
they go to the story, go to that same target
that Mike Barber went to and they buy something, and
again everything keeps moving and doesn't constipate up. And then
we all stay employed, and we can all better afford
to go to that ballgame that I mentioned, or can
sit still long enough to watch it, because we're not
(15:14):
working a second job or a third. Now, you or
your uncle Larry may think that poor person is lazy
or stealing from the public, but you know, there are
a variety of characters in every group, even among Nazi voters.
As I said earlier, there's a span from eh, I
guess I'll vote for them to oh god, yeah, And
there are plenty of lazy, rich people who steal from
the public too. Being poor doesn't define one's character. Mostly
(15:38):
it defines one luck or one's luck defines them in
that way, And it's not worth arguing about, because sure,
there probably are some quote unquote lazy people who are
gaming the system. There always have been, there always will be,
going back to the first hunter gatherers and the farmers
who decided to stop hunting and gathering, and then the
(15:58):
hunter gatherers came along, hit them over the head, instole
their rice and an indigo and wheat and hemp and
so on. But just because human nature often sucks doesn't
mean it's the majority of us, or that we should
abandon those who are sincerely in need, or that we
don't benefit ourselves from it. You can justify generosity purely
in terms of selfishness. Pay it forward. It comes back
(16:21):
to you, Larry very nearly the love boat theme, if
you think about it. Who knew the love boat theme
was about Kinesian economics and so earning it is not
worth arguing about because having that money just sitting around
does no one any good. But giving it to the
baker or the doctor via that impoverished person lifts everyone.
Is the foregoing a baseball story. Maybe maybe not. I
(16:43):
would argue that it is, but the rest of the
show is too in its way. Austin McHenry and Lou
Gerigg were inarguably ballplayers, very very good ones, and then
they stopped being that, and they stop being anything at
all because they got, as Lu said famously, a bad break.
Who is to say that can't happen to any of us.
(17:03):
That's what these stories are about. That's all for me
for this episode. I'll be back at the end to
wrap things up. Story Time begins right after this break
thanks for joining me today when there's so much going on,
and as ever, thanks for your support and most of all,
your time. The infinite inning is a place where it's
(17:43):
equally hard to make yourself understood and to understand. To quote,
they might be giants the TVs in Esperanto. It's the
everlasting hour of Babel, and we must bear down to
think clearly. Hold that thought for a moment. I've got
to tell you something else to make it pay off.
This may seem like a morbid place to start, but
as we get to the second segment, I hope you'll
(18:05):
understand why I chose this story parenthetically. As I speak
these words, a thunderstorm is raging outside, and you might
hear the occasional rumble of thunder or a curtain of
rain descending. If so, just consider it a little extra
mood setting thrown in by Mother Nature at no extra charge.
In nineteen twenty one, Bran Trickie Saint Louis Cardinals, he
(18:25):
was the manager then as well as the guy who
ran the team, had one of the best outfields in
baseball history. I don't mean one of the top three
or the top five, and probably not even the top ten.
But it goes on the kind of extended short list.
You haven't heard of any of them, and there's good
reason for that. The right fielder and center fielder weren't
two guys but four. They were in a job share
(18:46):
and there were injuries. They were journeymen who muscled up
and had big years, but didn't have any real careers
of note. The third guy, though, he's the one I
want to talk about, the left fielder. He was in
his fourth year in the big leagues, even though he
was only twenty five years old, and he broke out
out in a big way. He hit three point fifty
had a three ninety three on base percentage of five
thirty one slugging for those of you who liked numbers,
thirty seven doubles, eight triples, seventeen home runs, one hundred
(19:09):
and two RBIs. His teammates called him the Airdale because
of his incredibly speedy defensive work in the outfield. The
speed doesn't show itself on the bases, though he attempted
thirty stolen bases and only made it ten times. The
season wasn't a one off either. Nineteen twenty two started
and he could still hit, but there were problems. His
vision had gotten blurry. It wasn't so much a problem
at the plate as in the outfield. He'd tried to
(19:31):
track a fly ball and run after it, but as
he started moving, everything would just kind of go all hazy.
The Cardinal sent him to a doctor naturally, and the
thought was at first that he had a sinus problem
that was affecting his vision. Ricky sent him home for
a month, and the outfield arrested. Came back, said he
was all right. But it only took two games for
Ricky to see that something wasn't right, and he sent
him home for good. His last at bat came in
(19:52):
Brooklyn on July thirty first, nineteen twenty two. He pinch
hit a single. When he went home, he got a
more thorough examination. It turned out the sign a thing
was wrong. He had a brain tumor. He underwent surgery.
It didn't work. They are not a lot of firsthand
quotes by this player to give you, but his saber
biography by Mike Lynch quotes him as saying, it seems
hard that so young a man as I must die,
(20:14):
but I am ready when the Master summons me. Prior
to surgery, he told Ricky, who had become a good friend.
That he felt like he was up at bat with
the bases loaded in a three to two count, but
he promised he would hit the next one. There would
be no next one. The tumor and the surgery for
it laid him low. His name was Austin McHenry, and
he was just twenty seven years old. It's funny that
(20:34):
these things don't happen more often. We don't think they
should because ballplayers are young men in the prime of
their lives, and therefore mortality is antithetical to our joy
in the game. But in fact it does happen. Think
of Jose Fernandez and your Dano Ventura and the misadventure
that did them in. There are more treatments for cancer
now than there were then, of course, so thank goodness,
(20:55):
A player can survive if he does get it. But
they do get it. Both Chad bet and Jamison Taian
are receiving treatment for testicular cancer as we speak, and
John Lester is a survivor of lymphoma. The thing to
remember is that even if you're young and in the
proverbial pink of health, don't think yourself and vulnerable. One
of my favorite old radio shows was a horror anthology
called Lights Out Everybody. It ran in the thirties and
(21:18):
forties at Chill Wind Blue. A bell told it, well,
here's how it sounded, ironized.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
Yeast presents Lights Out Everybody. Vader the Lights Out.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
I'm Stephen Goldman, and this is the Infinite Inning Baseball Podcast. Well,
(22:37):
hello there, swimming away from the sinking ship, you beach
on an island from which these signs of civilization are
absent except for a sign saying episode seven and a
tiki bar serving my ties. Pull up a stool. It's
just a few minutes to continue the discussion that we
began at the outset of the episode. In nineteen thirty seven,
when lou Gerrig was thirty four, he hit three point
(22:59):
fifty one drove in one hundred and fifty eight runs
on thirty seven home runs, led the American League and
on base percentage. The next year, nineteen thirty eight, was
the one that retrospectively came to be seen as a
harbinger of Gereg's doom. He hit only two ninety five
with twenty nine home runs, although if you look at
the splits month by month, he had some periods, even
(23:19):
as late as August, where he was pretty much the
usual Garreg. It was only in the postseason, when he
had four hits, none of them for extra bases, that
people started saying that he looked sluggish and that maybe
he wasn't running as well as he used to. Garrek
called in an off year. The press freely speculated as
to whether, at thirty five, he was finally reaching the
(23:41):
end if the iron Horse was as they couldn't resist saying, rusting.
What was wrong with Garreg wasn't rust It was something
far more pernicious, although no one could be blamed for
not knowing it at the time. What there were were
clues that concerned people but didn't seem to add up
to anything. There's this from Bill Dickey, which is quoted
in Frank Graham's Leu Garrig A Quiet Hero, one of
(24:02):
the earlier biographies. Dicky said, I knew there was something
seriously wrong with him. I didn't know what it was,
but I knew it was serious. We were in the
room one day a few weeks ago and Lou stumbled
as he walked across the floor. I was reading a
paper and looked up to see what he had stumbled over,
but there was nothing there. I was going to ask
him what had happened, but he had a strange look
(24:23):
on his face, and I didn't say anything. A few
days later, he was standing looking out the window and
I was sitting behind him talking to him, and I
saw one leg give way, just as though somebody had
tapped him sharply at the back of the knee joint.
He looked around quick to see if I had noticed it.
I guess, but I didn't say anything, so I knew
it was something serious, but I didn't know it was
(24:44):
as bad as this. This to which Dicky was referring
was Garrig's diagnosis of amiotrophic lateral sclerosis, which his doctors
for some reason described as being not unlike polio. It's
very different than polio. People could have survived polio even then,
even if they did wind up in an iron lung
als was and is fatal. It's the death of the
(25:05):
motor neurons. Your ability to control your body or exercise
your muscles at all eventually goes away, as does the
ability to speak, swallow, and breathe. Gerrick's life was to
be sadly attenuated, and what remained was the rapid decline
which would shrink his world from the ballpark to his
living room, to his bedroom, and then to the grave.
Joe DiMaggio was on the field at Camden Yards that
(25:28):
night in September nineteen ninety five when Cal Ripken Jr.
Broke the consecutive game's played streak held by Demaggio's old
teammate Lou Garrig. As Demaggio observed the celebration, there were
tears visible in his eyes, but it was impossible to know.
Was he crying for the moment, Was he crying for
(25:49):
the memory of the long lost Lou, or was he
crying in some way for himself. For he was ancient now,
he was about a month from turning seventy one, and
he had to know that his future was not boundless,
that it was now, in its own way, as limited
as Garrig's was fifty six years earlier. He could see
(26:12):
that the thing that came for Gerreg all those years
ago and slowly tortuously murdered him over the course of
about three years, would be coming for him two. And
by that I don't mean als specifically, but the thing
that comes for us all. Maybe he finally understood what
most of us cannot acknowledge because it's too painful, too frightening.
(26:36):
And trust me, this isn't easy for me to say
here now either, which is that that moment in nineteen
thirty nine, when he Joe was a vigorous twenty four
year old who still had the successful courtship of Marilyn
Monroe in his future, that was always a temporary, transient
state of affairs. In the long term, things were going
(26:56):
to even out. That's the point of the lou greg story.
Many points to it, But at least in so far
as we are concerned today, it's not his awesome grace
in the face of death. With today, I consider myself
the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I mean,
that's an incredible thing, one of the great moments in
baseball history. But the point that we have to grapple
(27:18):
with is that he had to make the speech at all.
He was thirty six years old at that moment, and
he was totally I won't use the word he was done.
So what can we take for granted nothing? Really, Garrig
had been a strong man, stronger than most, and the
results of that strength, which are there to see on
his baseball card all these years later, still have the
(27:40):
power to amaze us. If you look at film of
him swinging the bat, you can see why the results
were so strong. He had broad shoulders, the build of
a tight end, and you can also see later in
pictures from nineteen thirty nine and onwards, the breath of
those shoulders vanish and sag, the big smile go slack around,
the strong jaw. You can look at that as the
(28:02):
result of a fluke of genetics or disease. You can argue,
as some have, that maybe he didn't have als but
had been sculled by too many baseballs in a time
before helmets. It doesn't matter at all, not right now.
What matters is that there's nothing he had that could
not be taken away. I don't tell you this to
(28:23):
be morbid. I tell you this for a reason. I
tell you about Austin McHenry for a reason. But I
have to make a confession now as to what that
reason is. I've been writing about sports for a very
long time, and I used to be in the habit
and I still give into this sometimes of making political
illusions or ruminating on the day's events in the context
of writing about the game. When I do this, I
(28:44):
tend to get pushback, including stick to sparts from the
usual commenters. I'm fine with that, if they'll stick to
having non consensual intercourse with farm animals. I think that's fair.
I mean, it's my soapbox that I'm standing on. They
can stand on theirs for whatever purpose they want want,
and there are plenty of people who will give you
the straight jockstrap stuff all the time, unadulterated. I also
(29:06):
got pushed back from publishers and editors and that I
was obligated to take a little more seriously, and I
did see the wisdom in it. One publisher of Baseball Perspectives,
who cautioned me on this stuff years after I stopped
doing it, because I don't think he actually read this site,
said to me that it was a bad idea to
bring any aspect of politics into what I was writing,
because you automatically alienated half your readership. And I think
(29:29):
that's fair. I think that's right, and so I've largely
toned it down except for instances in which, as often
happens more often than we care to acknowledge, regular quote
unquote real life crosses into the sphere of sports, so fine,
I long ago surrendered. We don't need to talk about politics.
Baseball can do the job for us. It's a game
(29:49):
that requires intelligence to really get it, and so I
encourage you don't think about politics, but think about everything
in terms of baseball. It's a great game for reality.
If Aaron Judge went three for four on Tuesday night,
no one on earth can tell you that it's just
the mainstream media telling you he went three for four
and that it didn't really happen. It's there in the
box score, it's there in the memories of fifty thousand
(30:11):
people who watched it, and anyone who tried to argue
with it would quickly be adjudged insane. Well, there are
other situations in which people try to argue about a
three for four and whether it really happen or not,
and try to assign fault for things that may or
may not be assignable, and one of those is illness.
One of those is health. And they will tell you
that if you suffer illness that it is somehow your fault,
(30:32):
or that if you need assistance with it, you are weak.
And what I would like to say in rejoinder to
those people is not political. It is simply this Austin
McHenry lou Garig now not batting number four, lou Garig
number four, and have some damned compassion, because there but
for the grace of God go you. And frankly, with
(30:52):
or without the grace of God, you're going there someday anyway,
just like Joe DiMaggio eventually did all those years later.
It's just a question of timing. I'll return to this
program central metaphor the Infinite Inning. When we are in
the Infinite Inning, we are forced to acknowledge that which
we would not acknowledge outside of it. That there is
no such thing as the present. There is only an
(31:15):
ever receding past and a future into which we are
relentlessly moving. Therefore, anything that obtains to us at this
fleeting moment is temporary, and we must understand the state
of our lives is constantly in flux, That entropy rules
the universe, and that only the Mona Lisa retains the
same smile forever and ever, and even she's disappearing adam
(31:37):
by adam of paint. And that was where I left off.
Let's get to the closing by the hoary hosts of Hagith.
We have somehow unbelievably made it to the end of
another episode. You probably know this by now, but you
has ever on these reissue episodes. This is where I
used to tell you how to follow the guest on Twitter.
But the guest is absent for this reissue and I
am absent from Twitter and so are you. But you
(31:59):
can follow me so many do hed Stephen Gooldman dot
bsky dot social. The great thing about this one is
that not only am I using closing music I don't
recall ever using, but I mention our old publications as well.
We have no sponsor as of yet, but I'm thinking
of approaching Ironized Yeast. They did a bang up job
with lights out every I left that seventy something year
(32:20):
old clip in and we'll see if I get in
trouble for that too. Seven Get Well Soon Number twenty seven.
Our producer is Ambrose Bierser, will be as soon as
he returns from his Mexican sojourn. It's been one hundred
and four years, and I'm thinking of giving up our
theme song, which you've heard throughout the episode, and in
fact our hearing now was co authored by myself and
Rick Mooring, who has written dozens of songs even better
(32:42):
than this one. Someday the world will know of his
genius and weep. Well, assuming I don't win an all
expense paid trip to Europe on the Lusitania, I'll be
back next week with that's all for this reissue episode.
I'll be back this weekend as ever with a brand
new episode number three forty seven, forty eight, five thousand.
I don't know, but I hope I'll see you.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
Then.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Thank you for taking this return trip to the Infinite
Inning
Well, hello there, and welcome back to another Infinite Inning
reissue episode another one. You know, when Bob Dylan's what
was it third or fourth album came out and it
had been titled Another Side of Bob Dylan, he kind
of wondered if that was someone's idea of a subtle
insult in this case, No, it is not my intention
(00:47):
to insult myself and certainly not you. It is simply
just like our weekly new episodes, the next one in
a series. I two am the next one in a
series after many previous piece people who responded to the
name Goldman. Although I learned recently that there has been
so much kind of well fleeing tyranny in my background
(01:09):
on the paternal side, I'm not sure they were all
called that. Actually, countries and nationalities got changed, and so
sometimes arbitrarily by immigration control types, so did names. But
in any case, I am, as ever Steven Goldman, your
host for this trip back to a trip back to
the past with the goal of better understanding the present,
(01:29):
the time machine, as ever being baseball, I'm going to
keep today's new remarks as brief as I can, and
actually story time is kind of brief too. These were
tightly told stories, unusual for me, I know, but there
is so much playoff baseball this week. I can't keep
up with it all, and I expect the same as
true of you. On our last reissue, I think between
(01:50):
my remarks and the length of the stories from the
original episode, the reissue came in around an hour. Well,
we're not going to do that this time. We go
back this week to the first months of the show
with episode number seven and a couple of brief but
dark stories of players in medical decline, the forgotten Austin
(02:12):
McHenry who never got a movie about his life, and
the not at all forgotten Lou Garrick, who did. I'm
not saying that's the only difference. It's a difference. I'm
reluctant to go back to a show this early in
the run because I didn't know what I was doing
yet if I've ever learned so. My voice is bad,
my mic technique is bad, the sound is bad, and
(02:34):
for me, it is as the kids say nowadays, caringe.
Here's another thing that's different. You'll hear me apologize for
doing what I do on this show, which is to
explain the world around us through the lens of baseball.
I did that because, as I explain, I had been
conditioned to be ashamed of it. I'm not anymore. It
(02:55):
is the essence of what I do and what I
care about, and the only thing I have to offer
the conversation that you couldn't get from one hundred other
people in other ways, not necessarily better or worse, but
broadly the same mor baseball commentary. I dress it up
a little differently when I do that, But yawn, I say,
do you hear me?
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Yawn?
Speaker 1 (03:15):
Since I think in these terms as much as I
would like not to, as I would be happier not
to to just be thinking about, well, Albert who holdsby
you made the manager of the Angels. That'll make a
huge difference. Yuk, yuk, yuk. And I recognize there's a
place for that. And again, I've buttered a lot of
bread for myself and my family making money writing that
(03:37):
sort of thing. But I've always done a little bit
of this, and over time I've been fortunate enough to
have the opportunity to do a lot of the kind
of mixed commentary that I do, of coloring outside the lines,
and I have to thank you for that whether you
simply listen and let the ads go by when you
are listening, or you support the show via Patreon, you're
(03:58):
showing that this is something you can about, that it's
worth doing, and that you are not offended by a
kind of commentary that includes both sports and the world
that surrounds sports and utilizes sports to examine the wider
world rather than simply be concerned with the wins and losses,
or the home runs and the stolen bases within the
(04:20):
sport itself. We've done a lot of both on this show.
I enjoy doing both, but when we are in a
time of crisis as now, the call to do the
fullest version of what I like to do, which is
talk about American tradition and history and culture and law
and just sweeten it with a bit of Babe Ruth
to make it all more palatable. Because Babe Ruth lived
(04:43):
through all of this too. It's very hard for me
to resist it, and in fact, I feel like it
would be wrong of me not to utilize what little
platform I have to speak to you about these things.
I'd be holding back the best part of myself out
of fear that I would lose you. And there are
a lot of you to lose. I keep obsessing about
these numbers lately. Pre war Germany had a population of
(05:06):
sixty four million. In the last Freeish election Germany had
before the takeover, when the population wasn't being wholly intimidated,
who are you going to vote for a Klaus Thunk?
The Nazi Party got a third of the vote, So
like twenty one million people. That's a ton of people.
In raw terms, they were vastly outnumbered. But think about
(05:27):
how many bodies that is. If you add up the
total twenty twenty five attendants of the Yankees, Blue Jays,
Red Sox, Astros, Angels, Mariners, Tigers, and Rangers, you get
about that number twenty one million. Imagine then that approximately
six hundred and fifty full modern ballparks of people. That's
(05:51):
eight teams times eighty one games went for the Nazis.
It's hard to visualize that. If you've ever sat in
a sold out ballpark for concert venue and said to yourself,
so that's what it looks like to put five thousand
people in the same place, never mind forty thousand. You
know how hard it is to conceive of it, even
when you're in the middle of it. Have you ever
(06:13):
walked through the postgame parking lot after an NFL game?
What happened to this place? Did they fight a battle
out here? When I was inside? Eighty thousand people happened
to it. That's about the seating capacity of my local
NFL stadium. Eighty thousand drunk, rowdy consistently disappointed people. Two teams,
so sixteen dates a year. They just passed through that
(06:36):
parking lot like a horde of depressed and angry locusts.
As they passed, they consume all hope and joy and
poop out fast food wrappers and empty beer bottles. It's
the circle of life. So the Nazis started with twenty
one million adherents, and within that you no doubt had
different levels of enthusiasm, from gung ho hardcore fascists to
(06:56):
people who held their noses and voted for them by
one ration now or another. And here's where I'm going
with this. The United States has a current population estimated
of over three hundred and forty million. So even if
ten percent of US are sympathetic with hardcore Nazism, it's
nothing like a majority. It's not big in mathematical terms,
(07:18):
but in raw people. It's thirteen million more Nazis than
the Nazis had at the outset. I feel like that's
emblematic of what we're up against. In both cases, the
key to survival, to blunting the minority from consuming the majority,
is to speak out. I keep using these words on
every show, both the re issues and the regular episodes.
(07:40):
Educate and persuade, argue. As futile as it is in
the vast majority of cases, it's the only way. It
doesn't happen with the blow of a fist or the
barrel of a gun. It happens when we reach not
the unconverted. You cannot convert the unconverted. You cannot convert
a Nazia. Their position is definitionally inflexible. What we must
(08:04):
hope to do is convert the people who are lulled
into a false state of indifference and to galvanize the ungalvanized.
And that means keeping up a constant level of chatter
about the threat that we are under from that angry minority.
And again, every individual who does this matters, because mass
(08:27):
media is in the bag for the other side. I've
cited this World War II Union ad before. I probably
played it right here on the show, touting at the
time the great numbers. The factories were hitting and churning
out war materiel, and one voice would say something like,
last quarter, we made a thousand artillery pieces. And then
another voice says, just a whisper, wait till we shout.
(08:49):
And then the first narrator says, and we made five
thousand fighter planes. Just a whisper, wait till we shout. Well,
we have not shouted yet, and we might not. But me,
I'm gonna go down talking in the best way that
I know. How about the topics that I care about, which,
as I said, consists of two mirrors reflecting one another,
(09:09):
America and the Great American Game. As I record these words,
the government has been shut down, the federal government, i
should say, because the two political parties in Congress have
failed to negotiate to a conclusion satisfactory to each other
regarding budgetary matters. Politics is supposed to be the art
of the possible, the art of compromise, but we are
(09:29):
well off that map these days. One of the sticking
points for the Democratic Party are subsidies to the Affordable
Care Act, or Obamacare, that were phased out in the
prior budget. If you get your medical insurance through work,
you might not care about this, but all of us
are going to be out of work at some point.
Few jobs are for life these days, and you just
(09:51):
might care about the existence of the Affordable Care Act. Then,
over twenty four million Americans, or about six percent of us,
get healthcare via the ACA exchanges without the tax credits
that were phased out the subsidies, lower income people and
healthier people will drop out of the plans due to
(10:12):
not being able to afford or not wanting to afford
the higher bills, leaving a sicker, older, less healthy pool
for insurers to cover, and that means a subsequent rise
in premiums, this time from the insurers. There's a healthcare
data analyst on Blue Sky named Charles Gaba. I believe
I'm pronouncing that right. Could be Gaba. Maybe he's a
(10:33):
Ramones fan, I don't know. He's been calculating how different
plans in different states would be priced without the subsidies
compared to now, For example, using Ohio Bellweather states it's
not anymore, but still As an example, he figures a
family of four with two adolescent children on a silver
level plan would go from paying eight hundred and ninety
(10:54):
three dollars a month right now to one thousand, eight
hundred and thirty dollars a month next year. In California,
that family would go from nine hundred and twenty one
dollars a month to two thousand, one hundred and fifty
one dollars a month. And in my beautiful, glorious home state,
which I appreciate more and more as each day goes by,
they would go from nine hundred and twenty one dollars
(11:16):
a month to one thousand, seven hundred and thirty three
dollars a month. That is a lot of baseball games
that those parents can no longer afford to treat their
kids to seeing. More realistically, of course, it's not baseball
games that they'll forego. It's basic necessities. And if you
don't have those, then you're less healthy, and a vicious
(11:36):
cycle ensues. And those kids, if they're not healthy, they
don't do as well in school, and then they are
not as good economic contributors to the United States of
America when they're of age. Our Secretary of Defense just
gave a big, big speech to some big big generals
and admirals about how all our soldiers should be big, big,
and muscular. They weren't in the Second World War. You know,
(11:58):
they were undersized with bad Why because they were children
of the Great Depression and they hadn't been eating Kobe
beef when they were little. Nothing in the world is
one thing. Every game of baseball has four bases. You
can't cover three and assume the last one's going to
be okay. It all intersects. You can't be mean and
uncharitable to some percentage of your population, even if it's
(12:20):
five or six percent. Again, we're talking in the millions
of people here, and then expect when you call on
the totality of that population for some national emergency or
again just to keep the economy going on a regular
daily basis, that everyone is going to be able to help.
They're going to fail the government because the government failed them. Now,
I would argue that medical care is a human right.
(12:41):
If you wouldn't let a stabbing victim bleed out in
the street because they can't afford to pay the er bill,
you shouldn't let the same person die of cancer in
six months when treatment might have gotten them another six years.
That's just morality. It's mine. It doesn't have to be
yours or anyone else's. But if you want to be
purely patriotiotic and capitalistic and cynical about it, every single
(13:04):
person in this country is an economic unit. Every one
of us contributes to some extent to the economy to
a greater or lesser degree. Again, this is just basic
capitalism today. Prior to this recording, I went out and
I got a haircut, and yes, it does look good,
thank you. I spent part of my gas tank to
get there, which means eventually I'll buy more gas, which
(13:26):
of course means wages for the guy. In my state,
we don't pump our own gas, it's weird, so that
means a wage for the guy who pumps it. It
means profits for the gas station. It means profits for
the oil company. As much as we don't love oil
companies necessarily, I paid for my haircut, of course, and
I tipped the stylist, and I use my credit card,
which means a premium goes to the credit card company.
(13:47):
The stylist will now take my tip plus their wages
and go to the target about a blockdown from the
barber shop or the stylist place, whatever you call it
and buy a bunch of things that they need at home,
and we all got thoroughly rolling along. If you're broke,
you're not doing any of that. If you're sick, you're
not doing that. If you're dead, you're not doing that.
(14:08):
That's why preventative healthcare, by the way, isn't just about
preventing illness. It's about preventing people from going out of
the ballgame, from having to hobble out to the dugout
because the pitch hit them on the hand and they
can't play anymore. And we know that, we've known it
for a long time. And so sometimes the government, which
is just a big money redistribution machine, gives cash to
(14:31):
our poorer brothers and sisters so that one they don't starve.
Starvation is un American, and two so they can be
productive for the United States. The loaf of bread they
get may be free to them, but it's not free
to the baker. He got paid. Whether the money came
out of the recipient's wallet or out of the federal treasury.
(14:53):
Either way, it still spends for him and he or
they go to the story, go to that same target
that Mike Barber went to and they buy something, and
again everything keeps moving and doesn't constipate up. And then
we all stay employed, and we can all better afford
to go to that ballgame that I mentioned, or can
sit still long enough to watch it, because we're not
(15:14):
working a second job or a third. Now, you or
your uncle Larry may think that poor person is lazy
or stealing from the public, but you know, there are
a variety of characters in every group, even among Nazi voters.
As I said earlier, there's a span from eh, I
guess I'll vote for them to oh god, yeah, And
there are plenty of lazy, rich people who steal from
the public too. Being poor doesn't define one's character. Mostly
(15:38):
it defines one luck or one's luck defines them in
that way, And it's not worth arguing about, because sure,
there probably are some quote unquote lazy people who are
gaming the system. There always have been, there always will be,
going back to the first hunter gatherers and the farmers
who decided to stop hunting and gathering, and then the
(15:58):
hunter gatherers came along, hit them over the head, instole
their rice and an indigo and wheat and hemp and
so on. But just because human nature often sucks doesn't
mean it's the majority of us, or that we should
abandon those who are sincerely in need, or that we
don't benefit ourselves from it. You can justify generosity purely
in terms of selfishness. Pay it forward. It comes back
(16:21):
to you, Larry very nearly the love boat theme, if
you think about it. Who knew the love boat theme
was about Kinesian economics and so earning it is not
worth arguing about because having that money just sitting around
does no one any good. But giving it to the
baker or the doctor via that impoverished person lifts everyone.
Is the foregoing a baseball story. Maybe maybe not. I
(16:43):
would argue that it is, but the rest of the
show is too in its way. Austin McHenry and Lou
Gerigg were inarguably ballplayers, very very good ones, and then
they stopped being that, and they stop being anything at
all because they got, as Lu said famously, a bad break.
Who is to say that can't happen to any of us.
(17:03):
That's what these stories are about. That's all for me
for this episode. I'll be back at the end to
wrap things up. Story Time begins right after this break
thanks for joining me today when there's so much going on,
and as ever, thanks for your support and most of all,
your time. The infinite inning is a place where it's
(17:43):
equally hard to make yourself understood and to understand. To quote,
they might be giants the TVs in Esperanto. It's the
everlasting hour of Babel, and we must bear down to
think clearly. Hold that thought for a moment. I've got
to tell you something else to make it pay off.
This may seem like a morbid place to start, but
as we get to the second segment, I hope you'll
(18:05):
understand why I chose this story parenthetically. As I speak
these words, a thunderstorm is raging outside, and you might
hear the occasional rumble of thunder or a curtain of
rain descending. If so, just consider it a little extra
mood setting thrown in by Mother Nature at no extra charge.
In nineteen twenty one, Bran Trickie Saint Louis Cardinals, he
(18:25):
was the manager then as well as the guy who
ran the team, had one of the best outfields in
baseball history. I don't mean one of the top three
or the top five, and probably not even the top ten.
But it goes on the kind of extended short list.
You haven't heard of any of them, and there's good
reason for that. The right fielder and center fielder weren't
two guys but four. They were in a job share
(18:46):
and there were injuries. They were journeymen who muscled up
and had big years, but didn't have any real careers
of note. The third guy, though, he's the one I
want to talk about, the left fielder. He was in
his fourth year in the big leagues, even though he
was only twenty five years old, and he broke out
out in a big way. He hit three point fifty
had a three ninety three on base percentage of five
thirty one slugging for those of you who liked numbers,
thirty seven doubles, eight triples, seventeen home runs, one hundred
(19:09):
and two RBIs. His teammates called him the Airdale because
of his incredibly speedy defensive work in the outfield. The
speed doesn't show itself on the bases, though he attempted
thirty stolen bases and only made it ten times. The
season wasn't a one off either. Nineteen twenty two started
and he could still hit, but there were problems. His
vision had gotten blurry. It wasn't so much a problem
at the plate as in the outfield. He'd tried to
(19:31):
track a fly ball and run after it, but as
he started moving, everything would just kind of go all hazy.
The Cardinal sent him to a doctor naturally, and the
thought was at first that he had a sinus problem
that was affecting his vision. Ricky sent him home for
a month, and the outfield arrested. Came back, said he
was all right. But it only took two games for
Ricky to see that something wasn't right, and he sent
him home for good. His last at bat came in
(19:52):
Brooklyn on July thirty first, nineteen twenty two. He pinch
hit a single. When he went home, he got a
more thorough examination. It turned out the sign a thing
was wrong. He had a brain tumor. He underwent surgery.
It didn't work. They are not a lot of firsthand
quotes by this player to give you, but his saber
biography by Mike Lynch quotes him as saying, it seems
hard that so young a man as I must die,
(20:14):
but I am ready when the Master summons me. Prior
to surgery, he told Ricky, who had become a good friend.
That he felt like he was up at bat with
the bases loaded in a three to two count, but
he promised he would hit the next one. There would
be no next one. The tumor and the surgery for
it laid him low. His name was Austin McHenry, and
he was just twenty seven years old. It's funny that
(20:34):
these things don't happen more often. We don't think they
should because ballplayers are young men in the prime of
their lives, and therefore mortality is antithetical to our joy
in the game. But in fact it does happen. Think
of Jose Fernandez and your Dano Ventura and the misadventure
that did them in. There are more treatments for cancer
now than there were then, of course, so thank goodness,
(20:55):
A player can survive if he does get it. But
they do get it. Both Chad bet and Jamison Taian
are receiving treatment for testicular cancer as we speak, and
John Lester is a survivor of lymphoma. The thing to
remember is that even if you're young and in the
proverbial pink of health, don't think yourself and vulnerable. One
of my favorite old radio shows was a horror anthology
called Lights Out Everybody. It ran in the thirties and
(21:18):
forties at Chill Wind Blue. A bell told it, well,
here's how it sounded, ironized.
Speaker 2 (21:24):
Yeast presents Lights Out Everybody. Vader the Lights Out.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
I'm Stephen Goldman, and this is the Infinite Inning Baseball Podcast. Well,
(22:37):
hello there, swimming away from the sinking ship, you beach
on an island from which these signs of civilization are
absent except for a sign saying episode seven and a
tiki bar serving my ties. Pull up a stool. It's
just a few minutes to continue the discussion that we
began at the outset of the episode. In nineteen thirty seven,
when lou Gerrig was thirty four, he hit three point
(22:59):
fifty one drove in one hundred and fifty eight runs
on thirty seven home runs, led the American League and
on base percentage. The next year, nineteen thirty eight, was
the one that retrospectively came to be seen as a
harbinger of Gereg's doom. He hit only two ninety five
with twenty nine home runs, although if you look at
the splits month by month, he had some periods, even
(23:19):
as late as August, where he was pretty much the
usual Garreg. It was only in the postseason, when he
had four hits, none of them for extra bases, that
people started saying that he looked sluggish and that maybe
he wasn't running as well as he used to. Garrek
called in an off year. The press freely speculated as
to whether, at thirty five, he was finally reaching the
(23:41):
end if the iron Horse was as they couldn't resist saying, rusting.
What was wrong with Garreg wasn't rust It was something
far more pernicious, although no one could be blamed for
not knowing it at the time. What there were were
clues that concerned people but didn't seem to add up
to anything. There's this from Bill Dickey, which is quoted
in Frank Graham's Leu Garrig A Quiet Hero, one of
(24:02):
the earlier biographies. Dicky said, I knew there was something
seriously wrong with him. I didn't know what it was,
but I knew it was serious. We were in the
room one day a few weeks ago and Lou stumbled
as he walked across the floor. I was reading a
paper and looked up to see what he had stumbled over,
but there was nothing there. I was going to ask
him what had happened, but he had a strange look
(24:23):
on his face, and I didn't say anything. A few
days later, he was standing looking out the window and
I was sitting behind him talking to him, and I
saw one leg give way, just as though somebody had
tapped him sharply at the back of the knee joint.
He looked around quick to see if I had noticed it.
I guess, but I didn't say anything, so I knew
it was something serious, but I didn't know it was
(24:44):
as bad as this. This to which Dicky was referring
was Garrig's diagnosis of amiotrophic lateral sclerosis, which his doctors
for some reason described as being not unlike polio. It's
very different than polio. People could have survived polio even then,
even if they did wind up in an iron lung
als was and is fatal. It's the death of the
(25:05):
motor neurons. Your ability to control your body or exercise
your muscles at all eventually goes away, as does the
ability to speak, swallow, and breathe. Gerrick's life was to
be sadly attenuated, and what remained was the rapid decline
which would shrink his world from the ballpark to his
living room, to his bedroom, and then to the grave.
Joe DiMaggio was on the field at Camden Yards that
(25:28):
night in September nineteen ninety five when Cal Ripken Jr.
Broke the consecutive game's played streak held by Demaggio's old
teammate Lou Garrig. As Demaggio observed the celebration, there were
tears visible in his eyes, but it was impossible to know.
Was he crying for the moment, Was he crying for
(25:49):
the memory of the long lost Lou, or was he
crying in some way for himself. For he was ancient now,
he was about a month from turning seventy one, and
he had to know that his future was not boundless,
that it was now, in its own way, as limited
as Garrig's was fifty six years earlier. He could see
(26:12):
that the thing that came for Gerreg all those years
ago and slowly tortuously murdered him over the course of
about three years, would be coming for him two. And
by that I don't mean als specifically, but the thing
that comes for us all. Maybe he finally understood what
most of us cannot acknowledge because it's too painful, too frightening.
(26:36):
And trust me, this isn't easy for me to say
here now either, which is that that moment in nineteen
thirty nine, when he Joe was a vigorous twenty four
year old who still had the successful courtship of Marilyn
Monroe in his future, that was always a temporary, transient
state of affairs. In the long term, things were going
(26:56):
to even out. That's the point of the lou greg story.
Many points to it, But at least in so far
as we are concerned today, it's not his awesome grace
in the face of death. With today, I consider myself
the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I mean,
that's an incredible thing, one of the great moments in
baseball history. But the point that we have to grapple
(27:18):
with is that he had to make the speech at all.
He was thirty six years old at that moment, and
he was totally I won't use the word he was done.
So what can we take for granted nothing? Really, Garrig
had been a strong man, stronger than most, and the
results of that strength, which are there to see on
his baseball card all these years later, still have the
(27:40):
power to amaze us. If you look at film of
him swinging the bat, you can see why the results
were so strong. He had broad shoulders, the build of
a tight end, and you can also see later in
pictures from nineteen thirty nine and onwards, the breath of
those shoulders vanish and sag, the big smile go slack around,
the strong jaw. You can look at that as the
(28:02):
result of a fluke of genetics or disease. You can argue,
as some have, that maybe he didn't have als but
had been sculled by too many baseballs in a time
before helmets. It doesn't matter at all, not right now.
What matters is that there's nothing he had that could
not be taken away. I don't tell you this to
(28:23):
be morbid. I tell you this for a reason. I
tell you about Austin McHenry for a reason. But I
have to make a confession now as to what that
reason is. I've been writing about sports for a very
long time, and I used to be in the habit
and I still give into this sometimes of making political
illusions or ruminating on the day's events in the context
of writing about the game. When I do this, I
(28:44):
tend to get pushback, including stick to sparts from the
usual commenters. I'm fine with that, if they'll stick to
having non consensual intercourse with farm animals. I think that's fair.
I mean, it's my soapbox that I'm standing on. They
can stand on theirs for whatever purpose they want want,
and there are plenty of people who will give you
the straight jockstrap stuff all the time, unadulterated. I also
(29:06):
got pushed back from publishers and editors and that I
was obligated to take a little more seriously, and I
did see the wisdom in it. One publisher of Baseball Perspectives,
who cautioned me on this stuff years after I stopped
doing it, because I don't think he actually read this site,
said to me that it was a bad idea to
bring any aspect of politics into what I was writing,
because you automatically alienated half your readership. And I think
(29:29):
that's fair. I think that's right, and so I've largely
toned it down except for instances in which, as often
happens more often than we care to acknowledge, regular quote
unquote real life crosses into the sphere of sports, so fine,
I long ago surrendered. We don't need to talk about politics.
Baseball can do the job for us. It's a game
(29:49):
that requires intelligence to really get it, and so I
encourage you don't think about politics, but think about everything
in terms of baseball. It's a great game for reality.
If Aaron Judge went three for four on Tuesday night,
no one on earth can tell you that it's just
the mainstream media telling you he went three for four
and that it didn't really happen. It's there in the
box score, it's there in the memories of fifty thousand
(30:11):
people who watched it, and anyone who tried to argue
with it would quickly be adjudged insane. Well, there are
other situations in which people try to argue about a
three for four and whether it really happen or not,
and try to assign fault for things that may or
may not be assignable, and one of those is illness.
One of those is health. And they will tell you
that if you suffer illness that it is somehow your fault,
(30:32):
or that if you need assistance with it, you are weak.
And what I would like to say in rejoinder to
those people is not political. It is simply this Austin
McHenry lou Garig now not batting number four, lou Garig
number four, and have some damned compassion, because there but
for the grace of God go you. And frankly, with
(30:52):
or without the grace of God, you're going there someday anyway,
just like Joe DiMaggio eventually did all those years later.
It's just a question of timing. I'll return to this
program central metaphor the Infinite Inning. When we are in
the Infinite Inning, we are forced to acknowledge that which
we would not acknowledge outside of it. That there is
no such thing as the present. There is only an
(31:15):
ever receding past and a future into which we are
relentlessly moving. Therefore, anything that obtains to us at this
fleeting moment is temporary, and we must understand the state
of our lives is constantly in flux, That entropy rules
the universe, and that only the Mona Lisa retains the
same smile forever and ever, and even she's disappearing adam
(31:37):
by adam of paint. And that was where I left off.
Let's get to the closing by the hoary hosts of Hagith.
We have somehow unbelievably made it to the end of
another episode. You probably know this by now, but you
has ever on these reissue episodes. This is where I
used to tell you how to follow the guest on Twitter.
But the guest is absent for this reissue and I
am absent from Twitter and so are you. But you
(31:59):
can follow me so many do hed Stephen Gooldman dot
bsky dot social. The great thing about this one is
that not only am I using closing music I don't
recall ever using, but I mention our old publications as well.
We have no sponsor as of yet, but I'm thinking
of approaching Ironized Yeast. They did a bang up job
with lights out every I left that seventy something year
(32:20):
old clip in and we'll see if I get in
trouble for that too. Seven Get Well Soon Number twenty seven.
Our producer is Ambrose Bierser, will be as soon as
he returns from his Mexican sojourn. It's been one hundred
and four years, and I'm thinking of giving up our
theme song, which you've heard throughout the episode, and in
fact our hearing now was co authored by myself and
Rick Mooring, who has written dozens of songs even better
(32:42):
than this one. Someday the world will know of his
genius and weep. Well, assuming I don't win an all
expense paid trip to Europe on the Lusitania, I'll be
back next week with that's all for this reissue episode.
I'll be back this weekend as ever with a brand
new episode number three forty seven, forty eight, five thousand.
I don't know, but I hope I'll see you.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
Then.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Thank you for taking this return trip to the Infinite
Inning
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