Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1536: Three Days at the Ballpark

Episode Date: May 1, 2020

Facing the prospect of a season without fans in the stands, Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley console themselves and fight baseball withdrawal by revisiting classic accounts of going to games. The authors of three revered books based on single games—Arnold Hano, the author of A Day in the Bleachers (1955), Dan Okrent, the author of […]

Carol started laughing when the other people in right field yelled, Left field sucks! Left field sucks! Jenny bought some Cracker Jack and got a water-soluble tattoo of a bumblebee. Put it on her knee. Carol sighed, this game is dull Then looked around the stands for her ideal man She stared at a well-tanned, blonde-haired fella As Pete Rose stole home plate to tie the score

Three straight singles and the pitcher packing Then Jenny noticed her high scoring was gone For nine minutes all of a 13-throw search Hello and welcome to episode 1536 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of Fangraphs, and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I'm doing very well, because this is one of those days when I'm really happy to have this show because it gives us the excuse to talk to people whose work has brought us a lot of joy and to have them talk to each other.

So we've got a fun conversation planned for today. We do. We have a fun conversation. We will spend some of that conversation being wistful about baseball yes and i i was doing some writing i know shocking kind of events and development that has not made itself known in quite a while and as uh in the course of that i had occasion to go back and watch part of like just like the least consequential parts i want to be very clear the least consequential parts of the red sox yankees series in london last summer and i don't know if you recall the the first game of that series that they played where yes that was a wild series yeah they scored roughly 7 000 runs uh between them and uh the game in question, I recall it starting when I was eating breakfast

because, you know, funny time zones and I live in Pacific time. And I had time and occasion to eat breakfast and then go to the gym and then meet a friend for beer and some snacks after the gym. And the game was still going on. The game just followed me through that whole day.

And I remembered that experience of it. And I was listening to all the goofy commentary and ins and outs, bumpers in and out that they were doing during that to remind us that England has a queen and also they play cricket. They say words funny. There are lots of U's next to O's.

We don't know why. And gosh, I just miss baseball so hard. Yeah. I just really do. And I know why we can't have it. And that's the right choice. But man, it would be good to mark time in a way that's comprehensible to my brain.

So boy. I agree. Yeah, it's great to have CPBL and KBO and all the other varieties of baseball. But the one that we were weaned on the one that we're used to with all the people that we know, and the teams we're used to rooting for, we missed that one. And as much as we miss watching baseball from afar, we also miss going to games and that communal experience. It's very easy to mock people waxing poetic about the green of the grass and the crack of the bat. And yes, those things are kind of cliches, but they're kind of cliches for a reason.

Those things are pretty cool and you miss them when they're taken away. And so we thought that we would devote this episode to remembering what it's like to go to games via three books about going to a game. So this just seems like the perfect comfort that we can offer right now on a day that the Little League World Series was canceled. I mean, what's more depressing than that? There's no Little League. That's the saddest possible headline. But there is a genre of baseball book that is devoted to the idea of going to a single game and writing about that single game in some amount of depth. And it's been done in a few different ways and from a few different

perspectives. But the most notable entries in this genre are A Day in the Bleachers, which came out in 1955, and that's by Arnold Haino. And then in 1985, Dan Okrent published Nine Innings. And in 2018, Rob Neier published Powerball. And in all of these books, the author goes to a game, writes about going to a game, writes about all the players in that game, all the experiences in that game, and makes some broader observations about baseball and life and human nature and why we care about sports and how the game has evolved over time. And I have had a chance and a reason because of this episode to go back and revisit those books. And we've both been reading A Day in the Bleachers over the past week. And it really is nice to at least remember what it was like and sort of bittersweet, but it brings you back to that moment. And hopefully that moment will be back

for us sometime soon. But for today, we wanted to get all three of those authors together on this call and have them tell us about the experience of writing those books and talk to each other about their experiences. And I thought we had a really great conversation that I think we all enjoyed. Yeah, I agree. It was lovely. So we will get right to it. Let's bring in our guests. Left-hander Vic Wirtz up and left-hander Don Little ready to go. Here's the pitch to Wirtz.

There's a long drive to deep, deep center field. Mays back to the wall. Makes an incredible catch. Tons of players in him. What a catch by Willie Mays. There's a long drive way back in center field, way back, back. All right. We are joined now by three prolific writers who have authored about 40 books between them, although we are focusing on just three of those books today, each of which focuses on a single game.

So I will introduce our guests in order of seniority. First, we have Arnold Haino, a longtime editor and freelance sports writer, novelist, and biographer who has produced dozens of books, including, of course, A Day in the Bleachers, his classic account of Game 1 of the 1954 World Series. Arnold, thank you for joining us. You're perfectly welcome. Thank you. And next we have Dan Okrent, another longtime, although slightly less longtime, editor, author, and historian who served as the first public editor of the New York Times and is well known in baseball circles for inventing rotisserie league baseball and helping bring Bill James to national attention and appearing in Ken Burns' Baseball. He also wrote Nine Innings, a book

about a June 10th, 1982 game between the Brewers and Orioles. Hello, Dan. Hi, how are you today, Ben? Doing well. And last, we welcome Rob Neyer, formerly of ESPN and other outlets and currently the host of the Sabercast and the commissioner of the West Coast League, which I believe has not yet canceled its season. Rob is the author or co-author of seven baseball books, including Powerball, about a September 8th, 2017 game between the A's and the Astros. Hello again, Rob.

Hello. And it's, as always, a thrill to speak to you and Meg. Thanks for having me. Well, we're very happy to have all of you together. And Rob, I'll start with you, because your book is the most recent arrival, and you wrote it with the other two somewhat in mind. So Powerball came out a little more than 30 years after Nine Innings, which itself came out 30 years after A Day in the Bleachers. But all three are great. And I wonder why you think this genre has such enduring appeal and what did you want to emulate about Arnold and Dan's books or do differently from them? Well, I could go on for the entire podcast just answering those two questions, which probably would be somewhat rude. So I won't. I will say that I can literally remember exactly where and approximately when I first purchased both Nine Innings

and The Day in the Bleachers, and I devoured both books immediately. So they have meant a great deal to me for, and by the way, when I say when, we're talking the mid to late 1980s. So these books have both been a part of me for a long time. When my editor came to me and said he wanted to do Powerball, of course, my thoughts immediately turned to A Day in the Bleachers and Nine Innings because I knew them

so well. And I love the idea of being a part of that tradition. And they endure because it's useful every so often for people to get a snapshot of what baseball is actually like, the mechanics of the game at any particular point. Now, you don't want to do it every year because the mechanics don't change enough. But every 20 or 30 years, absolutely, the mechanics of the game. It's the same game, but the way it's played changes, the way we talk about it, write about it changes. So that was a thrill. One thing I couldn't do was reread the books because I realized that my book, because of the timing of the thing and what my editor was looking for, I couldn't emulate precisely either of these books. And I knew that if I read them again,

right when I was starting my book, I would be overwhelmed with feelings of inadequacy. So I just sort of let those sit next to me. They were in a shelf next to me the entire time that I wrote, but I didn't reread them because I knew it wouldn't help me do what I needed to do. And Arnold, you were the pioneer here. And I know you didn't set out to write a book about a game. You went to game one of the 54 World Series as a fan and were inspired to write about it by what you saw. And I wonder if you can tell us what made the concept and tone of your book so unusual at the time and why it didn't immediately find an audience and why a book about a game played long ago has gained a greater audience and a greater appreciation over time.

The time is interesting because the book has now been in print since 1955, and that in itself makes it sort of stand alone, not in something better or worse, but just as old like me. I'm 98 now, and the book is closing in on me. I never thought of it as a possible book until it had been turned down as a possible magazine piece. I thought the New Yorker at that time was doing fairly lengthy pieces by Roger Angel and Ring Rodney Jr. And I thought they might be interested in this.

This was after I had sat with all my notes and everything else. So I brought it over to the New Yorker, and a young man came down, took it from me and I said, I'm going to need it back. And he said, yes, I'll bring it back as soon as they finish with it. And about an hour later, he came back with it and he said,

they like it, but it's not for them. And I thought that was perfectly fair assessment. And I took it home and I said to him, why is it not for them? Why is it hanging around? And then I thought, well, said to him, why is it not for them? Why is it hanging around? And then I thought, well, maybe there's something more to it than that. And the more became a book. And it was just, oh, I don't know. It worked well as a book. It didn't work well as a magazine piece. And so I was happy with it at that point and

gave it to my agent, Sterling Lord, and we proceeded from there. I'm curious how you thought about your depiction of other fans as you were going about writing this. You talk pretty candidly about the Yankees and Dodgers and Phillies fans you've encountered over the course of your experience of baseball to this point, and your opinion of them is unvarnished and not always especially flattering. And I wonder if you worried about how that depiction might make readers perceive your reliability as a narrator, or if you thought that being candid about those perceptions might make you seem more credible because you weren't trying to hide

anything. You're clearly honest about your own fandom in the course of the book. So how did you grapple with that? I don't know that I grappled with it. I think you're making more of it in your own mind than I made it in mine. I saw this thing as a nice day. It began with an argument with my wife and ended up my going home feeling very vindicated. and it ended up my going home feeling very vindicated, and in between there was a ball game. And I don't think I gave much of it the literary thought, as you seem to suggest, or academic thought. It was just, it was a day in the bleachers, me standing on line talking to a fan,

and me sitting next to a couple of guys who were playing the casino and arguing with a woman in a red cap and things like that. It all just fell into my lap. I am a very lucky person. Who else in the world would choose to pick a game in which Willie Mazur made a play that is

considered the highlight, defensive highlight of the entire World Series. That's the kind of luck that I have. I went to a ball game a year or so later, sitting in the mezzanine of the Yankee Stadium on October 8, 1956, and Don Lawson pitches his perfect game. These things just happen to me. So I don't argue back at them and say, yeah, I wonder why I'm doing it. I just let it happen. Fair enough. And when Rob was writing his book about a game that took place in September 2017, he could rewatch the game in high-definition video to his heart's content, I imagine. He could look up the speed and movement of every pitch. He could easily access player

stats and everything written about that team and that game. And Arnold, none of that was really available to you when you were writing. And because you hadn't intended to write a book about the game, all you had initially, as I understand it, was your memory and some notes on a newspaper that you had happened to bring to the game and jotted down some things. So how did you reconstruct everything that had happened and how did you preserve all of the details of the things that you saw? Well, I cheat a little. There'd be a photograph in the newspaper that gave me a new look at Willie Mays making his throw and things like that. And I absorbed all that stuff and just stole it. It all came to me, my notes in the New York Times and my notes in the program. They helped, but mainly I do have a good memory, and at least I did back then, and today I don't have

anything that's good about me. But I can recall seeing Mays making that throw, for instance. He caught the ball, he took a step or two, he whirled, and he threw, and his arm was outstretched. It looked like a longer arm than he possibly could have had. And that stuck with me. It was like a Greek throwing a javelin

in an Olympic game or something like that. And so those pictures became my pictures, and I just stole right and left and used what I saw. But mainly, I relied on my memory. That's why there's some dull pieces in the book, the sixth, seventh innings, things like that, I just almost glossed over. So I highlighted what I saw, and Willie Mays helped me out in that respect.

Dan, unlike Arnold, who went to a World Series game and then wrote a book about it in a few weeks, you chose a regular season game and did extensive research and reporting. So nine innings came out three years after the game you were chronic research and reporting. So nine innings came out three years after the game you were chronicling was played. Why did you decide to go about it that way? And what were some of the challenges of basing a book on a seemingly less consequential contest? Well, that was sort of the idea behind it. I was very well aware of Arnold's book. I had read it years earlier, and then of course, looked at it again as I began on this project. And the notion that I had, I had two notions that would make it different from Arnold's

book. One was, could you do this with an ordinary game? Could you take a typical game rather than one of the most famous games of our era with, of course, probably the most famous fielding play in baseball history. Could you just pick a day and write about that experience, use that as the experience? And then secondarily, unlike Arnold, and I kind of in retrospect, I regret this in a way, I didn't approach it as a fan. As you said, Meg, I spent a year and a half with the two teams that I was writing about before the game was played. And then I talked to all the participants many times afterward to get their

perspectives on what had gone on. And in fact, this led to my stopping writing about baseball. I had been writing about baseball mostly for Sports Illustrated, but a few other places inside Sports Magazine up to that point. But after writing this book, I realized I could no longer be a fan. I had taken something I had loved and I had vocationalized it. And I kind of wished, you know, it would have been great if I could have done it the way that Arnold Haino did it. Well, thank you. That's very sweet. Mine had no history behind it. You had a little history behind yours, so you could have that sort of feeling. I just was a fan and am a fan, and I thought I'd talk about that. The fact that Willie Mays did what he did added to it,

but I think I was going to write that book anyway. Yeah, it certainly reads that way. You pour yourself into the book i try to stay out of my book uh for better or for worse probably for better uh but the very fact of your presence in your book is what brings it to life i think well it it's nice i think it was part of that new journalism where where journalists for some for some time, decided to thrust themselves into the action of the piece they were writing. And here was the case where I totally did that. And so it was part of what was happening then around me.

Bill Hines was writing that kind of stuff. Other people were writing it. And so I just latched on to that style without giving it any thought. It people were writing it. And so I just latched onto that style without giving it any thought. It became natural to me. And one of the challenges of the book about a single game is the problem of play-by-play. You have to describe the action, but you don't want to get too bogged down in saying so-and-so did this and then so-and-so did that. And I'd be interested in hearing how any of you approach that problem of making play-by-play palatable and weaving it into your narrative and your broader observations about baseball.

But Dan, I guess I'll direct that to you. Well, I think I failed at that. My book is an endless digression or an endless series of digressions in which the polite way of saying it, or if I were showing off, would say what you see on the field is the tip of the iceberg, and I was writing about the nine-tenths that you don't see. How did everybody get there? How were strategies developed? What was the history of baseball in Milwaukee?

What in Earl Weaver's career qualified him to win three pennants in a row and such? This was my opportunity as a fan to learn everything I didn't know about baseball, to go deeply into it, to have access to the players and staff and the front office and really get to know it. So the game itself is really, it's a framework or almost an excuse to hang the rest of it on it. So I'm going to tell a story on myself. I'll try to make it brief. I finished the book and turned it into my publisher and my agent at the same time,

and they both liked it very much. And then a couple of friends read it, and my editor and I worked on it some, and it's going through the publishing process, which is both, well, as you know as well, Ben, that Robin, I don't know, it's a long and arduous process. And when the copy editor began to work on it, after two days, he went to my editor, who then called me and said, you left out the bottom of the fifth. you left out the bottom of the fifth and i had gotten i had gotten so lost in what i think is interesting stuff i mean i think the book is pretty good but really i had dug i had gotten so far below that iceberg i was drowning in it i think

and then pulled myself out. It's funny because when you talk about history and things like that, my history was what subway should I take to the ball game? Things like that. Mine was so natural that it seems

it probably was effortless just to do it. The book took me only maybe three weeks to write. And when I finished as a book and I gave it to Sterling Lord, my agent, he was very excited about it and he said he knew exactly who was going to publish it. Hiram Hayden at Crown Books was going to publish it. He knew that and etc., etc.

Hiram Hayden said to us when we met with him, I can't do this book. I don't know how to sell it. Where do I sell it? Being a wise ass, I said, in a bookstore. He was very gentle with me. He said, but where? If I put it in with the sports books,

that's where we publish books that daddies buy for their 14-year-old sons, and this is not that book. And he said, I just cannot sell this book. And so that changed the whole idea that gosh, this is going to be the book that Crown Publishers was going to publish and I'll be famous.

Instead, it went a second round to Thomas Fleming at his publishing house that was famous only because it also published Collier's Magazine. And the editor there said, how do I illustrate this? And I said, gee, I don't know. I'd helped illustrate a book at Bantam Books some years back. I liked the guy who did the illustration.

Should I call him? Yeah, call him. So I called him, and he became the illustrator. It was stuff like that. It was easy, and when I was finished with it all, I was finished with it. This book was now, you was now gone and done. In fact, when it came out the first week of August, Bonnie and I were in a car driving out of New York City for good,

driving to some other place where we would live. We did not know where that was going to be. And so I didn't have the little bit of fame. I must say I appreciate what the editor at the Herald Tribune did. He had read that I was able to call balls and strikes from 500 feet away, and so he went to the game, to a game, and he sat where about I sat, and he found out, yes, you can do that. So that was kind of flattering.

Anyway, I didn't have, since mine was the first, and I was not thinking in those terms, I had nothing to lose. Just play around with it and do it and let it go, which is what I did. Well, I think that Arnold had the luxury of not needing to be particularly digressive. His book was shorter and about a far more interesting game, which I think is one of the reasons why it's endured for as long as it has. I ran into the same issue that I think that Dan did, where the digressions sort of could lead one so far from the actual narrative of the game, however unimportant it was, that it could become awkward.

And I know that when I sent chapters to various people, various friends, before I sent it to my editor, one of my friends said, well, this doesn't really work, but I know how to fix it. And I knew what he meant. What he meant was that he couldn't follow the game action. So I went back through the entire book trying to add little details and make it a little more less awkward. But really, all my book is, is this guy grounded out. Oh, and here's something else I'm thinking about for the next three or four pages. And you have to figure out whatever it is,

50 different ways to make that transition, which was a bit of a challenge, but ultimately you have to do it. I had one break. I had gotten along pretty well with Willie Mays back from the time he came in in 51, writing about him, and he liked that, and so he sort of liked me.

And I was able to ask him, this is actually after the book was published, because I noticed that when Dick Wirtz hit that ball that Mays was going to catch, Mays whirled almost immediately and headed for where he wanted to go. I said to him, I said, how do you do that?

He said, I don't know. He said, I heard the crack of the bat and I knew two things. I knew exactly where that ball was going to end up and I knew I would catch it. And now that made life, I'd already written about it, but that sort of guaranteed something I had written. It was nice to hear it from him.

The instinct of a baseball player and a good baseball player or a good athlete is so far removed from my own life. I mean, to hear the crack of the bat and to know exactly those two things, it's impossible. You can't, that cannot be. But it was, and it was easy for him. So in A Day in the Bleachers, Arnold wrote, It was becoming a terribly long game, played at a dragging pace. The tempo of baseball itself has slowed down. And elsewhere in the book, he mentioned how long players were taking between pitches and wrote,

Ball games last much longer than they did in the old days. Of course, that was a 10-inning World Series game played in 3 hours and 11 minutes, which would seem pretty brisk to us today. In 2019, the average regular season game took 3 hours and 10 minutes to play. It's true that in 54, games had gotten about a half an hour longer compared to when Arnold first started going to games, but it's also true that they've gotten more than another half hour longer since then. And Rob, I'm wondering, uh, how do you think that's affected the spectator experience?

And since we often hear that there's so much great writing about baseball because the game allows for quiet and contemplation and observation, can that slow pace actually be a benefit to a writer? Well, I'm not sure if it's a benefit to a writer. I do think that obviously the chance to have a conversation is greater if there's more time between events. But look, I think you could, there's plenty of time between plays in the NFL as well, plenty. And yet we don't have the same level.

The huddle, the old huddle doesn't exist anymore, but the huddle is like a conference. Right, exactly. And so there's really, I've always sort of thought that was not necessarily why baseball was more interesting to write about. I think it's more the case that interesting people have tended to be baseball fans historically. And also baseball was obviously the sport for many decades.

And it's relatively recently, the 1960s, essentially, that baseball was essentially dethroned, at least in some ways. So, no, I don't think that a four-hour game means we're going to get better baseball writing. That's sort of a logical conclusion won by John. I don't think it's true. I agree. Some of the very best writing goes way back. Good writers write well, and we had some good writers writing about baseball before I was born. before I was born. I think it's also worth pointing out that the extended game today, if we take those pauses or those gaps in the game

where there's no action, they are filled with active scoreboards and music and in some stadiums, waves. All these things that I'm sure all of us in this conversation can't bear. When I go back to the things that I'm sure all of us on this on this in this conversation can't bear. When I go back to the games that I saw as a teenager in the early 1960s, early middle 1960s games that took, you know, an hour and 45 minutes, there was plenty of time to contemplate because there was nothing going on during those contemplative moments. The pause between pitches was all yours. There was nothing interrupting it. And that gave plenty of time for introspection and reflection. games than the games themselves. And so you wrote, when portable television becomes the rage,

grim thought though it may be, they will pack their little sets to the ballparks and glue their eyes to the television screen, quietly cursing the sunlight all around them that is making their reception so dim. Someday we will have ball games played in quiet studios and heavyweight championship prize fights fought before the three officials, the engineers and cameramen, and no one else. And that seems pretty prescient in the age of smartphones and also now social distancing. And I'm wondering if you could take us back to a time before all of that. So you started going to games in 1926, which was before video screens, before transistor radios, before music piped over the PA system, even before beer vendors, because Prohibition was on at that time. So what were you able to hear then that you can't hear now at a ballgame? And how is the experience of going to a game different?

Well, what I miss about the ballg just to watch Travis Jackson throw his rifle shots to Bill Terry before the game and Jojo Moore in left field would be throwing to the plate and they had a batter standing there

and calling balls and strikes on his throws from the outfield to the catcher. All that stuff, I found that stuff fascinating. And when I said to some friend who wanted to take me to a game, an Angels game, I said, let's go early so we can see fielding practice. He didn't say a word to me. There was no fielding practice.

A couple of guys came out, tossed the ball around, but there was no fielding practice, and I miss that. I miss lots of things. I miss seeing a manager like McGraw standing there coaching the third base with his hands on his hips. I miss the involvement of ballplayers and what it was they were doing. It bothers me today that a manager can sit in the dugout and call the next pitch for his pitcher.

I like the game to be returned to the players more than it is. And, you know, I'm rambling now, but there's stuff about the game today that bothers me. The length of it, I have a friend who keeps scorecards of very, very old ballgames. He had a scorecard of a St. Louis Browns doubleheader against the Yankees back when. Each game was decided by a 1-0 score. And each game took about 55 minutes to be played. And the audience was 2,000 people out in St. Louis

to watch the Browns and the Yankees. All that stuff is fascinating. It's part of my history. You can't take away from me that I saw Mel Ott when he was just a kid playing baseball in the major leagues and things of that nature. So I want to think about narrative for a moment. In the game that Arnold wrote about, Cleveland starter Bob Lemon not only pitched into extra innings, but also hit for himself in the top of the 10th with two outs and two on. And I know that Lemon was a very good hitter by pitcher standards, especially earlier in his career.

But it's practically impossible to imagine that same scenario playing out today. But it did allow Arnold to have a consistent character of a pitcher who was present for the entire game, which enabled him to write toward the end. of a pitcher who was present for the entire game, which enabled him to write toward the end. On the mound was a tired, very courageous gentleman who had gone to the limit of his strength and resources and, like other courageous gentlemen, would go a little farther. In the game that you wrote about, Rob, 12 pitchers appeared. And so I'm wondering if, for narrative purposes, would you rather have had a single pitcher who could serve as a protagonist, or did the constant cycling through of pitchers actually give you more material to work with? I'll tell you, the greatest day of pitching in all of baseball in its whole history

took place on July 3rd, 1933. Carl Hubbell went in against Tex Carlton. Each of them had a no-hitter behind them. That game went 18 innings. The Giants won it 1-0 against the relief pitcher, Papa Haynes, I guess his name was, who also pitched a no-hitter. And that was, it turns out, the first game of a doubleheader.

And Roy Palmerly went up against Dizzy Dean in the second game and beat Dean 1-0, slacking out 14 Cardinals in the process. Now, 1-0, 1-0, 27 innings, and the catch of Gus Mancuso caught the entire game for the Giants. Now, these are things that just don't happen

anymore. You know, Nolan Ryan throws 200 pitchers in a game, but nobody today throws 200 pitchers in a game but nobody today pitches 100 pitchers because his arm

is going to fall off at 101. He knows it everybody else knows it so out he comes after

five or six innings and that's a pity. I like the longevity of Hubbell going 18 innings giving up six hits in the 18 innings and didn't walk anybody in the 18 innings.

Stuff like that sticks with me. It has history and it has kind of music. It's beautiful. Well, I would say that I would much rather have had what Dan had, which is a couple of starters and a few relief pitchers because when you've got six or seven or eight or nine pitching changes, the theme of, oh, look how many relief pitchers there are these days, that gets old real fast. So I had a couple of different things to say about each one of the relief pitchers that

entered the game. And I think I hit most of them, but it did get to be really too many. And, you know, I go on and on in the book about how it's not great for the game to have so many pitching changes, especially toward the end of the book. I talk about that a lot, but I wish I wouldn't have had to talk about it because I think it's an unfortunate part of the game today. All I wanted in my game was to get Raleigh Fingers into it. I spent a lot of time with Fingers while I was reporting the book. And he was such an interesting character for so many reasons. And I did have this terrible fear because I was stuck. It had to be that day for reasons we don't need to go into. But I had that game on that particular June 10th had to be the one that I was

writing about, and if the Brewers had really collapsed early or if they were running away with it and there was no fingers, I would have to figure, how the hell do I get this guy into the book? He made it possible for me. Yeah.

Listen, I love relief pitches. I loved Wilhelm and the guy on the on the yankees murphy i think his name was who left he go i i win 20 games because murphy saves me from the seventh inning on so you know that that's stuff. I'm thinking of the guy who pitched that one, well, two-in-one count, pitched to Vic Wertz, and Vic Wertz is that ball. And that guy, that pitcher was out of the game. Somebody once said, well, he probably said to DeRocha on his way out, well, I got my man out.

And so I asked him about that, and he said if I said that, DeRocha would have beaten me to a pulp. I said it to him the following season in spring training, and I was allowed to get away with that as a joke. Right, yeah, done little. Yeah, but really pitching is wonderful. You know, I'm a sucker for the game. The changes are great.

The changes that I don't like are the noise and the music and the scoreboard exploding. And I went to a game, an Angels game. A friend had tickets, season tickets, and Bonnie and I went there to a game. And in the seventh inning, the waiter came up and said, dessert is being served. And so we went out into the hallway where they had a line of desserts.

And this was more important than watching the ballgame, apparently. And to me, that's not so. To me, the game is the game. That's the entertainment. It's not to owe To me, the game is the game, and that's the entertainment. It's not all this other foolish stuff. One thing I admired about Vin Scully, after Jerry Doggett had left, he never broadcast with another man in the booth.

It was always Vin Scully doing it himself. If I could add something about Arnold's absolutely correct notion that the game is the important thing. The very first game that I covered as a journalist was a spring training game in Fort Lauderdale when the Yankees were playing there. And I was in the press, the very small press box. And I guess I can say his name, Maury Allen, very nice guy from the New York Post, was sitting at my right. I was writing for the New York Times Magazine. And Allen couldn't have been nicer to me. He was showing me my right. I was writing for the New York Times Magazine. And Alan couldn't have been nicer to me. You know, he's showing me the ropes. And I was so excited to be there at my, you know, covering a game in the press box. And I, you know, I said to him, man, you have the

luckiest life. You get to spend all this time just, you know, with baseball. You get to, you know, to eat and sleep and live baseball. And he said, yeah, I like everything about it except for the goddamn games. And he got up and walked out. There are people like that. All right. Well, we just have a few more here and then we will let you get on with your days. Arnold, we have access to really great statistics today that tell us things about players from earlier eras that people may not have even realized at the time, but there's still something to be said

for seeing players in person. And you saw so many legendary players that most of us have only ever gotten glimpses of in black and white clips. So, you know, Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio and Jimmy Foxx and Melat, who you mentioned, and Carl Hubble and on and on. And Babe Ruth. Yes, yes. So I want to ask you, what was it like to watch and even meet Babe Ruth? And second, I wonder whether any other great players come to mind who were even more impressive in person than they are when we read about them or only look at their numbers years after the fact.

Well, the one who leaps to my mind was Hack Wilson, who was one of the great hitters in the National League and who approached the magical 60 home runs in one year. I think he had 56, 58, something like that. He was a short, stubby guy. You don't see guys looking like that anymore. I went to a game sitting in the bleachers and watching Hack Wilson being run all over

the field because the Giants were hitting line shots all over the place. And when the game was over, a whole bunch of us kids waited outside and then Hack Wilson and the Cardinals came out and we jeered him and we said,

oh, how'd you like it when Lindstrom hit that ball to your head and blah, blah, blah. And he stood there taking it all, taking it all, taking it all. And finally I went up to him and I said, Hack, will you sign my scorecard? And he stared at me as though he was going to kill me and grabbed my pencil and he signed. And every kid there had Hack Wilson signed his scorecards.

It was just one of those lovely moments with a great ball player in one of his worst days. It was just wonderful. Yeah, and what are your memories of Babe Ruth, who I think you briefly encountered, as you mentioned in the book? Well, he loved us. So we loved him. He loved kids. He just loved kids. And the kids loved him back. we would yell we want the babe we want the babe we knew we couldn't go back in we knew enough about the rules but that's the way we felt we wanted the babe it was just wonderful and then

seeing him pitch the last day of the 1933 season when the Yankees were out of it my father came into the kitchen when my brother and I were doing the dishes and said boys we're going to go to the stadium tomorrow, but Dave is going to pitch. And we saw Dave Bruce pitch.

And I said, he had a home run, and he pitched nine innings, and he beat the Red Sox. So it was all legendary. It was beautiful just to see all that stuff. So when I saw him crossing the street four or five days later, I ran up to him. I said, Dave, I saw you pitch that game.

Yeah, kid. I said, how come you didn't strike out anybody? And he laughed. He said, I wanted those eight palookas behind me to earn their keep. And his wife rolled her eyes.

These things stay with you. It's part of my life, not part of my history. It's part of my life itself. So during national crises like the one that we're facing now, I think baseball gets a sort of grim reality check in terms of its relative importance, but it's also a tremendous source of solace for many. And we're looking forward to baseball's return whenever that ends up being,

but we also have a lot on our minds, whether it's the pandemic or the economy, or in some cases, friends and loved ones who we've lost, or friends and loved ones of those we know who have been lost to this. And Arnold, I hope you'll forgive a personal question, but about 10 years before you wrote A Day in the Bleachers, you lost your brother in World War II, and you saw action in the Pacific yourself. And I'm wondering if baseball was a comfort to you in the immediate aftermath of that experience, or if it took time for your interest in the sport to return? It was even part of my experience. Joe DiMaggio and the

team came to Hawaii when we were in training there and Sam Jones was pitching and Jones struck him out once and DiMaggio single the next time. You know, it was all part of life. I took it upon myself to write about everything that was happening in the outside world while I was in the service. I don't know if any other combat soldier did that. Maybe somebody did. I did it and we published it

with a manuscript newspaper. And talk about this young Stan Musial hitting all these base hits at this age and things like that. So baseball was part of my life. Before a game or after a game when my brother and I would run on the field, I stood in the mound and I was striking out Luke Darrow with my screwballs. It was just wonderful. And lastly, for Dan or anyone else who wants to jump in, we're facing the prospect of a season played without fans in the stands if we see a season at all. And I think we'd all rather have a strange version of baseball than no baseball at all. But

what do you think we would lose without that communal experience of going to games? And what do you most miss about going to games? Well, obviously we would lose that, but we would gain so much more. And I am really hopeful that it becomes possible, even if there are no fans in the stands, and just as long as they don't do fake laugh tracks or applause tracks on it.

My son is a physician. He's a doctor on the front lines during the crisis in Tacoma, Washington. And I went when this began and he was under a great deal of stress, I would be writing to ask him, how is he doing? He's seeing a lot of patients who have it. Is he afraid? How's his family? And he wrote back to me, said, really, that during the day, I can't bear it. The only thing I want you to write to me about is baseball. And that having baseball, as Franklin Roosevelt knew so well

when he wrote the Green Light Letter in 1942, it's an essential thing for us. And having a distraction of that nature at a time of such horror and sorrow, I just miss it terribly, and I'm sure we all do. Well, I would add to that because I've been a little bit frustrated, isn't quite the right word, but I don't quite understand the perspective, which I've seen that we somehow shouldn't be thinking about baseball until everything's great again. Everything's perfect again. Now, granted, I'm biased because I'm the commissioner of a baseball league here in the Pacific Northwest, up in the corner of the country with Dan's son.

But if we can somehow get X number of people into a ballpark in July or August, and they're enjoying life for two and a half, three hours, and we can do it safely, or as safely as possible, safely to the point where people want to do it, why would we not try? I can't quite understand that perspective. I agree with everything you said. Rob, can you tell us a little bit about your decision-making process or how you have gone about trying to figure out how to preserve some semblance of baseball in the league this summer? Well, we look at all the different contingencies. Really, ultimately, I'm not the one making that decision. It's the, it's our 12 teams who are going to make that

decision. And I, you know, there's a chance that different teams will make different decisions, maybe in one county or city it's possible and in one it's not, but there's a great enthusiasm for playing some brand of baseball. And if that means that some of our teams lose some money this summer, well, I think most of them are happy to do that because they do realize that they play an important role in their communities. And they want to be there for not only their fans,

but also the players who come every summer to become better baseball players. There's a whole various constituencies that have a real, a truly deep interest in us playing baseball every summer. And if we can somehow do that, again, in a way that's safe

and provide basically the experience that we're used to providing, then everyone wants to do it. So all we can do at this point is wait for guidance from all the authorities and the epidemiologists and all those people. But we're still full speed ahead to have a season whenever that might happen. All right. Well, we wish you luck with that. And we're so happy to have had

all of you on here together. I've read so much of your work and admired so much of your work. And some of you have admired the work of others of you. And so it was really great to get you together and have you talk to us and to each other. So thanks so much for your time. Yeah, thank you. Oh, this has been a thrill. Thank you. And thank you too. All right. Well, thanks so much to Arnold and Dan and Rob. That was just a joy for me and I hope for you. I just want to read a brief passage from A Day in the Bleachers that I think

gets at what we all love about watching and going to games. This is in the fourth inning, right after Arnold wrote the phrase, a walk is as good as a hit, which inspired our discussion on the podcast earlier this week. He continues, The next batter was Dobie. The woman in the red hat, a Dodger fan rooting against the hated Giants, although I rooted for the Dodgers against the Yankees in 1953, yelled, Hit it where you live, Larry. I knew that Dobie hailed from Patterson, New Jersey,

and my calculations were that Patterson was in foul territory, almost directly behind the plate. I did not bother to mention this to her because I have long ago ceased trying to reason with Dodger fans. A man directly behind me, however, said, Hit the light tower in right field, Larry. And I felt I had to retort to this. I said, Hit the light tower in right field, Larry. And I felt I had to retort to this. I said, hit the light tower at second base, Larry. I do not pretend that there is any sparkling wit in any of this byplay, but it is all part of the struggle wherein we fans carry invisible bats and take invisible hitches at our belts, spit on our hands, and chew huge wads of tobacco. Though we are patently the watchers, we are really the participants, as the racing heart attests,

the tight chest, the rushing blood hot in the temples. That's what we miss, right? Fandom might be illogical, might be some remnant of our tribal-based early histories, but it's still something we enjoy, and that vicarious thrill that we get from watching people play baseball who are really, really good at it is something that we hate to be without and that I hope we will not be without for too much longer. I think an episode like this with me and Meg in our 30s and Rob in his 50s and Dan in his 70s and Arnold in his 90s, all of us bonded together by baseball. Well, that's just the best, right? We've all connected over this thing that we all love, that we've all experienced in different ways, and we can come together to have this great conversation, even though we're separated by distance and time and everything else and i think you all know if you've

been listening to this podcast for some time how much i enjoy cold calling people like arnold who remember earlier eras in baseball history and just picking their brains and listening as they recount these incredible memories i mean babe ruth seems to me like a figure from antiquity almost, but to Arnold, he's someone he talked to. That's just living history, so anytime that we can get someone like Arnold on, or the late Ned Garver, or Johnny O'Brien, or more recently on our sign-stealing episode, Eddie Robinson and Al Worthington, I've always been interested in history, but most of history you have to read about in books. Occasionally though, you can just call someone up who was there. I don't know if it's because I had older than average parents, but I never really felt that instinctive mistrust or scorn or even pity for previous generations that many young people feel. I always liked old movies and old music and old books and I guess old sports. It's not to say that people from previous generations didn't have their flaws, and in some ways they were much more flawed on the whole.

But if you've made it to Arnold's age, you've amassed an incredible compendium of memories in your own head, and to be able to access that is just a treat. It's also nice to talk to someone like him and imagine ourselves at 98 being as sharp as Arnold Hano. I wish we all could be. If you'd like to learn more about Arnold's extraordinary life and career, and why wouldn't you,

you can check out a documentary that was made about him that came out in 2015. It's called Hano, A Century in the Bleachers, and it's actually streaming on Amazon Prime, so I will link to that on the show page. And if you're looking for another weekend watch about baseball and history, I can also recommend A Secret Love, a documentary that came out on Netflix this week, and it's about the 70-plus year love story between Pat Henschel and

her girlfriend and then wife, Terry Donahue, how they had to hide and disguise their relationship, and then eventually how they came out. And Terry Donahue was a catcher and utility player for the Peoria Red Wings of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League for four seasons. Of course, the league made famous by a league of their own, so there's a lot of great baseball content in the movie too. And there's definitely crying in baseball when you watch this movie. By the way, Arnold and his wife Bonnie, whom he mentioned a couple times in our interview, have also been married for almost 70 years.

Yet another remarkable aspect of his life. So that will do it for today and for this week. Thanks as always for listening. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. And the following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Christopher R. Giolaretto, Naticia Hutchins, access to some perks, Christopher R. Giolaretto, Natissia Hutchins, Joshua Gailey, J.M., and Jeff Feng. Thanks to all of you. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg and Sam coming via email

at podcastfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. If you're looking for reading material beyond A Day in the Bleachers and Nine Innings and Powerball, you can pick up a paperback copy of my book with Travis Sacek, The MVP Machine, How Baseball's New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. It includes a brand new afterword. And if you're free this Friday, May 1st at 3 p.m. Eastern, Travis and I will be taking and answering questions live on a platform called Crowdcast that you can access online. I will link on the show page to where you can find that and submit some questions for us to answer. We hope that you all have a wonderful weekend,

and we will be back to talk to you early next week. So you can spill my beer or call me dumb. Give me the worst seat in the stadium. Hit me on the head with a batted ball. But don't take away my Bill Buckner doll. Call me crazy, take down my name. All's fair in love and war and I'm a small game. Hi Arnold, this is Ben. How are you? I'm okay so far. It depends how you're going to grill me and drill me.

We'll see how I am. All right. Hi, this is Dan Okrent. I'm very pleased to meet you, Arnold. I've admired you for most of my adult life. Oh, you poor dear. Yeah, I know. It's been tough. And Rob, it's nice to talk to you.

I have admired both Dan and Arnold for my entire adult life, and more, so this is a thrill. I'm going to have to sit down to take care of all this praise. And in fact, I think I'll hang up now because I'm ahead.