October 16, 2025 • 48 mins
In this week’s new remarks, we observe how quaint the racial dialogue of 2018 was (or at least your host’s was) in light of what was coming down the line for the nation. After a brief discussion of protest and backlash, we proceed to flash back to episode 72’s discussion of how the same message can be heard differently in the context of race (that’s the quaint part), revisit an oft-injured left-hander who was a low-key Red Sox great, and drop by Casey Stengel sailing uneasily through the great hurricane of 1938.
The Infinite Inning is a journey to the past to understand the present using baseball as our time machine. America's brighter mirror, baseball reflects, anticipates, and even mocks the stories we tell ourselves about our world today. Baseball Prospectus's Steven Goldman shares his obsessions: history from inside and outside of the game, politics, stats, and 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. America's brighter mirror, baseball reflects, anticipates, and even mocks the stories we tell ourselves about our world today. Baseball Prospectus's Steven Goldman shares his obsessions: history from inside and outside of the game, politics, stats, and 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 reissue episode.
This week we go back to year two of the
program for episode number seventy two. Normally, when we've done
these revisits, I've trimmed out all mention of the guests,
but this time I'm going to leave it in just
because the subject we discussed in the conversation section is
(00:49):
pertinent to what I talked about in the first part
of the show. My guest was the journalist Stephen Johnson,
then with the Amsterdam News and The Athletic. I enjoyed
talking to and I should have had him on again.
I did look for other opportunities to do so, but
I think his career went in another direction and I
never found the opportunity. He had written a piece about
(01:11):
the difficulties of being a black fan. This was back
in twenty eighteen. I was inspired to riff on this
subject before I went into the second story of the episode.
Now keep in mind this was September twenty eighteen. The
horrible murder of George Floyd had yet to happen. It
(01:31):
was more than a year and a half in the future.
There was already a Black Lives Matter movement, but that
idea took on a new sallience after this very obvious
example of police misconduct. You will recall, it's hard to
forget it that there were nationwide protests, some of which
(01:52):
were frightening in their intensity, and not just the intensity
of the protests themselves, but often the intensity of the
police response. I feel like, given what was just around
the corner from when we had this conversation, my comments
here sound oh so very quaint, and yet I don't
(02:12):
want to delete them from the record. We are still
living in the aftermath of those protests. I think that
as much as the election of Richard Nixon in nineteen
sixty eight was at least partially a reaction to the
watch riots of nineteen sixty five, the Harlem riots of
I believe the year before, not that long before, and
(02:34):
other examples of black Americans protesting at that time, the
eventual reelection of you know who in our own day
was part of the aftermath, the backlash, the counter revolution
to those more recent protests. It is as certain as
night follows day that when minority populations in America push
(02:55):
for recognition of their rights, and no matter who instigates
the violence, it ends up in riots, the mainstream hungers
for law and order, which is just a metaphor. It's
just a way of saying, hit those riders over the head,
even if they have a point, hit those riders over
the head. We don't like broken glass, we don't like fires,
(03:16):
and it's fair not to like violence. It's fair to
be worried if violent acts are happening down the street
from you simultaneously. That does not absolve you of the
responsibility of understanding why it is all happening in the
first place, and again to understand reaction and counter reaction,
(03:38):
and to know that in every group of people, whether
they have a point or not, or I should say,
whether they have a point that you agree with, there
is a spectrum that runs from the nonviolent to the violent,
and from people who are simply looking to say what
they need to say and people who are looking for
license to act out. And when you put police off
(04:00):
and angry people again, their anger may be justified. When
you put them together and you have that spectrum clashing,
you're going to have these outbreaks. And again I'm not
justifying them. I'm not saying that they're good. I'm just
saying it doesn't indict the whole cause it doesn't indict
everyone on either side, but because people react so strongly
(04:24):
to it, it creates a vicious cycle. And what happens
is the mainstream, as I said, hungers for law and order.
Suppression then results, which has the effect of reloading the
same energies, the same pressures that led to the crisis
in the first place. One of the few times America
is actually intelligent enough to move past that cycle was
(04:45):
the Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty five, now being
systematically fatally dismantled by the Supreme Court. And so we
rewind the clock. But Martin Luther King Junior won't be
coming again, and we await what James Baldwin referred to
as the fire next time, which in turn will lead
to more repression, which in turn leads us to a
darker place as a people as a whole, and nothing
(05:08):
ever gets better. Hallelujah. You know, in an hour world,
the ewoks never get to dance. They're deported and they
end up on the sidewalks in various cities around the
galaxy with a cup and a sign that says, homeless bear,
please donate. Yup nub yupnub. In preparing these remarks, I
came across an unexpected baseball oriented reaction to the watch
(05:32):
riots of the summer of nineteen sixty five, and I
will talk about that in this week's new episode of
The Infinite Inning, number three forty nine, which is due
to emerge from the Infinite Inning Labs approximately twenty four
hours after I post this here episode. I don't know
if that story goes anywhere, but it seems as if,
(05:55):
as I've already detailed when we're talking about these kinds
of events in American hit history, the not going anywhere
is the whole point. Today's reissue not only includes the
mutterings I referenced a moment ago, but a discussion of
nineteen thirties and forties left hander Fritz Ostmuller and his
many injuries. If Ostro Muller comes up today, or maybe
(06:16):
it's Ostro Mueller again, I wasn't there. If Fritz comes
up today, it's as a Jackie Robinson antagonist. In nineteen
forty seven. This was at the beginning of Robinson's National
League career and the penultimate season of oster Muller's Fritz's
Fritz did hit Jackie with a pitch in nineteen forty seven,
but there's no real evidence of it having been intentional.
(06:39):
I'm not exonerating him. I just don't know. Just like today,
eighty years ago, a number of white Americans, ballplayers among them,
felt that being out and proud in their bigotry, in
their gatekeeping was a totally appropriate response to Black Americans
asking to play baseball and be allowed to vote. Even
now in our thorough degraded era, it's shocking to read
(07:02):
that at the time, not forty seven sixty four, that
Mississippi Governor Paul Johnson, who was in office from sixty
four to nineteen sixty eight, was in the habit of
telling voters that the acronym NAACP stood for N words alligators, apes, coons,
and possums. Except he didn't say n words. He said
(07:23):
the whole thing right out loud, right there on radio
and television. This is a low bar. But Fritz doesn't
seem to have been one of those. Fritz was a
thirty war career pitcher. I suppose there have been enough
of those that it's not that special of an accomplishment.
That said, there have been a lot more careers of
one war or zero war or negative war, and there
(07:45):
have been of thirty, and in that context, thirty seems
pretty special. After all, he spent the first seven years
of his career nineteen thirty four through nineteen forty with
the Red Sox and pitched to a four to thirty
eight er, which sounds mediocre. But if you park and
league adjust that as Baseball Reference does, you get an
(08:06):
ER plus of one ten. That is, he was ten
percent better than league average. Ask yourself how many pitchers
in Red Sox history have thrown a minimum of one
thousand innings with an ERA plus of one hundred and
ten or better. The answer is out of one hundred
and twenty four years of the team's existence wenty. The
(08:26):
list begins with Pedro Martinez, passes through Smokey Joe Woods,
Cy Young, Roger Clemens, and Lefty Grove, and eventually makes
its way down to Bill Lee and our mister Fritz.
Josh Beckett, Clay Buckoltz, and Dennis Eckersley are so close
to them as to be indistinguishable. It's a pretty impressive
list to be part of. For our second tale, we
(08:46):
stayed in New England for the devastating hurricane of nineteen
thirty eight and a game Casey Stengel managed right in
the teeth of that storm. It's an amusing story, but
there was nothing funny about the hurricane itself. Zign note
from the National Weather Service regarding the storm's intensity were inadequate,
and as a result, people died. As I was preparing
(09:09):
to speak these words just now, literally this minute, I
saw on blue sky a note from today October sixteen,
regarding this weekend's Dolphins Browns game and a forecast with
a ninety four percent chance of rain and thirty six
mile per hour wind gusts. Although the poster says, and
who knows if they know what they're talking about, but
(09:31):
if the storm strengthens, those gusts could get up to
fifty or sixty miles per hour, And that means that
a quarterback could throw the ball downfield and potentially catch
it himself after the wind pushes it right back at him.
It could also mean that the goalposts come down on
his head. That's what I mean when I say that
that baseball game was amusing in the abstract and amusing
his weird baseball, but tragic when considered in the full context.
(09:54):
Of a storm that did massive economic and human damage
up and down the East coast of the United States.
But today's version, the one that I just gave you
about the Dolphins Browns game, is an example of us
getting something like adequate warning today. If you're in Cleveland,
you can decide to go to that game or not
(10:14):
go to put boards over your windows if you think
that strong winds are going to launch tree branches or
heaven forfend a cyber truck at your windows. Absent that,
you'd be as informed as the old time farmer saying
bring in the sheep, maud Sky looks ominous. We'd best
put the livestock in the living room and spend the
(10:35):
night in the cellar. Don't forget to put Dick Cavit
on for the goats. He calms their nerves. This is
an example of the significant truth that we together can
accomplish things we cannot achieve individually, among them having useful
safety things like the National Weather Service or air traffic controllers.
Are your taxes too high? Yeah? Mine too, but this
(10:57):
is part of why we pay them. And it's no
fun working hard and having to give that money away.
But we're not giving it away. We're buying something with it, Ringo,
We're buying our lives. That's all for me for this
reissue episode. I'll be back a little bit later to
paper over the odd break and say sayonara at the
end of the episode. As always, thank you for joining
(11:18):
me for this reissue of The Infinite Inning, which begins
right after this brief intermission. Somewhere in the Infinite Inning,
(11:52):
there's a bullet with your name on it. And it's
not just any ordinary bullet. It's more like a guided missile.
You can't duck it. Its fate. You experienced the grim, despairing
acceptance that this bullet is no different from a dinner
at Applebee's. You may not have done anything to deserve it,
but at this late hour, it's the only path that's
(12:12):
open to you. In the nineteen thirties, the Red Sox
had a left handed pitcher named Fred Fritz Ostmuler. He
came to the Majors in nineteen thirty four as a
twenty six year old after spending about eight years in
the minor leagues. The Socks, who were building under new
owner Tom Yacki, had signed him after he had a
big season at Rochester of the American Association. And you
(12:36):
know what, he did pretty well straight off the bat.
He only went ten to thirteen his rookie year, and
you know that back then wins and losses were one
of the major measures, if not the only, measure of
a pitcher's success. But it was recognized that he had
a better season than the record indicated. For one thing,
his three point four to nine ERA was well below
(12:57):
league average, and was even more impressive when you factored
in that he was a left hander in Fenway Park
with the Green Monster to worry about, so his future
would have seemed to be set. And indeed, he had
a prominent place in the nineteen thirty five Red Sox rotation,
a collective that observers at the time believed would make
(13:17):
the Socks strongly competitive that year, because it wasn't just
Oster Mueller who was looked on to have a good
sequel to his first season, but they had Leftki Grove
and Wes Ferrell as well, the same West Ferrell who
we discussed extensively in just last week's episode. Now, as
it turned out, the Red Sox were only a few
games over five hundred, and part of it was that
(13:39):
the rotation turned out not to be all that as
far as the top three that I just mentioned. When
Farrell was great went twenty five and fourteen with a
three point five to two ERA over three hundred and
twenty two point one innings. You won't see that again,
as I often say, And Grove also was quite good,
better even going twenty to twelve with a two point
(14:00):
seven to zero RA. As for Fritz, his RA was
three point nine two, which was still very good at
that time and that place. The problem was he could
only make nineteen starts. And it wasn't because manager Joe
Cronin dropped him from the rotation for non performance. It's
simply that someone up there didn't like him. Now I
(14:23):
have to confess that I'm a little bit fuzzy on
exactly how some of this went down. Specifically this first part.
He was pitching batting practice in late April when a
batter and I haven't been able to ascertain who it was,
lined a ball off of his knee. According to newspaper
reports published right there and then in Boston, so it's
(14:45):
not like they would have forgotten or done sloppy research.
The resultant injury kept him off the field for three weeks.
The box scores showed no such time out, so let's
assume that they were exaggerating and that whereas he was
not shelved, there wasn't really a formal disabled list at
the time that he did struggle with the injury, although
(15:07):
those same box scores show him pitching quite well by
the end of May, and his May ended early for reasons.
I'm about to tell you he had an ERA of
three point zero six. Now this part I am certain about.
On May twenty fifth, at Fenway Park, he was facing
the Detroit Tigers. The Detroit Tigers had a rather powerful
(15:28):
right handed hit or you might have heard of, named
Hank Greenberg, and in the top of the fourth Greenberg
lined a ball up the middle and off of ostr
Mueller's left cheek. He hit it so hard that the
ball rebounded into right field. Ostr Mueller did get off
the field mostly under his own power. He didn't have
(15:48):
to be carried off. He had to be helped off,
braced by his teammates. He needed a couple of stitches
under the eye, but there was no thought that he
was about to go Ray Chapman on the world. In fact,
the initial prognosis was he'll be back in no time.
He's fit as a fiddle right his reign. But that's
when the concussion symptoms started showing up, the dizzy spells
(16:08):
and headaches and nose bleeds. They told him to stay
in bed for a while. After about three weeks, they
thought they'd give it a try, and he pitched against
the Yankees, and he actually won. He pitched a complete game,
allowed only two runs. But here's another thing I'm not
quite sure about, except that I know it was bad.
It was at that point that he had another ball
(16:29):
bned off of his knee in batting practice, and this
time I know who it was. It was utility infielder
dib Williams. They had great names in the nineteen thirties.
That resulted in Ostmuler having to have his leg in
a splint. It wasn't broken, but there was kind of
a bad bruise and nerve injury that required some healing time. Now,
(16:50):
was that the same adding practice injury that resulted in
the timeout from April or were the April reports just confused.
I mean, it would require a time machine to screw
that up. Before the injury in June, I really am
very confused about this. What is certain is that this
time the statistical record matches what was reported in the papers,
(17:15):
because after that June eighth start, oster Muller disappeared for
about five weeks, but once again he got better. He rehabbed. However,
pitchers rehabbed in nineteen thirty five, hopefully by going off
to Spain and fighting the fascists or something. But in
any case, he came back in relief on July twelfth,
and on July fourteenth he pitched a ten inningcomplete game
(17:38):
over the Cleveland Indians, ended in a two to two tie. Well,
but still he's back. He's finally healthy. Everything is finally
going Fritz oster Mullers and the Red Sox. Way that is,
it was until August eighteenth, at Saint Louis, oster Muller
(17:59):
pitches another complete game, a win over the Browns. But
here's the thing. In the first inning he had to
face the Brown's outfielder, Moose Soldiers. Moose Salters really wasn't
much of a moose as baseball players go. I mean
that in a production sense. He came up very late,
had a couple of good years, and then was kind
(18:20):
of just a league average guy. But in any case,
it doesn't take a slugger to do damage to a pitcher.
And Ostermuler the human pincushion has another ball blindf of
his body. This time Moose Salters hits it off of
his leg. As far as I can tell, it's the
same leg that did Williams had injured a couple of
(18:42):
months before. But you know what, Fuller laughs it off. Hahaha,
He's fine. He keeps pitching. As I said, it was
a complete game. And after that he takes his next
turn in the rotation on just two days' rest, pitches
pretty well again, also throws a game in relief and
picks up the save, and makes yet one more complete game,
(19:03):
start time against the Indians in Cleveland, and again pitches
the team to win. He's got a three point six
two ERA, which, again by nineteen thirty five standards, is great.
But while warming up for that game, weren't the game
after Again, the newspaper reports seemed to indicate it was
that game, the game where he threw nine innings at
the Indians, that he suddenly found himself unable to walk.
(19:26):
And it was only at this point that somebody said, hey,
maybe wet to take an X ray of that leg
of Fritzes, you know, the one that Moose banged the
ball off of the ball that rebounded so hard by
the way that it had to be fielded by Red
Sox second baseman schem Alillo. And if you listened to
(19:47):
last week's show, no, I did not plan for a
scheme Altlo to make an encore just seven days on.
We're just doing scheme Mililo all the time. From now on.
It's the infinite scheme Mililo. The X rays came back
and it turned out that for a period of about
two and a half weeks oster Muller had been pitching
on a broken fibula. For those who cut class at
(20:08):
medical school today, that's the n leg bone that runs
from your knee down to your foot. It's not the
big bone of your leg. It runs along your calf.
Any other organization at any other time in history subsequent
to that might have said, look, let's call a halt
to the proceedings at this point until we can do
(20:29):
kind of an investigation and figure out which deity Fritz
Ostmuller has angered that has put him in the position
of having balls continually hitting him about the head, shoulders, legs,
and other extremities, but no, they didn't handle it that way.
Oster Muller sat out about four weeks, and on September
(20:50):
twenty second, with games left in the season, they brought
him back to pitch against the Yankees at home at
Fenway Park. The Yankees beat the hell out of him,
but at least it was in the conventional way. He
gave up a whole bunch of hits and runs and
added a third of a run to his ra for
the season, but he didn't get hurt or any more hurt,
So I guess you could consider that moral victory. Some
(21:12):
pictures will go a whole year without getting hit by
a batted ball. I imagine there are some fly ball
types who might not see a comebacker for years at
a time. Sid Fernandez say is always my exemplar for
that kind of picture. And sure, Austin Mueller was a
contact oriented pitcher. At a more contact oriented time, there's
(21:34):
no disputing that there were more chances for a pitcher
to be decapitated by a line drive off the bat
of Hank Greenberger numerous other hitters. Still that the base
ball would find you three to four times, depending on
how we eventually work out the chronology to this story
is unlikely. And maybe you don't believe in predestination, maybe
(21:58):
you don't believe in fate. Maybe you don't believe that
people get their just rewards or even their unjust rewards.
But in many ways, that's an even scarier world than
one in which, to borrow from Jonathan Edwards, we are
all sinners in the hands of an angry god. No,
in fact, we're just in the grip of the infinite inning,
(22:19):
and randomness happens. And it might just be that, against
all odds, your number doesn't come up once, but over
and over and over again, and there's no reason for
it at all. Ask Fritz Ostermuler. I'm Steven Goldman, and
this is the infinite inning. Well, hello there, welcome back
(23:19):
to the show. Let's get right into it. This week
I am joined by Stefan Johnson, staff writer for The
New York Amsterdam News, one of the longest running black
newspapers in the country, and has also written about baseball
for The Athletic, The Hardball Times, and most recently The Week,
where he published a column on the difficulties of being
(23:41):
a black fan in twenty eighteen, and this caught my
eye and I wanted to discuss it with him, and
I was well rewarded for extending that invitation, as we
had a great conversation. I really enjoyed it. There is
a lot to chew on there if you haven't considered
perspectives other than your own, and to just preview one
(24:02):
bit that hadn't really occurred to me to think of
it this way back a long time ago now, when
Carlton Fisk was getting on Deon Sanders for not playing
the game the right way, and when Buck Showalter did
the same to Ken Griffy Junior for having his hat
tilted during batting practice or having it on backwards during
(24:25):
batting practice. I viewed each of those events as an
isolated incident. And I also tried to understand the attitudes
of Fisk and show Walter because as someone who even
then was versed in the history of the game and
had kind of bought into this ancient ethos about not
(24:46):
showing up other players and playing the right way. But
what I failed to consider, I want to say this
without sounding precious, you might think that because I've told
a ton of stories on this show about the pernicious
effects of segregation on baseball, that I would analyze everything,
(25:07):
that my first instinct would be to look at these
kinds of interactions through the lens of race. But you
know what, at least at that age, I didn't, still
a teenager and not having encountered many overt racists in
my own life, certainly not as many as you can
now encounter on any given afternoon just by tuning into
(25:31):
the wrong website or social media account. And also, I
think having bought into kind of a liberal fantasy on
account of the way I was raised. I was raised
to believe that racism is wrong, that you judge people
as people, not on the basis of their skin color.
And I also had some African American playmates from a
(25:53):
very young age, and so it never occurred to me
to think that way. And I was born after the
Civil Rights, after Martin Luther King, after a lot of
things had changed. Both my parents can recall a world
that was segregated. My world was not, at least not legally,
not in terms of having signs that said blacks only
(26:14):
or whites only, which they both had seen at times,
being obviously much older than me, and so I think
Some of the message I got, not just from them,
but from school and people around me, was look, how
much better things are. Look how all that stuff is
over with now. And it doesn't mean it was all over.
It doesn't mean the majority of it was over. We're
(26:35):
seeing that now every single day. But I guess understandably,
at least for the white people around, they could say,
at least from their perspective, that yeah, a lot of
their wrongs had been righted again. Just to be really clear,
they were wrong. They were so wrong. It was just
(26:55):
those were the parts they could see because they were
the obvious ones. They were the one that got on
the evening news. And since the people around me were
not racist to begin with, because it was alien to
their way of thinking, they didn't see the other stuff,
the stuff that we see now, the stuff that people
say casually all the time in tweets and in Facebook
(27:16):
posts and so on. So great I was a child,
and if I was naive and complacent and basically well
intentioned where those things are concerned, hurry for me, I'm wonderful.
But that's not my point. My point is actually that
when you are complacent just because you're not thinking like
an oppressor doesn't mean that you can discount the views
(27:39):
of the oppressed. And I guess this is a long
way of saying that what didn't occur to me at
those times was not just the message or the baseball
aspects of what Fisk and Showalter were saying, but about
who was saying it and who they were saying it to,
and when you have an accumulation of the those messages,
(28:01):
how it might be communicated to the whole group of
African American players in the same way that when Ian
Kinsler says today or nearabouts to today, well, the Latinos
don't play the game in the same way we do,
and they're more demonstrative, and that doesn't really fit in here.
It's totally fine for you to err on the side
(28:23):
of generosity. It may not always be deserved, but let's
go with that with someone like Kinsler and say, hey,
let's just take it at surface value. He meant what
he meant, and he wasn't trying to be a racist
in any sense or a cultural chauvinist. He was just
saying that this is his view of the way that
professional ball players comport themselves. Now, I don't know if
(28:44):
that's true or not, But regardless, you have to take
into account how that message might be received by the
people he's talking about. Does it make them feel welcome
or unwelcome? Does it pile in with an accumulation of
years and years of other such incidents, And with African Americans,
we can rewind that to the sixteen hundreds, if not before,
(29:06):
and ask will they hear this as just one more
white person saying that their way of doing things or
they themselves are inferior in some sense? And I didn't
really get that until much later, And because I hadn't
thought of the Fisk or Showalter things in a very
long time, I hadn't really framed them in that way
until this show. So when you hear us talking about
(29:28):
it later, there's a real sense of discovery on my part,
and I hope that for those of you who haven't
thought through the social media stuff, particularly the tweets by
Josh Hater and the gang, and then you might join
us as we talk in this episode about why African
American participation, both from a fan and a player perspective,
(29:51):
is down so far from where it used to be.
You might say to yourself, you know, each of those
tweets by themselves is just one thing. It's just one
Josh hater, it's just one tray turner and so on.
But you put them together with everything else, and it's
a piling on that is so big that you couldn't
fit it in the biggest skyscraper. And I should have
(30:13):
figured that out years ago, because you know what, I
am Jewish, and when I hear anti Semitism, I don't
just hear one incident. I don't just say to myself,
that's one jerk. I hear five thousand years of stuff
I hear nineteen thirty two to nineteen forty five. That's
what I hear. Do I sound unusually squeaky back in
(30:33):
twenty eighteen, I don't remember feeling squeaky. Maybe everyone's a
little bit squeaky now. And again, just having occasional squeaky
inclinations doesn't make you totally squeaky. It just makes you human.
And that makes this a break. I'll be back with
more from episode seventy two in just a moment. A
(31:00):
couple of words on hurricanes. As I record this on
Friday afternoon, Hurricane Florence is still down in the Carolinas,
dumping rain and wind. Although I guess I misspoke. It's
down to a tropical storm. It's tropical Storm Florence. So
it's been demoted or rank, it's been busted. But still
it's a problem. And I just wanted to point out
(31:22):
that one week from today, eighty years ago, one week
from today, on September twenty first, that a similar thing
was going on. It was a busy day in the world.
Chamberlain was in Munich negotiating with harr Hitler, working up
towards that piece in our time moment that worked out
so well. He was about to sell out the Czechoslovakians
(31:42):
in exchange for that worthless piece of paper. And over
here they were trying to play some baseball up in
New England. In fact, they were trying to play baseball
everywhere and not doing a great job at it because
it was a very wet late summer and fall. It
was also unusually hot, and that was a problem because
there was a hurricane down in about the same spot
(32:04):
that Florence is in. It was a typical hurricane. It
formed off of Cape Verde in Africa, where so many
of them form, and it zipped across the Atlantic going
east to west in it wound up in the Carolina's
Florida's neighborhood, and then there was the question of what
it was going to do after that. And history had
taught the National Weather Service such as it was at
(32:25):
that time, in this sort of analog age when there
were no satellites and not jet airplane evaluations and so on,
they were kind of winging this, and it was half
reports of ships at sea and maps at charts, and
maybe the twitching in your leg from that old war
wound in trying to figure out what these things would do.
But they knew that hurricanes, for the most part ninety
(32:46):
nine point nine percent of the time that matched the
description I just gave you always curved out to see,
just as they talked about Florence curving out to see before. Well,
it didn't. And one guy with the National Weather Service,
a younger guy, understood that on September twenty first, nineteen
thirty eight, that this hurricane sitting off the Carolinas was
(33:09):
not going to curve out to see that. In fact,
weather conditions had accumulated where there was almost going to
be a tunnel created where it could just shoot right
up the east coast but he was overruled because again
the weight of hurricanes, or history of hurricanes, and the
weight of people's twitching legs was such that it never
(33:29):
ever happened. But as it turned out, he was right,
and so no one was told, there was no warning,
and it all happened very, very quickly. This hurricane moved
straight south to north at sixty miles an hour and
covered the entire distance from the Carolinas to Long Island
(33:49):
in New York in the space of about seven eight hours.
And so in the late afternoon of September twenty first,
people were doing all the beach type things that that
people typically do, and they had no idea. When the
sky's got dark, they just thought, oh, thunderstorm. They didn't
realize that a Category five hurricane was bearing down on them.
(34:11):
There were no evacuations, there was nothing of that sort.
And even if they had tried, it wouldn't have worked out,
because since no one thought of these gigantic storms as
having a tendency to occur at higher latitudes, they had
built right out to the water. Not that this has
really changed in any way, but they had built these
these flimsy structures are relatively speaking, flimsy structures right out
(34:35):
to the water's edge, right up the east coast, and
so this hurricane obliterated Montak and Long Island and then
rolled up through Connecticut into Rhode Island, which was just
absolutely devastated, and up into Massachusetts. There are countless documentaries
on this hurricane, and I urge you to watch some
(34:55):
of them. They are absolutely harrowing in terms of what
people went through. Clinging to these houses that are built
on sand on the beach and forty and fifty foot
waves are coming at them, and they know that either
they are going to die, or the people that they
can see out their windows are going to die, or both,
and very often they did. Roughly seven hundred people are
(35:18):
thought to have died in this storm, and about four
hundred and fifty of them I think my numbers could
be off slightly, but the majority of them, over four
hundred I believe, died in Rhode Island. And you read
these descriptions of people who one moment they had their
wife standing next to them, or one moment they were
looking at their kids coming home on the school bus,
(35:41):
and then there was some kind of wave and then
their wife was no longer standing beside them, or the
school bus was no longer there, and that they had
to go out after the water receded and look for bodies,
and it might be days until they found them, and
so there were funeral after funerals sequentially as more people
came in. It was truly a nightmare. And it was
(36:03):
worse than that. I mean, there were towns that burned
because the damage caused fires. There were towns that were
underwater and were looted downtown Providence, for example. And this
is just sort of trivial compared to the loss of life.
But there was a timber industry in New England before
this storm, and after there wasn't Because they lost two
(36:25):
hundred and seventy five million trees. These forests that had
existed beforehand did not exist after. And yes, they salvaged
a good amount of the fallen timber, but that was
that there's no renewal in a forest that has been
completely uprooted. Now, some of the cities along the way
they only got swiped by the hurricane. The boardwalk at
(36:47):
Atlantic City got ripped up, but it wasn't like what
happened to Providence. New York City also got brushed. They
had incredibly high winds and quite a bit of flooding,
but again not a total disaster, and Boston also got
off kind of light. It was on the northern edge
of all this that was happening. The hurricane by then
had given out a little bit and ultimately drifted up
(37:09):
to Canada and rained itself out of existence. But again
there had been no warning, and the Boston Braves had
a double header scheduled at home that day with the
Saint Louis Cardinals, so no one told them, even though
it was a rainy, miserable looking day not to play
these games. Very few people even showed up. The official
attendance was thirteen hundred and fifty six, and even that
(37:34):
was thought to have been an exaggeration. But Bob Quinn,
who was the frontman for the Braves at that time,
had a thing about, you know, if anybody shows up
to see the game, we owe them a game. So
I think if two people had been there, if one
person had been there, he would have opened the gates.
So they did play the first game. They got the
first game in in incredibly wet and windy conditions that
(37:57):
were the edge of the hurricane. The Cardinals shut out
the Braves for nothing. It wasn't a very good Cardinals team.
They had just fired Frankie Frish actually as their manager,
the guy who had coached them to the nineteen thirty
four World Series victory. He had kind of worn out
his welcome. And they had some good players. Nis Slaughter's
in that game, Pepper Martin, Joe Medwick, Johnny Mice, They're
(38:17):
all in there. And Dizzy Dean's younger brother Paul pitched
a shutout. He was coming back from an injury. So
it was a good day for them. Medwick hit a
home run somehow through all those wins. What I love
about that is that on a good day, wind was
a problem at braves Field in Boston. Braves Field was
also known as National League Park, and for a while,
in fact, at this time, as the Bee Hive because
(38:39):
the Braves. I'm calling them the Braves for simplicity's sake,
but they were called the Bees because in nineteen thirty
five they had had well kind of the season the
Oriels are having now, and they decided to distance themselves
from that by changing the name. For a while, it
never caught on and they reverted, But at this time
it's the beehive. It's kind of still there by the way.
(38:59):
Boston University took it over and turned it into a
football stadium, and they kept bits of it. It's called
Nickerson Field. You can actually see it if you're driving
along the Charles River in Boston. You can see the
floodlights and so on. But some of the grand stand
is there and some of the gate is still there.
It's all of a mile away from Fenway Park. It
had opened in August nineteen fifteen, and it was always
(39:22):
an extreme pitchers park. The owner at that time, James Gaffney,
really liked triples, and so he built the park intentionally
built it huge, so the opening day dimensions were four
hundred and three feet down either line and five hundred
and fifty feet to the deepest part of center field.
(39:43):
There were nearly eleven acres of playing surface. And my
favorite anecdote about the ballpark was that at some point
right around the time it opened, Ty Cobb drop By
looked around and said, well, one thing's for sure, nobody's
ever going to hit a ball out of this park.
And for almost ten years he was right. It didn't
even happen in batting practice. The first over the fence.
(40:05):
Home run to left field came on May twenty eighth,
nineteen twenty five, and it was hit by Frank Snyder,
who was a catcher for the Giants. I should add,
and this is why I bring this up. It wasn't
just the dimensions which as the lively ball came in
and they began to slowly understand Gaffney was long gone
by this point that people kind of liked this home
(40:26):
run thing. They started to move them. They started to
move them constantly. They moved them in the off season,
they moved them during the season, which is illegal now.
It didn't change much because of the atmosphere, the environment.
The ballpark, as I alluded to earlier, was built almost
right on the Charles River. There was a train yard
(40:46):
and a whole bunch of train tracks separating the ballpark
from the water and then the water itself. And it
turned out that the wind liked to blow in cold
off that river and it would just take any fly
ball that was hit out towards the water, and the
home plate did face the river, and it would just
knock it down. Casey Stengel, who managed the Braves from
(41:08):
thirty eight through forty three, and in fact, during these
games that we're talking about today, called that old Joe
Wind my fourth outfielder. That didn't stop him, by the way,
from giving his players grief about how the ballpark worked.
When his players would complain that the conditions of the
park made hitting impossible, he'd say, oh, yeah, impossible. Mister
(41:28):
Hornsby played here in nineteen twenty eight and he hit
only three eighty seven, and there probably wasn't much that
anyone could say back to that. But even Hornsby was
stopped by the park and the wind. We know that
now that we have home road splits. He hit three
seventy two in Boston just four oh one on the road.
So the park did take a chunk out of what
he did. And even then he benefited from the one
(41:51):
alteration that they made to the park that actually did
change the way the park played. At the beginning of
the nineteen twenty eight season, they added some bleachers down
the left field line and in left center that cut
something like seventy or eighty feet off the distance down
the line, and now all of a sudden, home runs
to left were too easy. On June second of that year,
(42:13):
third baseman Les Bell, who hit all of sixty six
career home runs in about nine hundred games. Shot three
home runs and a triple into or off of those
bleachers during a twenty eleven loss to the Cincinnati Reds.
I don't know if they even had seen two twenty
eleven games in the history of that park. The Braves
being the Braves, they pulled out the seats at that
(42:33):
point and split the distance to the old fences, so
instead of four hundred or three hundred, it was three
point fifty. But pretty much it reverted it that point.
It still took like two swings at the ball to
hit it out to left, given the distance in the
wind well. On September twenty first, nineteen thirty eight, they
started the second game, but conditions rapidly decayed and everybody
(42:57):
except Home played umpire beans. Rear was getting a little
antsy about it, and both the Cardinals and the Braves
or Bees were saying, listen, we gotta call this thing.
We might be in a bit of danger. What would
the sky's having this strange, ominous yellow cast, and you know,
trees and cats and dogs and horses sailing by in
(43:17):
the sky. And Reardon didn't want to call it you know,
there are other games during this period when Casey Stengel
was trying to get a game called on account of
darkness or rain, and he went out and signaled the
umpire with a railroad lantern where a flashlight or came
out in a rain slicker with an umbrella. And yeah,
he got run at those times. But he didn't pull
any of those stunts on September twenty first, because they
(43:40):
would have been purely redundant, and yet they played on.
By the time the Cardinals batted in the top of
the third, the wind had picked up quite a bit,
and yet Rearden was being quite stubborn. They begged him
to call it off, and he said, when the advertising
signs go down, that's when I'll call it. As it
turned out, he didn't that much persuasion. As that inning
(44:02):
god underway, a Cardinal popped out to second base the
brave second basement. Tony Cucinello called for the ball. I
got it, I got it, and the ball was caught,
but not by him. It was caught by catcher Al
Lopez behind home plate near the wall. It had been
blown that far astray and I guess at that point
(44:24):
it finally reached Beings Rearden that there was a hurricane
on and the game was called. And this is my
favorite part. Right after that the advertising signs did come down.
It's all a joke now, but Boston got very lucky
that day. A few turns or twists of the hurricane
in one direction of the compass or another, and the
(44:45):
map of Boston might not look the way it does today.
As it is, there are still scars from that hurricane
visible on the landscape in other places. And I think
the real interesting point is this that Being's Rearden gives
us evidence of what happen in the total absence of government.
One meteorologist with the National Weather Service wanted to warn
(45:07):
the people of New England that that hurricane was coming,
and he got shouted down, and so there was no warning.
And that left the decision potentially a life or death
decision in the hands of an umpire in terms of
whether to keep playing, to keep the teams on the field,
to keep himself on the field, to keep the fans
(45:27):
in the seats if they so chose. And that's evidence
of the kind of thing that can happen when those
who are elected to look out for us and supervise
those who look out for us grew up or abdicate.
You know, Ronald Reagan got a lot of mileage out
of a line where he said that the scariest words
in the English language were I'm from the government and
(45:49):
I'm here to help. It is funny. Ronald Reagan was
a funny guy. But the truth is there are times
you need it, and when you don't have it, people
can die. Never scoff competent government. Those children who died
on September twenty first, nineteen thirty eight would tell you
if they could. By Herbert Hoover's Hernia of the Soul.
(46:13):
We have come to the end of another program you
can follow as ever in these reissue episodes. This is
where I used to tell you how to follow the
guests on Twitter. But I am no longer on Twitter,
and neither are you. Thus I am left only to
say please follow me at Stevengoldman dot bsky dot social,
where I post frequently. And here's a cliche for you.
(46:35):
If you're listening on YouTube, hit that like and I
can't do it, hit that like and subscribe button. I'm
not making light of anyone who makes a living that way,
because Wow, you've accomplished something. It's just that I never
imagine myself saying it. So email us, by which I
mean me, at Infinite Inning at gmail dot com. And
there's a Facebook group. Go to Facebook search Infinite Inning.
(46:57):
Not I will let you in. Everybody's doing it and
a splendid time is guaranteed for all. And of course,
if you have a spare moment, please go to the
podcast of your choice, rate and review and subscribe. It
helps bring an attention to the program. And if your
podcaster doesn't let you do those things, then volunteer for
your local PTA bake sale as long as you save
(47:19):
me a cupcase. We have a sponsor now. But nevertheless,
this episode is brought to you by the number twenty five.
Our producer is Disabled List and Dan. Good Bye you
our teams. I'm what you are hearing now and have
in fact we've listening to you throughout. The episode was a
co composition on myself and doctor Rick Moring. Doctor Rick
Moring is at the Motel six. He'll leave the light
(47:39):
on for you and then go off to stay at
his actual hotel. Well, if my plea agreement doesn't come through,
then I suppose I'll be back next week with more
tails and discussion from inside the Infinite Inning. That's all
from squeaking me in the past. Thanks for dropping by,
and join me tomorrow for a new episode of The
in thed Inning, Save Travels, Friends,
Well, hello there, and welcome to another Infinite Inning reissue episode.
This week we go back to year two of the
program for episode number seventy two. Normally, when we've done
these revisits, I've trimmed out all mention of the guests,
but this time I'm going to leave it in just
because the subject we discussed in the conversation section is
(00:49):
pertinent to what I talked about in the first part
of the show. My guest was the journalist Stephen Johnson,
then with the Amsterdam News and The Athletic. I enjoyed
talking to and I should have had him on again.
I did look for other opportunities to do so, but
I think his career went in another direction and I
never found the opportunity. He had written a piece about
(01:11):
the difficulties of being a black fan. This was back
in twenty eighteen. I was inspired to riff on this
subject before I went into the second story of the episode.
Now keep in mind this was September twenty eighteen. The
horrible murder of George Floyd had yet to happen. It
(01:31):
was more than a year and a half in the future.
There was already a Black Lives Matter movement, but that
idea took on a new sallience after this very obvious
example of police misconduct. You will recall, it's hard to
forget it that there were nationwide protests, some of which
(01:52):
were frightening in their intensity, and not just the intensity
of the protests themselves, but often the intensity of the
police response. I feel like, given what was just around
the corner from when we had this conversation, my comments
here sound oh so very quaint, and yet I don't
(02:12):
want to delete them from the record. We are still
living in the aftermath of those protests. I think that
as much as the election of Richard Nixon in nineteen
sixty eight was at least partially a reaction to the
watch riots of nineteen sixty five, the Harlem riots of
I believe the year before, not that long before, and
(02:34):
other examples of black Americans protesting at that time, the
eventual reelection of you know who in our own day
was part of the aftermath, the backlash, the counter revolution
to those more recent protests. It is as certain as
night follows day that when minority populations in America push
(02:55):
for recognition of their rights, and no matter who instigates
the violence, it ends up in riots, the mainstream hungers
for law and order, which is just a metaphor. It's
just a way of saying, hit those riders over the head,
even if they have a point, hit those riders over
the head. We don't like broken glass, we don't like fires,
(03:16):
and it's fair not to like violence. It's fair to
be worried if violent acts are happening down the street
from you simultaneously. That does not absolve you of the
responsibility of understanding why it is all happening in the
first place, and again to understand reaction and counter reaction,
(03:38):
and to know that in every group of people, whether
they have a point or not, or I should say,
whether they have a point that you agree with, there
is a spectrum that runs from the nonviolent to the violent,
and from people who are simply looking to say what
they need to say and people who are looking for
license to act out. And when you put police off
(04:00):
and angry people again, their anger may be justified. When
you put them together and you have that spectrum clashing,
you're going to have these outbreaks. And again I'm not
justifying them. I'm not saying that they're good. I'm just
saying it doesn't indict the whole cause it doesn't indict
everyone on either side, but because people react so strongly
(04:24):
to it, it creates a vicious cycle. And what happens
is the mainstream, as I said, hungers for law and order.
Suppression then results, which has the effect of reloading the
same energies, the same pressures that led to the crisis
in the first place. One of the few times America
is actually intelligent enough to move past that cycle was
(04:45):
the Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty five, now being
systematically fatally dismantled by the Supreme Court. And so we
rewind the clock. But Martin Luther King Junior won't be
coming again, and we await what James Baldwin referred to
as the fire next time, which in turn will lead
to more repression, which in turn leads us to a
darker place as a people as a whole, and nothing
(05:08):
ever gets better. Hallelujah. You know, in an hour world,
the ewoks never get to dance. They're deported and they
end up on the sidewalks in various cities around the
galaxy with a cup and a sign that says, homeless bear,
please donate. Yup nub yupnub. In preparing these remarks, I
came across an unexpected baseball oriented reaction to the watch
(05:32):
riots of the summer of nineteen sixty five, and I
will talk about that in this week's new episode of
The Infinite Inning, number three forty nine, which is due
to emerge from the Infinite Inning Labs approximately twenty four
hours after I post this here episode. I don't know
if that story goes anywhere, but it seems as if,
(05:55):
as I've already detailed when we're talking about these kinds
of events in American hit history, the not going anywhere
is the whole point. Today's reissue not only includes the
mutterings I referenced a moment ago, but a discussion of
nineteen thirties and forties left hander Fritz Ostmuller and his
many injuries. If Ostro Muller comes up today, or maybe
(06:16):
it's Ostro Mueller again, I wasn't there. If Fritz comes
up today, it's as a Jackie Robinson antagonist. In nineteen
forty seven. This was at the beginning of Robinson's National
League career and the penultimate season of oster Muller's Fritz's
Fritz did hit Jackie with a pitch in nineteen forty seven,
but there's no real evidence of it having been intentional.
(06:39):
I'm not exonerating him. I just don't know. Just like today,
eighty years ago, a number of white Americans, ballplayers among them,
felt that being out and proud in their bigotry, in
their gatekeeping was a totally appropriate response to Black Americans
asking to play baseball and be allowed to vote. Even
now in our thorough degraded era, it's shocking to read
(07:02):
that at the time, not forty seven sixty four, that
Mississippi Governor Paul Johnson, who was in office from sixty
four to nineteen sixty eight, was in the habit of
telling voters that the acronym NAACP stood for N words alligators, apes, coons,
and possums. Except he didn't say n words. He said
(07:23):
the whole thing right out loud, right there on radio
and television. This is a low bar. But Fritz doesn't
seem to have been one of those. Fritz was a
thirty war career pitcher. I suppose there have been enough
of those that it's not that special of an accomplishment.
That said, there have been a lot more careers of
one war or zero war or negative war, and there
(07:45):
have been of thirty, and in that context, thirty seems
pretty special. After all, he spent the first seven years
of his career nineteen thirty four through nineteen forty with
the Red Sox and pitched to a four to thirty
eight er, which sounds mediocre. But if you park and
league adjust that as Baseball Reference does, you get an
(08:06):
ER plus of one ten. That is, he was ten
percent better than league average. Ask yourself how many pitchers
in Red Sox history have thrown a minimum of one
thousand innings with an ERA plus of one hundred and
ten or better. The answer is out of one hundred
and twenty four years of the team's existence wenty. The
(08:26):
list begins with Pedro Martinez, passes through Smokey Joe Woods,
Cy Young, Roger Clemens, and Lefty Grove, and eventually makes
its way down to Bill Lee and our mister Fritz.
Josh Beckett, Clay Buckoltz, and Dennis Eckersley are so close
to them as to be indistinguishable. It's a pretty impressive
list to be part of. For our second tale, we
(08:46):
stayed in New England for the devastating hurricane of nineteen
thirty eight and a game Casey Stengel managed right in
the teeth of that storm. It's an amusing story, but
there was nothing funny about the hurricane itself. Zign note
from the National Weather Service regarding the storm's intensity were inadequate,
and as a result, people died. As I was preparing
(09:09):
to speak these words just now, literally this minute, I
saw on blue sky a note from today October sixteen,
regarding this weekend's Dolphins Browns game and a forecast with
a ninety four percent chance of rain and thirty six
mile per hour wind gusts. Although the poster says, and
who knows if they know what they're talking about, but
(09:31):
if the storm strengthens, those gusts could get up to
fifty or sixty miles per hour, And that means that
a quarterback could throw the ball downfield and potentially catch
it himself after the wind pushes it right back at him.
It could also mean that the goalposts come down on
his head. That's what I mean when I say that
that baseball game was amusing in the abstract and amusing
his weird baseball, but tragic when considered in the full context.
(09:54):
Of a storm that did massive economic and human damage
up and down the East coast of the United States.
But today's version, the one that I just gave you
about the Dolphins Browns game, is an example of us
getting something like adequate warning today. If you're in Cleveland,
you can decide to go to that game or not
(10:14):
go to put boards over your windows if you think
that strong winds are going to launch tree branches or
heaven forfend a cyber truck at your windows. Absent that,
you'd be as informed as the old time farmer saying
bring in the sheep, maud Sky looks ominous. We'd best
put the livestock in the living room and spend the
(10:35):
night in the cellar. Don't forget to put Dick Cavit
on for the goats. He calms their nerves. This is
an example of the significant truth that we together can
accomplish things we cannot achieve individually, among them having useful
safety things like the National Weather Service or air traffic controllers.
Are your taxes too high? Yeah? Mine too, but this
(10:57):
is part of why we pay them. And it's no
fun working hard and having to give that money away.
But we're not giving it away. We're buying something with it, Ringo,
We're buying our lives. That's all for me for this
reissue episode. I'll be back a little bit later to
paper over the odd break and say sayonara at the
end of the episode. As always, thank you for joining
(11:18):
me for this reissue of The Infinite Inning, which begins
right after this brief intermission. Somewhere in the Infinite Inning,
(11:52):
there's a bullet with your name on it. And it's
not just any ordinary bullet. It's more like a guided missile.
You can't duck it. Its fate. You experienced the grim, despairing
acceptance that this bullet is no different from a dinner
at Applebee's. You may not have done anything to deserve it,
but at this late hour, it's the only path that's
(12:12):
open to you. In the nineteen thirties, the Red Sox
had a left handed pitcher named Fred Fritz Ostmuler. He
came to the Majors in nineteen thirty four as a
twenty six year old after spending about eight years in
the minor leagues. The Socks, who were building under new
owner Tom Yacki, had signed him after he had a
big season at Rochester of the American Association. And you
(12:36):
know what, he did pretty well straight off the bat.
He only went ten to thirteen his rookie year, and
you know that back then wins and losses were one
of the major measures, if not the only, measure of
a pitcher's success. But it was recognized that he had
a better season than the record indicated. For one thing,
his three point four to nine ERA was well below
(12:57):
league average, and was even more impressive when you factored
in that he was a left hander in Fenway Park
with the Green Monster to worry about, so his future
would have seemed to be set. And indeed, he had
a prominent place in the nineteen thirty five Red Sox rotation,
a collective that observers at the time believed would make
(13:17):
the Socks strongly competitive that year, because it wasn't just
Oster Mueller who was looked on to have a good
sequel to his first season, but they had Leftki Grove
and Wes Ferrell as well, the same West Ferrell who
we discussed extensively in just last week's episode. Now, as
it turned out, the Red Sox were only a few
games over five hundred, and part of it was that
(13:39):
the rotation turned out not to be all that as
far as the top three that I just mentioned. When
Farrell was great went twenty five and fourteen with a
three point five to two ERA over three hundred and
twenty two point one innings. You won't see that again,
as I often say, And Grove also was quite good,
better even going twenty to twelve with a two point
(14:00):
seven to zero RA. As for Fritz, his RA was
three point nine two, which was still very good at
that time and that place. The problem was he could
only make nineteen starts. And it wasn't because manager Joe
Cronin dropped him from the rotation for non performance. It's
simply that someone up there didn't like him. Now I
(14:23):
have to confess that I'm a little bit fuzzy on
exactly how some of this went down. Specifically this first part.
He was pitching batting practice in late April when a
batter and I haven't been able to ascertain who it was,
lined a ball off of his knee. According to newspaper
reports published right there and then in Boston, so it's
(14:45):
not like they would have forgotten or done sloppy research.
The resultant injury kept him off the field for three weeks.
The box scores showed no such time out, so let's
assume that they were exaggerating and that whereas he was
not shelved, there wasn't really a formal disabled list at
the time that he did struggle with the injury, although
(15:07):
those same box scores show him pitching quite well by
the end of May, and his May ended early for reasons.
I'm about to tell you he had an ERA of
three point zero six. Now this part I am certain about.
On May twenty fifth, at Fenway Park, he was facing
the Detroit Tigers. The Detroit Tigers had a rather powerful
(15:28):
right handed hit or you might have heard of, named
Hank Greenberg, and in the top of the fourth Greenberg
lined a ball up the middle and off of ostr
Mueller's left cheek. He hit it so hard that the
ball rebounded into right field. Ostr Mueller did get off
the field mostly under his own power. He didn't have
(15:48):
to be carried off. He had to be helped off,
braced by his teammates. He needed a couple of stitches
under the eye, but there was no thought that he
was about to go Ray Chapman on the world. In fact,
the initial prognosis was he'll be back in no time.
He's fit as a fiddle right his reign. But that's
when the concussion symptoms started showing up, the dizzy spells
(16:08):
and headaches and nose bleeds. They told him to stay
in bed for a while. After about three weeks, they
thought they'd give it a try, and he pitched against
the Yankees, and he actually won. He pitched a complete game,
allowed only two runs. But here's another thing I'm not
quite sure about, except that I know it was bad.
It was at that point that he had another ball
(16:29):
bned off of his knee in batting practice, and this
time I know who it was. It was utility infielder
dib Williams. They had great names in the nineteen thirties.
That resulted in Ostmuler having to have his leg in
a splint. It wasn't broken, but there was kind of
a bad bruise and nerve injury that required some healing time. Now,
(16:50):
was that the same adding practice injury that resulted in
the timeout from April or were the April reports just confused.
I mean, it would require a time machine to screw
that up. Before the injury in June, I really am
very confused about this. What is certain is that this
time the statistical record matches what was reported in the papers,
(17:15):
because after that June eighth start, oster Muller disappeared for
about five weeks, but once again he got better. He rehabbed. However,
pitchers rehabbed in nineteen thirty five, hopefully by going off
to Spain and fighting the fascists or something. But in
any case, he came back in relief on July twelfth,
and on July fourteenth he pitched a ten inningcomplete game
(17:38):
over the Cleveland Indians, ended in a two to two tie. Well,
but still he's back. He's finally healthy. Everything is finally
going Fritz oster Mullers and the Red Sox. Way that is,
it was until August eighteenth, at Saint Louis, oster Muller
(17:59):
pitches another complete game, a win over the Browns. But
here's the thing. In the first inning he had to
face the Brown's outfielder, Moose Soldiers. Moose Salters really wasn't
much of a moose as baseball players go. I mean
that in a production sense. He came up very late,
had a couple of good years, and then was kind
(18:20):
of just a league average guy. But in any case,
it doesn't take a slugger to do damage to a pitcher.
And Ostermuler the human pincushion has another ball blindf of
his body. This time Moose Salters hits it off of
his leg. As far as I can tell, it's the
same leg that did Williams had injured a couple of
(18:42):
months before. But you know what, Fuller laughs it off. Hahaha,
He's fine. He keeps pitching. As I said, it was
a complete game. And after that he takes his next
turn in the rotation on just two days' rest, pitches
pretty well again, also throws a game in relief and
picks up the save, and makes yet one more complete game,
(19:03):
start time against the Indians in Cleveland, and again pitches
the team to win. He's got a three point six
two ERA, which, again by nineteen thirty five standards, is great.
But while warming up for that game, weren't the game
after Again, the newspaper reports seemed to indicate it was
that game, the game where he threw nine innings at
the Indians, that he suddenly found himself unable to walk.
(19:26):
And it was only at this point that somebody said, hey,
maybe wet to take an X ray of that leg
of Fritzes, you know, the one that Moose banged the
ball off of the ball that rebounded so hard by
the way that it had to be fielded by Red
Sox second baseman schem Alillo. And if you listened to
(19:47):
last week's show, no, I did not plan for a
scheme Altlo to make an encore just seven days on.
We're just doing scheme Mililo all the time. From now on.
It's the infinite scheme Mililo. The X rays came back
and it turned out that for a period of about
two and a half weeks oster Muller had been pitching
on a broken fibula. For those who cut class at
(20:08):
medical school today, that's the n leg bone that runs
from your knee down to your foot. It's not the
big bone of your leg. It runs along your calf.
Any other organization at any other time in history subsequent
to that might have said, look, let's call a halt
to the proceedings at this point until we can do
(20:29):
kind of an investigation and figure out which deity Fritz
Ostmuller has angered that has put him in the position
of having balls continually hitting him about the head, shoulders, legs,
and other extremities, but no, they didn't handle it that way.
Oster Muller sat out about four weeks, and on September
(20:50):
twenty second, with games left in the season, they brought
him back to pitch against the Yankees at home at
Fenway Park. The Yankees beat the hell out of him,
but at least it was in the conventional way. He
gave up a whole bunch of hits and runs and
added a third of a run to his ra for
the season, but he didn't get hurt or any more hurt,
So I guess you could consider that moral victory. Some
(21:12):
pictures will go a whole year without getting hit by
a batted ball. I imagine there are some fly ball
types who might not see a comebacker for years at
a time. Sid Fernandez say is always my exemplar for
that kind of picture. And sure, Austin Mueller was a
contact oriented pitcher. At a more contact oriented time, there's
(21:34):
no disputing that there were more chances for a pitcher
to be decapitated by a line drive off the bat
of Hank Greenberger numerous other hitters. Still that the base
ball would find you three to four times, depending on
how we eventually work out the chronology to this story
is unlikely. And maybe you don't believe in predestination, maybe
(21:58):
you don't believe in fate. Maybe you don't believe that
people get their just rewards or even their unjust rewards.
But in many ways, that's an even scarier world than
one in which, to borrow from Jonathan Edwards, we are
all sinners in the hands of an angry god. No,
in fact, we're just in the grip of the infinite inning,
(22:19):
and randomness happens. And it might just be that, against
all odds, your number doesn't come up once, but over
and over and over again, and there's no reason for
it at all. Ask Fritz Ostermuler. I'm Steven Goldman, and
this is the infinite inning. Well, hello there, welcome back
(23:19):
to the show. Let's get right into it. This week
I am joined by Stefan Johnson, staff writer for The
New York Amsterdam News, one of the longest running black
newspapers in the country, and has also written about baseball
for The Athletic, The Hardball Times, and most recently The Week,
where he published a column on the difficulties of being
(23:41):
a black fan in twenty eighteen, and this caught my
eye and I wanted to discuss it with him, and
I was well rewarded for extending that invitation, as we
had a great conversation. I really enjoyed it. There is
a lot to chew on there if you haven't considered
perspectives other than your own, and to just preview one
(24:02):
bit that hadn't really occurred to me to think of
it this way back a long time ago now, when
Carlton Fisk was getting on Deon Sanders for not playing
the game the right way, and when Buck Showalter did
the same to Ken Griffy Junior for having his hat
tilted during batting practice or having it on backwards during
(24:25):
batting practice. I viewed each of those events as an
isolated incident. And I also tried to understand the attitudes
of Fisk and show Walter because as someone who even
then was versed in the history of the game and
had kind of bought into this ancient ethos about not
(24:46):
showing up other players and playing the right way. But
what I failed to consider, I want to say this
without sounding precious, you might think that because I've told
a ton of stories on this show about the pernicious
effects of segregation on baseball, that I would analyze everything,
(25:07):
that my first instinct would be to look at these
kinds of interactions through the lens of race. But you
know what, at least at that age, I didn't, still
a teenager and not having encountered many overt racists in
my own life, certainly not as many as you can
now encounter on any given afternoon just by tuning into
(25:31):
the wrong website or social media account. And also, I
think having bought into kind of a liberal fantasy on
account of the way I was raised. I was raised
to believe that racism is wrong, that you judge people
as people, not on the basis of their skin color.
And I also had some African American playmates from a
(25:53):
very young age, and so it never occurred to me
to think that way. And I was born after the
Civil Rights, after Martin Luther King, after a lot of
things had changed. Both my parents can recall a world
that was segregated. My world was not, at least not legally,
not in terms of having signs that said blacks only
(26:14):
or whites only, which they both had seen at times,
being obviously much older than me, and so I think
Some of the message I got, not just from them,
but from school and people around me, was look, how
much better things are. Look how all that stuff is
over with now. And it doesn't mean it was all over.
It doesn't mean the majority of it was over. We're
(26:35):
seeing that now every single day. But I guess understandably,
at least for the white people around, they could say,
at least from their perspective, that yeah, a lot of
their wrongs had been righted again. Just to be really clear,
they were wrong. They were so wrong. It was just
(26:55):
those were the parts they could see because they were
the obvious ones. They were the one that got on
the evening news. And since the people around me were
not racist to begin with, because it was alien to
their way of thinking, they didn't see the other stuff,
the stuff that we see now, the stuff that people
say casually all the time in tweets and in Facebook
(27:16):
posts and so on. So great I was a child,
and if I was naive and complacent and basically well
intentioned where those things are concerned, hurry for me, I'm wonderful.
But that's not my point. My point is actually that
when you are complacent just because you're not thinking like
an oppressor doesn't mean that you can discount the views
(27:39):
of the oppressed. And I guess this is a long
way of saying that what didn't occur to me at
those times was not just the message or the baseball
aspects of what Fisk and Showalter were saying, but about
who was saying it and who they were saying it to,
and when you have an accumulation of the those messages,
(28:01):
how it might be communicated to the whole group of
African American players in the same way that when Ian
Kinsler says today or nearabouts to today, well, the Latinos
don't play the game in the same way we do,
and they're more demonstrative, and that doesn't really fit in here.
It's totally fine for you to err on the side
(28:23):
of generosity. It may not always be deserved, but let's
go with that with someone like Kinsler and say, hey,
let's just take it at surface value. He meant what
he meant, and he wasn't trying to be a racist
in any sense or a cultural chauvinist. He was just
saying that this is his view of the way that
professional ball players comport themselves. Now, I don't know if
(28:44):
that's true or not, But regardless, you have to take
into account how that message might be received by the
people he's talking about. Does it make them feel welcome
or unwelcome? Does it pile in with an accumulation of
years and years of other such incidents, And with African Americans,
we can rewind that to the sixteen hundreds, if not before,
(29:06):
and ask will they hear this as just one more
white person saying that their way of doing things or
they themselves are inferior in some sense? And I didn't
really get that until much later, And because I hadn't
thought of the Fisk or Showalter things in a very
long time, I hadn't really framed them in that way
until this show. So when you hear us talking about
(29:28):
it later, there's a real sense of discovery on my part,
and I hope that for those of you who haven't
thought through the social media stuff, particularly the tweets by
Josh Hater and the gang, and then you might join
us as we talk in this episode about why African
American participation, both from a fan and a player perspective,
(29:51):
is down so far from where it used to be.
You might say to yourself, you know, each of those
tweets by themselves is just one thing. It's just one
Josh hater, it's just one tray turner and so on.
But you put them together with everything else, and it's
a piling on that is so big that you couldn't
fit it in the biggest skyscraper. And I should have
(30:13):
figured that out years ago, because you know what, I
am Jewish, and when I hear anti Semitism, I don't
just hear one incident. I don't just say to myself,
that's one jerk. I hear five thousand years of stuff
I hear nineteen thirty two to nineteen forty five. That's
what I hear. Do I sound unusually squeaky back in
(30:33):
twenty eighteen, I don't remember feeling squeaky. Maybe everyone's a
little bit squeaky now. And again, just having occasional squeaky
inclinations doesn't make you totally squeaky. It just makes you human.
And that makes this a break. I'll be back with
more from episode seventy two in just a moment. A
(31:00):
couple of words on hurricanes. As I record this on
Friday afternoon, Hurricane Florence is still down in the Carolinas,
dumping rain and wind. Although I guess I misspoke. It's
down to a tropical storm. It's tropical Storm Florence. So
it's been demoted or rank, it's been busted. But still
it's a problem. And I just wanted to point out
(31:22):
that one week from today, eighty years ago, one week
from today, on September twenty first, that a similar thing
was going on. It was a busy day in the world.
Chamberlain was in Munich negotiating with harr Hitler, working up
towards that piece in our time moment that worked out
so well. He was about to sell out the Czechoslovakians
(31:42):
in exchange for that worthless piece of paper. And over
here they were trying to play some baseball up in
New England. In fact, they were trying to play baseball
everywhere and not doing a great job at it because
it was a very wet late summer and fall. It
was also unusually hot, and that was a problem because
there was a hurricane down in about the same spot
(32:04):
that Florence is in. It was a typical hurricane. It
formed off of Cape Verde in Africa, where so many
of them form, and it zipped across the Atlantic going
east to west in it wound up in the Carolina's
Florida's neighborhood, and then there was the question of what
it was going to do after that. And history had
taught the National Weather Service such as it was at
(32:25):
that time, in this sort of analog age when there
were no satellites and not jet airplane evaluations and so on,
they were kind of winging this, and it was half
reports of ships at sea and maps at charts, and
maybe the twitching in your leg from that old war
wound in trying to figure out what these things would do.
But they knew that hurricanes, for the most part ninety
(32:46):
nine point nine percent of the time that matched the
description I just gave you always curved out to see,
just as they talked about Florence curving out to see before. Well,
it didn't. And one guy with the National Weather Service,
a younger guy, understood that on September twenty first, nineteen
thirty eight, that this hurricane sitting off the Carolinas was
(33:09):
not going to curve out to see that. In fact,
weather conditions had accumulated where there was almost going to
be a tunnel created where it could just shoot right
up the east coast but he was overruled because again
the weight of hurricanes, or history of hurricanes, and the
weight of people's twitching legs was such that it never
(33:29):
ever happened. But as it turned out, he was right,
and so no one was told, there was no warning,
and it all happened very, very quickly. This hurricane moved
straight south to north at sixty miles an hour and
covered the entire distance from the Carolinas to Long Island
(33:49):
in New York in the space of about seven eight hours.
And so in the late afternoon of September twenty first,
people were doing all the beach type things that that
people typically do, and they had no idea. When the
sky's got dark, they just thought, oh, thunderstorm. They didn't
realize that a Category five hurricane was bearing down on them.
(34:11):
There were no evacuations, there was nothing of that sort.
And even if they had tried, it wouldn't have worked out,
because since no one thought of these gigantic storms as
having a tendency to occur at higher latitudes, they had
built right out to the water. Not that this has
really changed in any way, but they had built these
these flimsy structures are relatively speaking, flimsy structures right out
(34:35):
to the water's edge, right up the east coast, and
so this hurricane obliterated Montak and Long Island and then
rolled up through Connecticut into Rhode Island, which was just
absolutely devastated, and up into Massachusetts. There are countless documentaries
on this hurricane, and I urge you to watch some
(34:55):
of them. They are absolutely harrowing in terms of what
people went through. Clinging to these houses that are built
on sand on the beach and forty and fifty foot
waves are coming at them, and they know that either
they are going to die, or the people that they
can see out their windows are going to die, or both,
and very often they did. Roughly seven hundred people are
(35:18):
thought to have died in this storm, and about four
hundred and fifty of them I think my numbers could
be off slightly, but the majority of them, over four
hundred I believe, died in Rhode Island. And you read
these descriptions of people who one moment they had their
wife standing next to them, or one moment they were
looking at their kids coming home on the school bus,
(35:41):
and then there was some kind of wave and then
their wife was no longer standing beside them, or the
school bus was no longer there, and that they had
to go out after the water receded and look for bodies,
and it might be days until they found them, and
so there were funeral after funerals sequentially as more people
came in. It was truly a nightmare. And it was
(36:03):
worse than that. I mean, there were towns that burned
because the damage caused fires. There were towns that were
underwater and were looted downtown Providence, for example. And this
is just sort of trivial compared to the loss of life.
But there was a timber industry in New England before
this storm, and after there wasn't Because they lost two
(36:25):
hundred and seventy five million trees. These forests that had
existed beforehand did not exist after. And yes, they salvaged
a good amount of the fallen timber, but that was
that there's no renewal in a forest that has been
completely uprooted. Now, some of the cities along the way
they only got swiped by the hurricane. The boardwalk at
(36:47):
Atlantic City got ripped up, but it wasn't like what
happened to Providence. New York City also got brushed. They
had incredibly high winds and quite a bit of flooding,
but again not a total disaster, and Boston also got
off kind of light. It was on the northern edge
of all this that was happening. The hurricane by then
had given out a little bit and ultimately drifted up
(37:09):
to Canada and rained itself out of existence. But again
there had been no warning, and the Boston Braves had
a double header scheduled at home that day with the
Saint Louis Cardinals, so no one told them, even though
it was a rainy, miserable looking day not to play
these games. Very few people even showed up. The official
attendance was thirteen hundred and fifty six, and even that
(37:34):
was thought to have been an exaggeration. But Bob Quinn,
who was the frontman for the Braves at that time,
had a thing about, you know, if anybody shows up
to see the game, we owe them a game. So
I think if two people had been there, if one
person had been there, he would have opened the gates.
So they did play the first game. They got the
first game in in incredibly wet and windy conditions that
(37:57):
were the edge of the hurricane. The Cardinals shut out
the Braves for nothing. It wasn't a very good Cardinals team.
They had just fired Frankie Frish actually as their manager,
the guy who had coached them to the nineteen thirty
four World Series victory. He had kind of worn out
his welcome. And they had some good players. Nis Slaughter's
in that game, Pepper Martin, Joe Medwick, Johnny Mice, They're
(38:17):
all in there. And Dizzy Dean's younger brother Paul pitched
a shutout. He was coming back from an injury. So
it was a good day for them. Medwick hit a
home run somehow through all those wins. What I love
about that is that on a good day, wind was
a problem at braves Field in Boston. Braves Field was
also known as National League Park, and for a while,
in fact, at this time, as the Bee Hive because
(38:39):
the Braves. I'm calling them the Braves for simplicity's sake,
but they were called the Bees because in nineteen thirty
five they had had well kind of the season the
Oriels are having now, and they decided to distance themselves
from that by changing the name. For a while, it
never caught on and they reverted, But at this time
it's the beehive. It's kind of still there by the way.
(38:59):
Boston University took it over and turned it into a
football stadium, and they kept bits of it. It's called
Nickerson Field. You can actually see it if you're driving
along the Charles River in Boston. You can see the
floodlights and so on. But some of the grand stand
is there and some of the gate is still there.
It's all of a mile away from Fenway Park. It
had opened in August nineteen fifteen, and it was always
(39:22):
an extreme pitchers park. The owner at that time, James Gaffney,
really liked triples, and so he built the park intentionally
built it huge, so the opening day dimensions were four
hundred and three feet down either line and five hundred
and fifty feet to the deepest part of center field.
(39:43):
There were nearly eleven acres of playing surface. And my
favorite anecdote about the ballpark was that at some point
right around the time it opened, Ty Cobb drop By
looked around and said, well, one thing's for sure, nobody's
ever going to hit a ball out of this park.
And for almost ten years he was right. It didn't
even happen in batting practice. The first over the fence.
(40:05):
Home run to left field came on May twenty eighth,
nineteen twenty five, and it was hit by Frank Snyder,
who was a catcher for the Giants. I should add,
and this is why I bring this up. It wasn't
just the dimensions which as the lively ball came in
and they began to slowly understand Gaffney was long gone
by this point that people kind of liked this home
(40:26):
run thing. They started to move them. They started to
move them constantly. They moved them in the off season,
they moved them during the season, which is illegal now.
It didn't change much because of the atmosphere, the environment.
The ballpark, as I alluded to earlier, was built almost
right on the Charles River. There was a train yard
(40:46):
and a whole bunch of train tracks separating the ballpark
from the water and then the water itself. And it
turned out that the wind liked to blow in cold
off that river and it would just take any fly
ball that was hit out towards the water, and the
home plate did face the river, and it would just
knock it down. Casey Stengel, who managed the Braves from
(41:08):
thirty eight through forty three, and in fact, during these
games that we're talking about today, called that old Joe
Wind my fourth outfielder. That didn't stop him, by the way,
from giving his players grief about how the ballpark worked.
When his players would complain that the conditions of the
park made hitting impossible, he'd say, oh, yeah, impossible. Mister
(41:28):
Hornsby played here in nineteen twenty eight and he hit
only three eighty seven, and there probably wasn't much that
anyone could say back to that. But even Hornsby was
stopped by the park and the wind. We know that
now that we have home road splits. He hit three
seventy two in Boston just four oh one on the road.
So the park did take a chunk out of what
he did. And even then he benefited from the one
(41:51):
alteration that they made to the park that actually did
change the way the park played. At the beginning of
the nineteen twenty eight season, they added some bleachers down
the left field line and in left center that cut
something like seventy or eighty feet off the distance down
the line, and now all of a sudden, home runs
to left were too easy. On June second of that year,
(42:13):
third baseman Les Bell, who hit all of sixty six
career home runs in about nine hundred games. Shot three
home runs and a triple into or off of those
bleachers during a twenty eleven loss to the Cincinnati Reds.
I don't know if they even had seen two twenty
eleven games in the history of that park. The Braves
being the Braves, they pulled out the seats at that
(42:33):
point and split the distance to the old fences, so
instead of four hundred or three hundred, it was three
point fifty. But pretty much it reverted it that point.
It still took like two swings at the ball to
hit it out to left, given the distance in the
wind well. On September twenty first, nineteen thirty eight, they
started the second game, but conditions rapidly decayed and everybody
(42:57):
except Home played umpire beans. Rear was getting a little
antsy about it, and both the Cardinals and the Braves
or Bees were saying, listen, we gotta call this thing.
We might be in a bit of danger. What would
the sky's having this strange, ominous yellow cast, and you know,
trees and cats and dogs and horses sailing by in
(43:17):
the sky. And Reardon didn't want to call it you know,
there are other games during this period when Casey Stengel
was trying to get a game called on account of
darkness or rain, and he went out and signaled the
umpire with a railroad lantern where a flashlight or came
out in a rain slicker with an umbrella. And yeah,
he got run at those times. But he didn't pull
any of those stunts on September twenty first, because they
(43:40):
would have been purely redundant, and yet they played on.
By the time the Cardinals batted in the top of
the third, the wind had picked up quite a bit,
and yet Rearden was being quite stubborn. They begged him
to call it off, and he said, when the advertising
signs go down, that's when I'll call it. As it
turned out, he didn't that much persuasion. As that inning
(44:02):
god underway, a Cardinal popped out to second base the
brave second basement. Tony Cucinello called for the ball. I
got it, I got it, and the ball was caught,
but not by him. It was caught by catcher Al
Lopez behind home plate near the wall. It had been
blown that far astray and I guess at that point
(44:24):
it finally reached Beings Rearden that there was a hurricane
on and the game was called. And this is my
favorite part. Right after that the advertising signs did come down.
It's all a joke now, but Boston got very lucky
that day. A few turns or twists of the hurricane
in one direction of the compass or another, and the
(44:45):
map of Boston might not look the way it does today.
As it is, there are still scars from that hurricane
visible on the landscape in other places. And I think
the real interesting point is this that Being's Rearden gives
us evidence of what happen in the total absence of government.
One meteorologist with the National Weather Service wanted to warn
(45:07):
the people of New England that that hurricane was coming,
and he got shouted down, and so there was no warning.
And that left the decision potentially a life or death
decision in the hands of an umpire in terms of
whether to keep playing, to keep the teams on the field,
to keep himself on the field, to keep the fans
(45:27):
in the seats if they so chose. And that's evidence
of the kind of thing that can happen when those
who are elected to look out for us and supervise
those who look out for us grew up or abdicate.
You know, Ronald Reagan got a lot of mileage out
of a line where he said that the scariest words
in the English language were I'm from the government and
(45:49):
I'm here to help. It is funny. Ronald Reagan was
a funny guy. But the truth is there are times
you need it, and when you don't have it, people
can die. Never scoff competent government. Those children who died
on September twenty first, nineteen thirty eight would tell you
if they could. By Herbert Hoover's Hernia of the Soul.
(46:13):
We have come to the end of another program you
can follow as ever in these reissue episodes. This is
where I used to tell you how to follow the
guests on Twitter. But I am no longer on Twitter,
and neither are you. Thus I am left only to
say please follow me at Stevengoldman dot bsky dot social,
where I post frequently. And here's a cliche for you.
(46:35):
If you're listening on YouTube, hit that like and I
can't do it, hit that like and subscribe button. I'm
not making light of anyone who makes a living that way,
because Wow, you've accomplished something. It's just that I never
imagine myself saying it. So email us, by which I
mean me, at Infinite Inning at gmail dot com. And
there's a Facebook group. Go to Facebook search Infinite Inning.
(46:57):
Not I will let you in. Everybody's doing it and
a splendid time is guaranteed for all. And of course,
if you have a spare moment, please go to the
podcast of your choice, rate and review and subscribe. It
helps bring an attention to the program. And if your
podcaster doesn't let you do those things, then volunteer for
your local PTA bake sale as long as you save
(47:19):
me a cupcase. We have a sponsor now. But nevertheless,
this episode is brought to you by the number twenty five.
Our producer is Disabled List and Dan. Good Bye you
our teams. I'm what you are hearing now and have
in fact we've listening to you throughout. The episode was a
co composition on myself and doctor Rick Moring. Doctor Rick
Moring is at the Motel six. He'll leave the light
(47:39):
on for you and then go off to stay at
his actual hotel. Well, if my plea agreement doesn't come through,
then I suppose I'll be back next week with more
tails and discussion from inside the Infinite Inning. That's all
from squeaking me in the past. Thanks for dropping by,
and join me tomorrow for a new episode of The
in thed Inning, Save Travels, Friends,
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