October 30, 2025 • 56 mins
A slightly discursive rainy-day episode in which we question the unlikely players who have hit three home runs in a game and ask if the Rockies-Pirates season series was really necessary before examining two players who were called “Fat”—Fothergill and Fitzsimmons.
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? “Bear Angry Growl” by celldroid
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? “Bear Angry Growl” by celldroid
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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 number twenty two in the series. I believe I am,
as ever Steven Goldman, your host for both these flashback
episodes and for the fresh fish the hot pancakes that
come your way at the end of each week. I
(00:48):
hope that, as always, this episode finds you well. I'm
very glad to be here with you. It's very funny
because I'm late as usual, and when you get to
the flashback part of the episode, you will see that
I began seven years ago by talking about procrastination, and
it's really not that I do think this last week
(01:10):
or month. Actually, the postseason has been taking up an
excessive amount of my time, just because I am less
likely to tear myself away from a ballgame that has
a direct championship impact than if it were just a
weekday game between the Pirates and the Rockies. We'll get
back to that Pirate's Rockies idea in a second. As
(01:31):
I come to you today, It's Thursday, the day after
Game five of the World Series won by the Toronto
Blue Jays, and I am here in the very rainy
Northeast just listening to the water. Come down. I've talked
openly here on the show and other places about my
battles with depression, which at times have been severe. I'm
(01:51):
in a better place right now, Knockwood. I'm happy to
report that. And unlike a lot of people who have
seasonally affected depression or are brought down by this kind
of weather, I'm not negatively affected by dark, wet days.
I enjoy the ambiance of a rainy day. There's a
Peanuts strip from somewhere in the middle of the run,
(02:12):
and it just wasn't time effective for me to figure
out the dates, so I apologize, in which Snoopy is
lying on his doghouse as always being rained on, and
he thinks this is the sort of dreary fall rain
that makes you want to sit inside all day and
stare out the window and drink tea and play sad
songs on the stereo. And the last of the four
(02:34):
panels shows Snoopy doing exactly that, as Charlie Brown looks
on with a quizzical expression on his face. That is
me exactly except I'm not brought down by it. I'm
lifted by it for some perverse reason. I should get
a print of that one and hang it somewhere. I
have one Peanuts reprint up directly across from my desk.
(02:54):
I can see it as I'm speaking to you. I
may have mentioned this before. Snoopy is doing his World
War One five pilot bit is describing the First World
War in exquisite detail, and the strip ends with him
looking at camera and saying, have you ever in your
life seen such thorough research? And that seemed very appropriate
for what I do here. It was one of many
(03:15):
Peanut strips in which I felt seen, and I thank
goodness that Charles Schultz made that fifty year work of
art so it could read me as I was reading it.
I hope it's okay. Then, if consistent with the spirit
of a very wet day in which one just sits
by the window, seeing what one can see and thinking
what one can think, that we ramble a bit. I'm
(03:36):
a bit burned out. As much as I love baseball,
that eighteen inning game did me in. Don't misunderstand I
loved every minute of it, but coming back the next
two days felt anticlimactic and a little burdensome. Even though
Games four and five only went the regulation nine, we've
still seen an average of twelve innings a night for
the last three nights even something or so someone you
(04:00):
love can overstay it, or they're welcome in select periods
of high stress. As Benjamin Franklin once wrote, both fish
and house guests start to stink after three days, and
thus does welcome friend transit to unwelcome imposition. There's only
one downside to my love of rainy days. I hate rainouts.
That's not an issue now with Toronto playing in a
(04:22):
domed ballpark and the Dodgers, who were done with in
terms of home games for the year, playing in a
climate in which reinouts are exceedingly rare. But during the
regular season, I'm, for some reason excessively troubled by those
games that we're supposed to be played on Thursday, April
twenty third, but are rescheduled to be made up as
part of a split bill double header on August twelfth.
(04:45):
That seems like too long to wait for me, and
I particularly hate those reinouts, which result in a game
being made up if necessary. To me, they're all necessary,
well maybe not Pirates Rockies. How did that series go
this year? Do you want to get yes? My initial
guess was Pirates five games Rockies one. I was off
by one. The Pirates won four of the six, and
(05:08):
that's not surprising because the Pirates try to subsist at
a level just above miserable, like some invertebrate species that
lies on the bottom of the ocean and consumes the
detritus that snows down on them from above. Yes, I
think I just described the Pittsburgh c cucumbers. It's a
delicacy in some places. It really really is. It's just
an alimentary tract and a sausage casing. But who am
(05:29):
I to judge anyone anyway. Unlike the Pirates, the Rockies
are the detritus. And I know that sounds terribly mean,
and I feel bad about it. In fact, I would
like to work for the Rockies. I wrote something about
that somewhat facetiously at Baseball Perspectives earlier this year. I
have limited math skills and no scouting skills to speak of.
(05:50):
Being partially blind, I have less to offer in an
observational way than the average bear, I mean a literal bear.
Get that bear up behind home plate with a radar
gun and a bowl of peanut and he'll do better
than I do. What was that he just swung out
change up, thank you. Unlike the Bear, though, I do
know my baseball history, I do know how winning teams
have been constructed, and I know that the Rockies have
(06:11):
consistently ignored that history. Now, maybe that's not a job.
Maybe it's a single consulting session to scream on bays
percentage at them in a way they've already heard a
million times. But I'm still willing to try, not for
my sake, but for theirs. Just buy me a plane
ticket and lunch. It's fine. I don't need to profit
by it. I just want to have the conversation with you, okay.
(06:34):
The real shocker to me of the Pirates going four
and two against the Rockies was that one of the
two was a Paul Skien start. Paul Skeen's one point
nine to seventy ra in one hundred and eighty seven
and two thirds innings two hundred and sixteen strikeouts was
roughed up by them. On August twenty fourth, he pitched
against them in Pittsburgh and held them to three hits,
(06:57):
no walks, no runs over seven innings. The Pirates, who
had an almost historically bad offense this year, scored four
runs and Bob's your uncle. The fans went home happy.
I say almost historically bad, because the Rockies were worse. Nevertheless,
three weeks earlier at Colorado, the Rockies got to Skeens.
He had pitched a shutout through five. The Pirates were
(07:20):
up four to nothing on Leover Pagero's three homer game somehow,
and can you blame me? I had completely forgotten that
Leover Paghero had a three homer game this year. He
only hit four on the season while averaging two hundred
this in eighty eight played appearances. Maybe I never knew.
I study every day, I really do, but that's one
(07:41):
that didn't stick with me. Suddenly. In the sixth Skeens
couldn't get it out, allowed four consecutive hits, including a
three run homer to Jordan Beck, and was lifted for
Brandon Ashcraft, who crashed the Ashcraft he allowed an inherited
runner to score, then added a bunch of runs of
his own. It was like a Dodger's bullpen. Cameo Skiings
(08:03):
in twenty twenty five, and he may well yet or
has already, and we just don't know. Won the Nlsy
Young Award had twenty quality starts in thirty two chances.
As you may remember, a quality start is six innings
or more, three runs or less. I was a little
surprised by the percentage being that low until I checked
(08:23):
and was reminded that the Pirates many times lifted him
after five innings, even if he was doing very well.
As I said, you need six to get that quality
stamp of approval. In four of those starts he allowed
no runs at all. Thus his start at the Rockies
was one of his few true clunkers, and he had
help from the bullpen and a Pirate's coaching staff that
(08:45):
sent him out for the sixth even though he was gassed.
I know that last one isn't fair, and I don't
really mean it. So if you had thrash Paul Skeens
on your Rockies Bengo card for this year, you blue
haired Sir or Madam, are a winner. Can we returned
to leover Pagero for a second. Was he the unlikeliest
player ever to hit three home runs in a game?
(09:06):
Perhaps he had some coffee that morning, Vibrant afuera coffee, Yes,
it vibrates. I missed the trill on the r there
Afuera and if you go to a Fuera dot com
and use the coupon code infinite Inning, you will get
a fifteen percent discount the best that they offer on
their ethically sourced coffee from the Free Nation of El Salvador.
(09:30):
If you encounter the ghost of Ronald Reagan, take my
advice don't mention it. But anybody else you can say, hey,
this is rainforest friendly Java. Is it the chase in
Sanborn Coffee Hour starring Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy with
special guest W. C. Fields. You could look it up, folks. Nope,
it's all online nowadays at Afuera Coffee dot com. Pagero,
of course, is from the Dominican Republic, and I don't
(09:52):
know what he drinks in the mornings or at night
or at any time. Really. There have been a lot
of three homer games in baseball history. We've been doing
this for a very long time, after all, playing thousands
of games a season. According to Baseball Reference, four hundred
and eighty seven players have hit three homers in a game,
some of them multiple times. Of those four hundred and
(10:14):
eighty seven players, two hundred and eighty seven of them
did it since nineteen ninety five, or I should say
after nineteen ninety five. At that point the ball started
getting bouncier and the players started getting juicier. Perhaps the
players are less juicy than they used to be, but
the ball is still as resilient as ever, or at
(10:34):
least historically more resilient than it was previously. Even if
in different years it's dulled down or hyped up halfinated.
You might say, don't worry, I'm not going back to that.
But think of it this way. From the introduction of
the lively ball in nineteen twenty until the Selig canceled
World Series, two hundred players did it again, some of
(10:55):
the multiple times, but still two hundred players in seventy
five years. Since then, two hundred and eighty seven players
have done it in thirty years. And if you go
down the list, you get a ton of people you
would expect Hall of famers or players who were noted
for their power, so you're not surprised. Johnny Maise, hall
of Famer, did it six times. Dave Kingman did it five,
(11:17):
Joe Carter did it five times. Not a Hall of
Famer again, a pretty strong hitter though. Lou gerrig four
two Hall of Famers, two players who aren't in and
shouldn't be, But it was well within the realm of
possibility that they would have days like that. When I
was a kid, we used to wonder how the Hall
of Fame voters would have handled things if Kingman, then
still active, reached five hundred home runs. Collusion and a
(11:41):
low on base percentage stopped him. I still wonder Larry
Parrish did it three times, which surprises me a little.
But he also hit two hundred and fifty six home
runs in his career, and if he hadn't started his
career in Montreal, he probably would have hit ten or
fifteen percent more home runs. In his most extreme season there,
nineteen seventy eight, he hit two eighty two three thirty
(12:03):
five hundred with eleven home runs on the road two
seventy two three thirteen with a four to twelve slugging percentage,
with only four home runs at home. Darnell Coles hit
hit twice. That one surprised me by a odd coincidence.
I believe he was fired just today as National's hitting coach.
So sorry, Darnell. He was such a vexing player. He
(12:24):
was the sixth overall pick in the nineteen eighty draft,
and that's not as much of a miss as it
sounds like, because none of the first rounders that yere
turned into stars except for the very first, the tippy top,
the first overall pick, Darryl Strawberry, and his career was
pretty vexing as well. Coles hit pretty well in the minors,
but he was drafted as a shortstop and moved to
third base, but he couldn't field well enough for either
(12:47):
of those positions, and except for a couple of seasons,
didn't hit well enough to make up for his lack
of fielding ability. He first came to my attention in
a big way. I was amazed and astounded during his
forty eight game trial with the nineteen eighty four Mariners,
when he hit one sixty one with a two to
fifty nine on base percentage and a one ninety six
(13:08):
slugging percentage while also fielding nine to eighteen at third.
His most notable offensive season came in nineteen eighty six,
after the Tigers traded their nineteen eighty two first round pick,
the reliever Rich monte Leone to the Mariners to get him.
Monte Leone was selected fifteen picks after Dwyight Gooden, falling
between Franklin Stubbs and Todd Warrel. The Tigers were having
(13:30):
a very hard time finding a regular third baseman back then.
They had signed Darryl Evans for the nineteen eighty four season,
and although he hit pretty well for them, including having
a forty home run season, at one point he was
really past the age that he was going to play
third base well, and they had traded Howard Johnson. Sparky
Anderson did not believe in Howard Johnson, and so Coles
(13:50):
was their latest try, and in eighty six he played
every day, mostly at third. He hit two seventy three
with a three thirty three on base in a four
to fifty three slugging percentage, with twenty home runs. Evans
also hit twenty playing first base, as did Lou Whitaker
and Alan Trammel as the double play combination, and so
the Tigers became just the second team, after the nineteen
(14:12):
forty Red Sox, to have the entire infield put up
matching power numbers. The Red Sox did it first with
Jimmy Fox, Bobby Door, Joe Cronin, and Jim Taber It's
now happened more than ten times, all of them after
nineteen ninety five. If you count catcher Lance Parrish as
an infielder, then the Tigers were the first team to
(14:32):
have the entire infield hit at least twenty home runs.
That too, has now been duplicated three times by the
nineteen ninety six Oriols, two thousand and five Rangers, and
twenty nineteen Twins. But here's how random all of this is.
The first name that truly surprises me was Butch Henln.
I'm sure there were many more who would be unexpected,
(14:54):
but his name happened to come up first. And we're
not going to be here long enough to go through
five hundred names. He was a part time catcher, mostly
in the nineteen twenties, playing with the Giants, Phillies, Dodgers,
and White Sox, and he had all of forty home
runs in a seven hundred and forty game career. My
first clue should have been Phillies, because yes, Hemlin did
it in the phone booth sized Baker Bowl. Hey tell
(15:17):
your children what a phone booth was, or if they
happened to hear me refer to the Sanborn and chase
coffee hour tell them what radio was as well. Henlin
had come up with the Giants, but at mid season
nineteen twenty one, the Phillies had picked him up along
with outfielder Kurtwalker and the thirty grand They needed to
be able to afford underwear without holes in them in
return for the disgruntled outfielder Irish Musal. Actually they were
(15:41):
more disgruntled with Irish or Emmel than he was with them,
and in fact they got in trouble for slagging him
as he was going out the door. But it was
a good trade for both sides. On September fifteenth, nineteen
twenty two, the Phillies hosted the Cardinals in what turned
out to be a wild ten nine home team victory
Rogers Horns. He hit two homers off of Jimmy Ring
(16:01):
for the visitors, while Henlan hit his off of Bill Shirtle,
a twenty game winner in the future Spitt and Bill
Doak also a twenty game winner, while the third came
off of Lester Elwood Epcel, a four game winner with
a career six fifty six ra. The Philadelphia Inquirer game
story the next day described it this way. Hefty Butch,
(16:23):
the demon kid catcher showed so many balls out of
the lot that the umpire contracted a sore arm reaching
for additional spheres. In the fourth, the peppery catcher lifted
the old apple into the left field bleachers for number one.
In the seventh, Enland duplicated the drive and followed with
the one which tied things up. In the final result
three homers, which equals the work of Ken Williams this season.
(16:46):
Williams and Henland are the only two to lose three
pills this season, but many have done it in the past.
Ken Williams, of course, was the Saint Louis Brown's outfielder
who was in the process of having the first thirty
thirty season in US Major league history. Alongside the game
story was a separate article that it was probably just
a coincidence that it ran that way, but it seemed
(17:08):
like a comment the headline home run hitting in major
leagues is becoming farce. I just want to point out,
maybe this seems obvious, that it's not surprising that whereas
two of Hemlen's homers came off of pretty decent pitchers
just having off days, that the third came off of EPCEL,
(17:28):
because who gives up the most home runs? Not Sandy Kofax,
not Greg Maddox. If they had given up a lot
of home runs, they wouldn't have been who they were. No,
it's pictures like EPCEL who allow the Ruths and Garricks
and Judges and Otani's to fill up the record books
with big shots. Today's reissue goes back to episode ninety
three for a discussion of two players who had the
(17:50):
nickname fat hung on them. This was sort of kind
of inspired by listening to all the encomiums placed on
Alejandro Kirk by broadcasters during the postseason. Kirk is a
good player, and he's having a very good postseason, but
he's not Yogi bra And that said, he's Yogi Bera's size.
Yogi was five seven. Kirk is five to eight. And
(18:11):
I wouldn't say he's fat, he's just kind of oval.
And that was all the excuse I needed to revive
this particular show and that particular slander, and it was
a slander. You will note that when you get into
the reissue section of the show, which is just moments
away now that I left in the name of the guest,
I've usually been taking those out, even though we're not
hearing that segment today, and that's because it was Marty Appel.
(18:32):
He had a biography of Casey stengelout that got me
talking about the old professor, and I am loath to
delete any Casey talk at all. As Buddy Holly saying, well,
all right, that's all for me for this reissue episode,
it's also all from Butch Henlen in terms of three
Homer games. You will hear from me periodically as I
paper over the odd thing that I have to patch,
(18:53):
old advertising breaks that no longer fall in the right place,
and I will be back at the end to say well,
at least until tomorrow, when again I'll be back with
a brand new episode. So stand by, and on the
other side, we'll return to old episode forty seven. Eeha.
(19:35):
Sometimes in life we struggle to bring ourselves to do
the very things that we most need to do. We
can be very self critical about this. We can call
it procrastination. We can call it a lack of will
power or a lack of self discipline. I don't know
if those things are useful. I know I go through
periods like that where there are things I need to do,
(19:57):
and at least on some level, want to do, but
it's very hard for me to get myself to do them,
or it might require me a kind of ramping up
period of hours wasted hours before I really get moving.
And sometimes those are useful hours because I know creatively
my thoughts are crystallizing in that time, And although it
(20:19):
feels like I'm putting things off, it's that I really
don't know what to do. But there are other times
I can't claim anything so lofty and I just have
trouble getting started. We tell ourselves that we have infinite
time to do the things that we want to do.
My maternal grandfather died almost a quarter of a century
(20:42):
ago now, and shortly thereafter I went to my grandmother's
house to help her clean up some of his effects,
and their garage was his work area. He had a
couple of them. He was an engineer and he was
very handy fixing things. So he had a long list
of a play alliances and items of furniture and so
(21:02):
on that he was going to repair or, for all
I know, combine into something completely new. It was not
beyond him to imagine that he might patch a torn
lawn chair and attach an engine to it and go
rocketing off down the street or into the sky. And
I have little doubt he could have achieved at least
(21:23):
some of that if life, for some other stuff I
guess hadn't kept getting in the way. Maybe sometimes when
I visited, I got in the way. But now the
opportunity had irrevocably passed, and it was my job to
take all these half finished projects and bring them out
to the curb. And as I showed my grandmother one
half finished project or another, she remarked, not without some humor,
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that man thought he was going to live forever. And
that struck me like lightning. I was in my early
twenties at the time, and whereas I had always had
a dread of mortality, I guess I had never framed
it in terms of piling up such a backlog of
goals that one could never reach the bottom of the stack.
Once you've had that thought, it puts a kind of
(22:07):
pressure on you, especially if you're me and you keep
adding new books. I want to learn so many things.
I want to learn everything, But when am I going
to find the time to read that? I say to myself, well,
that subject is important I'll make time, and sometimes I do,
but not always. And of course making time means that
(22:28):
something else gets pushed to the bottom of the pile
that seemed just as important the day before. And it's
also problematic to think about things in this way because
you can't drive yourself all the time. You can't be
all work in no play all the time. And so
when you're tired, when you don't feel like tasking your brain,
(22:49):
when you just want to unwind a little bit, the
question is are you going to finally get around to
reading Titus Andronicus or are you going to watch that
Seinfeld repeat for the fifth time. Once you've committed, it's
an irrevocable decision. You may steal the time back from
some other thing down the road, but that time is
(23:10):
not restored to you. It's just spent. Strangely, I was
thinking about that this week in relationship to something you've
no doubt heard about if you follow the game. The
Atlanta Braves decision to demote Ronald Acunya, one of the
top prospects in baseball, and what was a transparent bid
(23:30):
to mess around with his service time so that they
could save an extra year on arbitration. Or free agency,
as if they couldn't afford it anyway. Occasional guest of
this show, Craig ko Katara, has done a great job
railing against this kind of chicanery, and David Roth, my
regular co host, had a terrific peace on it as
well at Deadspin, which manages to connect the decision to
(23:55):
the whole malaise that afflicts our society in what I
call the age of you'll take what we give you
and like it. But it occurred to me that whether
you are living for George R. R. Martin to finish
the Game of Throne series, don't hear a lot about
that lately. Maybe people have moved on, or you want
(24:15):
to see the conclusion of the current Star Wars trilogy,
or you just want to see Acunya play in the
major leagues. We're all just a slip and fall in
the bathtub away from missing out all together, and that
every day that Acunya is down, the odds of that
happening grow larger. I realize this is true of everything
all the time, but it brought it home to me.
(24:38):
And when I start thinking of issues like that, I
not only have the same fears that everyone else has.
But I think again of what my grandmother said, that
man thought he would live forever, and of all the
things that are undone that I want to do. And
then with that in mind, I go ahead and I
do nothing, or often do nothing. And it only provides
(25:01):
so much sucker to say, like pomp by the sailor,
I am what I am, and that's all that I am,
and just accept one's old weakness. There was an outfielder
on the Tigers in the nineteen twenties and thirties. His
name was Bob Fathergill. Given the very light lower boundary
of one thousand plate appearances, I know you know that
(25:22):
the all time leader in batting average for the Tigers
was Ty Cobb. He hit three sixty eight during his
stay there. Number two was Harry Hollman, who won three
or four batting titles and hit four hundred. One year
he hit three forty two. But number three was Bob Fathergill,
he hit three thirty seven in two thousand, six hundred
(25:44):
and ninety three played appearances. Despite his obvious hitting ability,
the name Bob Fathergill may not ring a bell because
he's more commonly listed under the name Fat's father. Gill.
I'm not going to call him that because he didn't
like to be called that. To him, he was Bob.
He was also to him and everybody else five foot
ten and officially two hundred and thirty pounds. That I
(26:07):
promise you is not true. You can look at any picture.
He was, as Captain B. Fheart once said repeatedly on
trout mask replica, large and bulbous to my eye. He
was proportioned a bit like C. C. Sabbathia, just at
a reduced scale because he was almost a foot shorter.
But whatever his dimensions, the man could hit. In his
(26:27):
best season of nineteen twenty seven, he hit three p
fifty nine in one hundred and forty three games, hit
thirty eight doubles, nine triples, nine home runs, drove in
one hundred and fourteen runs. I hate having to recite stats.
They are the death of entertaining listening. But sometimes there's
no other way to describe a player. The thing is
he didn't have much of a career. You haven't heard
of him, even though he was a three twenty five
(26:49):
lifetime hitter overall, because he had a hard time getting
into the lineup and staying in the lineup. Part of
that was a problem of timing, an aspect of his
career that was not at all his fault. When he
first came up, the Tigers outfield was packed, and it
mostly stayed packed in his first seasons. They still had
Cobb and Holman, who we've already established were among the
(27:11):
best hitters for average of all time, and the third
outfielder was Bobby Feach, who wasn't quite of that quality.
He was a three to ten career hitter, but was
pretty clearly a haul of very good kind of guy
who at his best combined high averages with a lot
of extra base hits. And once he was gone, they
moved in Heinemanush, another future Hall of Famer, who hit
(27:31):
three point thirty for his career, and then they came
up with John Stone, another three ten career hitter, and
then g Walker, who had speed and defense and at
his best in the mid thirties was a three twenty
guy every year and as good a hitter as father
Gill was. A crowded outfield was more of a problem
for him than it would have been for another player,
(27:53):
because his weight pretty much limited him to left field.
You can't have a five to ten two hundred and
fifty years two hundred and sixty pound guy in center field,
and you really can't have him in right field either,
because every hit into the corner is going to be
a triple. The last thing I want to do is
echo all the people who mocked Bob for his weight
(28:13):
during his life, but even the newspapers describe him as waddling.
Waddling is not conducive to good outfield defense. He took
endless grief for this, both professionally and at the place
where the professional intersects with the personal. There are many
stories of players trying to get Father Gill's goat by
(28:35):
mocking his weight on the field. There is one that
Leo Durocher told over and over again. And Leo lied
about a lot of things, but you can trace the
game that he's talking about to the newspapers and the
box scores, and although the incident isn't confirmed exactly by them,
the contours are close enough that it seems like it's
(28:57):
real that in a Yankees type game that was about
to be called after seven for darkness, the Tigers were
batting with runners on, Father Gil was either going to
drive in the winning run or be the last batter,
and in order to shake him up, Leo du Rocher
came running in from second base, yelling time time, the
(29:18):
tigers are batting out of order. And everybody said, what
are you talking about. That's father Gil. He's been batting
third all day and he's batting third now. And Leo said, oh,
I'm sorry, I thought they had sent two men up
to the plate at once brush that joke. Supposedly, Father
Gill was so unnerved by this that he struck out,
which he very rarely did, and then tried to cream
(29:39):
Leo with the bat, but of course Leo was too
fast for him. Today, we know that the causes of
obesity come in many flavors. There's lifestyle, diet, exercise, even genetics.
But none of that is to say that Father Gil
bore no responsibility for his conditioning. He was what they
used to call a trencherman. He liked to eat, he
liked to drink a lot of beer, and yet he
(30:00):
knew the effect that those things were having on his career.
Every spring they made a show of putting him in
rubber suits and having him run extra laps. This was
a way of making fun of him too. In addition
to trying to get him into shape, and yet he
did not or could not or would not change. As
a result, he couldn't compete with all those other guys
(30:20):
that I named. As good a hitter as he was,
he would sit. And there is only one season in
his whole career, which lasted twelve years, where he played
anything like a full campaign. And as happens to all
limited players, as soon as the Tigers had other options,
and they had the firstest, barest hint that he might
(30:40):
be slipping off of that three point fifty three sixty
batting average peak, he was con They didn't even bother
to trade him. They just put him on waivers. And
even then you might say, well, he was thirty five.
A lot of ballplayers go home at thirty five. That's
a good run, and I suppose that's true, but you
can't help the feeling that there should have been more,
(31:03):
not necessarily later, not at thirty five, that's hard for
the best of players, but earlier, when he could have
helped himself, when he could have fought through that crowded
outfield by giving the Tigers another image for himself beyond
blimp like and that was his teammate's description, not mine,
But I think that Bob, like so many of us,
(31:23):
thought there's time to do it tomorrow. There's one more
beer and one more burger, looking very attractive today, and
there's dieting and jogging and the things that I gotta do,
whatever they are, those will wait because there's time. And
then there's this. He stayed in Detroit after his retirement,
(31:44):
went to work for the Ford Motor Company, but the
weight was still a problem. He must have been hypertensive
as hell. There was one stroke that he survived, but
a second one hit him on March twentieth, nineteen thirty eight,
not quite five years after his career had ended. That
was the end of Bob father Gil. He was forty
(32:06):
years old. Harry Holman was one of his close friends
on the team, and Holman used to kid him a lot.
Bob was such a friendly, popular guy. He was actually
known as the people's choice in Detroit for many years,
and after games, any fan could go up to him
in a hotel lobby. There used to be a whole
art of lobby sitting for ball players, and Bob would
show off his swing and talk about what a great
(32:28):
hitter he was. And Holman would kid him that he
got most of his hits in hotel lobbies. I don't
know if Holman also pointed out that he did much
of his eating in hotel restaurants, or that he did
far too much of his playing on the bench. Again,
some of us figure will live forever, And whether it's
taking off wade or getting that lawn chair hitched to
(32:50):
that rocket engine, we can always get to it tomorrow.
There's always something more compelling, more interesting, more important. And hell,
we're only human, right, Just ask Bob Fathergill. He's right
over there on the periphery of your vision, just out
of view, a pale and hungry ghost, pointing a finger
(33:10):
that bulges like a sausage casing and saying, work now,
for the night comes when no man can work. I'm
Stephen Goldman, and this is the Infinite Inning Baseball Podcast. Hell, hell,
(34:02):
there it is later then you thing, and so your
(34:22):
time has come. You had been a good person, and
so you were rive in due time. Before the pearly gates.
The gatekeeper wears a green eyeshade and he checks over
your paperwork with care. Well, well that was very good, Yes,
that was a good moment. Yes, yes, Charity, yes, yes,
(34:43):
kindness yes, gave hope to others, yes, all very positive.
You can't come in, but he says, handing you a
sheaf of blank papers, there are a few things we
need you to do first. Specifically, we need a little
more content around here. It is heaven, after all, but
people still need to be entertained, don't they. They need
things to read. And so you were a writer in life,
(35:07):
and we'd like to ask you if it's not too
much to just write seven or eight or ten stories
before you come in, so that the people who are
already inside can be uplifted by them, just as you
uplifted people down below. Well, sure, you say, But where
(35:29):
am I supposed to stay during the time that I'm
working on these These are are going to take some time?
Uh oh, well, right out here on this cloud, it's
very comfortable. Do people get hungry up here? Yes, yes
they do. Well, what am I supposed to eat? Well,
there's kind of a coffee bar, a Starbucks kind of
(35:52):
thing just over on the next cloud. You can go there.
Do they charge money? Yes, yes, I'm afraid they do. Well.
This gown sort of thing that you have me in it?
It doesn't seem to have any pockets. My wallet seems
to be back in my other life. So how do
I pay for them? Are you going to compensate me
(36:14):
for writing these stories? Are you going to give me money? Money?
This is heaven. We're a sort of a utopian commune.
We have no concept of money. No, I'm afraid you're
on your own for that. But how am I supposed
to survive? Well, that's really not our responsibility. We're giving
you an opportunity here. You see an exposure to the
(36:37):
great audience that we have behind the gates. It's a
very large and select audience. And if you do well
with them, why the sky's the limit for you? Oh boy,
pardon the pun. Write the stories, and if you can
just hang on for seven or eight or nine thousand years, well,
reevaluate your case and perhaps admit you then can be
(37:00):
on staff. Staff doesn't need to eat. And you realize
that John Milton, who is conspicuously absent here on the cloud,
was correct. Tis better to reign in hell than serve
in heaven, and better to write nothing at all than
to write for free, And better than both is to
listen to episode forty seven, The Wobblies used to have
a song You'll get pie in the sky when you die,
(37:23):
but that was pure supposition. Welcome back to the show today.
I am joined by Marty Appel, author of many books,
most recently Casey Stangele Baseball's Greatest Character, which is the
latest of many biographies of the old professor, among them
(37:44):
my own Forging Genius. But whereas Forging Genius was focused
on Casey's pre Yankees managerial career, Marty's book takes in
the whole mcgilla. And I'm pleased to note that my
own book appears in the bibliography, So some element meant
of my own contribution is carried on in this one.
And that's a good feeling, as I allude to in
(38:05):
our discussion, or at least I think I do. I'll
explain that in a minute. There are many biographical subjects
who recur over and over again. Statistically, I think Abraham
Lincoln has had more written about him than any human
being to walk the earth other than Jesus Christ. Here
in our country, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Franklin Roosevelt. There
(38:25):
are a whole lot of Richard Nixon books, and some
of them have something new to offer, and some of
them are just recapitulations, and so as reader you have
to be discerning. But there are good reasons to go
back to them, and the reasons vary depending on who
you're talking about. But each story has something valuable to
teach us that is worth restating every once in a
(38:49):
while so a new generation can get hold of it.
Not all of us haunt the used bookstores or the libraries,
or even the new bookstores, and these things just need
to get recirculated in the culture so that they get
some coverage, some discussion with Casey. There are two aspects
of it. One is, as Marty's subtitle suggests, he was
(39:11):
a great character. The bigger part, I think was his indefatigability,
which is to say that he got knocked back a
number of times because of the circumstances that he got
to manage in. And I often wonder when you have
a manager who takes over a horrible team and that
team goes sixty to one hundred and two and he
(39:32):
gets canned, that manager may never get another chance, and
yet it's not all on him. Let me use Alan
Trammell as an example. In two thousand and three, Alan
Trammell's Detroit Tigers, his first year as a major league manager,
went forty three and one hundred and nineteen. They were
one of the worst teams of all time. Casey could
not have saved that team. Connie matt could not have,
(39:52):
Joe McCarthy could not have Tony Luissa or a Weaver.
Any manager in the Hall of Fame you care to
name would not have prove that team. And more than that,
even in this modern age with free agency and other
ways of jump starting a club, that is not the
kind of team that's going to fix itself very quickly.
And so tramill got two more years, and he lost
(40:13):
ninety games both times. Other than an interim stint in Arizona,
he has had no other opportunity to manage, and maybe
he hasn't wanted it. Maybe he's happier being a coach.
Maybe if you go forty three to one nineteen you
have PTSD. I don't really know. I haven't asked him.
I'd like to, But the bigger point is, obviously, had
(40:33):
he gone one hundred and nineteen and forty three instead,
he'd likely still be working. I don't know whether he
would be a good manager in that case. I don't
know if he was a bad one. I don't know
if he was part of the problem with the Detroit Tigers.
I just know he was irrelevant. Casey, when he was
about the age that Trammell started managing, got a Brooklyn
Dodgers team that was broke, that the bank had cut off,
(40:57):
that the National League had to intervene to restructure, and
had some good players, had some interesting players. It was
not a forty three to one hundred and nineteen team.
It was a team that, if everything broke right, might
have had a five hundred season somewhere, but there was
no helping it. And then from there he went to
the Boston Braves, who were actually worse off. And as
(41:19):
we'll discuss in the interview, Casey had his own sources
of money by that point, and at times he was
advancing the Braves money out of his pocket to keep
the franchise afloat. That's how bad they were. But not
everybody knew that. And I do think that by the
time he got done with the Braves, he was phoning
it in a little bit, because, let's face it, if
(41:40):
you're paying to keep your team going as a manager,
it's probably hard to keep your interest up, and so,
like Alan Tramble, there was every reason that he not
be given another shot, because people just take the record
at face value and say why bother? And I wonder
how many Casey stengeles we might have been deprived of
in that way. The interview with Marty is a little
(42:02):
bit shorter than the typical interview I do here, in
part because there were some technical problems at the beginning,
and I actually cut off his first answer, which was
really just hey, how you do. I'm glad to be here,
And then because you just didn't have time to do
the typical hour that I do, and that's fine, so
I'll let you off the hook a bit early this week. Nevertheless,
I hope you enjoy this discussion about this important figure
(42:25):
in American history, not just baseball history. He really is
an example of resiliency and all the ways that a
person can bounce back from adversity and keep believing in
themselves and try again. Casey once summed himself up this way,
don't give up. Tomorrow is just another day, and that's myself.
(42:48):
Sure it's in Stangalese, but it's something we can all
understand and aspire to. Today might not have gone my way,
but I'm the man who is tomorrow. Tomorrow belongs to me.
Before I roll, Marty in a few words about another
player who happened to go by the name Fat. I
(43:09):
didn't intend that to be a theme today. Just a
coincidence that I was attracted to two stories about players
with that nickname. This one is a pitcher, a knuckleballer,
Fat Freddie Fitzsimmons. In fairness to all involved, I should
say that Fat Freddy was more stocky Freddie Fitzsimmons, especially
(43:29):
compared to Bob father Gill, who was as wide as
he was high. You know, there's a World War II
song with that theme. It's called Mister five by five
And as the kids say it slaps. Do they say that?
I've never heard my kids say it. Maybe you'll say
it about our next discussion, which will commence right after
this brief intermission. Freddy Fitzsimmons was a really good pitcher
(44:05):
for a long time. Mostly he wasn't a great pitcher,
not in your miss Hall of Famer or anything, just
a solid third starter for almost twenty seasons. He had
a three point five to one ERA pitching from nineteen
twenty five through nineteen forty three, and for that period,
that's a really strong era because the twenties and thirties
were a really high offense period. For the most part,
(44:27):
the National League calmed down a bit faster than the
American League did in the thirties, but still he was
from California, but he spent his whole career in New
York with the Giants and Dodgers. One of my favorite
pitching lines of all time was Ted lyons Sunday starter
season of nineteen forty two. He was forty one years old.
He made twenty starts, completed all twenty, led the al
(44:47):
and Era at two point one zero, went fourteen and six,
and had a seven hundred winning percentage. Fitzimmons had one
of those seasons two at thirty eight years old in
nineteen forty. Even though he was a knuckleballer, his arm
tended to get sore. He had all kinds of physical problems.
He made eighteen starts, he completed eleven, pitched four shoutouts,
saved a game, had a two point eight one ERA
(45:08):
and a sixteen and two record, which meant that he
led the National League in winning percentage. And I know
we sabermetric types are not supposed to put too much
stock in one lost record, and I don't, but still
sixteen and two is pretty cool. And for the most part,
a pitcher with a sixteen and two record and a
two point eight one ERA he earned the record, So
it's not like it's an unreasonable shorthand for quality here.
(45:31):
As I said before the break, he was called fat,
but he was more stumpy. He was five eleven, which,
even then for a pitcher, was a little bit short.
Pitchers tend to run tall, even at times when the
average American, the average player even is not that tall.
That's not the part I want to talk about. This
is not like Bob Fathergill's story, where I have a
kind of a moral that I want to teach. Well,
(45:52):
there is a moral, but it's a kind of small one.
I useful one, but a small one. I want to
talk about two games that Freddy fitz Simmons pitched and
the fact that he never won a World Series game
despite several tries. On September fifth, nineteen thirty one, the
Dodgers were at the Giants. He was pitching for the Giants.
Fitz Simmons had a one hit shutout. Going through five.
(46:15):
He had a four run lead, in part because he
himself hit a two run home run. The Dodgers broke
up the shutout in the sixth, but still, as we
go to the seventh, Freddy was having a very good
day and then all at once he wasn't. Giants pitcher
fred Himak came up in that inning, two outs in fact,
and I don't know what Freddy threw him exactly, but
(46:38):
whatever it was, he wasn't a strikeout pitcher. Even then.
He struck out about two and a half per nine
innings if that. And Himak smashed the ball up the middle.
It was a grounder, but somehow it took a high
velocity hop and it nailed Freddy somewhere in the stomach
or in the ribs, or where the ribs meet the stomach.
It's not clear from the different counts. However, he went down.
(47:03):
He was knocked to his knees. All the air is
out of him, and from that moment on he was unconscious.
But Freddy had a great reputation as a fielder, and
his testimony to that. He picked up the ball and
completed the play and then fell on his face. He
had no memory of doing any of this. The trainer
(47:24):
comes out, Both teams surround the mound, smelling salt are administered.
Freddie wakes up. They pat him on the head, They
hand him a bat, and they say, you're leading off
the bottom of the seventh, Go get him, Tiger. Now,
is Freddie really awake at that point? Was he concussed?
It seems unlikely that you would get a concussion from
being hit in the stomach by a baseball, But the
(47:45):
man was unconscious. The man did fall down, so something
was going on there. So he goes up to the plate.
Himak is out of the game. Now, back in that
period of baseball, they would let pitchers hit and then
replace them rather than pinch hitting for them. I mean,
they did the other thing too, but managers don't seem
to have always been as on top of things as
they were, And of course the gap between the average
(48:06):
hitter and the good hitting pitcher was not as extreme
as it might be now. So there's Freddy at the plate,
and if we don't know if he was concussed before
the bat, we can be pretty sure that he was
after because Giants reliever Cyn Moore throws a high and
tight fastball, and Fitzsimmons did have enough presence of mind
(48:27):
to try to duck. But again, some days your luck
has just turned. One minute you're pitching a shout out,
the next there's a fastball crashing into the left side
of your jaw. Fitzimmons goes down in a heap, and
for the second time in the space of about five minutes,
he is unconscious. And I defy you in all the
annals of baseball history to find too many more players
(48:50):
who have been knocked unconscious twice in the space of
the same inning, in the same game. Well, they get
the smelling salts all again. They wake him up, but
he has trouble standing. He needs help getting off the field,
and he collapses again when he reaches the clubhouse. So no,
this time, his day is over. The reported diagnosis was
(49:12):
a ruptured blood vessel in the head, which sounds like
an aneurysm, but it was probably more like a bruise.
He missed about eight days, not the rest of his life.
He missed only about one start, so I guess he
was okay. A minor note on that game is that
Giants manager John McGrath brought in Carl Hubble to finish it.
For fitz Simmons, he picked up the save, which is
(49:33):
a lot like bringing in Clayton Kershaw to finish it.
A bigger point is that sometimes you duck fate, but
it makes a second pass with the exact same role
of the great twenty sided die in the sky. Now
we skip forward a bunch of years. Even though Fitzsimmons
had that great year in nineteen forty, even though he
was a knuckleballer, by late in his career he was
just a wreck. He really had a hard time getting
(49:53):
and staying on the mound. In nineteen forty one, he
didn't appear in a game until late May, and he
only through eighty two point two innings all year. Still,
they were good innings. So when the Dodgers won the NL,
pennant manager Leo Durocher, there's Leo again. He keeps coming up,
tabs him to start Game three against the Yankees at Brooklyn. Again,
(50:13):
that sounds weird. A guy who only threw eighty two
innings all year, you're gonna put him in a World Series? Well,
the Dodgers didn't really have that much of a rotation
that year. It was kind of a patchwork. It was
a really veteran team. Four of the five main starters
were thirty five or older, so starting a sore arm
thirty nine year old was not unusual for them. Fitzimmons
opponent for the Yankees was Marius Russo, a great baseball
(50:36):
name not well remembered now, but he was a lefty
who got in a few good years before a combination
of arm problems in Hitler ended his career very quickly
in the game, both of them are brilliant for seven innings.
There are four future Hall of famers in the Yankees lineup,
Joe Demaggio, Bill Dickey, Joe Gordon, Phil Erzuto. Three in
the Dodgers lineup, Pee Wee Rees, Billy Herman, Joe Medwick.
(50:58):
But the game was a scoreless time Hi heading to
the top of the seventh, Fitzimmons takes the mound. He
gets two out sandwiched around a walk, and that brought
up his bat Noir opposing pictures. This time, there's no grounder.
Russo hits a hard liner up the middle, which catches
Fitzimmons right on the left knee. He hits it so hard,
(51:19):
in fact, that the ball rebounded way up in the air,
as high as a pop up, some accounts say, and
pee Wee Reese got under it and caught it. People
were rather confused about what had happened, at least those
in the stands, but the umpires had the presence of
mind to note that the ball had never touched the ground.
It had just gone zap off. The bat rebounded off
of Fitzsimmons, hung up in the air for I don't
(51:42):
know ten or fifteen minutes, and then pee Wee Reese
caught it for the out inning over, Also Fitzimmons' career over.
Once again. He had to be helped off the field.
You can see the pictures on one side of him
as coach Chuck dressing and on the other side another
infinite inner friend, Cookie Lavijetto, and they took him to
(52:03):
the hospital. He had suffered incredibly enough of bad bruise.
I assume a very bad bruise, but no fracture, he said.
I guess I should have learned a duck long ago.
When I first started pitching. They told me all they
can do is bruise you. But this is a bit
more than a bruise, and maybe now I'm too old
to play any other way. In fact, he was too
(52:24):
old to play any other way. He was too old
to play, especially on a bad knee. It never did respond,
and one wonders if the diagnostics available at the time
X rays and probing things with fingers missed a more
subtle injury that our better machines would have picked up today.
He tried to come back, but between his sore arm
and his knee, it was over. Midway through the nineteen
(52:46):
forty three season, he retired to become manager of the
Philadelphia Phillies. He won two hundred and seventeen Major League games,
but was for four in World Series attempts, And within
that for four was a game he pitched decent against
the Senators, but the Senators shut out the Giants, and
this game, in which the opposing pitcher tried to kill him.
(53:07):
I mentioned before that Freddy was supposed to be a
very good fielder despite his girth. He had a wind
up that makes that sound even more unlikely, because he
completely turned his back to the batter. And yet maybe
because of that, there are more instances than I've told
you about of batters pounding the ball off his person.
(53:27):
Regarding this, he said, that's what you get for being
a good fielding pitcher. I've been hit everywhere in the throat,
on the wrist and all over. That strikes me as
a strange statement, because that's what you get for not
being a very good fielding pitcher. Fitzimmons, who is supposed
to be shockingly agile, kind of like one of those
hippos in Fantasia, just gets peppered with baseball. He's Charlie
(53:51):
Brown out there being undressed by line drives. Like I said,
there's no huge moral here. If there is one, it's
that there is no incongruity in what fits him, and
said that he was a good fielding pitcher, and somehow
the universe and all its unfairness selected him to be
barraged by more than his share of base boss and
perhaps more than that for some of us at the
(54:14):
turning points of our lives, in our World Series games,
in the midst of our shutouts and one hitters and
so forth, the universe paints a bullseye on us and
uses us for target practice. And if we're lucky, really lucky,
after that, we get to go manage the phillies, which
is often even worse. This life of ours is perplexing
(54:39):
and offers some very strange incentives, rewards and punishments. We'll
take our second and last. You know, I accidentally chopped
off the tail end of the episode when I was
remastering the old stuff to the extent that I remaster it,
(55:00):
and we're running so far behind that I think I'm
just going to freestyle this section as ever. Should you
wish to follow me, you can do so on social
media at Stevengoldman dot bskuid dot social and there's a
Facebook group Barnacle like it clings. Simply go to Facebook
search on Infinite Inning. Bang, you're there. Should you wish
(55:20):
to support the show, and I very much hope you do,
please visit patreon dot com slash the Infinite Inning. Oh
and I left off. If you want to write us,
by which I mean me, simply go to Infinite Inning
at gmail dot com. Our theme song, which you are
hearing now and have been listening to throughout the episode,
was a co composition of doctor Rick Mooring and myself,
(55:41):
And since I lopped off what he said at the
end of this episode, I really don't know, so I
asked him, and he wasn't prepared to tell me anything new.
He simply said, make make something up, don't don't just
leave it like I didn't say anything. Well, that's what
he said. It's the best I can do. Well, that's
all for me for this reissue episode, however lame it is.
(56:03):
As I've said a couple of times already, I will
be back in just a brief twenty four hours or
so from now with a new episode number three, p.
Fifty one in the series, and maybe we'll have a
new World Series champion to talk about. And it's not
that I'm rooting for one side or the other. I'm
rooting for seven games, so I kind of hope not
Well, hello there, and welcome to another Infinite Inning reissue,
episode number twenty two in the series. I believe I am,
as ever Steven Goldman, your host for both these flashback
episodes and for the fresh fish the hot pancakes that
come your way at the end of each week. I
(00:48):
hope that, as always, this episode finds you well. I'm
very glad to be here with you. It's very funny
because I'm late as usual, and when you get to
the flashback part of the episode, you will see that
I began seven years ago by talking about procrastination, and
it's really not that I do think this last week
(01:10):
or month. Actually, the postseason has been taking up an
excessive amount of my time, just because I am less
likely to tear myself away from a ballgame that has
a direct championship impact than if it were just a
weekday game between the Pirates and the Rockies. We'll get
back to that Pirate's Rockies idea in a second. As
(01:31):
I come to you today, It's Thursday, the day after
Game five of the World Series won by the Toronto
Blue Jays, and I am here in the very rainy
Northeast just listening to the water. Come down. I've talked
openly here on the show and other places about my
battles with depression, which at times have been severe. I'm
(01:51):
in a better place right now, Knockwood. I'm happy to
report that. And unlike a lot of people who have
seasonally affected depression or are brought down by this kind
of weather, I'm not negatively affected by dark, wet days.
I enjoy the ambiance of a rainy day. There's a
Peanuts strip from somewhere in the middle of the run,
(02:12):
and it just wasn't time effective for me to figure
out the dates, so I apologize, in which Snoopy is
lying on his doghouse as always being rained on, and
he thinks this is the sort of dreary fall rain
that makes you want to sit inside all day and
stare out the window and drink tea and play sad
songs on the stereo. And the last of the four
(02:34):
panels shows Snoopy doing exactly that, as Charlie Brown looks
on with a quizzical expression on his face. That is
me exactly except I'm not brought down by it. I'm
lifted by it for some perverse reason. I should get
a print of that one and hang it somewhere. I
have one Peanuts reprint up directly across from my desk.
(02:54):
I can see it as I'm speaking to you. I
may have mentioned this before. Snoopy is doing his World
War One five pilot bit is describing the First World
War in exquisite detail, and the strip ends with him
looking at camera and saying, have you ever in your
life seen such thorough research? And that seemed very appropriate
for what I do here. It was one of many
(03:15):
Peanut strips in which I felt seen, and I thank
goodness that Charles Schultz made that fifty year work of
art so it could read me as I was reading it.
I hope it's okay. Then, if consistent with the spirit
of a very wet day in which one just sits
by the window, seeing what one can see and thinking
what one can think, that we ramble a bit. I'm
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a bit burned out. As much as I love baseball,
that eighteen inning game did me in. Don't misunderstand I
loved every minute of it, but coming back the next
two days felt anticlimactic and a little burdensome. Even though
Games four and five only went the regulation nine, we've
still seen an average of twelve innings a night for
the last three nights even something or so someone you
(04:00):
love can overstay it, or they're welcome in select periods
of high stress. As Benjamin Franklin once wrote, both fish
and house guests start to stink after three days, and
thus does welcome friend transit to unwelcome imposition. There's only
one downside to my love of rainy days. I hate rainouts.
That's not an issue now with Toronto playing in a
(04:22):
domed ballpark and the Dodgers, who were done with in
terms of home games for the year, playing in a
climate in which reinouts are exceedingly rare. But during the
regular season, I'm, for some reason excessively troubled by those
games that we're supposed to be played on Thursday, April
twenty third, but are rescheduled to be made up as
part of a split bill double header on August twelfth.
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That seems like too long to wait for me, and
I particularly hate those reinouts, which result in a game
being made up if necessary. To me, they're all necessary,
well maybe not Pirates Rockies. How did that series go
this year? Do you want to get yes? My initial
guess was Pirates five games Rockies one. I was off
by one. The Pirates won four of the six, and
(05:08):
that's not surprising because the Pirates try to subsist at
a level just above miserable, like some invertebrate species that
lies on the bottom of the ocean and consumes the
detritus that snows down on them from above. Yes, I
think I just described the Pittsburgh c cucumbers. It's a
delicacy in some places. It really really is. It's just
an alimentary tract and a sausage casing. But who am
(05:29):
I to judge anyone anyway. Unlike the Pirates, the Rockies
are the detritus. And I know that sounds terribly mean,
and I feel bad about it. In fact, I would
like to work for the Rockies. I wrote something about
that somewhat facetiously at Baseball Perspectives earlier this year. I
have limited math skills and no scouting skills to speak of.
(05:50):
Being partially blind, I have less to offer in an
observational way than the average bear, I mean a literal bear.
Get that bear up behind home plate with a radar
gun and a bowl of peanut and he'll do better
than I do. What was that he just swung out
change up, thank you. Unlike the Bear, though, I do
know my baseball history, I do know how winning teams
have been constructed, and I know that the Rockies have
(06:11):
consistently ignored that history. Now, maybe that's not a job.
Maybe it's a single consulting session to scream on bays
percentage at them in a way they've already heard a
million times. But I'm still willing to try, not for
my sake, but for theirs. Just buy me a plane
ticket and lunch. It's fine. I don't need to profit
by it. I just want to have the conversation with you, okay.
(06:34):
The real shocker to me of the Pirates going four
and two against the Rockies was that one of the
two was a Paul Skien start. Paul Skeen's one point
nine to seventy ra in one hundred and eighty seven
and two thirds innings two hundred and sixteen strikeouts was
roughed up by them. On August twenty fourth, he pitched
against them in Pittsburgh and held them to three hits,
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no walks, no runs over seven innings. The Pirates, who
had an almost historically bad offense this year, scored four
runs and Bob's your uncle. The fans went home happy.
I say almost historically bad, because the Rockies were worse. Nevertheless,
three weeks earlier at Colorado, the Rockies got to Skeens.
He had pitched a shutout through five. The Pirates were
(07:20):
up four to nothing on Leover Pagero's three homer game somehow,
and can you blame me? I had completely forgotten that
Leover Paghero had a three homer game this year. He
only hit four on the season while averaging two hundred
this in eighty eight played appearances. Maybe I never knew.
I study every day, I really do, but that's one
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that didn't stick with me. Suddenly. In the sixth Skeens
couldn't get it out, allowed four consecutive hits, including a
three run homer to Jordan Beck, and was lifted for
Brandon Ashcraft, who crashed the Ashcraft he allowed an inherited
runner to score, then added a bunch of runs of
his own. It was like a Dodger's bullpen. Cameo Skiings
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in twenty twenty five, and he may well yet or
has already, and we just don't know. Won the Nlsy
Young Award had twenty quality starts in thirty two chances.
As you may remember, a quality start is six innings
or more, three runs or less. I was a little
surprised by the percentage being that low until I checked
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and was reminded that the Pirates many times lifted him
after five innings, even if he was doing very well.
As I said, you need six to get that quality
stamp of approval. In four of those starts he allowed
no runs at all. Thus his start at the Rockies
was one of his few true clunkers, and he had
help from the bullpen and a Pirate's coaching staff that
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sent him out for the sixth even though he was gassed.
I know that last one isn't fair, and I don't
really mean it. So if you had thrash Paul Skeens
on your Rockies Bengo card for this year, you blue
haired Sir or Madam, are a winner. Can we returned
to leover Pagero for a second. Was he the unlikeliest
player ever to hit three home runs in a game?
(09:06):
Perhaps he had some coffee that morning, Vibrant afuera coffee, Yes,
it vibrates. I missed the trill on the r there
Afuera and if you go to a Fuera dot com
and use the coupon code infinite Inning, you will get
a fifteen percent discount the best that they offer on
their ethically sourced coffee from the Free Nation of El Salvador.
(09:30):
If you encounter the ghost of Ronald Reagan, take my
advice don't mention it. But anybody else you can say, hey,
this is rainforest friendly Java. Is it the chase in
Sanborn Coffee Hour starring Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy with
special guest W. C. Fields. You could look it up, folks. Nope,
it's all online nowadays at Afuera Coffee dot com. Pagero,
of course, is from the Dominican Republic, and I don't
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know what he drinks in the mornings or at night
or at any time. Really. There have been a lot
of three homer games in baseball history. We've been doing
this for a very long time, after all, playing thousands
of games a season. According to Baseball Reference, four hundred
and eighty seven players have hit three homers in a game,
some of them multiple times. Of those four hundred and
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eighty seven players, two hundred and eighty seven of them
did it since nineteen ninety five, or I should say
after nineteen ninety five. At that point the ball started
getting bouncier and the players started getting juicier. Perhaps the
players are less juicy than they used to be, but
the ball is still as resilient as ever, or at
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least historically more resilient than it was previously. Even if
in different years it's dulled down or hyped up halfinated.
You might say, don't worry, I'm not going back to that.
But think of it this way. From the introduction of
the lively ball in nineteen twenty until the Selig canceled
World Series, two hundred players did it again, some of
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the multiple times, but still two hundred players in seventy
five years. Since then, two hundred and eighty seven players
have done it in thirty years. And if you go
down the list, you get a ton of people you
would expect Hall of famers or players who were noted
for their power, so you're not surprised. Johnny Maise, hall
of Famer, did it six times. Dave Kingman did it five,
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Joe Carter did it five times. Not a Hall of
Famer again, a pretty strong hitter though. Lou gerrig four
two Hall of Famers, two players who aren't in and
shouldn't be, But it was well within the realm of
possibility that they would have days like that. When I
was a kid, we used to wonder how the Hall
of Fame voters would have handled things if Kingman, then
still active, reached five hundred home runs. Collusion and a
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low on base percentage stopped him. I still wonder Larry
Parrish did it three times, which surprises me a little.
But he also hit two hundred and fifty six home
runs in his career, and if he hadn't started his
career in Montreal, he probably would have hit ten or
fifteen percent more home runs. In his most extreme season there,
nineteen seventy eight, he hit two eighty two three thirty
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five hundred with eleven home runs on the road two
seventy two three thirteen with a four to twelve slugging percentage,
with only four home runs at home. Darnell Coles hit
hit twice. That one surprised me by a odd coincidence.
I believe he was fired just today as National's hitting coach.
So sorry, Darnell. He was such a vexing player. He
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was the sixth overall pick in the nineteen eighty draft,
and that's not as much of a miss as it
sounds like, because none of the first rounders that yere
turned into stars except for the very first, the tippy top,
the first overall pick, Darryl Strawberry, and his career was
pretty vexing as well. Coles hit pretty well in the minors,
but he was drafted as a shortstop and moved to
third base, but he couldn't field well enough for either
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of those positions, and except for a couple of seasons,
didn't hit well enough to make up for his lack
of fielding ability. He first came to my attention in
a big way. I was amazed and astounded during his
forty eight game trial with the nineteen eighty four Mariners,
when he hit one sixty one with a two to
fifty nine on base percentage and a one ninety six
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slugging percentage while also fielding nine to eighteen at third.
His most notable offensive season came in nineteen eighty six,
after the Tigers traded their nineteen eighty two first round pick,
the reliever Rich monte Leone to the Mariners to get him.
Monte Leone was selected fifteen picks after Dwyight Gooden, falling
between Franklin Stubbs and Todd Warrel. The Tigers were having
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a very hard time finding a regular third baseman back then.
They had signed Darryl Evans for the nineteen eighty four season,
and although he hit pretty well for them, including having
a forty home run season, at one point he was
really past the age that he was going to play
third base well, and they had traded Howard Johnson. Sparky
Anderson did not believe in Howard Johnson, and so Coles
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was their latest try, and in eighty six he played
every day, mostly at third. He hit two seventy three
with a three thirty three on base in a four
to fifty three slugging percentage, with twenty home runs. Evans
also hit twenty playing first base, as did Lou Whitaker
and Alan Trammel as the double play combination, and so
the Tigers became just the second team, after the nineteen
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forty Red Sox, to have the entire infield put up
matching power numbers. The Red Sox did it first with
Jimmy Fox, Bobby Door, Joe Cronin, and Jim Taber It's
now happened more than ten times, all of them after
nineteen ninety five. If you count catcher Lance Parrish as
an infielder, then the Tigers were the first team to
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have the entire infield hit at least twenty home runs.
That too, has now been duplicated three times by the
nineteen ninety six Oriols, two thousand and five Rangers, and
twenty nineteen Twins. But here's how random all of this is.
The first name that truly surprises me was Butch Henln.
I'm sure there were many more who would be unexpected,
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but his name happened to come up first. And we're
not going to be here long enough to go through
five hundred names. He was a part time catcher, mostly
in the nineteen twenties, playing with the Giants, Phillies, Dodgers,
and White Sox, and he had all of forty home
runs in a seven hundred and forty game career. My
first clue should have been Phillies, because yes, Hemlin did
it in the phone booth sized Baker Bowl. Hey tell
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your children what a phone booth was, or if they
happened to hear me refer to the Sanborn and chase
coffee hour tell them what radio was as well. Henlin
had come up with the Giants, but at mid season
nineteen twenty one, the Phillies had picked him up along
with outfielder Kurtwalker and the thirty grand They needed to
be able to afford underwear without holes in them in
return for the disgruntled outfielder Irish Musal. Actually they were
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more disgruntled with Irish or Emmel than he was with them,
and in fact they got in trouble for slagging him
as he was going out the door. But it was
a good trade for both sides. On September fifteenth, nineteen
twenty two, the Phillies hosted the Cardinals in what turned
out to be a wild ten nine home team victory
Rogers Horns. He hit two homers off of Jimmy Ring
(16:01):
for the visitors, while Henlan hit his off of Bill Shirtle,
a twenty game winner in the future Spitt and Bill
Doak also a twenty game winner, while the third came
off of Lester Elwood Epcel, a four game winner with
a career six fifty six ra. The Philadelphia Inquirer game
story the next day described it this way. Hefty Butch,
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the demon kid catcher showed so many balls out of
the lot that the umpire contracted a sore arm reaching
for additional spheres. In the fourth, the peppery catcher lifted
the old apple into the left field bleachers for number one.
In the seventh, Enland duplicated the drive and followed with
the one which tied things up. In the final result
three homers, which equals the work of Ken Williams this season.
(16:46):
Williams and Henland are the only two to lose three
pills this season, but many have done it in the past.
Ken Williams, of course, was the Saint Louis Brown's outfielder
who was in the process of having the first thirty
thirty season in US Major league history. Alongside the game
story was a separate article that it was probably just
a coincidence that it ran that way, but it seemed
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like a comment the headline home run hitting in major
leagues is becoming farce. I just want to point out,
maybe this seems obvious, that it's not surprising that whereas
two of Hemlen's homers came off of pretty decent pitchers
just having off days, that the third came off of EPCEL,
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because who gives up the most home runs? Not Sandy Kofax,
not Greg Maddox. If they had given up a lot
of home runs, they wouldn't have been who they were. No,
it's pictures like EPCEL who allow the Ruths and Garricks
and Judges and Otani's to fill up the record books
with big shots. Today's reissue goes back to episode ninety
three for a discussion of two players who had the
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nickname fat hung on them. This was sort of kind
of inspired by listening to all the encomiums placed on
Alejandro Kirk by broadcasters during the postseason. Kirk is a
good player, and he's having a very good postseason, but
he's not Yogi bra And that said, he's Yogi Bera's size.
Yogi was five seven. Kirk is five to eight. And
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I wouldn't say he's fat, he's just kind of oval.
And that was all the excuse I needed to revive
this particular show and that particular slander, and it was
a slander. You will note that when you get into
the reissue section of the show, which is just moments
away now that I left in the name of the guest,
I've usually been taking those out, even though we're not
hearing that segment today, and that's because it was Marty Appel.
(18:32):
He had a biography of Casey stengelout that got me
talking about the old professor, and I am loath to
delete any Casey talk at all. As Buddy Holly saying, well,
all right, that's all for me for this reissue episode,
it's also all from Butch Henlen in terms of three
Homer games. You will hear from me periodically as I
paper over the odd thing that I have to patch,
(18:53):
old advertising breaks that no longer fall in the right place,
and I will be back at the end to say well,
at least until tomorrow, when again I'll be back with
a brand new episode. So stand by, and on the
other side, we'll return to old episode forty seven. Eeha.
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Sometimes in life we struggle to bring ourselves to do
the very things that we most need to do. We
can be very self critical about this. We can call
it procrastination. We can call it a lack of will
power or a lack of self discipline. I don't know
if those things are useful. I know I go through
periods like that where there are things I need to do,
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and at least on some level, want to do, but
it's very hard for me to get myself to do them,
or it might require me a kind of ramping up
period of hours wasted hours before I really get moving.
And sometimes those are useful hours because I know creatively
my thoughts are crystallizing in that time, And although it
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feels like I'm putting things off, it's that I really
don't know what to do. But there are other times
I can't claim anything so lofty and I just have
trouble getting started. We tell ourselves that we have infinite
time to do the things that we want to do.
My maternal grandfather died almost a quarter of a century
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ago now, and shortly thereafter I went to my grandmother's
house to help her clean up some of his effects,
and their garage was his work area. He had a
couple of them. He was an engineer and he was
very handy fixing things. So he had a long list
of a play alliances and items of furniture and so
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on that he was going to repair or, for all
I know, combine into something completely new. It was not
beyond him to imagine that he might patch a torn
lawn chair and attach an engine to it and go
rocketing off down the street or into the sky. And
I have little doubt he could have achieved at least
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some of that if life, for some other stuff I
guess hadn't kept getting in the way. Maybe sometimes when
I visited, I got in the way. But now the
opportunity had irrevocably passed, and it was my job to
take all these half finished projects and bring them out
to the curb. And as I showed my grandmother one
half finished project or another, she remarked, not without some humor,
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that man thought he was going to live forever. And
that struck me like lightning. I was in my early
twenties at the time, and whereas I had always had
a dread of mortality, I guess I had never framed
it in terms of piling up such a backlog of
goals that one could never reach the bottom of the stack.
Once you've had that thought, it puts a kind of
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pressure on you, especially if you're me and you keep
adding new books. I want to learn so many things.
I want to learn everything, But when am I going
to find the time to read that? I say to myself, well,
that subject is important I'll make time, and sometimes I do,
but not always. And of course making time means that
(22:28):
something else gets pushed to the bottom of the pile
that seemed just as important the day before. And it's
also problematic to think about things in this way because
you can't drive yourself all the time. You can't be
all work in no play all the time. And so
when you're tired, when you don't feel like tasking your brain,
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when you just want to unwind a little bit, the
question is are you going to finally get around to
reading Titus Andronicus or are you going to watch that
Seinfeld repeat for the fifth time. Once you've committed, it's
an irrevocable decision. You may steal the time back from
some other thing down the road, but that time is
(23:10):
not restored to you. It's just spent. Strangely, I was
thinking about that this week in relationship to something you've
no doubt heard about if you follow the game. The
Atlanta Braves decision to demote Ronald Acunya, one of the
top prospects in baseball, and what was a transparent bid
(23:30):
to mess around with his service time so that they
could save an extra year on arbitration. Or free agency,
as if they couldn't afford it anyway. Occasional guest of
this show, Craig ko Katara, has done a great job
railing against this kind of chicanery, and David Roth, my
regular co host, had a terrific peace on it as
well at Deadspin, which manages to connect the decision to
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the whole malaise that afflicts our society in what I
call the age of you'll take what we give you
and like it. But it occurred to me that whether
you are living for George R. R. Martin to finish
the Game of Throne series, don't hear a lot about
that lately. Maybe people have moved on, or you want
(24:15):
to see the conclusion of the current Star Wars trilogy,
or you just want to see Acunya play in the
major leagues. We're all just a slip and fall in
the bathtub away from missing out all together, and that
every day that Acunya is down, the odds of that
happening grow larger. I realize this is true of everything
all the time, but it brought it home to me.
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And when I start thinking of issues like that, I
not only have the same fears that everyone else has.
But I think again of what my grandmother said, that
man thought he would live forever, and of all the
things that are undone that I want to do. And
then with that in mind, I go ahead and I
do nothing, or often do nothing. And it only provides
(25:01):
so much sucker to say, like pomp by the sailor,
I am what I am, and that's all that I am,
and just accept one's old weakness. There was an outfielder
on the Tigers in the nineteen twenties and thirties. His
name was Bob Fathergill. Given the very light lower boundary
of one thousand plate appearances, I know you know that
(25:22):
the all time leader in batting average for the Tigers
was Ty Cobb. He hit three sixty eight during his
stay there. Number two was Harry Hollman, who won three
or four batting titles and hit four hundred. One year
he hit three forty two. But number three was Bob Fathergill,
he hit three thirty seven in two thousand, six hundred
(25:44):
and ninety three played appearances. Despite his obvious hitting ability,
the name Bob Fathergill may not ring a bell because
he's more commonly listed under the name Fat's father. Gill.
I'm not going to call him that because he didn't
like to be called that. To him, he was Bob.
He was also to him and everybody else five foot
ten and officially two hundred and thirty pounds. That I
(26:07):
promise you is not true. You can look at any picture.
He was, as Captain B. Fheart once said repeatedly on
trout mask replica, large and bulbous to my eye. He
was proportioned a bit like C. C. Sabbathia, just at
a reduced scale because he was almost a foot shorter.
But whatever his dimensions, the man could hit. In his
(26:27):
best season of nineteen twenty seven, he hit three p
fifty nine in one hundred and forty three games, hit
thirty eight doubles, nine triples, nine home runs, drove in
one hundred and fourteen runs. I hate having to recite stats.
They are the death of entertaining listening. But sometimes there's
no other way to describe a player. The thing is
he didn't have much of a career. You haven't heard
of him, even though he was a three twenty five
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lifetime hitter overall, because he had a hard time getting
into the lineup and staying in the lineup. Part of
that was a problem of timing, an aspect of his
career that was not at all his fault. When he
first came up, the Tigers outfield was packed, and it
mostly stayed packed in his first seasons. They still had
Cobb and Holman, who we've already established were among the
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best hitters for average of all time, and the third
outfielder was Bobby Feach, who wasn't quite of that quality.
He was a three to ten career hitter, but was
pretty clearly a haul of very good kind of guy
who at his best combined high averages with a lot
of extra base hits. And once he was gone, they
moved in Heinemanush, another future Hall of Famer, who hit
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three point thirty for his career, and then they came
up with John Stone, another three ten career hitter, and
then g Walker, who had speed and defense and at
his best in the mid thirties was a three twenty
guy every year and as good a hitter as father
Gill was. A crowded outfield was more of a problem
for him than it would have been for another player,
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because his weight pretty much limited him to left field.
You can't have a five to ten two hundred and
fifty years two hundred and sixty pound guy in center field,
and you really can't have him in right field either,
because every hit into the corner is going to be
a triple. The last thing I want to do is
echo all the people who mocked Bob for his weight
(28:13):
during his life, but even the newspapers describe him as waddling.
Waddling is not conducive to good outfield defense. He took
endless grief for this, both professionally and at the place
where the professional intersects with the personal. There are many
stories of players trying to get Father Gill's goat by
(28:35):
mocking his weight on the field. There is one that
Leo Durocher told over and over again. And Leo lied
about a lot of things, but you can trace the
game that he's talking about to the newspapers and the
box scores, and although the incident isn't confirmed exactly by them,
the contours are close enough that it seems like it's
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real that in a Yankees type game that was about
to be called after seven for darkness, the Tigers were
batting with runners on, Father Gil was either going to
drive in the winning run or be the last batter,
and in order to shake him up, Leo du Rocher
came running in from second base, yelling time time, the
(29:18):
tigers are batting out of order. And everybody said, what
are you talking about. That's father Gil. He's been batting
third all day and he's batting third now. And Leo said, oh,
I'm sorry, I thought they had sent two men up
to the plate at once brush that joke. Supposedly, Father
Gill was so unnerved by this that he struck out,
which he very rarely did, and then tried to cream
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Leo with the bat, but of course Leo was too
fast for him. Today, we know that the causes of
obesity come in many flavors. There's lifestyle, diet, exercise, even genetics.
But none of that is to say that Father Gil
bore no responsibility for his conditioning. He was what they
used to call a trencherman. He liked to eat, he
liked to drink a lot of beer, and yet he
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knew the effect that those things were having on his career.
Every spring they made a show of putting him in
rubber suits and having him run extra laps. This was
a way of making fun of him too. In addition
to trying to get him into shape, and yet he
did not or could not or would not change. As
a result, he couldn't compete with all those other guys
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that I named. As good a hitter as he was,
he would sit. And there is only one season in
his whole career, which lasted twelve years, where he played
anything like a full campaign. And as happens to all
limited players, as soon as the Tigers had other options,
and they had the firstest, barest hint that he might
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be slipping off of that three point fifty three sixty
batting average peak, he was con They didn't even bother
to trade him. They just put him on waivers. And
even then you might say, well, he was thirty five.
A lot of ballplayers go home at thirty five. That's
a good run, and I suppose that's true, but you
can't help the feeling that there should have been more,
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not necessarily later, not at thirty five, that's hard for
the best of players, but earlier, when he could have
helped himself, when he could have fought through that crowded
outfield by giving the Tigers another image for himself beyond
blimp like and that was his teammate's description, not mine,
But I think that Bob, like so many of us,
(31:23):
thought there's time to do it tomorrow. There's one more
beer and one more burger, looking very attractive today, and
there's dieting and jogging and the things that I gotta do,
whatever they are, those will wait because there's time. And
then there's this. He stayed in Detroit after his retirement,
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went to work for the Ford Motor Company, but the
weight was still a problem. He must have been hypertensive
as hell. There was one stroke that he survived, but
a second one hit him on March twentieth, nineteen thirty eight,
not quite five years after his career had ended. That
was the end of Bob father Gil. He was forty
(32:06):
years old. Harry Holman was one of his close friends
on the team, and Holman used to kid him a lot.
Bob was such a friendly, popular guy. He was actually
known as the people's choice in Detroit for many years,
and after games, any fan could go up to him
in a hotel lobby. There used to be a whole
art of lobby sitting for ball players, and Bob would
show off his swing and talk about what a great
(32:28):
hitter he was. And Holman would kid him that he
got most of his hits in hotel lobbies. I don't
know if Holman also pointed out that he did much
of his eating in hotel restaurants, or that he did
far too much of his playing on the bench. Again,
some of us figure will live forever, And whether it's
taking off wade or getting that lawn chair hitched to
(32:50):
that rocket engine, we can always get to it tomorrow.
There's always something more compelling, more interesting, more important. And hell,
we're only human, right, Just ask Bob Fathergill. He's right
over there on the periphery of your vision, just out
of view, a pale and hungry ghost, pointing a finger
(33:10):
that bulges like a sausage casing and saying, work now,
for the night comes when no man can work. I'm
Stephen Goldman, and this is the Infinite Inning Baseball Podcast. Hell, hell,
(34:02):
there it is later then you thing, and so your
(34:22):
time has come. You had been a good person, and
so you were rive in due time. Before the pearly gates.
The gatekeeper wears a green eyeshade and he checks over
your paperwork with care. Well, well that was very good, Yes,
that was a good moment. Yes, yes, Charity, yes, yes,
(34:43):
kindness yes, gave hope to others, yes, all very positive.
You can't come in, but he says, handing you a
sheaf of blank papers, there are a few things we
need you to do first. Specifically, we need a little
more content around here. It is heaven, after all, but
people still need to be entertained, don't they. They need
things to read. And so you were a writer in life,
(35:07):
and we'd like to ask you if it's not too
much to just write seven or eight or ten stories
before you come in, so that the people who are
already inside can be uplifted by them, just as you
uplifted people down below. Well, sure, you say, But where
(35:29):
am I supposed to stay during the time that I'm
working on these These are are going to take some time?
Uh oh, well, right out here on this cloud, it's
very comfortable. Do people get hungry up here? Yes, yes
they do. Well, what am I supposed to eat? Well,
there's kind of a coffee bar, a Starbucks kind of
(35:52):
thing just over on the next cloud. You can go there.
Do they charge money? Yes, yes, I'm afraid they do. Well.
This gown sort of thing that you have me in it?
It doesn't seem to have any pockets. My wallet seems
to be back in my other life. So how do
I pay for them? Are you going to compensate me
(36:14):
for writing these stories? Are you going to give me money? Money?
This is heaven. We're a sort of a utopian commune.
We have no concept of money. No, I'm afraid you're
on your own for that. But how am I supposed
to survive? Well, that's really not our responsibility. We're giving
you an opportunity here. You see an exposure to the
(36:37):
great audience that we have behind the gates. It's a
very large and select audience. And if you do well
with them, why the sky's the limit for you? Oh boy,
pardon the pun. Write the stories, and if you can
just hang on for seven or eight or nine thousand years, well,
reevaluate your case and perhaps admit you then can be
(37:00):
on staff. Staff doesn't need to eat. And you realize
that John Milton, who is conspicuously absent here on the cloud,
was correct. Tis better to reign in hell than serve
in heaven, and better to write nothing at all than
to write for free, And better than both is to
listen to episode forty seven, The Wobblies used to have
a song You'll get pie in the sky when you die,
(37:23):
but that was pure supposition. Welcome back to the show today.
I am joined by Marty Appel, author of many books,
most recently Casey Stangele Baseball's Greatest Character, which is the
latest of many biographies of the old professor, among them
(37:44):
my own Forging Genius. But whereas Forging Genius was focused
on Casey's pre Yankees managerial career, Marty's book takes in
the whole mcgilla. And I'm pleased to note that my
own book appears in the bibliography, So some element meant
of my own contribution is carried on in this one.
And that's a good feeling, as I allude to in
(38:05):
our discussion, or at least I think I do. I'll
explain that in a minute. There are many biographical subjects
who recur over and over again. Statistically, I think Abraham
Lincoln has had more written about him than any human
being to walk the earth other than Jesus Christ. Here
in our country, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Franklin Roosevelt. There
(38:25):
are a whole lot of Richard Nixon books, and some
of them have something new to offer, and some of
them are just recapitulations, and so as reader you have
to be discerning. But there are good reasons to go
back to them, and the reasons vary depending on who
you're talking about. But each story has something valuable to
teach us that is worth restating every once in a
(38:49):
while so a new generation can get hold of it.
Not all of us haunt the used bookstores or the libraries,
or even the new bookstores, and these things just need
to get recirculated in the culture so that they get
some coverage, some discussion with Casey. There are two aspects
of it. One is, as Marty's subtitle suggests, he was
(39:11):
a great character. The bigger part, I think was his indefatigability,
which is to say that he got knocked back a
number of times because of the circumstances that he got
to manage in. And I often wonder when you have
a manager who takes over a horrible team and that
team goes sixty to one hundred and two and he
(39:32):
gets canned, that manager may never get another chance, and
yet it's not all on him. Let me use Alan
Trammell as an example. In two thousand and three, Alan
Trammell's Detroit Tigers, his first year as a major league manager,
went forty three and one hundred and nineteen. They were
one of the worst teams of all time. Casey could
not have saved that team. Connie matt could not have,
(39:52):
Joe McCarthy could not have Tony Luissa or a Weaver.
Any manager in the Hall of Fame you care to
name would not have prove that team. And more than that,
even in this modern age with free agency and other
ways of jump starting a club, that is not the
kind of team that's going to fix itself very quickly.
And so tramill got two more years, and he lost
(40:13):
ninety games both times. Other than an interim stint in Arizona,
he has had no other opportunity to manage, and maybe
he hasn't wanted it. Maybe he's happier being a coach.
Maybe if you go forty three to one nineteen you
have PTSD. I don't really know. I haven't asked him.
I'd like to, But the bigger point is, obviously, had
(40:33):
he gone one hundred and nineteen and forty three instead,
he'd likely still be working. I don't know whether he
would be a good manager in that case. I don't
know if he was a bad one. I don't know
if he was part of the problem with the Detroit Tigers.
I just know he was irrelevant. Casey, when he was
about the age that Trammell started managing, got a Brooklyn
Dodgers team that was broke, that the bank had cut off,
(40:57):
that the National League had to intervene to restructure, and
had some good players, had some interesting players. It was
not a forty three to one hundred and nineteen team.
It was a team that, if everything broke right, might
have had a five hundred season somewhere, but there was
no helping it. And then from there he went to
the Boston Braves, who were actually worse off. And as
(41:19):
we'll discuss in the interview, Casey had his own sources
of money by that point, and at times he was
advancing the Braves money out of his pocket to keep
the franchise afloat. That's how bad they were. But not
everybody knew that. And I do think that by the
time he got done with the Braves, he was phoning
it in a little bit, because, let's face it, if
(41:40):
you're paying to keep your team going as a manager,
it's probably hard to keep your interest up, and so,
like Alan Tramble, there was every reason that he not
be given another shot, because people just take the record
at face value and say why bother? And I wonder
how many Casey stengeles we might have been deprived of
in that way. The interview with Marty is a little
(42:02):
bit shorter than the typical interview I do here, in
part because there were some technical problems at the beginning,
and I actually cut off his first answer, which was
really just hey, how you do. I'm glad to be here,
And then because you just didn't have time to do
the typical hour that I do, and that's fine, so
I'll let you off the hook a bit early this week. Nevertheless,
I hope you enjoy this discussion about this important figure
(42:25):
in American history, not just baseball history. He really is
an example of resiliency and all the ways that a
person can bounce back from adversity and keep believing in
themselves and try again. Casey once summed himself up this way,
don't give up. Tomorrow is just another day, and that's myself.
(42:48):
Sure it's in Stangalese, but it's something we can all
understand and aspire to. Today might not have gone my way,
but I'm the man who is tomorrow. Tomorrow belongs to me.
Before I roll, Marty in a few words about another
player who happened to go by the name Fat. I
(43:09):
didn't intend that to be a theme today. Just a
coincidence that I was attracted to two stories about players
with that nickname. This one is a pitcher, a knuckleballer,
Fat Freddie Fitzsimmons. In fairness to all involved, I should
say that Fat Freddy was more stocky Freddie Fitzsimmons, especially
(43:29):
compared to Bob father Gill, who was as wide as
he was high. You know, there's a World War II
song with that theme. It's called Mister five by five
And as the kids say it slaps. Do they say that?
I've never heard my kids say it. Maybe you'll say
it about our next discussion, which will commence right after
this brief intermission. Freddy Fitzsimmons was a really good pitcher
(44:05):
for a long time. Mostly he wasn't a great pitcher,
not in your miss Hall of Famer or anything, just
a solid third starter for almost twenty seasons. He had
a three point five to one ERA pitching from nineteen
twenty five through nineteen forty three, and for that period,
that's a really strong era because the twenties and thirties
were a really high offense period. For the most part,
(44:27):
the National League calmed down a bit faster than the
American League did in the thirties, but still he was
from California, but he spent his whole career in New
York with the Giants and Dodgers. One of my favorite
pitching lines of all time was Ted lyons Sunday starter
season of nineteen forty two. He was forty one years old.
He made twenty starts, completed all twenty, led the al
(44:47):
and Era at two point one zero, went fourteen and six,
and had a seven hundred winning percentage. Fitzimmons had one
of those seasons two at thirty eight years old in
nineteen forty. Even though he was a knuckleballer, his arm
tended to get sore. He had all kinds of physical problems.
He made eighteen starts, he completed eleven, pitched four shoutouts,
saved a game, had a two point eight one ERA
(45:08):
and a sixteen and two record, which meant that he
led the National League in winning percentage. And I know
we sabermetric types are not supposed to put too much
stock in one lost record, and I don't, but still
sixteen and two is pretty cool. And for the most part,
a pitcher with a sixteen and two record and a
two point eight one ERA he earned the record, So
it's not like it's an unreasonable shorthand for quality here.
(45:31):
As I said before the break, he was called fat,
but he was more stumpy. He was five eleven, which,
even then for a pitcher, was a little bit short.
Pitchers tend to run tall, even at times when the
average American, the average player even is not that tall.
That's not the part I want to talk about. This
is not like Bob Fathergill's story, where I have a
kind of a moral that I want to teach. Well,
(45:52):
there is a moral, but it's a kind of small one.
I useful one, but a small one. I want to
talk about two games that Freddy fitz Simmons pitched and
the fact that he never won a World Series game
despite several tries. On September fifth, nineteen thirty one, the
Dodgers were at the Giants. He was pitching for the Giants.
Fitz Simmons had a one hit shutout. Going through five.
(46:15):
He had a four run lead, in part because he
himself hit a two run home run. The Dodgers broke
up the shutout in the sixth, but still, as we
go to the seventh, Freddy was having a very good
day and then all at once he wasn't. Giants pitcher
fred Himak came up in that inning, two outs in fact,
and I don't know what Freddy threw him exactly, but
(46:38):
whatever it was, he wasn't a strikeout pitcher. Even then.
He struck out about two and a half per nine
innings if that. And Himak smashed the ball up the middle.
It was a grounder, but somehow it took a high
velocity hop and it nailed Freddy somewhere in the stomach
or in the ribs, or where the ribs meet the stomach.
It's not clear from the different counts. However, he went down.
(47:03):
He was knocked to his knees. All the air is
out of him, and from that moment on he was unconscious.
But Freddy had a great reputation as a fielder, and
his testimony to that. He picked up the ball and
completed the play and then fell on his face. He
had no memory of doing any of this. The trainer
(47:24):
comes out, Both teams surround the mound, smelling salt are administered.
Freddie wakes up. They pat him on the head, They
hand him a bat, and they say, you're leading off
the bottom of the seventh, Go get him, Tiger. Now,
is Freddie really awake at that point? Was he concussed?
It seems unlikely that you would get a concussion from
being hit in the stomach by a baseball, But the
(47:45):
man was unconscious. The man did fall down, so something
was going on there. So he goes up to the plate.
Himak is out of the game. Now, back in that
period of baseball, they would let pitchers hit and then
replace them rather than pinch hitting for them. I mean,
they did the other thing too, but managers don't seem
to have always been as on top of things as
they were, And of course the gap between the average
(48:06):
hitter and the good hitting pitcher was not as extreme
as it might be now. So there's Freddy at the plate,
and if we don't know if he was concussed before
the bat, we can be pretty sure that he was
after because Giants reliever Cyn Moore throws a high and
tight fastball, and Fitzsimmons did have enough presence of mind
(48:27):
to try to duck. But again, some days your luck
has just turned. One minute you're pitching a shout out,
the next there's a fastball crashing into the left side
of your jaw. Fitzimmons goes down in a heap, and
for the second time in the space of about five minutes,
he is unconscious. And I defy you in all the
annals of baseball history to find too many more players
(48:50):
who have been knocked unconscious twice in the space of
the same inning, in the same game. Well, they get
the smelling salts all again. They wake him up, but
he has trouble standing. He needs help getting off the field,
and he collapses again when he reaches the clubhouse. So no,
this time, his day is over. The reported diagnosis was
(49:12):
a ruptured blood vessel in the head, which sounds like
an aneurysm, but it was probably more like a bruise.
He missed about eight days, not the rest of his life.
He missed only about one start, so I guess he
was okay. A minor note on that game is that
Giants manager John McGrath brought in Carl Hubble to finish it.
For fitz Simmons, he picked up the save, which is
(49:33):
a lot like bringing in Clayton Kershaw to finish it.
A bigger point is that sometimes you duck fate, but
it makes a second pass with the exact same role
of the great twenty sided die in the sky. Now
we skip forward a bunch of years. Even though Fitzsimmons
had that great year in nineteen forty, even though he
was a knuckleballer, by late in his career he was
just a wreck. He really had a hard time getting
(49:53):
and staying on the mound. In nineteen forty one, he
didn't appear in a game until late May, and he
only through eighty two point two innings all year. Still,
they were good innings. So when the Dodgers won the NL,
pennant manager Leo Durocher, there's Leo again. He keeps coming up,
tabs him to start Game three against the Yankees at Brooklyn. Again,
(50:13):
that sounds weird. A guy who only threw eighty two
innings all year, you're gonna put him in a World Series? Well,
the Dodgers didn't really have that much of a rotation
that year. It was kind of a patchwork. It was
a really veteran team. Four of the five main starters
were thirty five or older, so starting a sore arm
thirty nine year old was not unusual for them. Fitzimmons
opponent for the Yankees was Marius Russo, a great baseball
(50:36):
name not well remembered now, but he was a lefty
who got in a few good years before a combination
of arm problems in Hitler ended his career very quickly
in the game, both of them are brilliant for seven innings.
There are four future Hall of famers in the Yankees lineup,
Joe Demaggio, Bill Dickey, Joe Gordon, Phil Erzuto. Three in
the Dodgers lineup, Pee Wee Rees, Billy Herman, Joe Medwick.
(50:58):
But the game was a scoreless time Hi heading to
the top of the seventh, Fitzimmons takes the mound. He
gets two out sandwiched around a walk, and that brought
up his bat Noir opposing pictures. This time, there's no grounder.
Russo hits a hard liner up the middle, which catches
Fitzimmons right on the left knee. He hits it so hard,
(51:19):
in fact, that the ball rebounded way up in the air,
as high as a pop up, some accounts say, and
pee Wee Reese got under it and caught it. People
were rather confused about what had happened, at least those
in the stands, but the umpires had the presence of
mind to note that the ball had never touched the ground.
It had just gone zap off. The bat rebounded off
of Fitzsimmons, hung up in the air for I don't
(51:42):
know ten or fifteen minutes, and then pee Wee Reese
caught it for the out inning over, Also Fitzimmons' career over.
Once again. He had to be helped off the field.
You can see the pictures on one side of him
as coach Chuck dressing and on the other side another
infinite inner friend, Cookie Lavijetto, and they took him to
(52:03):
the hospital. He had suffered incredibly enough of bad bruise.
I assume a very bad bruise, but no fracture, he said.
I guess I should have learned a duck long ago.
When I first started pitching. They told me all they
can do is bruise you. But this is a bit
more than a bruise, and maybe now I'm too old
to play any other way. In fact, he was too
(52:24):
old to play any other way. He was too old
to play, especially on a bad knee. It never did respond,
and one wonders if the diagnostics available at the time
X rays and probing things with fingers missed a more
subtle injury that our better machines would have picked up today.
He tried to come back, but between his sore arm
and his knee, it was over. Midway through the nineteen
(52:46):
forty three season, he retired to become manager of the
Philadelphia Phillies. He won two hundred and seventeen Major League games,
but was for four in World Series attempts, And within
that for four was a game he pitched decent against
the Senators, but the Senators shut out the Giants, and
this game, in which the opposing pitcher tried to kill him.
(53:07):
I mentioned before that Freddy was supposed to be a
very good fielder despite his girth. He had a wind
up that makes that sound even more unlikely, because he
completely turned his back to the batter. And yet maybe
because of that, there are more instances than I've told
you about of batters pounding the ball off his person.
(53:27):
Regarding this, he said, that's what you get for being
a good fielding pitcher. I've been hit everywhere in the throat,
on the wrist and all over. That strikes me as
a strange statement, because that's what you get for not
being a very good fielding pitcher. Fitzimmons, who is supposed
to be shockingly agile, kind of like one of those
hippos in Fantasia, just gets peppered with baseball. He's Charlie
(53:51):
Brown out there being undressed by line drives. Like I said,
there's no huge moral here. If there is one, it's
that there is no incongruity in what fits him, and
said that he was a good fielding pitcher, and somehow
the universe and all its unfairness selected him to be
barraged by more than his share of base boss and
perhaps more than that for some of us at the
(54:14):
turning points of our lives, in our World Series games,
in the midst of our shutouts and one hitters and
so forth, the universe paints a bullseye on us and
uses us for target practice. And if we're lucky, really lucky,
after that, we get to go manage the phillies, which
is often even worse. This life of ours is perplexing
(54:39):
and offers some very strange incentives, rewards and punishments. We'll
take our second and last. You know, I accidentally chopped
off the tail end of the episode when I was
remastering the old stuff to the extent that I remaster it,
(55:00):
and we're running so far behind that I think I'm
just going to freestyle this section as ever. Should you
wish to follow me, you can do so on social
media at Stevengoldman dot bskuid dot social and there's a
Facebook group Barnacle like it clings. Simply go to Facebook
search on Infinite Inning. Bang, you're there. Should you wish
(55:20):
to support the show, and I very much hope you do,
please visit patreon dot com slash the Infinite Inning. Oh
and I left off. If you want to write us,
by which I mean me, simply go to Infinite Inning
at gmail dot com. Our theme song, which you are
hearing now and have been listening to throughout the episode,
was a co composition of doctor Rick Mooring and myself,
(55:41):
And since I lopped off what he said at the
end of this episode, I really don't know, so I
asked him, and he wasn't prepared to tell me anything new.
He simply said, make make something up, don't don't just
leave it like I didn't say anything. Well, that's what
he said. It's the best I can do. Well, that's
all for me for this reissue episode, however lame it is.
(56:03):
As I've said a couple of times already, I will
be back in just a brief twenty four hours or
so from now with a new episode number three, p.
Fifty one in the series, and maybe we'll have a
new World Series champion to talk about. And it's not
that I'm rooting for one side or the other. I'm
rooting for seven games, so I kind of hope not
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