Infinite Inning Reissue 21 (093): Baseball and the Unlimited National Emergency

In both this week’s new remarks and our reissue, we go back to pre-Pearl Harbor 1941 and the days when Joe DiMaggio was, day by day, counting up hits and the president, without the medium of television available to him, spoke on a nationwide radio broadcast—an event so new that it caused a major league game to be put on pause. Meet the old boss, different than the new boss, because the world was demonstrably on fire. Then we return to a segment about a manager getting too much credit for helping, which seems timely in a postseason in which managers are taking a good deal of deserved credit for inflicting harm.

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? 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:26):
Well, hello there, and welcome to the twenty first Infinite
Inning reissue episode. My friends call me Stephen Goldman. And
whether we are talking about a regular episode, a new
episode of the series which comes out they come out
every Friday night, or we are referring to one of
these episodes when we revisit an episode from earlier in

(00:47):
the show's eight year run. I remain your convivial host
for a trip to the past on a mission to
better understand the present. The vehicle being, as ever, the
game of baseball. If you've been listening to the over
the twenty one weeks that I've done them, I think
I took a week off somewhere when I was recovering
from surgery earlier this year. But if you've listened to them,

(01:09):
then you know I began this as a way to
get past a problem that had belatedly come up via
Spotify and some other services. YouTube was another one, which
was simply that I had spent a lot of time
on one of my sidelines, not just telling you stories
about the game of baseball, but occasionally using, well not

(01:31):
occasionally constantly, using clips of very old music, generally to
comment on the stories, and it was fun for me
to do, and I talked about the songwriters or the performers.
I told you a little something about them that seemed
to me to be a legitimate kind of critical use
of the work. I never played entire songs, and the
only criticism I ever got was from a friend who

(01:53):
felt that that aspect of the show was perhaps detracting
from the main thrust of the stories, which is always
a fair point to raise with any kind of creative endeavor.
I think William Goldman No Relation, the late screenwriter, put
it very well when he described your story as a trunk,
and you have to prune away things that branch distractingly
away from it. Well, a podcast episode is not necessarily

(02:17):
exactly the same as a story about, say, a couple
of cowboys in the Vanishing West, as old Uncle Bill wrote,
with the late Bob Redford and Paul Newman starring as
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But it's similar, It's
close enough. And I said, well, when I get feedback
from listeners, they seem to enjoy that aspect of the show.
I've heard positive things about it, never anything negative. And

(02:38):
I was on these services for years. I've only been
on YouTube for well this year, because it was only
recently that YouTube became this big podcast delivery device, which
I don't totally understand, because, as I've said in other episodes,
you really don't need to look at me just talking
to my microphone. I do have a lovely sheet of
nineteen eighty eight baseball cards behind me. I fear they

(03:00):
would distract you. You'd want to look at those more
than you'd want to look at me and my weird
googly cancer stricken I Well, Spotify, I'd been on pretty
much since day one, and they never said nothing. But
suddenly I was inundated with all of these copyright violation warnings,
which was a shock to me because no one believes. Well,
I won't say no one, but as much as anyone,

(03:22):
I believe in creators' writes, I believe that a creator
should be paid for his work every single time. It
is never my intention to steal from anyone. It certainly
was not my intention those times, and again I don't
really believe that I did. However, I also don't have
the bandwidth to fight Spotify's lawyers, and so it seemed
to make more sense to do some light re editing

(03:44):
on these restrict them to story time, which is the
part that everyone said that they liked best out of
the well the first six or so years of the show,
when I also had a guest on just about every
episode and reissue them with some new commentary. I realized
that many of you have been here for all twin
two one weeks, but for any newcomers, that is how
we arrive at this point of flashing back in time.

(04:05):
And this week we go back to twenty nineteen and
two stories that seem pertinent to the week we are
presently living through here in twenty twenty five. In the
first tale, we go back to May nineteen forty one,
when a game between the Braves and the Giants was
interrupted so the attendance seventeen thousand and nine could hear

(04:25):
a speech by the President of the United States declaring
an unlimited state of national emergency. Why did he do that? Well,
I'll let past me tell you the story, but I
imagine you can guess by the date of the speech again,
May nineteen forty one, and it was a true national emergency.
See now here comes a comparison that I could not

(04:47):
have made when I first told you the story because well,
a lot of things hadn't come to pass yet. It
was indisputably a national emergency, not a I hope you'll
pardon the experts, but a trumped up emergency. Opinions as
to how we should respond to that emergency differed, but
no one could say it was imaginary or pretextual. Well,

(05:10):
I suppose they did in some sense. You'll hear me
mention the arch isolationist Burton K. Wheeler, Senator Democrat of Montana.
He did not back the president's play at that time.
Back then, the parties really did have bigger tents, and
presidents often had to contend with some friendly fire. On
December thirtieth, nineteen forty, so, five months before Roosevelt gave

(05:32):
the speech and question this episode, Wheeler had given a
speech of his own. I won't read you the whole
thing because I'm your friend and I have no desire
to torture you. Here's a key passage. The thoughts I'm
about to express are not based upon any fear of
wild boasts of American conquest by Stalin, Hitler or Mussolini.
I know that neither they nor their ideologies will capture

(05:55):
the people of the United states or our imagination to
the point that we would adopt up fascism, communism, or
Nazism as an American doctrine. You and I are Americans,
and as Americans, of course, we are interested in the
well being of the people of all the world, coming
as we do from the four corners of the earth.
We know that our business, our race, and our religion

(06:18):
color our reaction to any European war. We know that
today wars in Europe or Asia affect us economically, politically,
and emotionally. We sympathized with the oppressed and persecuted everywhere.
We also realize that we have great problems at home,
that one third of our population is ill fed, ill housed,
and ill clad. And we have been told repeatedly upon

(06:41):
the highest authority that unless and until this situation is corrected,
our democracy is in danger. I fully subscribe to this view. Okay,
so so far, so good. The one third of a
nation thing was throwing FDR's words back at him, But
at least he wasn't disputing the economic facts, and he
was right in this, and hence that as the nations

(07:01):
that had gone fascist show, a dead economy is a
threat to national security, same as a bomber or a missile.
We never talk about it that way, but it's true.
This conservative and occasionally anti Semitic senator was way to
the left of many of today's conservatives and anti Semites,
but the demagoguery was still ahead. On January twelfth, nineteen

(07:22):
forty one, he went on the radio to say that
the New Deal's foreign policy was to quote plow under
every fourth American boy. A few weeks later, he said,
we're so close to war that on January thirtieth, nineteen
forty one, the War Department announced that they were seeking
bids on one million, five hundred thousand caskets for your

(07:42):
sons and for mine. By the way, he also asked,
is it possible that the American people are so gullible
that they will permit their representatives in Congress to sit
supinely by while an American president demands totalitarian powers in
the name of saving democracy. Hell of a question, Bert,

(08:02):
Hell of a question. Wheeler was arguing about the Lend
Lease Act, by which President Roosevelt had said that America
would become the arsenal of democracy. By that he meant
give material to the British and the Russians to Wheeler,
it meant we would inevitably be drawn into the war. Well,
the fascist went ahead and attacked anyway, so the point
was moot. My point is that whether you were a

(08:25):
guarded interventionist like the president, or someone like Emporia Gazette
editor William Allen White, who was part of a group
called Defend America by Aiding the Allies the CDAAA for
those keeping score at home, or a member of America First,
the pro fascist anti Semitic group fronted by Charles Lindberg,
all agreed that something was going on, something is happening here.

(08:49):
What it is ain't exactly clear. As Buffalo Springfield Sang
no AI videos are recycled b roll of Portland on fire,
things were definitely absolutely bad. The agreement was about how
bad and how best to respond, or even if we
shouldn't respond at all. And so, whereas baseball fans might
have found it strange to have a ballgame pause for

(09:11):
a presidential address, they wouldn't have been at all confused
by the lack of context for such a pause, as
we are confused today by the supposedly urgent need for
our own military to be loosed upon American cities, but
only certain American cities. From there, the episode proceeds to
a story of John McGraw and other managers getting way

(09:32):
too much credit for disrupting their players or other players.
I should say, if this postseason has shown us anything
it's that at least as often as not, managers are
an impediment to winning. Or maybe they're inert like Aaron Boone,
and they don't subtract much, but they also don't add anything.
They're like AI, useful in a handful of circumstances, but
mostly the externalities outweigh the benefits. The larger pitching staffs

(09:56):
of today ironically make it easier for managers to mess
up in ste of harder because back in oh as
recently as the eighties, maybe they had only five chances
to pick the wrong guy for a matchup, but now
they have eight or nine Ralph Branca for Bobby Thompson,
yes or no, Yes or no. Now at any given
moment there are five or six Ralph Brancas more and yes,

(10:18):
this is a reaction to Manager's Manager, Manager's Manager, Mariners
manager Manager Manager Dan Wilson and his decision not to
go to closer Andres Muno's five point two hits for
nine innings this year. Oh well, in a key spot
in Game seven of the Alcs. This is one place
where the old time managers knew better than the current
generation of skippers as to how to handle things. And

(10:40):
I'll unpack that more on this week's new episode. As
I said out at the end of the week, as always,
Oh and I should add that we drop in on
a rather awkward placer, just a slightly awkward place. I'm
not saying it's mortifying or anything. I just kind of
picked a spot to come in the middle because I
had begun with a long story about how that week's
guest canceled and the current guest was a pinch hitter,

(11:03):
and that I had been told not to explain such
things to you, but that I wanted to. It seemed
a little too much to retain for an episode that
ultimately has no guest. I mean this reissue, but I
concluded that discussion with a statement of philosophy, or I
should say, one of the many reasons that I do

(11:23):
this show, and it's still true. So I wanted to
retain that much. See, nothing too complicated, That's all for me.
For this reissue episode. As always, I'll be back in
the present to fix some breaks from the past and
to say so long as the episode ends, thank you
as always for joining me for this reissue episode, which
begins just on the other side of this break. On

(12:02):
the evening of Tuesday, Bay twenty seventh, nineteen forty one,
the New York Giants hosted the Boston Braves at the
Polo Grounds in New York. The Giants, managed by their
former first baseman Bill Terry, were off to a good
start at nineteen and fourteen, but were already seven games
back because the Saint Louis Cardinals had gone twenty eight

(12:24):
to nine to start the season. The Cardinals would fall
off that pace and later be overtaken by the Brooklyn Dodgers,
but the Giants would fall off even harder and finish
under five hundred. They weren't a terrible team, actually, with
Mellot leading the offense, they were just a little bit
short both at bat and on the mound. Their opponents,

(12:45):
the Braves, were terrible, not as terrible as they had
been six years earlier in nineteen thirty five, but pretty
bad and practically bankrupt, surviving in part on loans from
their own manager, Casey Stengel. They had some super annuated
former stole like both Wayner brothers Paul and Lloyd. Paul
started and batted third that game, and then they had

(13:06):
some young players who never quite got to where the
Braves thought they were headed, including second baseman Carvel Bama Rowell,
who hit the clock breaking home run credited to Roy
Hobbs in the natural shortstop Eddie Miller, who did make
seven All Star teams, mostly on the basis of his glove,
although it was thought at that time he was going

(13:27):
to be a two way player, and outfielder Max West,
a Pacific Coast League product who was supposed to be
the Braves answer to Ted Williams, but of course he wasn't.
Manny Salvo, almost the dictionary picture of a journeyman, pitched
for the Braves, while Hal Schumacher, a very solid right
handed pitcher who probably would have won about two hundred

(13:48):
games in the majors had World War Two not intervened,
took the mound for the home team. The game was
a scoreless tie into the bottom of the fifth, at
which point Joe Ringo, a utility man playing third for
the Giants that day hit a solo home run off
of Salvo Miller, showing some of the promise that so

(14:08):
tantalized the Braves let off the top of the seventh
with a home run of his own, tying things up.
The Giants got a little rally going in the bottom
of the frame when Salvo hit Orango, which couldn't have
been a coincidence, but they had the bottom of the
order up and they failed to plait him. Young Giant
center fielder Johnny Rucker, their leadoff man that day, popped

(14:30):
to catcher Ray Barris with two outs, stranding Orango at second.
It was ten thirty pm in New York. Rather than
proceed to the top of the eighth inning, the umpires
waved all the players off the field. It wasn't raining.
Some seventeen thousand spectators waited restlessly. After a moment, the

(14:51):
PA announcer said, ladies and gentlemen, the President of the
United States, Now this wasn't a complete prize. Major address
had been promised for that evening, an important address before
getting to what was said over the stadium speakers that day,
and to an estimated audience of eighty five million around

(15:13):
the world, a brief outline of the state of things
at that moment, in no particular order. Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia,
France were gone, Bulgaria, Albania occupied, Norway invaded and occupied.
The simultaneous miracle and disaster that was Dunkirk a year before,

(15:34):
London bombed relentlessly, Egypt under attack, the British bombed by
the Germans at Fallujah in Iraq, that very weak Nazi
paratroopers attacking Crete. That same week, the US merchant ship
Robin Moore sunk by a U boat between Brazil and
the coast of Africa, even though it was a neutral

(15:55):
vessel clearly flagged, the survivors spending two to three weeks
flowed in the heat of the East Atlantic, and that
same day, the same day the Braves were at the
Giants and the President was speaking, the giant German battleship
Bismarck slipped into the North Atlantic, where after an epic

(16:15):
battle that included the loss of the British battle cruiser Hood,
with fourteen hundred and eighteen men going down with the ship,
the Bismarck was fatally wounded and scuttled by her own sailors.
The foregoing is not sufficient to convey the entire dire
state of the planet at that time. We haven't even
touched on the Pacific, where the Japanese were already doing

(16:39):
evil things to the Chinese and had been doing them
for a number of years, had established military bases in
what would later be Vietnam, and were preparing to drive
on Singapore. And whereas not everything that the Germans were
doing to the peoples of their own country or the
occupied nations was known at the time, a lot of
it was, and none of the foregoing of what I

(17:02):
just told you was anything like a secret. The world
was a bad place. The only controversy was what the
United States should do about it, if anything, And when
there were many people in the country who thought that
the answers to those two questions should be nothing and

(17:22):
never and it was on those topics that the President would,
or at least it was hoped by many that he
would speak that night. He did, in fact speak for
about thirty minutes. Here is just a little bit of
what those fans of the Polo grounds heard him say.

Speaker 2 (17:39):
Depressing problems that confront us a military and naval problem
we cannot apart to approach them from the point of
view of wishful to think us a sentimentalist. What we
face is collar fact. The first and fundamental fact is
that what started as a European war has developed as

(18:04):
the Nazis always intended it should develop, in the way
war for world domination had our Hitler never considered the
domination of Europe as an end in itself. European conquest
was but a step forward ultimate goals in all the

(18:24):
other continents. It is unmistakably apparent to all of us
that unless the advance of Hitlerism is possibly checked now,
the Western hemisphere will be within range of the Nazi
weapons of destruction. Your government knows what terms Hitler, if victorious,

(18:46):
were imposed. They are indeed the only terms on which
he would accept a so called negotiated peace. Under those terms,
Germany would literally parcel out the world, hosting the Swastika
itself over vast territories and populations, setting up puppet governments

(19:11):
of its own, choosing only subject to the will policy
of a conqueror. To the people of the Americas, a
triumphant Hitlar would say, as he said after the seizure
of Austria, and as he said after Munich, and as
he said after the seizure of Czechoslovakia, I am now

(19:34):
completely satisfied. This is the last territorial readjustment I will see.
And he would, of course add, all we want is
peace and friendship, profitable trade relations with you in the
New World. Were any of us in the Americas so

(19:59):
incredibly simple and forgetful as to accept those funny it would,
but would then have?

Speaker 1 (20:07):
The President then spent a great number of minutes explaining
in vivid detail what life would be like in Nazi
occupied America, even describing how the Germans did not permit
the worship of any god other than Adolf Hitler, and
that our own children would and I quote, be sent
goose stepping off to find other gods to worship. He

(20:28):
then tried to explain, as he had explained so many
other complicated things, as to why it would be foolish
to wait until one everyone else had been defeated, and
two until we were attacked to get involved in the war.
And yet if you listen, you won't actually hear any
policies being announced. Not yet.

Speaker 2 (20:47):
The war is approaching the brink of the Western hemisphere itself.
It is coming very close to home. I have said
on many occasions the United States is mustering its men
and its resources only for purposes of defense, only to

(21:08):
repel attack. I repeat that statement now, But we must
be realistic. When we use the word attack, we have
to relate it to the lightning speed of modern warfare.
Some people seem to think that we are not attacked

(21:30):
until bombs actually drop in the streets of New York,
course San Francisco, On Orleans, or Chicago. But they are
simply shutting their eyes to the lesson that we must
learn from the fate of every nation that the Nazis
have conquerct. Nobody can foretell tonight just when the acts

(21:54):
of the dictators will ripen into attack on this hemisphere
and us. But we know enough by now to realize
that it'll be suicide to wait until they are in
our front yard. When your enemy comes at you in
a tank or a bombing plane, if you hold your

(22:17):
fire until you see the whites of his eyes, you
will never know what hits you. Our bunker hill off tomorrow,
maybe several thousand miles from Boston, Massachusetts. Anyone with anatolis,

(22:41):
anyone with a reasonable knowledge of the sudden striking force
of modern war knows that it is stupid to wait
until a probable enemy has gained a foothold from which
to attack. Old fashion common sense calls for the use
of a strategy that will prevent such an enemy from
gaining a football in the first place.

Speaker 1 (23:04):
Okay, say the fans at the polo grounds. But a
few questions. Number One, can I get a hot dog
while this is going on? Because it's been a while
and I'm hungry. Two? Can they really bring back the
starting pictures after this, because this is a long delay? Three? Fine,
I accept the argument, but what are we going to
do about it?

Speaker 2 (23:23):
We reassert our abiding faith in the vitality of our
constitutional republic as a perpetual home of freedom, of tolerance,
and of devotion to the Word of God. Therefore, with
profound consciousness of my responsibilities to my countrymen and to

(23:47):
my country's cause, I have to night issued a proclamation
that an unlimited national emergency exists and requires the strengthening
of our defense. Oh, the extreme limit national law and authority.

Speaker 1 (24:09):
Oh that okay, there's some policy, a declaration of national
emergency that should be okay with everyone? Right? I mean,
things are inarguably super dangerous right now. So a national
emergency is the least that we can do. But wait,
what does that actually mean? In practice? No one was
sure exactly. It had never happened before emergencies had been declared,

(24:33):
but not unlimited national emergencies. By making that declaration, the
president had activated some extreme nine dictatorial powers, but Roosevelt
said he had no plans to use them anytime soon.
In fact, the next day he said he contemplated no
policies based on his speech whatsoever, an answer that confused everyone.

(24:56):
And though the reaction to the address seemed to be
generally favorite vable, with Roosevelt claiming to one of the
two main speech writers, Robert Sherwood, that his telegrams, the emails,
and tweets of the day were ninety five percent positive.
And though the seventeen thousand fans at the Giant's game
applauded the speech, cheering and whistling, said the news reports

(25:18):
for at least thirty seconds when the president was done,
some people were very upset. Speaking for Nazi sympathizers and isolationists,
Charles Lindbergh said that Roosevelt had quote out hitlerd Hitler
mister Roosevelt claims it Hitler desires to control the world,
but it is mister Roosevelt himself who advocates world domination.

(25:40):
Does this mean, mister president, asked Senator Burton Wheeler of Montana,
a Democrat, that you will wage an undeclared war in
violation of the Constitution of the United States that provides
only Congress can declare war. Senator Gerald and Iye of
North Dakota, an arch isolationist Republican, said the Roosevelt War

(26:02):
is progressing all right, and suggested that Roosevelt had already
taken illgal action to steer us into a shooting war.
Congressman Hamilton Fish of New York, also a Republican, speaking
for the America First Committee, said the speech was a
quote smoke screen to get us into an undeclared war
by subterfuge, and said that Roosevelt could go down in

(26:23):
history as the president who betrayed the American people into
war against their will. Republican Senator Robert Tapt said the
proclamation of national emergency has no more legal effect than
a proclamation that I or any other citizen might issue.
Some legal scholars agreed, and Alf Landon, the former Republican

(26:44):
governor of Kansas, who had been defeated by Roosevelt in
the nineteen thirty six presidential election, said that Roosevelt had
signaled the end of democratic government in the United States
temporarily at least, well, baby, but not before they resume
play at West one hundred and fifty fifth Street in
New York. And so we returned to the baseball game.

(27:05):
If not democracy a crisis in infinite Americas, because democracy
is truly always under threat one way or another. And
sometimes it's the guy who warns you it's under threat
who is the threat himself. Funny how that works. The

(27:29):
starting pitchers did not come back in Dick Erickson, in
the fourth year of a mostly replacement level career, took
over for the Braves, while the Great Carl Hubble, about
a month short of his thirty eighth birthday, came out
of the bullpen for the Giants. The two time National
League MVP was just a league average pitcher now, and

(27:50):
Bill Terry had him on the flexible usage plan. The
Braves loaded the bases against him with one out in
the top of the eighth, but Maxwest hit into the inning,
ending two to three two double play. Then in the
top of the ninth, Hubble walked the first two batters
to face him, but this time it was Babe Dahlgren,
familiar to Yankees fans as the player who had taken

(28:10):
over for lou Gerrig in nineteen thirty nine, who hit
into the double play that killed the rally. Finally, in
the bottom of the ninth, Erickson walked Billy Jerg's with
one out, Orengo, the hero of the day, pushed him
to second with a single to left, and then Hubble,
hitting for himself, fouled off two two strike pitches and

(28:32):
then laced the third into center for the walk off winner.
As for the President, he never did win the argument
he had continued that night. The meaning and the very
legality of his declaration of unlimited national emergency wasn't resolved
until December seventh of that year, at which point the
argument itself became boot For a while. Meanwhile, the games

(28:57):
went on and on, the ballgames. I mean, seriously, I'm
Steven Goldman, and this is the infinite inning. I figure

(29:22):
part of this whole podcasting experiment, now in its ninety
third episode, is that you get to know me a
little bit, and if I'm lucky fortunate, I get to
know some of the community that has formed around this
show as well. And if I pretend to be remote
and wholly professional and combed and put together with everything

(29:45):
in place, well you're not going to get the benefit
of who I really am. And that's kind of a lie.
It's a lie I don't want to tell. And I
don't think that person that illusion is that knowable. I
will say. I am rather pleased to be able to
invoke the phrase how the sausage gets made at this juncture,
because it leads rather nicely into our next topic of discussion.

(30:09):
Before I roll Mike out here, don't follow leaders and
watch your parking meters, Bob Dylan wrote in nineteen sixty
five in the opener to his classic album Bringing It
All Back Home Subterranean Homesick Blues, And all these years later,
it's still hard to decide whether the parking meters or
the leaders are more oppressive. I mean, the leaders are

(30:30):
far more likely than the parking meters to order a
roundup of their political enemies and have them jailed or executed,
So on an existential level, the leaders are winning this
pennant race. Hands down, since they do have that arbitrary
power to decide to end your life, or if they
have their finger on one of the world's many nuclear

(30:52):
buttons and all life. I suppose they could do that
by just putting their fingers in their ears and saying,
la la la. There is no such thing as climate change.
It would just happen a little more slowly. Parking meters, though,
are disproportionately oppressive in the way that they can nag
at the back of your mind while you're doing whatever
it is that you're supposed to be doing that's well

(31:13):
intended to be fun. It could be the most fun
thing in the world. Perhaps maybe you're at a combination
dessert buffet and orgy. It's the party of a lifetime,
but you're still thinking about nickels. I guess it's a
little better now that in some towns and cities they
operate on credit cards, so you can prepay at some
central location, although there have been times that's been stressful too,

(31:35):
because I couldn't find the central location. It was somewhere
with almost zero propinquity to the parking meter in question.
And then even if you do find it, sometimes the
restrictions are inscrutable, There'll be a sign that says something
like parking must be paid seven days a week, twenty
four hours a day. Violators will be towed except Sundays. Well, wait,

(31:57):
I have to pay it Sundays, but I won't be
towed if I don't pay it Sundays. But I don't
have to pay it Sundays. But I do have to
pay it Sundays because it's seven days a week twenty
four hours a day. In many places, though, it's still
did I remember to bring change? Did I bring enough? Change?
Is the number of hours I can be in the
space limited? If I overstay? Do I get ticketed? Or toad?

(32:17):
Who wants that on their mind while they're eating a
Franchi pain tart with naked people? Possibly vice versa. Parking
Meters can make you question if human beings are moral
animals or just failed primates with a mutation that provides
for advanced sadomasochistic tendencies. Because of all the possible systems

(32:38):
in the universe we could have invented over the last
fifty thousand years, we thought up parking meters. In baseball,
managers have traditionally been both leaders and parking meters in
the sense that Dylan referred to them their leaders to
be watched for inefficial or dictatorial tendencies. And they're also

(33:03):
parking meters because they nagget you and draw attention to themselves.
Even though their function and importance is vastly overstated. There
are whole books devoted to the big important decisions they made,
and admittedly some of those decisions were pretty smart. However,
they were, like all decisions, also contingent, and the managers

(33:25):
in question, the leaders the parking meters, were prodded into
them by circumstance when they would have much preferred not
to have to think so hard. By that, I mean
that Earl Weaver wouldn't have platooned John Lowenstein and Gary
Renick in the late nineteen seventies and early eighties with
the Baltimore Orioles. If he had happened to have had,
say George Foster or Reggie Smith or some other outfielder

(33:48):
he could have played every day. He didn't, so he
was forced to invent something that would work. And again
that's commendable. Not every manager would have done that. Some
managers just play the hand they're dealt. Sometimes they even
double down on it. Nephie Perez had over eleven hundred
career played appearances as a leadoff man, and Corey Patterson
had about the same number. It's not that there weren't better,

(34:11):
higher on base percentage choices on those clubs. Of course,
there were. Virtually everyone on those clubs was a better choice.
It's just that the managers, the people in charge, couldn't
be bothered to think about it. There are a ton
of examples of this in baseball history. When you read
that some manager had the bright idea to bring up

(34:33):
minor league vet Jimmy Barzini from the minor leagues, I'm
just using that name as a hypothetical and use him
in a platoon with Timmy Robot or obvious hypothetical. But
what they never tell you is that the manager only
did that and got a combination three point fifty batting
average and in five hundred platoon at bats because Ted
Williams had torn a hamstring and the manager had no

(34:55):
other choice. But sometimes it wasn't Ted Williams. More often
the original guy was some replacement level player who did
the manager a huge favor by getting hurt, thereby clearing
the way for the emergency replacement who was actually better
than the planned starter. So in short, what I'm trying
to say is, let's not go out of our way

(35:17):
to make heroic figures out of guys who are literally
nothing more in most cases than what their job title entails.
They're managers, They're managing. How are you doing today, Bob,
I'm managing Stan. I'm just managing. For the last couple
of weeks, I've been talking about the collision of aging

(35:40):
New York Giants manager John McGraw and the resolutely obese
catcher Shanty Hogan. I'm going to let the conclusion of
that story mature one more week because I want to
give you a little more detail about McGraw's overstated brilliance.
This feels like a good week to be talking about leadership,

(36:00):
what it is in baseball and elsewhere. And it was
notable to me that while Mike Bates and I spent
a good deal of time talking about what the Twins
have done in this offseason, we didn't mention that they
made the managerial change from Paul Molitor to Rocco Baldelli,
as if it didn't matter. Leaders are undoubtedly important, but

(36:21):
baseball teams governments, armies are complex systems that do not,
for the most part, respond to simplistic fixes and sudden,
brilliant insights. We currently in the United States have a
president who has said on several occasions, I alone can
fix it, whatever the problem is. This is an inaccurate

(36:44):
but very seductive way of thinking. Everyone wants to believe
that there is a problem out there that can be
solved simply by saying go right when everyone else says
go left. But the rare times that a situation does
present that kind of option. And I'm not talking about
whether to call a run or a passing play in

(37:04):
a football game, or to bunt or not in a
baseball game. It's then that you get the opportunity to
create a little big horn kind of situation for yourself,
because often there is a good reason that the people
who have studied the problem had said go left in
the first place. And that's true even in baseball. There's
a thing that Hank Greenberg wrote for Life Magazine in

(37:26):
the fifties in his capacity as president of the Cleveland
Indians that I like to quote often and just paraphrasing
it briefly, He said that every prospect is the product
of a long process that requires the investment of time, money, coaching,
all kinds of resources in order to deliver that player

(37:47):
to the major leagues. And if the manager thinks that
after all of that that the club has put into
the player, that he can take one quick look at
the kid and say, no, I don't like the cut
of his jib. I think I'll play all cities Escobar. Instead,
that that manager is going to find himself unemployed because
he is a cavalier idiot. Again I'm paraphrasing, but that's

(38:10):
what Greenberg was saying, and I hope you can see
that that same process of thinking that Greenberg just explained
in terms of leadership and the failure thereof, can be
extrapolated to other complex systems as well. There are many
I alone can fix it anecdotes about John McGraw, some

(38:31):
at the team level, many at the game level, and
they're all unnecessary. His good teams, as I said last week,
are his monument. Even his bad teams were pretty good,
and that's saying something given that he was fond of
insisting that the Giants were a team without stars. Actually
we can test that proposition using winds above replacement Baseball

(38:53):
Reference version in this case, during McGraw's years as Giants manager,
the National League had one hundred and fears fifty one
position players record seasons of five wins above replacement, hereafter
referred to as war or more. That's a solid star,
but not necessarily an MVP, most often not an MVP
kind of player. In twenty eighteen, Matt Carpenter, Paul Goldschmid,

(39:15):
Jed Lowry, Jose al Tuve were each in their own way,
five ish sort of players, whereas Kristin Yelich, the actual
NL MVP, clocked in at seven point six and Bookie
Betts the AL MVP was nigh on historic at ten
point nine. Not that the five guys are to be
scoffed at. They are exceptionally good players. They're just not

(39:37):
your Demi gods, your Babe Ruths and Ted Williams and
so on. Well, the Giants had thirty seven of those guys,
all star level guys, more than any other club in
the National League at that time. The Cubs were next
at twenty three and the Pirates third at twenty two.
I'm talking about position players only now, not pitchers. We'll
get to those in a second, this is to be expected.

(39:58):
They were a good team that had to come from somewhere.
But if we drill a little further into that and
look for players who were at that MVP level, taking
Christian Yelich in his seven ish season as kind of
our floor for that, we find that during the long
years that McGraw managed the Giants from nineteen oh three
to the beginning of nineteen thirty two, with some little

(40:19):
chunks in their missing due to illness and other things,
that the National League had two really dominant superstars on
the position level during that time, Hans Wagner and Rogers Hornsby,
and the Giants had just one year from those two guys,
Hornsby for the single season that he played for the Giants,
when he had a Betsy in ten point one war

(40:42):
that was nineteen twenty seven. Otherwise, though mcraw did not
have position players at that level, if we look at
the Yellich category, they had eight such seasons during the
McGraw years, and that accounts for total war both offense
and defense. So did the Pirates, while the Cardinals had
seven we're looking at Hornsby and Wagner again, the Cubs

(41:03):
had six, so McGraw was guilding his own lily by
saying that the Giants didn't have stars. But when we
look at the pictures, it becomes true after a certain point.
When he took over the Giants, he arrived at the
moment that the previous manager was thinking, for some reason,
maybe Christy Mathewson might be better off as a first

(41:26):
basement or outfielder or something and not a pitcher. And
McGraw looked at Matthewson and said, what no. And doing that,
making that decision, he created a future Hall of Famer
in one of the great pictures of his day. For
nine of the next eleven seasons, Maddie was ridiculously great,
but his run ended in nineteen thirteen. McGraw managed until,

(41:50):
as I said, thirty two, and he never had another
picture at that level. Look at the greats of the
National League at that time. Pete Alexander never a Giant
as he advance, Nope, Burly Grimes one season and not
his best. Between nineteen fourteen and nineteen thirty one, there
were twenty one pitchers who had cy Young type seasons,

(42:12):
seasons of seven or more wins above replacement, and none
of them were Giants. So on the pitching side, mcros's
statement was accurate, and he deserves credit for finding enough
depth to withstand Matthewson's decline and the fact that the
team could not for whatever reason, And the obvious reason
is because pitchers at that level just don't come along

(42:33):
all the time. Land Another ace in fact, and I've
made this argument in other places, and this is just
a parenthesis, the Cincinnati Reds in their entire long storied
history have never had that guy. They've had him for
a year or two at a time, but they have
never had a career great starter pitch for that team

(42:54):
for any appreciable length of time. So there is some
objective evidence of what mCrab to the Giants. We have
that that information is out there, so he doesn't need
stories like this one. In nineteen oh eight, the Cardinals
came up with a left gi named Harry Slim Salie.
Slim has been compared to rubewadellen that he drank a

(43:16):
lot and tended to wander away from the team at
random times. Waddell, though, seems to have been impaired in
some organic way, Whereas, and this is just my sense
of it, that Sali was not mentally challenged in the
same sense, he was just some deleterious combination of eccentric

(43:37):
and alcoholic, taken just as a picture. He had two
things going for him that made him very difficult to hit,
either of which was pure stuff. First, he threw a
curveball with great command and control. Second, he used, and
you can see this in pictures, a weird crossfire delivery

(43:58):
in which his plant foot would end up perpendicular to
the rest of his body pointing towards first base. It
looks painful. It looks like a dislocation. I tried it,
and it feels painful. As I said, he didn't throw
hard at all. He had low strikeout totals even for
that time. During the years of his career one hundred

(44:20):
and seven major league pitchers through one thousand or more innings,
he ranked one hundred and third in strikeout rate. Mccrass said,
he has so little on the ball that it looks
like one of those salame dancers when it comes up
to the plate and actually makes me blush. But here's
another objective thing about mcraw Even if Sali's fastball did

(44:42):
remind him of a young woman with too few clothes, on.
It didn't stop him from acquiring him later on in
his career because to him, effective was effective, and the
Giants won the nineteen seventeen National League Pennant with Sali
in their starting rotation. When Sali first came up, he
was very effective at beating the Giants. That's why mcraw

(45:04):
was complaining, and according to legend, he tasked his great
brain with figuring out how to beat the lefty. Decades later,
the writer Jack Scherr told the story this way in
sport magazine Max Keen I ferreted out the south pause
one weakness. He broke Salie's heart in the first inning

(45:24):
of the Giants' next game with the cards, I want
every man to bunt and keep on bunting, McGraw told
his team before the game started. Pokem right near sale.
The Giants thought their manager's mind had jumped the track,
but they followed his orders. The New Yorkers scored thirteen
runs in the first inning. Exclamation point, mcraw had discovered

(45:46):
what other managers had failed to notice, that Salie couldn't
field bunts. As with many myths, this story has its
origins in the truth. On May thirteenth, nineteen eleven, the
Cardinals faced the Giants at the Polo Grounds. In the
first inning, Sale gave up three hits, a walk, and
two runs and was hooked from the game. The Giants, though,

(46:08):
kept on hitting, ultimately sending seventeen batters to the plate
and scoring thirteen runs in the frame. Just as Cher said,
the game stories don't mention any bunts. They do, however,
mention because they had to that. Fred Snodgrass, batting third
that day, hit a triple, and Fred Merkle, hitting fifth,
hit a triple and a home run in the inning

(46:29):
and drove in seven of those runs. That's power, not
small ball. The New York Herald Tribune reported the thirteen
runs were practically all by dint of clean stick work.
Nine hits in three passes telling the tale, and not
an error figured in the scoring. There was, by the way,
also a hit batsman that led to a run. The

(46:50):
Saint Louis Post Dispatch said, simply, the Giants peppered the pitchers,
and that's all there was to it. In his book
Pitching in a Pinch, one of the first ghosts written
as tos, Christy Mathewson actually talk quite a bit about
Slim Sale and what the Giants did to beat him,
and it had nothing to do with exaggerated bunting, but
rather simply that if they happened to find their way

(47:12):
on base, they would try to run a lot to
take advantage of his long, weird delivery, figuring that either
they would be safe or he would have to change
his motion and shorten things up in order to stop
them from stealing all the bases. That makes a lot
more sense than the whole he can't field bunts thing

(47:35):
and doesn't require any brilliant leadership insight, because that's a
surface level detail what a picture's wind up looks like.
And here's the other thing that really puts the lie
to the story. The series in May nineteen eleven between
the Giants and Cardinals, in which all this happened, was
scheduled to last four days. Sali was blown out in

(47:57):
the first of the four. The Cardinals put him right
back out there for the fourth game, after all, he
had hardly pitched in the first one, and in that
second appearance of the series, just a few days later,
he pitched a complete game, one run victory. Where did
his vulnerability to the bunt go over those three days?
Had he managed to fix it. Did McGrath decide just

(48:19):
to be nice and win the game fair and square?
And how is it that, with this vulnerability exposed, that
Sally managed to pitch another dozen years in the majors.
Please indulge me while I give you one more, perhaps
better known, but also more ridiculous version of the same
story of McGrath finding an insight that defeated a here

(48:41):
tofore invincible pitcher also dates from nineteen oh eight, or
a nineteen oh eight rookie in any case. Down the
stretch that season, the Phillies were trying out a young
southpaw pitcher, Harry Koveleski. He was the brother of the
Hall of Fame pitcher Stan Coveleescu came along a little
bit later. You know about that season about Fred Merkles,
so called Boner. You know how this arbitrary ruling by

(49:04):
the National League put the Chicago Cubs ultimately in the
World Series. Well, I'm not going to recapitulate that whole
story for you. There are whole books on that, and
it's pretty well known if you know your basic baseball history.
Let me just say this much that Merkeles Boner wasn't
as important, perhaps as Kovaleski personally was, to the Giants'

(49:25):
fortunes down the stretch. The Giants played eight straight games
against the Phillies starting in late September, four at home
for a way. On September twenty ninth, Covealeski pitched a
seven hit shutout against them. The Phillies kind of liked that,
so they started Kovaleski again on just one day's rest.
You could do things like that back then, nobody knew

(49:46):
any better. This time, he allowed a couple of runs,
but they still won. That also seemed like a positive
result to the Phillies, and so they tried it again.
They gave Harry one more day off, and then again
he came back and started the eighth and final game
of the series, and he won. Now, the Giants went
five to three in the series, with the only losses

(50:08):
coming via Harry starts. That's not a bad record at all.
If you win five of every eight games today, you'll
finish the season one hundred and one and sixty one
and go to the playoffs. But the Cubs went four
and one during the same stretch, and so when the
Giants were finally done with the Phillies, they were a
game and a half out, McGraw pouted, which is a

(50:29):
more standard position or outcome for leaders to take, because
there are many circumstances that you alone or they alone
cannot fix it. No manager in a tight race has
the right to play favorites. McGrath said, it was a
lousy trick pitching that young left hander out of turn
in his efforts to beat us out of a pennant. McGraw,

(50:49):
I can't assure you would have done the exact damn
same thing had he been in the position to do
so well. He supposedly had his revenge. Fred Snodgrass told
the story this way in the classic oral History, The
Glory of Their Times? How could you blame Merkle when
we lost the playoff game? And besides, we lost five
other games after the Merkele incident. If we had won

(51:12):
any one of those five games, we would have won
the pennant in the regular season, and we wouldn't even
have had to play a playoff game. We lost a
double header to Cincinnati, and then we played the Philadelphia Phillies,
and Harry Koveleski pitched against us three times in one week.
He pitched against us on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday and
beat us all three times. That's when he acquired the

(51:32):
nickname Giant Killer. Kovealeski. Beating us three times in one
week surely wasn't Merkle's fault. And do you know that
we ran Harry Koveleski clear out of the league the
next season. It was the craziest, most foolish thing that
ever happened. McGraw was told by a friend of his
who had managed Kovaleski in the minor leagues before he
came up to Philadelphia, that Kovaleski always carried some bologna

(51:56):
in his back pocket and shoot on that bologna throughout
the game, and that he did this more or less secretly,
maybe somewhat ashamed of his habit. It was sort of
an obsession with him. So this manager told McGraw and
McGrath saw to it that some of US players would
always meet Kovealeski as he was going to and from
the pitcher's box. Whenever he pitched against us, we'd stop

(52:17):
him and say, hey, give us a chew of that bologna,
will you. Well this so upset the fellow that he
couldn't pitch against us to save his life, he never
beat us again. Word got around the league and the
other clubs started doing the same thing, and it chased
him right back to the Miners. Or at least that's
what we Giants always claimed. First of all, Harry Koveleski

(52:39):
did beat the Giants again the very next season in
nineteen oh nine, although he was only one in three
against them. That said, they didn't exactly beat him up. Second,
in the very same book The Glory of Their Time,
Stan Kovealeski denied the story had any merit whatsoever. He
said there was no bolooney Sandwich. There was more plausibly
an arm injury does seem to bear this out. After

(53:02):
nineteen ten, Harry went back to the Miners, pitched pretty effectively,
very effectively at times, and resurfaced in the majors in
nineteen fourteen with the Detroit Tigers. Over the next three seasons,
from age twenty eight to age thirty, he went twenty
two and twelve with a two point four to nine
ERA in three hundred and three innings, twenty two and

(53:24):
thirteen with a two point four five ERA, while pitching
in a league leading fifty games and throwing three hundred
and twelve point two innings, and finally, in nineteen sixteen,
at age thirty, he went twenty one and eleven with
a one point nine to seven ERA in three hundred
and twenty four point one innings. All of those ERA

(53:46):
figures are well below league average. At that point, his
arm gave out again and he was pretty much done.
Or maybe he lost his blowna sandwich. Hear me out, Oh,
my brothers and sisters, it sounds inane to believe that
a man's destiny could be altered by a piece of
processed meat, or at least being mocked for his possession thereof,

(54:10):
but people did believe it. Fred Snodgrass believed it, and
he was there. I am here to tell you that
mister Snodgrass was a gullible dope, and that has nothing
to do with any flyballs he dropped in the World
Series or anything else. More importantly, there are many gullible
dopes in the world who will probably not buy that
Bologna changed the course of a man's career, but will

(54:32):
believe things that are one or two degrees off of that.
In terms of some ineffable leadership principle that says that
one man alone, manager, CEO, general president can fix it
simply by uttering a few well placed words to the
right person. And so I guess Bob Dylan got it

(54:55):
about half wrong. Don't follow leaders. That was correct, but
forget about the parking meters and watch your finely ground
pork cold cuts. Actually that's pretty sound advice, regardless by
the fire that still rages. We've come to the end
of another episode. As always, here is where I used

(55:18):
to tell you how to find the guest on Twitter,
but there is no guest and there is no Twitter. However,
should you wish to follow me on social media, you
can do so at Stephen Gooldman dot bskuy dot social.
I can't say that a splendid time is guaranteed for all,
but I find the company more well. To use a
word I used at the beginning of the show, convivial.

(55:40):
You don't have to look it up or anything. It
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And there's a Facebook group. Go to Facebook noc I
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(56:00):
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and thank you on behalf of everyone who got to
hear me say Ugly Johnny dick Shot three times. Please

(56:23):
subscribe with weird player names. I'll say anything you want.
Our majestic theme song was a co composition of myself
and doctor Rick Moring, who reminds you that you don't
have to be a martyr to your own pain. You've
got to know just when to let it go. And
that's good advice. Well, if I can get this episode
finished and uploaded, then I'll start work on next week's

(56:43):
episode and I'll be back next week with more tales
and discussion from inside the Infinite Inning. And oh boy,
is that true this week more than most. So I'll
get onto episode number three fifty and I'll see you
this weekend. Thanks for dropping by for this Reissue episode