Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2154: Sliding Doors and Sliding Home

Episode Date: April 21, 2024

Amid a wave of pitcher injuries, Ben Lindbergh talks to Dr. Rich Nye (4:20), a former major leaguer whose career-ending injury became a career-beginning injury when he decided to become an exotic-animal veterinarian (among other occupations). Then (1:07:09) Ben talks to prolific TV creators/writers/producers Tom Fontana and Julie Martin about what might have been for […]

Hello and welcome to episode 2154 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangrass, Sometimes, sometimes to fill in for Meg, but four people. I have sort of a supersized episode for you today, as is often the case when Meg is away. Effectively, while it turns into a variety show, we have three disparate segments this time. And as you know, if you're a regular listener, pitcher injuries have been on my mind. The onslaught hasn't stopped. Robert Stevenson out for the season with an elbow injury before he could throw his first pitch for the Angels.

This is such a common occurrence that Robert Stevenson's contract included a clause that triggered a $2.5 million team option for 2027 if he suffered damage to an elbow ligament that required an IL stint of at least 130 consecutive days. Maybe we'll start to see that kind of clause appear in pitcher contracts more often. The Rockies' Kyle Freeland, former Effectively Wild guest, also out with an elbow injury, reportedly not related to his recent pitch running appearance or to his entering the cockpit and pretending to take control of a Rockies charter flight. That was hitting coach Hensley Mewlands. Not Kyle Freeland.

The Rockies man. Even United Airlines pilots. Not immune to mismanagement in the Rockies presence. Fly the friendly skies. Not supposed to be that friendly. The Blue Jays Ricky Tiedemann is hurt. The Dodgers Kyle Hurt is hurt. And I read a great article in The Athletic about the Guardians Tristan McKenzie, who opted not to have surgery on his UCL last year and now

appears to be pitching in compromised condition. He's lost some speed. He's lost some effectiveness. The specter of surgery lurking in the back of his mind. And what pitcher wouldn't be worried about that these days? In a recent interview, I was asked, well, what with these advanced pitching machines they have these days, might we not need pitchers? Might the situation be so dire that baseball would be better off if pitchers were replaced with machines? Well, I certainly hope not. And I was thinking, look on the bright side. Because of all these injuries, some other pitchers get opportunities who might not have otherwise. The Astros' Rennell Blanco gets to throw a no-hitter. The Orioles' Albert Suarez returns to the majors for the first time since 2017 after a global odyssey.

And he pitches well. These are great stories. And you know another pitcher who has a great story? Rich Nye. And he's here to tell us that story today. You know when Meg's away I'm going to take that opportunity to talk to a former player. Well, Rich Nye, 6'4", left-handed pitcher, born in Oakland in 1944, spent five seasons in the majors, mostly with the Cubs, also with the Cardinals and Expos.

And he was a promising young pitcher. 1967, ranked fourth in Fangraph's War among rookie pitchers. Just behind rookie of the year Tom Seaver. But his career was cut short by a shoulder injury. Bad news, sad story, right? Well, not necessarily. Rich Nye is now Dr. Rich Nye. He'll turn 80 this summer.

Spring chicken, compared to other players I've talked to. And Rich has chickens, among many other animals, because he's an accomplished veterinarian. And that's just one of many occupations he's had. In his case, when you talk about a career ending injury, you have to specify which career. We've had some former teammates of his on the show before, Don Kessinger, the late Bill Hands. And I thought Rich would be a great guy to talk to. He has an inspirational story. He's a fascinating figure and he's living proof that a pitching injury that ends your playing career does not end your life or your professional fulfillment. After I talk to Rich about some hypothetical history, if he hadn't gotten hurt, what would have happened?

Would it have been better or worse? I'll talk to two TV veterans, Tom Fontana and Julie Martin, to engage in another What If, because Tom and Julie, in the early 2000s, wrote and filmed a pilot for a TV show intended for HBO called Baseball Wives. Back in the heyday of The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Oz, The Wire, Band of Brothers, Six Feet Under, Curb Your Enthusiasm, there was almost a baseball-centric Sunday night drama on HBO from two acclaimed creators. And Tom and Julie will tell me about that bit of baseball lost media. And what a woman-centric baseball show long before pitch, long before a league of their own, the Prime Video

series, would have looked like. And lastly, stat blaster extraordinaire Ryan Nelson will be here to deliver several stat blasts. It's a full show. It's a fun show. Let's get it started. Joining me now is Dr. Rich Nye to talk about his baseball career and all the careers that came after. He'll face Willie McCovey with Mays at third. The infield is drawn in. Nye will pitch from a windup. Mays getting a lead at third. Sandoe playing close to the bag. Swing and a miss by McCovey. I do want to ask you maybe mostly about your post-baseball life or lives,

but I guess I'll start with your baseball career and start at the beginning. Sure. But I guess I'll start with your baseball career and start at the beginning. You were drafted in 1965 for the first time, the first MLB amateur draft, right? And then I know you were drafted again the next year, and that's when you signed. But I wonder what the concept of a draft was like at the time when it was new, of course, young men your age had to think about military drafts, but to be drafted into a sports league and to sort of surrender control of where you were going to go, was that sort of a strange concept when it was new? Well, I'll say yes, that was. But the thing that was interesting about that was this.

You might think that someone that gets drafted to play professional baseball has had that as a goal in their lives for a while and had drawn attention from scouts for a while. And I will say back when I was in, let's say my last year in high school, the summer before I went to college, I had a coach in my little town of Walnut Creek, California that had a contact with the Giants. And he said, you know, I'd like to take a couple of you guys over to Candlestick Park and we'll have a little, like a little tryout, you know, a little, let them see what you're like, you know? So I, I did go over there and I was a little bit nervous. I didn't throw a lot of strikes as as I recall, but I threw the ball pretty well.

But nothing happened with that. And so, again, playing professional sports was not something that I was shooting for. I was going to school to get an education and get myself involved in a particular profession. At that time, it was engineering, civil engineering. particular profession at that time. It was engineering, civil engineering. So I go to Berkeley with that education in mind. And I did get a work scholarship, which gave me two bucks an hour to work cleaning the stadium after football games. And that would be money that was going to go towards my books or towards my tuition or whatever. And everything was less expensive, obviously, than it is today. After that freshman year, I had a very decent freshman year, and I started getting some scouts

to come up to me after games, and that was a new thing for me, really having a scout talk to me about playing professionally. I really hadn't thought about it, and I didn't realize that I would be a suitable candidate. I thought it took more than what I had to offer at that time. So I just continued to play summer ball every year, played college ball. And in 1965, they initiated the first baseball draft. I was drafted way down the line by Houston Astros. And that summer in 65, I was spending the summer up in Northern California with a team that eventually won the state championship and went back to play in the National Baseball Congress World Series in Wichita. I was up in Eureka, California, and the scout came up to me. He says, oh, I'm from Houston Astros. And at that time, I was a junior in the College of Engineering, and I was focusing on my academics.

And because they didn't really have much to offer me, they said, oh, something about you can start out in the minor leagues, and you make about $500 a month. And there wasn't much of a bonus involved, I said, you know, I think I'd rather stay in school. So nothing happened until the following summer when they had the summer draft. I think they called it the special phase or something, whatever. And that had to do with fellows that had been drafted before. So I was drafted by the Cubs this time. And the fellow that drafted me was Ray Perry was his name. And I just said, yeah, I'm going to make more money if I sign that contract, at least for the summer than I would for my summer job that I had planned.

So I did go to the Rookie League. I was there for about three weeks and I pitched a couple of good outings, but nothing spectacular. But Ray Perry became the interim manager at Lodi in the California league. And he made a call up to my manager and said he was looking for a left-handed pitcher. Could he recommend anybody? And of course he knew I was there and I had just pitched and had a nice outing. So he said, oh, sure, I'll send Rich Nye up to you. So I ended up coming to Lodi and was there for about five weeks. I had a number of good outings there. I think I had something like 95 strikeouts in 69 innings. And at the end of the season, the Cubs called me up.

They called up three left-handed pitchers, Dave Dowling, Fred, I can't think of Freddie's name, and myself from A, AA, and AAA. We all joined the team. I got to join the team in San Francisco because that was the closest town. The team was on the road. And being on the field in a major league ballpark, especially one where I had been in the stands as a kid growing up watching my favorite Giants play, Willie Mays, Orlando Cepeda, et cetera. It was quite a thrill. Yeah. Fred Norman, right? You were looking for. Thank you. You got it. Yes. Thank you. You nailed the 95 strikeouts in 69 innings. That was pretty impressive. Some figures, you know, I'm at an age where I'm not remembering a lot of things like names, but some of the statistics

or some of the situations, it's amazing how clear I seem to be on those. Well, I was going to ask you about that call up because you had just turned 22. You had spent most of the season, as you said, rookie ball, A ball, and then suddenly you're thrown into the fire mid-September. You're facing a lineup that starts with Julian Javier, who I know gave you fits throughout your career. Lou Brock and Kurt Flood and Orlando Cepeda. I mean, these are big name players. Tim McCarver, of course. Yeah. And Mike Shannon. Yeah, they were. But you know what's funny? I was warming up in the California League in A-ball and a traveling pitching coach, Fred Martin,

and he'd been a big league pitcher. He watched me warming up in the bullpen, and he said, don't throw that pitch. That was a knuckleball, which I had been experimenting with. He said, just stick with the fastball, curveball and changeup. I said, well, you think that's all that's necessary? He says, that's all you need. The guys down here in A ball, they can't catch ground balls. They can't catch fly balls. But if you throw strikes, put the ball in play up in big leagues, they may

call a play behind you. It did turn out to be the case. I was mostly a ground ball pitcher and a fly ball pitcher, it seemed like. And pitching against the Cardinals, I just remember keeping them scoreless for the first seven innings, I think. Ended up giving up a three-run homer to Mike Shannon. But it was still, that was my first start in the big leagues. And it's funny how I wasn't all that nervous. I don't know what it was. Maybe Fred Martin just said to me, you know, you can pitch up there. Don't worry about it. And because they were the last place club, what did they expect? You know, what were their expectations, really? Yeah, that game you only struck out two, but you made it through eight innings, so it worked. There you go, right. You mentioned that

Willie Mays was a hero of yours growing up, and of course you got to face him 10 times in your career, and you did quite well. He got only one single off you. You struck him out in half of the plate appearances that he had against you. So you must have mastered your nerves against your childhood hero. Well, I'll tell you what, though. The actual first time I faced Willie Mays was in spring training of 1967

where the Giants are in Phoenix and we're in Scottsdale. And what we had set up in the game, this was a spring training game. And I don't remember who was pitching the first three innings. I was supposed to pitch the second three innings and then someone else pitched the next three innings, right? So I come in and about, I guess it was probably the beginning of the fourth inning. I go through the Giant lineup. I retire the first eight guys in the, in row. I think, yeah, this is, you know, spring training. And this is my first pitching against my childhood favorite team, right? The giants.

And all of a sudden the number nine batter coming up is Willie Mays. And I look in and I go, geez, he's not, he's not very big, is he? I think he was 5'10". I ended up getting a couple of strikes on him, fouling off pitches or whatever. And I had seen other people watching the games. I'd seen other people pitching him. They call it climbing the ladder. You throw a high fastball, then you throw a higher fastball. So I had two strikes on him, two balls and two strikes. We're in Phoenix Stadium. ball. So I had two strikes on him, two balls and two strikes. We're in Phoenix Stadium. And I said, well, now's the time to give him my best fastball above his shoulders. He's going to chase it. Well, he did chase it. I did throw my best fastball and he hit it off the center field wall out there a little bit higher than the 430 foot sign. Of course, I immediately raced behind third base,

and now the fun part is when you watch Willie Mays run the bases. So he rounds first. He's watching the ball being played by the outfielders. He hits second with his left foot and starts backpedaling from second to third, never taking his eye off the relay. And I'm standing behind home, behind third base going, I'll make the relay. Please make the relay. They did.

Perfect relay. Stand up triple. Wow. And that was Willie Mays in his mid to late thirties at that point, but still had wheels. I'm sure. Oh, he was, he was amazing. Always. You were just testing him Oh, he was amazing, always. You were just testing him, though. That was just for fun. That one didn't count.

Absolutely. Well, I hate to sort of fast forward through your glory days as a pitcher, which of course are well chronicled, but I'm almost more fascinated by what came after and your post-playing transition. So when it comes to your shoulder injury, I know there was a fateful outing in AAA Buffalo, right, when you were with the Expos in 1970. And can you tell me what you felt, what happened, what you think the origins of that injury were? Well, it may have been something that was recurrent from pitching in the Little League, or you just pick up something and

you throw it. I love to throw, right? So you pick up rocks and you're throwing it as you walk down the railroad tracks, you're throwing at the telephone poles along the way. And there's always a game who could throw the biggest rock and hit the pole from farthest away. And it's like, I was always throwing stuff. And I remember when I started in high school, I was an outfielder and I played the outfield and I can remember, you know, standing in the outfield with my arm kind of hanging to my side because it hurts. Didn't affect me hitting, didn't affect me running, but I couldn't throw. And then I think part of the thing that leads to an injury is when your synchronization of your throwing is altered to some way. So it could be the height of the mound. And I think in this case, it was. I'm throwing and warming up on a flat surface

as opposed to stepping down on a slanted surface and trying to throw harder than my body was ready to throw at that time because I'm warm enough and I hadn't thrown for a while. So, you know, I'm ready to say, Oh gosh, I feel pretty good. I'm just going to cut loose one. And when I cut loose and I feel this twinge in my shoulder and it hurts, I go, well, okay, that's expected because I haven't been throwing right in my mind. I'm thinking no big deal. This is just things that need to stretch out and get back into shape. So I did a nice job in the game. We're pitching against the Baltimore AAA, where they had Bobby Grich and Don Baylor. Those are

the two names that I recall, home run hitters and future major league stars. I pitched really well for six innings, struck out nine guys. And then the manager said, well, you know, you haven't been thrown for a while, so I think you're done. And I said, yeah, great. I stopped, never said a word about how my shoulder felt. And then after the game, I went to the little restaurant to get something to eat and I couldn't lift my arm up to put food in my mouth without having pain. And I go, lift my arm up to put food in my mouth without having pain. And I go, that's not normal. Something's wrong here. Didn't sleep that night very well. The trainer said, ah, you know,

you just haven't been thrown. We'll give you some pain meds. And that's how they dealt with it. You know, here's pain meds. And it wasn't a matter of, hey, you could have really done an injury there. And it just, you know, you kind of live with those things. In fact, I had about three more starts after that at AAA level. And, you know, you pitch five, six innings, and then you come out and you've altered your motion to compensate for the fact that your shoulder hurts. You're dropping down a little bit or you're throwing higher or whatever. And I wasn't very effective. Then I went and got a cortisone shot and rested about four or five days,

went out and pitched 10 innings, pitched real well, won the ball game in extra innings. And then I get called back up to the big leagues. And this was something that was interesting about this, because when I went to the big leagues, a manager up there was Gene Mock. And Gene was, he was the very first person that I'm aware of that looked at the statistics to figure out where his ballplayers were, to figure out how to pitch people like they do now. They're looking at all the averages of things or keeping charts on everything. Well, he used to handwrite the charts and he had charts on everybody and you'd be pitching and

he'd be standing in the dugout and he'd be looking at his second baseman and his outfielders and his first baseman moving them around and someone would hit a ground ball and there's the infielders right there. It was a really kind of an amazing experience. There was a time when I told him my shoulder was bothering me, and he said, well, what's going on? I said, well, didn't you get a report from the minor leagues? I didn't pitch well for a month because my arm hurt. He says, oh, I didn't know that.

I hate sore arm pitchers. That was his comment. Well, I did start for him. I was still starting pitcher for him. And yet I came in in relief one time after I'd gotten a cortisone shot in my shoulder. And the doctor that did it said, okay, now don't do anything for a week to 10 days, just throw easy. And that happened to be my birthday. So I got a shot in my shoulder on my birthday. We had just come back from a 10 day road trip. The Giants are back in town, right? I'm just sitting in the bullpen, just talking because I knew I didn't have to warm up or

anything. The phone rings and he says, get an eye up. And I go, doesn't he know that I just got a shot? He says, he wants you to pitch. He's got McCovey coming up and he wanted me to be ready for McCovey, right? It turns out I threw about 15 or 20 pitches, sort of loosening up, not really loosening up. And he calls me in to face McCovey. I've got a runner on first base and I'm throwing, I hit a, I throw a pitch outside fastball to McCovey and he hits a rope past me, just a line drive, one hopper. And I go, well, there's a base hit and mock had moved the shortstop to the first base side of second base. He'd done a shift. I wasn't aware of it. It was a one hop to Bobby Wine. He steps on second, throws the first double play. Jim Ray Hart's the next batter. I got him to

pop up or something and got him out. And that was my last appearance in the big leagues. I'm looking at the game log right now, actually, because all these things are at our fingertips, right? Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Your recollection, I think, is mostly correct. You came in to face McCovey. It may not have been Hart. You got McCovey to ground out, and then Hart singled, and then you got Al Gallagher to ground into a double play. There you go. Al Gallagher. Dirty Al. Dirty Al. Absolutely.

It looks like you had two more outings later that season. Oh, really? Yeah, those were your last two, it looks like. Memory can be a tricky thing. Absolutely, Ken. I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah. Well, that kind of comment that Mach made and that lack of care, that was fairly common then, and that's why there was, and to some extent still is a culture of silence sort of when it comes to injuries, right? And you don't want to disclose what's happening, which probably makes it worse. And I wondered at that time, the first rotator cuff surgery, the first Tommy John surgery, not till the mid seventies. So a little too late for your purposes.

And I wonder, knowing that you didn't have that safety net, that you couldn't get a do-over and get a new ligament or get your shoulder repaired, were you more cautious pitching back then? Were you less likely to really air it out knowing that there was no surgical recourse for you? Right. I would have to say that probably was in the back of your mind. You know, when you're standing out in the mound and you're trying to, somebody calls for a fastball and he holds his glove up and you want to hit that target. I don't know that I would mentally ease up to throw it. I think I would still give my best effort,

but the best effort wasn't 100%. And each time if I threw it, if it hurt more, I would throw a little less hard each time if I threw it, if it hurt more, I would throw a little less hard each time. And I know that's the way my starting pitches did. When you start and you're throwing and you're throwing in the bullpen, you see how you feel. And you say, you know, I don't know that I'm going to get anybody out today. I really don't have very good stuff. And you cross that foul line, you go out on the mound, and they're hitting ground balls right at everybody. They're hitting fly balls at everybody.

And you're pitching the sixth, seventh inning and you're going, I didn't have anything today. And yet look at what's happened. Well, one of the things that really happens is getting batters to make contact with the ball and put the ball in play gives your defense a chance to do their thing. And I would tell you, when I was pitching for Chicago, we had absolutely a fantastic defense. I mean, especially on the strong side, we had Kessinger and Santo, and you hit a ball near Santo. And I'm thinking, wow, what a difference. But I used to watch Santo get to balls that I don't think the average third baseman would get to. He was making plays, and he had a shotgun for an arm.

It was great. Kessinger made great plays covering a huge amount of territory. So I put the ball in play, and I looked looked at my stats and I say, you know, didn't have an awful lot of strikeouts. You don't need to throw the ball by guys. For me, learning about pitching was there's a strategy. There's the thought process that goes into approaching a batter, a hitter, especially a good hitter to say, Oh, so-and-so is coming up. Well, you know, he's got this weak spot. If you can get a couple strikes on him, you can strike him out if you throw right to this spot. And it was amazing. You didn't have to throw the ball 95 miles an hour. You just had to hit the spot.

And you never considered bringing back the knuckleball. I know you roomed with Joe Nico at one point. That could have been your second act as a pitcher yeah well i did have uh early on joe becker the pitching coach for the cubs at the time that i when i was throwing i had an overhand curve i had a fastball and i had a a change up he wanted me to start throwing a spitter okay because that was one of the things that uh one of our players or sinker, we call it a sinker, but you know, a spitter. You don't want to out anyone several decades later. Right. So I go and I pitched about two days before and Joe said, we need to learn a new pitch.

So he takes a gob of Vaseline and puts it on my wrist. And he said, just put that on your two pitching fingers, grab the top of the ball, not on the seam, grab the smooth part and just throw the ball. And so we started warming up and a game was going on. It was like into third or fourth inning of the game. And I'm just throwing in a bullpen, but I'm just, this is like a warmup, like a practice, right? Well, I'm throwing, and I threw for about 20 minutes. They had to stop the game three different times at least because the ball that I was throwing had slipped out of my hand and gone over the catcher's head right down to interrupt the ball game.

They had to stop the game, grab the ball, throw it back to the bullpen. And after about 20 minutes, Joe Becker walks up to me. He says, give me the ball. He says, to the bullpen. And after about 20 minutes, Joe Becker walks up to me, he says, give me the ball. He says, that's not your new pitch. Yeah. You're too honest, I guess, to make that work. Yeah. But I did work on a slider and developed that later on, and that became really a very good pitch for me. And many years later, recently, you suffered a shoulder injury and you had surgery and you discovered the extent of the damage that had been in there all along, right? Oh, absolutely. I'd slipped on the ice, landed on my shoulder point and heard a pop. Well, the doctor said, you know, you've torn a couple of tendons off your shoulder joint and we need to go fix it.

So I said, fine, let's do it. And it was a simple process. Right now you go in with an endoscope and he's putting a couple of screws in there through a tiny little hole in my shoulder. No big deal, right? But while I was in there, he says, I was looking at that rotator cuff and he said, there was a lot of scar tissue and a new tear in it, but a lot of scar tissue. He said, ever have any shoulder injuries before? So I did tell him the story, but he fixed it. And my shoulder's got absolutely normal rotation now. Probably a 45-mile-an-hour looping fastball, but I can rotate.

So I'm pitching to my grandson. I just took a picture of it. He's six years old now, and he's put some good swings on it. His line drives. And I said, yeah, there it is. I'm still throwing strikes. Well, you know, change of speeds. You throw 45 out there.

You mix in the knuckler. You never know if that could work. You know something? It could happen. It could happen. But ultimately you decide, you know, you're in the minuckler, you never know if that could work. You know something? It could happen. It could happen. But ultimately, you decide you're in the minors in 71 with Cleveland, with Montreal, with Pittsburgh briefly, right? And then 72, you're in spring training with the A's, and you decide that that is it for you. And you could have gone in so many different directions, and you had a master's in

civil engineering, which you studied at Berkeley, and you got your master's in the off seasons. And instead, you decided, I'm going to be a veterinarian. So tell me about the decision to call it a career, your first career, and embark upon your second of many. Well, I knew that I had a love of animals. I'd always brought animals home when I was growing up. I always visited when I was on the road. I would always go to the zoos when we had, you know, playing an evening game, and so we had afternoons off,

and I was always going to the local zoo, wandering around, enjoying communicating with the animals. And in spring training of 71, a roommate next to me was John Olerud. And John was studying regular medicine. And John was very interested at that time in sports medicine. He was a catcher. So, you know, we worked out and he said, you know, if I don't get beyond AAA, if I can't make the big leagues, make the big club, he said, I've got an internship waiting for me. And as it turns out, he didn't make it. I didn't make it. So our discussions stimulated an interest of maybe

pursuing something in medicine. And yet when I talked to him, he said, oh yeah, it's only an eight year program. And I said, well, I don't want to spend another eight years in school. He said, well, why don't you look at veterinary medicine? It's only four years, and it's medicine. You're solving problems, and you're dealing with animals, which you love. So I took a break between spring training and the season. I went back to Chicago. I visited my local vet.

Then I went down to the University of Illinois and talked to them. I visited my local vet. Then I went down to the University of Illinois and talked to them. They told me if I get a couple of courses out of the way, I would qualify for admission to vet school. In the wintertime, I did take those courses. There were biology courses and I think a genetics course or something. As it turns out, after spring training in 72, when they had the first strike, I wasn't really able to make the team. And I was like a fringe player.

And they just cut all the fringe players, the major league teams, with their bare bones players and contracts until they decided to settle that strike. So I didn't have a job. Basically, I tried out with Oakland and then I tried out with the Cubs AAA. So when I didn't make it, I went back to my apartment. I called the Players Association. I just wanted to find out from them, how much time do I have in the pension plan? And they said, well, you've got four years and three days. And at that time, you needed four years to become a vested member in the pension plan. So I told them, would you repeat that? They repeated it four years and three days. I remember that specifically. I said, thank you, hung up, turned to my wife and I said, pack your bags, we're done.

So I just went back home to Chicago. I called the University of Illinois and they said I was on a waiting list. I said, okay, fine. I had things that I was doing and a week later they called me and said, you've been accepted. And I said, well, this is something I need to do. I'm going to give it a try. And, you know, sometimes it's a little scary when you start trying something new that you're not sure of. And I was one of the oldest people in my class, but I found it to be absolutely fascinating, stimulating, and I could hardly wait to go to school every day. It was fabulous. And for anyone who's wondering, the John Ulrood you referenced, that's John Ulrood Sr.,

so John Ulrood's dad, and he went on to a 50-year career in dermatology. I actually interviewed him a few years ago, not about his son, who was one of my favorite players growing up, but about blisters for pitchers because he was an expert in that. A lot of people love John O'Rourke, the son, who was, of course, extremely talented himself. Very talented. And when John was going to his internship, and I was living in Champaign at the time. He was driving back and forth for some reason. He stopped at my house in Champaign, Illinois on the way home, and his little son was seven years old. That's Johnny. And he said, watch this, and he starts throwing balls to Johnny, and Johnny is just hitting line drive after line drive. And I go, wow,

he's really got a coordination. He was hitting left-handed. I do remember that. You know, he obviously grew up to be a superstar. It was great. One of the sweetest swings. Yeah. And you didn't seem to look back because I found a Chicago Tribune article from May of 1976, once you had decided on this veterinary track and started that, and you were just 31 at the time, but you were married, you had a couple of young kids, and it seemed like you were much happier, or at least that's what you said at the time, to have the cold, cruel world of baseball behind you. You were quoted saying, it's an extremely insecure profession.

At any time, for any reason, they can get rid of you. You never know about your future. When they're through with you, it sounds like you weren't feeling super sentimental that you had fully committed to your new life and that you were finding some great advantages to it. Absolutely. And, you know, baseball at that time, the reserve clause was intact and the owners had complete control over you. You'd signed a contract to say, I'm going to play for you for the rest of my life, no matter what it turns out to be. And if they wanted to send you down, even if you were doing well, you had no choice. You had nothing to say about it. And that was one of the things I think probably that most baseball players at that time felt bad about was they didn't really, they didn't have a choice. You know, they were told do this our way, do it at our will.

And if we don't like it, what you're doing, you're out of here. And that was one of the reasons you mentioned not wanting to say anything about injuries. You know, guys didn't say anything. They might hurt themselves, but they're going to play hurt because if they say something and the manager makes a comment to someone upstairs, they're out of here. So you start to build up your practice. And then in the mid 80s, you have a friend, Dr. Susan Brown, who later you marry and have a romantic relationship as well as a professional one. And you two together started Midwest Bird and Exotic Animal Hospital in Westchester, Illinois, the first exotic animal

practice in the country. And when I read that, I was thinking Dr. Doolittle, I was thinking all creatures great and small. And I imagine the reality wasn't too different from that. So when you say exotic animals, how exotic are we talking? What animals were you treating and what were the most exotic that you saw? Well, the concept of exotic animals in veterinary parlance is those animals that are not dogs or cats or zoo animals or farm animals. However, we did see some animals that you probably should keep in a zoo and you shouldn't have as pets. Things like primates, you know, monkeys, big cats, bears, small bears like brown bears. There were people that would come in with these animals because they were having a

traveling zoo for kids to have a hands-on or get an education about them. And I remember seeing an Australian porcupine, seeing a echidna, and I can't think of what the biggest rodent in South America, my mind is blank right now for what that is. Capybara. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, capybara. I have the internet at my beck and call right now. You do. And I saw some of those in practice. And after a year or two and having a few incidents with monkeys, we would have the primate come in and we would tell the owner, you come in and get this pill and you make sure

you give the pill to the primate an hour before your visit. And it would pill was a tranquilizer, right? So that we could actually examine the animal without having any issues, without getting bit, that kind of thing, because there were diseases that transmitted between humans and primates, obviously. I will tell you this quick story. Woman comes in, she has two primates, right? Then they're just small spider monkeys, something like that. And told her, here's a pill for each one. We ask her when she comes in with the cage, did they get the medicine? Yep. Gave them both the pill an hour ago and everything's fine. So I opened the door to the cage and there's, I can look in there and I could see the one in front was flat out. So he

was tranquilized, no big deal. So I opened the cage like this. The other one leaps over the first one out of the cage and in my exam room was bouncing off the walls, passing feces everywhere, knocking stuff off the walls. Finally was caged by the owner and put back in the cage. But turns out I look in the cage and there's a little orange pill sitting on the bottom of the cage. So he spit his out. And, you know, the things like that happened, we just decided, you know, we really don't need to be taking care of these animals because they're not safe, to be taking care of these animals because they're not safe, good pets. So we did stop seeing primates. We did stop seeing large cats and any other animals that you would really start saying they should be in the zoo. When you have any of these animals and you have them in a pet situation,

it's so strange for the animal. And yet they just, they'll cuddle, they'll sleep up on your bed because they think you're a safe haven for them. And that's what they want. But are they good pets? I don't think so, no. And ultimately, you become an avian expert. What was it that drew you to birds, and what were your favorite kinds or most exotic kinds? drew you to birds and what were your favorite kinds or most exotic kinds? Well, when you're in veterinary school, they give you an opportunity during your senior year to take a few months in between semesters and you can work and get some experience outside to see if what you think you

want to do is what you want to do. And I took an internship with Dr. Ted Lefebvre. And at that time, Ted Lefebvre was one of the forefathers of avian medicine in the United States. There were very few actual avian doctors in the United States. As a senior, I went out and worked for him for two months. And I was working with lots and lots and lots of birds because he saw 25% of his practice was pet birds. And these are from big parrots to little parakeets. The most exotic birds you'd see would be those large parrots. And some of them, like the black palm cockatoo, are rare. You just don't find those except in collections or in zoos. Fascinating birds. My favorite bird is a little parrot let. They're the smallest parrot species, but they talk. They sit on your shoulder while you're walking around the house.

And I mean, they're just very personable. Again, once they find that you're a safe haven, the birds want to be with you because you've changed what their normal habitat would be. Their normal habitat out be, their normal habitat out in the wild, out in the bushes, flying around, being with buddies, and there's no buddies around. It's just you. But you have great big 105-pound boa constrictors come in and the owner says, well, you know, my snake's not eating and you've got to do the exam and handle it. And I had no experience with that. My two partners in the practice said, we're going to see all these exotics, so you need to get some experience. So the way we got experience and a lot of our

knowledge came hands-on and learning, just learning when an animal came in and it had a problem. There was a very small network of veterinarians around the country that saw birds or snakes or whatever. And you'd be on the phone talking to them. Hey, I've got this so-and-so in the practice. What do you think? The guy would say, I've tried this. I've tried that. That didn't work. So don't do that. There were no textbooks that we could go to. That's what impresses me so much. You know, you say that you pursued veterinary medicine in part because it took half as long as going to medical school would have, but it sounds like you should study veterinary medicine for twice as long, at least, because you're

dealing not with just one type of anatomy, but many. Absolutely. And now, when I started, people sort of did everything. You know, you saw all the exotics in your practice, even though you might like birds like I did. I will tell you this, I've only been practicing 47 years plus, and every time I see a patient, it's still a learning process. I mean, medicine is that way. Medicine is not a black and white thing. Even in human medicine, they say, oh, you've got cancer. But what other factors are involved in whether this is going to spread? It's the kind of cancer. It's your immune system. There's so many things that they've got information on 47 years later. Back in the day, we just went by the seat of our pants. I chose to stay in

practice just giving input, sharing my knowledge, sharing my information. This is a silly question, but it's one I've always wondered. There's an episode of Seinfeld where George swerves to avoid a pigeon and he hits a squirrel instead. And his girlfriend wants him to do something for the squirrel, so he takes the squirrel to the vet, who offers him a couple of options. You can put the squirrel to sleep. That'll cost you 80 cents. We could, of course, try to save him, but it would be costly, difficult, and we'd have to send away for some special really tiny instruments.

And as you have operated on tiny creatures, I wonder whether that is accurate. Do you use special really tiny instruments? Absolutely. When we were early on in the development of avian medicine, we realized that the large instruments that we're normally using for dogs and cats weren't very effective when you're trying to spay a budgie or a parakeet. You're removing their reproductive tract. You go through a little hole in the side. You've got to have tiny instruments, and you've got to have some form of magnification. So what we have as workshops early on in avian medicine was we had human microsurgeons come

in and do courses on microsurgery. And that is using the small instruments, using magnification, learning how to suture blood vessels back together, for example. You needed to learn how to use these tiny instruments because you're going to have those problems come up where you need to have a tiny instrument to get in there and clamp a vessel without destroying all the tissue around it. Things like that. But yes, you definitely do. And while this was happening, you had yet another side gig going, which was that you worked at the

Chicago Mercantile Exchange as a currency trader. You were able to use those funds and pour them back into your veterinary practice, so it serves some purpose there. But it sounds like you were perhaps not as passionate about that as you were about your other pursuits. And there was a quote in your Sabre bio that really spoke to me when you decided to step away from that trading in the early 90s. You said about that there was no intrinsic value in what I was doing. It was all about money. It makes you very desensitized. So you wanted to make something more than money. You wanted to create something, entertain people, make people or animals' lives better. And it sounds like that was

not achieving that purpose for you. And maybe many people's jobs don't. Well, this sort of goes back to the beginning of our exotic practice. And when my partner, Dr. Susan Brown, said to me, let's start an all exotic veterinary practice. And I said to her, well, can you make any money doing that? And she said, oh, is that why you became a veterinarian? And I hung my head and I stuck it under the table. That's how I felt. I wanted to just hide because I know the reason I wanted to become a veterinarian was to help animals, save lives, and enrich the lives of the caretakers of those animals as well.

It's amazing how that circles around. And I look at stuff right now that everything seems to be based on how much money, how much money. And I still say money in itself doesn't make you happy. You got to be doing something that makes you happy. So it was a good choice. Leaving the trading was really not that difficult to do. The mercantile exchange had decided to go public. And I had a membership in it. So the value of it went up. And that was something that I just put those funds into an account. And that's my retirement, essentially. And I know you felt that it wasn't amounting to much the work because your profit meant someone else's loss, right? And so it was sort of a zero-sum game. And I guess you could say the same about baseball.

When you do well, it comes at another player and opponent's expense. But at least together, you're creating entertainment, right? Millions of people are enjoying your work. So it's sort of a public good. It's bettering the world in that way. And I see that today with the way they've made some changes in the game. I really do like the changes they've made. I like going to a ball game and having it move right along, as opposed to having it drag when you get people coming in and out, you get players stepping out of the box to

adjust their cup and their gloves and all the other stuff. It moves right along and you can enjoy it. It is entertainment. And if you love to watch and you enjoy and you understand the game, it's worth the money. And these guys that are getting the money, I think it is a fair way to spread it out. I think it's fair. And when I played, because the owners had control over everything, they could keep all the money down. I mean, Fergie Jenkins, who I played with six years, 20 games in a row, six times, he was just making over a hundred thousand dollars a year. And most of us worked six months playing baseball. And then we had another job. We had to get another job to keep the family going. That's the way it works. Right. Well, you probably would have had another job

just for fun, just to keep your mind occupied regardless. Oh, totally. You're still practicing medicine, but you also have quite a menagerie at home. So tell me about your setup and the creatures who are your companions today. Well, my wife, who's also a veterinarian, that's Dr. Susan Brown, she is obsessed with animals and animal behavior and saving animals and that kind of thing. So she's created on our property out west of Chicago, a sanctuary where outside the house, we've got a couple of llamas. We've got some alpacas. We have some pot-bellied pigs. We have some goats. We have ducks and geese. She has a pigeon house outside with about 100 different pigeons in it,

all different varieties. We've got chickens and turkeys. That's outside. In the house, we've got six dogs, two rabbits, and a cat. Wow. Yeah. So it keeps us busy. Yeah. Yeah. And they have the best medical care, two physicians on call 24-7. So that's great. I like to believe that. Well, it sounds idyllic and pastoral. I wish I could do something similar, but a Manhattan apartment does not allow me much room for wildlife. I just have one dachshund who I think demands as much attention as six other dogs probably, but she is a great companion too. So I'm speaking to you right now. So I'm speaking to you right now. You're at a conference, not at a veterinary conference,

but at a woodturning conference because you have picked up yet another hobby. The first three or four careers, not enough. You've become an accomplished woodworker. So tell me about how you developed that interest. Well, my wife's a very observant person. And as we would travel around the country visiting family and going on trips and whatever, we'd go into little shops, and she'd notice that I would pick up pieces of wood that was turned on a lathe, you know, vases and plates and pens and you name it. And she noticed that in our neighborhood, there was a club that was a woodturning club. She says, why don't you go see what they do? So I did go. After a few meetings, I just went right down the rabbit hole. I bought equipment. That was about 17 years ago. And I've gone to a variety of different meetings to learn all different techniques and work with different woods. And I mean, that's just, I'm passionate. I've now got,

Susan collects animals, I collect wood. Right. When you said that you were initially sort of surprised that scouts started approaching you, that they considered you a professional baseball prospect because you had been so focused on your studies and given everything that you've gone on to do, I think that makes perfect sense. So it seems almost in retrospect that baseball was a bump in the road for you, maybe a pleasurable bump in the road, but just a step along the way. And so I wonder, as so many pitchers who have been hurt and have had their playing careers, and whether you think, if only, or what if, if my arm had held out, if I had been able to keep pitching longer, you know, maybe you would have pitched into the free agency era. Maybe that would have been transformative financially for you, but would that have been a blessing? Are you better off the way

things worked out? Would it just have delayed your embarking on maybe even more meaningful careers for you? Well, you know, it's interesting people asking, you know, is there anything you would change in your history? Well, I wouldn't be where I am doing what I'm doing today if I did change something. Right. But I do think back about my attitudes towards playing and competing. For me, it's not always been the winning or the losing. For me, it's not always been the winning or the losing. It's been the competition. You know, it's been playing the game.

I loved the game. I started playing when I was nine, maybe eight even. I've got an older brother. He was a catcher. He said, I need to practice my catching, so just throw it to me. And that's really how I started. He's always been my promoter, if you will, giving me things to look forward to, saying, hey, you know, you've got to go to college. Hey, you've got to get a scholarship because mom and dad can't afford it. So do a little better in your academics, do a little better in your sports,

and you're going to be able to get a scholarship and go to college. So those were things that with his impetus, I said, well, I need to get good at something. I'll get good at studies. So I was an A student. I think I turned out in my high school to be the salutatorian, which was second in my graduating class, go to college and getting academic athletic scholarships so that I could stay in school but play baseball at the same time.

And I loved baseball, but I never thought of it as a career. You know, it seemed like it was like an untouchable thing. You know, I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. My friends and I would get on a bus and take one or two or three buses to get to Seal Stadium when the Giants first came out to San Francisco. SEAL Stadium when the Giants first came out to San Francisco. And I could hardly wait to watch Willie Mays catch a fly ball or hit a ball or run the bases. And I mean, what a thrill. So it was not a real thing until scouts started showing an interest. And then even when I was drafted, I still felt that the academics was a thing that was going to carry me through life. It was not going to be baseball. And my brother said, sign the contract, give it a shot. If it

doesn't work, you can always fall back on your education. Well, by having the safety net, do you have the same attitude towards the competition? Are you a killer out there on the mound? Do you know? And I don't know that I had that killer instinct. You know, I would go out there and I would do my best, at least what I felt was my best at the time. But then you start thinking about what if I'd done it a little harder? What if I had maybe had more success playing baseball and hung around like my college teammate Andy Messerschmitt did? You know, you pitch 10 plus years and he hung around long enough to actually break that reserve clause. He was the one that was instrumental in that. Yeah, that killer instinct, I guess.

I mean, I know that you out-dueled Bob Gibson so you could summon that when you needed it on particular days. But absolutely. You know, you had a fallback plan, right? Or maybe it was even a primary plan. Well, you know, that's that's the problem. Was it the primary plan? Was I thinking, oh, I'm just going to see how this goes and we'll play this out. And when it doesn't work, I'm just going to leave and I'm not going to try anymore. Well, you know, I did try for about a year with that sore shoulder and I spent a year in the minor leagues fluttering around. And I said, you know, I don't know that this is worth it. As I look back, I'm glad that I made, I really, I am thrilled that I made the decisions that I made. Again, money wasn't my motivation. In fact, when I was

coming up and I think about those fellows that I played with, Ernie Banks, Fergie Jenkins, I played with four Hall of Famers on my team and only one of them was making over $100,000. They were an inspiration for me to want to do my best. But I think the decision I made, as it turns out, I just I can't imagine if I were to change something. Yeah. And ultimately, baseball was a fairly small percentage of your life in terms of total time. And now that it's in the rearview mirror, you know, there are a lot of baseball players who for them, those were the glory days. Those were the best years of their lives. That's what they want to talk about and trade on for the rest of their lives. And a lot of people want to hear them talk about that,

and they want to talk to them. And so there's no harm in that. But I wonder where baseball rates on your personal pantheon of achievements or your self-conception when you think of yourself and you look back on your life. Are you an athlete? Are you a baseball player? Are you a vet? Are you a woodturner? You know, if your life flashes before your eyes, are the highlights striking out Willie Mays? Or are they a bird you saved in surgery? I mean, you've had so many different incarnations. Well, here's what I think of. I don't think of myself with a label like a baseball player or a veterinarian or a woodturner, unless I'm in that crowd, I'm in that group. I think of myself as a compassionate, understanding, loving, caring individual. And, you know, more about

my personal qualities as opposed to what I've done. That's the best way I can say it. And if I need memories, it's real simple. I've got a thick scrapbook on my shelf and, you know, I can flip through the pages and I can see, oh, look, Rich and I best bunning in a duel in Philadelphia, you know, pitching complete games. I guess that's the only thing that I regret looking at baseball today, is that the starting pitcher goes out there and he's not thinking about pitching nine innings. I can't imagine not thinking about pitching nine innings. If I start a game, I want to finish it. And I don't care how many pitches I'm throwing. If it takes 150. And I know Fergie Jenkins pitched 20-something complete games in a season maybe. And all I know is when he went out there, nobody was keeping track of the count of

pitches. There were times when the manager said, you know, you start out the game and you're having difficulty in the first few innings. Maybe you're not loose. So I want you to throw more pitches in the bullpen. So Jenkins got off to some rough starts in a row. I know Leo told the pitching coach, have him throw about 100 pitches in a bullpen to get loose. So he would throw two or three innings in the bullpen, number of pitches to get loose before he even started the game. And then he'd go out and throw a nine-in complete game and strike out 10.

to get loose before you even started the game. And then you go out and throw a nine-in complete game and strike out 10. I mean, really, amazing, amazing accomplishments. And in fact, looking before I played, look at the statistics for some of those pitchers that would pitch with two days rest. Sure. And they'd go out or pitch both ends of a doubleheader. Are you kidding me? Well, yeah, maybe because of that, there are fewer shoulder injuries these days And they'd go out or pitch both ends of a double header. Are you kidding me?

Well, yeah, maybe because of that, there are fewer shoulder injuries these days, which were often caused by overuse. But there are many more elbow injuries, which are often related to throwing really hard and max effort on every pitch, right? And so the game has evolved or devolved, arguably, in that way. And a lot of players, and you've probably played with some of them, if their elbow goes, if their shoulder goes, they have a tough time transitioning to whatever's next. Maybe they never discover what's next because their lives are so wrapped up in the sport. It took so much dedication to become professional baseball players. Maybe they always envisioned themselves as baseball stars more so than you did. And so then that goes away. And what do you do next? Are you as good as

at something else? And you had the degree, which you didn't even really end up using because you decided that you didn't actually want to pursue civil engineering, but you had sort of a restless intellect and you had aptitude for a lot of things. And so for you, it was a natural transition. Exactly. And I know I didn't mention this, but I did have a little experience with my civil engineering one winter. I got a job working for a soil consulting firm. And this soil consulting firm was dealing with the foundation for the, at that time, the Sears Tower. And my job as a junior civil engineer was to inspect the soil

for the foundation of the Sears Tower. So I would drive down into the city from the suburbs, and I would get my little safety hat on, and I would climb into a bucket and go down in the ground 90 feet and jump out of the bucket, run to the edge of the hole, scoop up some soil, jump back in the bucket and go back up to test the soil to see that it had the right strength for the foundation for this building. And I found myself doing this and I'm thinking, you know, this really doesn't take any great brains. It's not challenging except going in the bucket 90 feet down the ground. And did I fit in? Was this something I was passionate about? That's really what's driven me is that in my life is the passion, you know, that's what I feel. Just if I feel passionate about something, I share it. I want to motivate other people to do the same thing, like this woodturning thing that I've gotten myself into, or veterinary medicine for that matter. But when I'm telling

young people, don't just take a job to take a job as a full-time thing for the rest of your life, you know? You want to follow a passion, and you'll make it work. If you're passionate about it, you can make it work. Yeah. People think of it as a modern phenomenon that you might go through three or four or five careers over the course of your life, but you've been living that life for quite a while now. And it's the classic kind of one door opens, another closes. Your career-ending injury was really a career-starting injury in another sense, right?, your career ending injury was really a career starting injury in another sense, right? So it's about the happiest ending to a serious shoulder injury that I can imagine.

So, and, you know, I know that you're going to a card show, right? You sign autographs. I mean, people send you cards and they relive, you know, when they were young and they were watching you pitch and then you're Rich Nye the baseball star again. Absolutely. They don't make cards for veterinarians, I guess, but they should. No, no. You've arguably made a greater contribution to that field and that sphere.

So I'm glad that you made the best of this situation and were able to pivot so effectively. And I thank you so much for taking time to reminisce. Ben, I appreciated the conversation. I've enjoyed it. And, you know, that's one of the things I will tell you. If you sit around baseball players long enough, you'll find that they've all got stories. long enough, you'll find that they've all got stories. And it's amazing how as you talk to them and you say something, it brings up another story and another story. I love that recall. I love

retelling. And of course, every time I tell it, it's probably embellished a little bit, like that story about the last time I pitched. Right, right. You know, what I remember and what I don't remember, yes. Yeah, exactly. Well, yes, we could have done a whole interview just about your baseball career and not even touched on everything that came after. And we got through this whole thing. We didn't mention the 1969 pennant race.

It didn't even come up, which I'm sure people always ask you about. They do. Well, if you've got a second, let me just say one thing, and that is an observation of why the Mets won that year and why the Cubs didn't. The Cubs didn't utilize 25 members as a cohesive unit. The Mets did. They played all 25 of their players. Yes, they had a fabulous pitching staff, but when you have all these players participating, when one goes out on the field, it's not like someone sitting on the bench says, I never get to play. I should be in that spot. It's like, come on, Joe, hit the ball. Everybody's pulling for everybody. And I don't know that I felt that everybody was pulling for everybody when I was sitting on the bench getting splinters in

my rear end because I hadn't been in a ballgame for two weeks. Yeah. The good news is that one team blows it. Another team makes a miraculous comeback, right, and has a surprise victory. So it's sort of like we were saying, the zero-sum sport, someone's up, someone's down. Either way, someone gets great memories out of it. And I know that you're friends with some of the Mets from that team as well. Oh, for sure. For sure. Well, I will let you get back to your adoring fans who are waiting for you later, as well as the six dogs who are waiting for you and the people who want to buy your woodworks. So thank you again. What a pleasure, Rich. Thanks, Ben. Appreciate it. All right. Thanks to Rich. Thanks to listener Christian Ruzich for suggesting some time ago that we talk to Rich. How am I going to transition to this next segment? You might wonder, here's how. Remember that 1976 Chicago Tribune article about Rich Nye that I quoted back to him, the one about how he was happier as a veterinarian than he'd

been as a baseball player. Well, that article also talked about the impact that baseball had on Rich's family life and on his then-wife, Linda, who was also happy that Rich had gotten out of the game. The article says, Mrs. Nye believes baseball stifled their marriage to a point where they couldn't have a simple romantic dinner without some tension about the upcoming games. You got the feeling the world only existed for baseball, she said. And then, get this.

To her dismay, Mrs. Nye found it difficult to get along with many of the baseball players' wives because they were superstitious. Many considered her a jinx on the team and often asked her not to come to the games. In those days, some of the baseball wives thought Mrs. Nye, a professional model, was bitchy and conceited. Yes, the Chicago Tribune said bitchy in 1976. Quote, they often handed me hot dogs for the team's good luck. Sometimes I had as many as 12 hot dogs in Yes, the Chicago Tribune said, bitchy, in 1976. Quote, You think those relationships among sports spouses sound like a TV show? Well, so did Tom Fontana and Julie Martin. I wrote recently about former HBO flagship show Sex and the City coming to Netflix and what that meant for media and

exclusivity. And in the course of my research for that article, I came across an AP piece from March 2002 about how HBO was thriving and its lineup was set to expand. And here's one paragraph in that piece. HBO has high hopes for three new series. The Wire, due in June, is about the Baltimore Police Department and focuses on a single case for the entire season. Baseball Wives, produced by Fontana, focuses on the lives of pro-sport spouses with the ex-wife of Arizona Diamondbacks first baseman Mark Grace consulting. Carnival follows the characters in a Dust Bowl-era carnival. Well, I'm quite familiar with The Wire, which, like Sex and the City, does contain baseball content.

Carnival ran for two seasons. But what is this baseball wives you speak of? That never made it to air. It's a very specific culture, HBO executive Carolyn Strauss said at the time, and the more specific something is, in a weird way, the more universal it is. There's a tone and a style to the storytelling that's a little different.

It's really about something. The opposite of Seinfeld, I suppose. Through this lens, we have the opportunity to examine marriage and women's relationships with each other. And yet, HBO ultimately didn't take that opportunity. After this quick break, much more on what the show would have been and why we never saw it. Barry Tompkins and Tim McCarver review the week's runs, hits, and errors on the baseball diamond when HBO Sports presents Race for the Pennant, next. HBO Sports presents... Race for the Pennant.

Race for the pennant. Well, you have almost certainly seen some of the TV that Tom Fontana and Julie Martin have made together or separately, though today we'll be talking about some TV they tried to make, but almost no one has seen, sadly. Tom and Julie met in the 80s when Tom was a writer and Julie was a researcher on the classic medical drama St. Elsewhere, and they went on to work together on the similarly celebrated Homicide Life on the Street. Julie has since worked on several incarnations of the Law & Order franchise and is currently a writer and executive producer on Law & Order Special Victims Unit. Tom, who has won multiple Emmys and Peabody's, was the creator and showrunner of HBO's Oz,

and most recently co-created and co-showran AMC's Monsieur Spade. It would take more time than we have to list all of their credits, but I guess that is what IMDb is for. Thank you both for joining me. Hello, Tom and Julie. Hi, thanks for having us. Yes, thank you. How surprised are you to be doing an interview about Baseball Wives in the year 2024? Have you been asked about the show at all recently? Have you even thought about the show recently? I don't think we've been asked about it since 2002, and I certainly haven't thought about it

since then. I mean, every once in a while, I actually have heard people say that they read a scene from it in an acting class. So the pilot script did circulate around L.A. for a couple of years. No one has asked us anything more in-depth than that. It was quite a walk through memory lane to go back through old paperwork. And amazingly, it is an epic tale. And amazingly, it is an epic tale that includes, I mean, it was a two-year period, and it includes September 11, 2001, and other moments. Unforeseen. Unforeseen circumstances. And I did as much research and digging as I could and came up with a bunch of contemporary reports, which were fairly light on detail.

So I'm looking forward to hearing the full saga as you recall it here. Why don't you, whichever one of you would be better to lead off here, tell me how this idea came to you and how this project came together? I had an overall development deal at HBO, and they brought me a project for a potential series suggested by the real-life experiences of Michelle Grace, who was married to Mark Grace of the Chicago Cubs and the Arizona Diamondbacks. I, being the smartest man in television, thought, I can't write this. Julie Martin can. I knew she'd have the sensibility to do it and that I would screw it up. This was in 2000.

We went out to LA. I met with Michelle Grace, who was the baseball wife and her producing partner, and with the executives at HBO. And the meeting went well, apparently, because they contacted Tom and I shortly thereafter and said, let's go, let's write a pilot. It took quite a while because we did an outline and then we did a draft, a draft, and they actually greenlit the pilot in March of 2001. So from the summer of 2000 through the winter,

we were working on the script and then doing research. I spent a lot of time with Michelle Grace here. And if I remember correctly, and you'll tell me if I'm wrong, she was very open to the whole fictionalization. She wasn't looking to do a docud and we she wanted to play one she wanted to act in it yeah but she didn't want to necessarily play herself exactly yeah exactly yeah so um she was great i spent a lot of time with her and just talking to her about i mean it's fascinating to me i mean i'm a huge baseball fan but never have met any players or their wives personally. So didn't know anything more than just a regular fan in the stands or watching it on TV. And the way she described the hierarchy of the baseball wives was just fascinating because they are themselves a team. And so was the concept initially Michelle's and she brought it to HBO or did she get attached to it when someone

else pitched the idea? No, no. She brought it to HBO, but all she had was let's do a show about baseball wives. That was all there was. Julie really came in and invented all the characters. There were six or so women, seven or there was about seven or eight. Seven or eight women. Women and then their husbands. And the stories and everything was totally Julie. Were you then looking for a post-Oz project at that time, Tom? Because Oz didn't wind down until early 2003. And I saw one suggestion somewhere in a trade at the time that maybe baseball wives would be positioned to be sort of a successor or kind of a bridge between a Sopranos season finale and the third season of Six Feet Under. So were you looking at it as I'm going to need the next thing or did you just like the idea? I never wanted to like, oh, I need the next thing.

As Julie described, I didn't know anything about the hierarchy of the wives. And that felt like a very compelling story to tell. The wife of the star of the team is sort of the queen. And then the new players, the wives of the new players have to earn their way into her good graces. You know, it all felt very fresh. And very emotional. Yeah. Because these women are, you know, you don't really think about it, but these women were incredibly important in their husbands' careers.

But their husbands' careers were paramount, obviously, in the relationship. So it was an interesting story about just dynamics between women. It was almost less about baseball than it was about the interactions. The dynamic, yeah. Yeah, the dynamic between wives and between the wives and their husbands. There's always a danger of somebody getting hurt or somebody getting transferred. I mean, it was a very chaotic lifestyle. A lot of travel on the road a lot. Obviously, a lot of temptation from female fans. And just recently, I found my Miami Kings baseball shirt, which clearly I have kept for 25 years. I still have mine.

Wow, that could go for a lot on eBay. Yeah, I doubt it. But if anybody's listening, make me an offer. Now, Julie, I'm going to ask you a question because I don't remember. Why did we decide to set it in Miami? I think because Jim Finnerty wanted us to. Ah, our line producer, Jim Finnerty, was splitting his time between New York and Miami. Also, he lived very near to the Homestead Sports Complex, which was about the actual size of a real base. I mean, one of the biggest production challenges, obviously the storytelling with the wives and the dynamic and all that was sort of the easy part i mean the challenging production part was how do you stage a realistic looking major league baseball game yeah every week and this was this was before you know cgi

where you could stick a lot of fake yeah fake people in the stands you actually had to fill the stands with the breathing human beings and sort, yeah, the city that we chose was sort of driven by the availability of this perfect, almost major league baseball stadium that was available to us to film in and to do what we wanted there. So. You see, now I remember. That does lead me to one question I was going to ask, which was how much baseball would there have been in baseball wise? Because as you say, it would be about the off the field action as much as or more than the team itself or the players, right? So would you have envisioned having a lot of in-game action, in-stadium action that would have really run up the budget? We wanted to have some, which was a contributing factor, I think, to the storytelling style that we came up with was a Rashomon style, where there would be one game per episode, actually even just one part of a game, a couple of innings at most. Every Wives story would start at whatever point in that game that we wanted to show

and obviously you can't you know nine nine innings of baseball in an hour series so we picked we did the style that way and it worked it worked out really well because you just all you had to just you did the repeat of the baseball part of it and then you just took the point of view of the wives and unfolded the story from from where they were walked they all sat together i'm in the stands which was traditional and they they were all reacting differently because their husbands were either doing well or doing terribly yeah so but we only end up ended up having to film you know the in the well we didn't fill up anything more than the pilot but the idea being that if it goes to series, you would never have to fill more than two or three innings of an actual game.

Right. Because that is challenging. I saw one contemporary report that said, after the UK's Footballers' Wives comes a US-equivalent Baseball Wives. There was a 2002 ITV British TV show called Footballers' Wives, which I guess had sort of a similar concept, but for soccer instead of baseball. I assume that was just a coincidence, right? Because this idea had... Yeah, I didn't know about that.

That was all... I think that was all after... I do remember hearing, well, wait, they passed on Baseball Wives, and then I do... I remember hearing that they're doing... All of a sudden, as soon as HBO passed on this pilot, it was like there was wives shows everywhere. There were sports wives, desperate housewives a couple of years later. You were trendsetters or could have been before your times with the wives and girlfriends content. Tell me a little bit about the pilot. I don't know if you've gone back and reread it, but what was sort of the setup? What were you introducing in that episode?

I haven't reread it, but like any pilot, what you're trying to do is set up the characters, define the characters so that the audience is engaged by them, and then also creating the world. What the plot lines were, do you remember what the plot lines were? Well, I know one of them. I i mean the head wife the her storyline i think was that she suspected her husband was cheating or maybe he was cheating because it was i mean there there's there certainly was in writing the pilot there was like the wives dynamic is great but there was an expectation that this is hbo i remember tom you saying, okay, I know if I want to get people's attention on Oz, somebody gets shivved. So we talked a lot about what would be that equivalent for a show.

Which I refer to as the holy fuck moment. I don't know if you can use that. Feel free, yes. That's what I call it. So there was some sexual plot lines involved. One of the ones I remember most was that the pitcher was in a slump. He was a great guy and a faithful guy. His wife was desperate to get him out of the slump and ended up hiring a call girl to seduce him to get his confidence up so he would perform better.

Sort of like the slump buster idea. Slump buster, exactly. And her idea worked and he was never the wiser and never confessed to her. So it was setting up an interesting dynamic in their relationship. Julie, to write the pilot and then to plan the perspective season, how many conversations were you having with Michelle? How much did you learn about the Baseball Wives world? Oh, I talked to her quite a bit. When I went out to L.A. for the initial meeting, I met with her every day that I was out in L.A.

But that was primarily from July to March. Right. I mean, in terms of you gathering information, it wasn't like once we were getting going, once we got the green light, a lot of decisions had been made in terms of character and story. What we needed to do was to start finding a director and casting and all that other fun stuff. And the director you found for the pilot was Steve Buscemi, of all people? Is that right? Well, actually, before Steve Buscemi, we had hired Kathy Bates, who I had hired on Homicide and who had also done Oz, directed both.

And I don't remember why she dropped out. She was afraid of flying after 9-11. Oh, that's right. So she was hired in March and we were starting to put it all together. But then September 11th happened and she didn't want to get on a plane to come east. Yeah. So that was a bit of a setback production-wise, obviously. And then you went to plan B, Buscemi. How did that happen? Buscemi, again, had worked for me on Oz as a director,

and I knew him from around town. It seemed to make sense. I don't know. Now I can't remember what inspired us. I don't remember. I don't know. I think he read the script and was very enthusiastic about it yeah and we were i mean i was excited about the idea of a of a which we know kathy bates obviously but

excited about the idea of a of an actor directing um because it was more of an acting even though it's base it was baseball the screen time for the baseball game was minimal compared to right the um the acting scenes between the wives themselves, between the wives and their husbands. Yeah, we wanted a director who could talk and talk to actors, and Buscemi had done a great job on Oz, as Kathy had done. Yeah, so down to Miami we went. And these days you hear that, oh, baseball's a tough sell for movies and TVs. We're past the peak period of baseball movies, certainly. And baseball shows, there have been a few that we've covered on this podcast, Pitch and Brockmire and A League of Their Own most recently.

And, of course, HBO subsequently had its own baseball show, Eastbound and Down, which mostly predated this podcast. But at the time, HBO was bringing this idea to you. I'm sure they wanted to be in business with you two or continue to be in business with you, Tom. But at that time, was baseball looked at as sort of a saleable concept, something to pin a series on? Well, it must have been, or they wouldn't have brought me the project at the first place. They must have made that decision in the same way that, you know, when I went to them and said I wanted to do a show about prison, they were like, oh, we do very well with our prison documentaries. So maybe their sports analysts were saying that baseball was the place to go.

Tell me about the casting process. I know that there were some notable names associated with this series, right? I don't know if this is all accurate, but the pilot's cast included, I think, Amy Ryan, who people know well from many other projects, Julie Warner, Cindy Iglesias, Michelle Grace, herself, Sarah Ramirez, Tina Powers. Am I leaving anyone else out? How did you cast these? Well, Elizabeth Reeser. And we initially had Kerry Washington. And some genius at HBO decided that we needed to recast her after we shot the pilot.

And so we were devastated because we really loved Kerry. In hindsight. And Danny Pino was one of the baseball players. And Tretch and Michael Ealy. Michael Ealy, Nick Sandow. Yeah, it was a great cast. The pilot was produced. Tell me about that process. How did it go? I guess maybe opinions differed on how it went, but tell me how it came together. Well, first of all, we were shooting in winter in Florida, so I was relatively happy to be out of New York in the snow in terms of how the shooting went. I think it was great. I mean, all the women loved each other immediately. There was never any infighting

or problems among the cast that can happen. I think my other memory was, and this is terrible, that I had done Oz and there were 30 men and we never waited for anyone for hair and makeup. And I just remember us waiting a lot. There was a lot of waiting for hair and makeup and costumes. I was totally out on your wheelhouse. Hours long costumes meetings. Yeah, I guess the jumpsuits are simple. You know, the good thing about not having to be in the costume conversations is I trusted Julie's taste much more than my own. So I was able to, like, spend time smoking Cuban cigars down in Florida.

It was fun. And I was in, I talked to, I think, Carolyn Strauss, I think, was my main point of contact at the time. And, you know, we talked every day, and everyone seemed very happy with the dailies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were very enthusiastic about it. And obviously, the locations that we picked were stunning. I guess we had a big budget. I didn't pay attention to that part of it.

Yes, I did. But we didn't know. The homes they live in had to be… Opulent. Opulent, yeah. Or at least the longer. The star of those. Yeah. I saw a quote in The Hollywood Reporter at the time from the executive you mentioned, Carolyn Strauss, who was HBO's senior vice president of original programming. I think that Baseball Wives offers a very unique opportunity to look at women and their relationships to men's jobs and their own lives.

There was something about this window that was a really interesting way to look at marriage. So it was full speed ahead. All signs were positive. What were the first indications of trouble? Well, we got picked up for eight episodes. I think so. Yeah. In March of 2002. I think there was a little, there was some issue, issue i remember with the with we recut the show because the rashomon style of storytelling i think they were a little concerned because there was a big and a buzzy show coming up in the fall on nbc called boomtown which had that multi-point of view structure and we came up with what i thought was a pretty pretty good and visual and narrative idea which was a scoreboard man and a woman announcer who were guiding you

through the episode. And when Chris Albrecht saw us with what we had, what we had reshot to include the, the announcers, these announcers, he loved it. He was like, I, I honestly, from that point on, I thought we were, we were golden. Yeah, we hired writers. We beat out storylines for the eight or ten or whatever they had picked us up. I don't quite remember.

But we were working full steam ahead. And I'm going to say something else that's terrible. You know, having done the first drama series on HBO, where they trusted the writers and the producers, the showrunners, and then did Sopranos and Six Feet Under. And it was all about, it's all about the writing. It's all about trusting the writers. This is personal opinion, but the more success they had, the more executives, the executives thought they knew more than the writers and the showrunners. And if you look at like Carnival, that was a show that was the first show that HBO did where they replaced the showrunner. That had never happened before. It was unthinkable up to that point.

And I think they replaced the showrunner twice. Yeah, that was kind of a disaster. It was, yeah. But that's because, and I don't know which executives were working on Carnival, but I think that what happens sometimes in television, and I can say this having been in television for 40 some years, is that success doesn't always lead to more success. Sometimes success leads to people thinking they know more than they know. And, you know, none of us know anything. I'm the first to say that. Yeah, it's lightning in a bottle a lot of times whether something's going to work or not. But I think what happened was they decided that they could write

and make the show better when instead of trusting us to do what they had hired us to do. Were you kind of going head to head and competing for space on the schedule with The Wire, with Carnival? I mean, was there room for all of those shows? I don't remember The Wire being in the mix, but again, who remembers?

But Carnival, yes. And the thing you have to remember is they weren't making that many shows then. They were making two new series a year because they were only programming Sunday nights. And if Sopranos and Six Feet Under and Oz were there, they didn't need that many shows. They didn't need that many hours, right? Yeah. So it wasn't like they were going to go,

oh, well, we'll put this on at eight and Sopranos will go on at nine. They just were programming for nine o'clock on Sundays. Yeah, I was going to say, you know, if it was sort of either or, The Wire or Baseball Wives, it would be as much as I would have liked to see Baseball Wives. I'm glad we got The Wire. The Wire is brilliant, but I honestly don't remember The Wire being in the mix at that particular moment. And you know what? When we hang up, I'm calling David

Simon and telling him off. Right. The alternate history where Baseball Wives becomes the revered HBO show from that time or one of them, right? I actually, I saw some reports that there was an eight episode order. I saw some that there was a 13 episode order. So I don't know if that was accurate or if it was expanded.

I remember eight, but again, who the hell knows? I remember they ordered eight episodes. Back then they were only doing it. We did eight of Oz a year. To hire writers to pay for eight scripts. Thirteen may have been something they would have considered, but I would think the initial order was eight. If you had a writer's room, if you had broken much of the season, do you remember, Julie, any particular storylines or baseball adjacent storylines that would sound intriguing now or that you wish we'd had a chance to see? I think they won the World Series. No, I'm kidding. I have no idea. I mean, we definitely, and I don't, and forgive me, I don't, because I haven't read the scripts in a while. We explored all the different types of trauma that these marriages could go through during a year. And most of it was depending on the husband's career.

He was on the DL list. That shifted the dynamic for the wife with the other wives. Divorce was an issue. Guys on the road traveling a lot could cause marital problems and and then there were a lot of stories about the the competition between the wives themselves um there was an incident of a of nanny stealing i think we we tried to do you know there was correlations between how the wives interacted with each other and how their husbands interacted on the field with the opposing team.

You know, you steal bases, you try and strike people out. You're like, I mean, there's an intense amount of competition that these wives live with and they can't be in competition with their husbands or sometimes they can and that's an interesting storyline too.

But there were definitely a lot of stories to mine about them being in competition with each other. This is not to be confused with the later series called Baseball Wives, which was a reality TV series you mentioned. So there was a lot of wives content suddenly. So in 2011, there was a short-lived reality TV series on VH1 called Baseball Wives, which I guess coincidentally, I think featured a different ex of Mark Grace, I guess coincidentally, I think, featured a different ex of Mark Grace, Tanya Grace. Oh, really?

Were you even aware that this other baseball wife existed? No, not. Wow. How many times did he get married? We should find out where the next one is. We should do a series on him. Yeah, that's right. Right.

The three Graces, we'll call them. series on him. Yeah, that's right. Right. Yeah, I wondered whether that had come across your radar and you thought, oh, they stole our title, but apparently not. All of a sudden, housewives or wives did become a thing. It was a little disheartening as we were like, wait, we had the wives idea. And Julie, you mentioned that you're aoles fan. And then, of course, coming back to New York, then there's no way I could be a Yankees fan after having been an Orioles fan. So I'm a solid Mets fan now. And Tom, were you a baseball person? I'm from Buffalo, and we always had, I don't know, what's lower than a farm team? Whatever's lower than a farm team we had.

So we would go, I think it was the Bisons back then, and we would go to War Memorial Stadium and watch. But I have to say, my family was much more focused on rowing. So that's kind of where our energies went. But one name I have not mentioned is Barry Levinson, who is my producing partner in the Levinson Fontana Company. And, you know, Barry is a huge Orioles fan and I believe still one of the owners of the Orioles. So he was delighted by this whole series and was equally disappointed when HBO suddenly said, they didn't really cancel us. They just sort of said, we don't know.

Yeah, they were pushing us back, pushing us away. Continuation on baseball has been pushed indefinitely. So it still hasn't been officially canceled. You're saying there's still a chance. So watch out. And I should add that all of the scripts, for anyone who's listening who wants to read the scripts that we did develop they're all at my college library in buffalo new york so uh somebody can can do a pilgrimage to buffalo and read all the episodes we should try to see if we could get that hbo to air it they wouldn't put

it on hbo but maybe they could put it on YouTube or something. Yeah, I was going to say during the pandemic, I wrote something when almost all TV production was halted and people were worried about running out of material. I made a plea. I made the case that networks should open up the vaults and let us see the unseen pilots because there are so many intriguing ones over the years. And granted, maybe most of them weren't great, but even as interesting experiments, I'd love to see them. And some of them are available. They show up on various websites, right? Or they do get re-aired. So I wonder, I guess HBO still owns the rights to Baseball Wives? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. So you weren't able to shop it around anywhere else after it didn't get the pick up?

And also because I had the development deal, I was locked into HBO. So I couldn't make the show somewhere else. So it's the one that got away, I guess. Rowing Wives probably would have been even harder to get a green light for you. It's a very different dynamic because rowing is an amateur sport.

There's no corporate. There's no money in it. There's no money. Right. I emailed an HBO executive who was involved in the process, I think, and wanted to remain nameless even all these many years later. I guess it's still too sensitive to go on the record. And the explanation I got was the pilot didn't meet our hopes for the project. We tried lots of fixes in post, but couldn't get there. I asked if there was one specific issue on their end, and they said it wasn't one specific thing.

They tried hard. They liked the idea. They loved Tom, but it just didn't come together from their perspective, at least. But from yours, I guess you still don't know exactly what sank baseball-wise. As I said, my opinion is because they wanted to fix it. And it became problematic because we were trying to make them happy, but we were still trying to maintain the vision that we had.

I don't know. We still have the Miami Kings jerseys. That's right. We got something out of the goddamn experience. Right. Yeah, if anyone wants to pick this up now, that'll save you some costs that ramp up on production. You've already got some of the merch there.

And I guess you could update it for 2024 if this got new legs. You know, it could be expanded in certain ways. Maybe it wouldn't just be baseball wives. You know, maybe there'd be a baseball husband or a baseball boyfriend. Who knows? It could work now. I'm thinking a baseball puppet show. That's my take on it. Well, I'm sorry that this didn't end up happening and that most of us haven't gotten to see it. It would have changed HBO history. Who knows how, for the better, for the

worse. But that was such a fertile time for the network and so many legendary shows that if Baseball Wives were part of that pantheon, I'd love for there to have been a bigger baseball presence on Sunday nights and prestige TV drama related to baseball would have been great for my interests. Yeah, we should have done. We should have had it been a crossover with Oz. They came home and played the prisoners. In the prison yard. In the prison yard. And there were murders and other nasty events. An embedded spinoff. Right. Yeah. I mean, I guess it would have been quite

a pivot for you to go from Oz to Baseball Wives tonally, but maybe not as much as it would have sounded like on the surface. Who knows? Because I guess, as you said, it would have gotten heated at times among the Baseball Wives as well. Are there any other baseball shows

that either of you has enjoyed or any sort of show that you thought maybe embodied the spirit of what you were going for with Baseball Wives? Or is it just that all the other Wive shows that came out subsequently sort of hopped on the same kind of concept? Yeah, I can't think of it. I mean, I'd heard Pitch was excellent, but I never ended up watching it. It was, yeah. Was that just one season? Just one, sadly.

I'm still interested in seeing that. I heard that was very good. And has either of you found a way to work baseball into your subsequent work in one way or another? No, by the time we got pushed aside, it was just the actual baseball part was so not fun. Not that it wasn't fun. It was the complicated actual baseball part was so not fun, you know, because not that it wasn't fun. It was the complicated part of filming. And, you know, you just go like, oh, it's just so much effort. Well, is there anything that we have not discussed about Baseball Wives, about the production process at the time?

I don't know when I'll have another opportunity to talk about baseball wives with people who were involved. So any other tidbits, any other details that have not come up or that I've not asked about that you want to get out there? The experience obviously ended up being disappointing, but overall it was incredibly enjoyable and it felt very creatively fulfilling and very collaborative. As I said, with all the actors, with all the writers, all the producers, even the HBO executives, who shall remain nameless. But it was very collaborative. Everyone was very excited about the project. And it felt like it was something that hadn't been seen on TV before. So it was great to be a part of that.

Yeah. Well, it still hasn't been seen on TV, at least in this incarnation, unfortunately. Well, it still hasn't been seen on TV, at least in this incarnation, unfortunately. And I guess if you work in TV long enough, you inevitably encounter something that doesn't make it to air. And you've both gotten so many shows on the air that maybe you've experienced that less than most. But is this, in your mind, the one that got away or one of the ones that got away? Is this kind of a career regret or have you moved on until I dredged up these memories? Well, I've had enough of them that got away that this is somewhere in there, but not a major part of my career regrets. Yeah, I wouldn't say I regret anything. Do I feel disappointed? How fantastic would that have been to have a series on HBO at the time? The crown jewel in the streaming services and shooting in Miami. Might not have been so great in August. And I meant to ask, would you have fully taken advantage of the HBO license for more adult content?

I mean, would this have been a very explicit, steamy sort of show? We were definitely reminded, or at least I was, by HBO that there's a reason people are paying for a subscription. It doesn't hurt to show some skin. Right. Well, thanks so much for indulging my unusual, I might even say unique interview request here. And if any HBO executives who have the keys to the vault are listening and want to just slip us a copy of that pilot,

maybe leak it, we would love to share it and see it. That would be wonderful. But Tom and Julie, thanks so much for your time and this trip down memory lane. Thank you for your interest in it. It was quite a shock when you wrote to us asking to do this interview, but now I'm very glad we did. It brought up a lot of happy memories. So thank you very much. All right. We've got one more segment for you. This time, I don't have a neat transition,

but you know, back in the day when there were thriving sports desks at newspapers, you used to be able to pick up the phone and call them and ask them to answer questions about sports. I doubt you can still do that. You'd be lucky if anyone answered, but we answer as often as we can. We try to give you a better answer than some sports

editor with a baseball encyclopedia could have. So in just a moment, I will be back with Ryan Nelson for some in-person StatBlast action length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to days that last. All right, I'm calling in the closer, last segment, but not least. I am joined now by frequent StatBlast consultant, Ryan Nelson. Hello, Ryan. Hey, Ben. How are you doing? Doing well. I noticed on your Twitter bio, as I always say, you can follow Ryan on Twitter at rsnelson23, you have yourself described there as a StatBlast correspondent.

Is that your preferred nomenclature? Should I be describing you as a frequent stat blast correspondent? So I think just like on LinkedIn, you can make your title whatever you want, and no one's going to know any better. So that's the one I went with. It seems pretty official. But I'm happy to take any title you'll give me. Okay.

I've been going with consultant to this point, but I'm fine with correspondent. If you prefer that, we can change that right now. Frequent StatBlast correspondent, Ryan Nelson. And Meg and I didn't do a StatBlast this week, and you have been busily blasting away. And you have compiled a StatBlast backlog. So I figured I would just have you on again. This is your third podcast appearance, but we did sort of the same thing on an episode when Meg was away last spring. You came on and you delivered several stat blasts,

and that's what we're going to do again. We have a fusillade of stat blasts. We have a stat blast salvo, a stat blast barrage, no fewer than eight stat blasts to deliver, most of which have come from listeners at Effectively Wild. Because as I've mentioned, many more stat blast requests and suggestions when games are going on. Not that they ever stop, but they definitely slow down. And when people are watching MLB games, then they're prompted to ask questions. And then often I send those questions to you. So you've been busy.

Yeah, absolutely. And I do want to take this time to reiterate, we get so many good questions. And then often I send those questions to you. So you've been busy. Yeah, absolutely. And I do want to take this time to reiterate, we get so many good questions and we do not answer all of them. That does not mean your question was bad. It just means we get a lot of really good ones. So we try to do as many as we can here, but sometimes it backs up on the backlog for sure. Ryan's only one man, and I have some other semi-frequent StatBless consultants slash correspondents, but he's doing the bulk of these things. Some of the questions are bad, to be clear. I wasn't going to throw anyone under the bus, but generally solid question asking. Yeah. Okay. Well, this was a good one. This was from listener Michael, who says, as a young person, I remember one of the first books I obsessed over was a 100 strange but true sports facts book, which described Bob Feller's opening day no-hitter, citing it as the only time that a team ended a game with the same batting average it started the game with.

a team cannot be said to have a batting average since dividing by zero is not allowed in mathematics since it opens a hell mouth or demon portal of something. So I guess we'd have to say that's what, undefined? But, you know, most people would say it's probably unchanged. Michael continues, as a much older person, I wonder if this is really true. I can imagine a team entering a game with, say, 25 hits and exactly 100 at-bats

and then getting nine hits, making 27 outs, thus going nine for 36 on the day, and exiting the game with the same 250 mark it started with. Has this happened? Does this happen often? Is it even possible to blast this stat? Is the plural stats blast, like attorneys general or courts martial? I think it's probably not, right? I've been saying stat blasts. It's blasts for sure. Definitely blasts. Yeah, okay.

We have an official ruling on that. By the way, if you want to get your question blasted, you should probably put something in there that's like, I don't know how anyone could answer this one. This is probably impossible because Ryan takes that as a challenge, it seems like. It's amazing. It works like a charm every single time.

I can't help myself. Reverse psychology. So I have also heard this fun fact or some formulation of this fun fact. There's sort of a part two to this question that we'll get to. But how about this initial question? A team entering a game with the same batting average that it leaves the game with. Yeah, my first instinct was almost exactly the same as Michael's, right? You know, I could see it happening, especially early in the season.

You know, the team's batting 250 in his example. We have one more game where we bat 250. Surely that's happened before. And it turns out it has. It's not super common. You know, a couple times a year, this does happen almost always right at the beginning of the season, but not necessarily sometimes late well into the season as well. So I found 171 times where a team ended a game with the same team batting average that they started the game with. Michael was even more spot on in that the most common batting average far and away that a team has ever done this with is a 250 batting average. ever done this with is a 250 batting average. 64 of the 171 times the team started and ended with a 250 batting average. About half of those times, the team went 8 for 32, and another half of those times, just like Michael proposed, the team went 9 for 36. Some other common ones that you see is I'll round it up to a 286 batting average. This is one that does not end as a

million decimal places, but it happens to equate to two out of seven or 10 for 35, 12 for 42, something like that. Yeah. You're using three decimal places for all of this, right? Because I guess if we were to go out further, then it would be fewer matching numbers. No, actually, to go out further than it would be fewer matching numbers? No, actually, this is matching eternally. Oh, wow. So in this, because it's a fraction, right? So two out of seven, that fraction appears a lot. So this is truly exactly the same batting average before and after.

And so two out of seven, 10 for 35, 12 for 42. It's happened a bunch of times. And then the third most common rate is the fraction of 272, which is three out of seven, 10 for 35, 12 for 42. It's happened a bunch of times. And then the third most common rate is the fraction of 272, which is three out of 11. That's happened eight times, I'm assuming in quite shortened games. And then eight for 33 has happened eight times as well. Those are kind of the most common ones there. Where we get more interesting though, is because those are kind of early in the season. It's just random batting average, kind of fluky. But some interesting ones, there was two different times that a team entered a game with a 100 batting average and then left that game still with a

100 batting average. So that was the 1960 Cardinals and the 2013 Athletics. Not counting the 2024 White Sox, who've probably done it too, but I haven't checked that. athletics. Not counting the 2024 White Sox, who've probably done it too, but I haven't checked that. Yeah, we haven't confirmed, but would not be surprised. So both of those teams started the first game of the year going three for 30 and then followed it up with the second game of the year going three for 30 once more. So just not the start you want. On the other end, the highest we've ever seen this is a 364 batting average, which is the fraction four out of 11 by the 1930 Tigers. This one actually went a little further into the season. And so, you know, 12 for 33 in game one, eight for 22 in game two, the game only went six innings. But the last one I'll flag here, the most

interesting one that I found was the 1944 Cubs. In game one, they went three for 30. In game two, they went four for 31. And in game three, they went five for 30 in game two they went four for 31 and in game three they went five for 29 to have a 133 batting average and then they kept that rolling through game four going four for 30 which is that same 133 um they ended up being okay they went 75 and 79 that year but they did start 1 and 13 and were batting 133 through several games so not the start you want to have. But definitely interesting. Definitely has happened before, unlike the quote we were led to believe was saying. But I'll let you cue that up. It sounds like maybe there was a slightly different

interpretation. We missed first pass. Yeah. So and by the way, this has happened as late as September four times, you noted, right? So it's not just an early season phenomenon. That's right. Three of those four times we're batting 250. So again, those common numbers appear where they're going to be bouncing around. The league average player is about a 250 hitter, right? So that's why those things happen to pop up even late into the season. Got it. 2004 Brewers, the last to do it in September, September 10th. And it looks like the very latest, September 29th for the 1921 Pirates. So that fun fact is fun,

but it's not a fact as phrased, at least. If it was phrased exactly that way, a team ending a game with the same batting average it started the game, that has happened more than one time. And it has happened more than one time, even the popular understanding, now that the Negro Leagues are classified as major leagues.

There was the Bob Feller opening day no-hitter in 1940. There was also a Leon Day opening day no-hitter for the Newark Eagles in 1946. But there is a more precise formulation of this fun fact, and I'll read here from the Baseball Hall of Fame website, which put it this way, the record is as unbreakable and ignominious depending on which team you were on as it gets in Major League Baseball. Only once in AL or NL history has each player on a team finished a game with the same batting average with which they started. So now we're not talking about the team batting average, we're talking about every individual player on that team, which is a much taller order. But you did check to see if somehow that had happened.

You know, everyone had entered the game batting 250 and everyone went one for four, right? So high bar to clear here. Yeah, that's right. So it did happen one time in the mentioned game, you know, starting zero, ending zero. Granted, we already made the point there that technically they weren't batting zero before the game started. They were batting some surreal, unknowable number amount. But that is the only example that's even kind of close. We're not even anywhere near close to this ever happening outside of that example. The next closest one is a similar story.

So in 1953, the White Sox started by getting one hit in their game one of the season. That was Manny Mignoso went one for four. Everyone else went over in the whole lineup. In game two, it happened the exact same way that everyone went over except for Manny Mignoso, who went one for four. But in the second Mignoso, who went 1-4. But in the second game, Vern Stevens also went 1-4.

So he had not got a hit in the first game. He did in the second game. If he hadn't have gotten that hit, though, this would be the second only example that we have of a team where every player from game to game did not change their batting average for the season. Come on, Vern, you ruined it. Vern ruined that one. We could have lorded this over everyone who's sharing this fun fact, and we could say, no, it's the Vern Stevens game. You forgot about that one, the 1953 White Sox. We could have corrected everyone, but sadly, not to be. That's right. Another close-ish call, if you want to call it

that, is the 1968 Mets. They made it all the way into their 12th game of the season. So they went a little bit further in. They had five players not change their batting average from game to game, which, you know, five out of nine doesn't sound like a lot, but actually that's one of the closest calls we have outside of that kind of game one example. And so we had Greg Goosen who went two for four to maintain his 500 season average. Don't know exactly how many bats he had had up to that point, but you know, even a couple of games in 500 average is usually pretty good. And we had three players who, again, we do kind of get into pedantic territory. They were making their season debuts. So if you count that as coming in as a zero, they all went over as well. If you want to be the strictest definition of this, where

you really do have to come in with the real number, not this presumptive zero coming into the season, we've never come close to this. I mean, it's, you know, maybe half of the players do it. It's not ever really come close to happening. It probably never will happen. It's just a mathematical improbability for sure. Yeah. I guess it's a glass half full, glass half empty thing, whether you see it as zero or a thousand entering this, maybe you're perfect entering. Why are we assuming that you're completely imperfect and terrible? Maybe you should look at it the other way. They're both equally wrong. Yeah.

But for some reason, the thousand feels way more wrong. Yeah. Well, I guess it's harder to get a hit than it is to not get a hit, right? That's probably why. Yeah. Okay. Well, most of these will be a little less involved than that one was, but good question. Eli asks, I was thinking about Aaron

Judge and Juan Soto being in the same lineup this year and had an idea. Has there ever been a lineup, and if so, what's the best one, where each batter's last name starts with the same letter as the next batter's first name? So Juan after Judge, for example. If none of these exists, is there a lineup that could be a rearrange to fit this rule? So this reminds me of a game that I used to play in high school with my friends where we would just endlessly, like for hours in my memory, we would just list off names of baseball players, each one, the last name, and then the first letter of the next name, right? And you could do that forever. So Eli is asking if that has happened in a lineup.

So it has not happened. And this is another one that it really hasn't come that close either. So in this definition, right, between nine players in a lineup, that means you're going to have eight pairs of players, you know, between batter one and batter two, between batter two and batter three, et cetera. So of the eight pairs, the closest we've come is having five of those eight pairs meet the criteria, which has happened four times. So this is a good one where when you first read it, it sounds unlikely, but maybe it could have happened, but no, it has not come close. I'll read a couple examples here, some names people will know. The 97 Oakland Athletics came

close-ish in this sample of the four. They started off the lineup with Damon Meshore, and you're going to really test my pronunciation of names here. Damon Meshore and then Jason Giambi. Those do not match. But Jason Giambi was followed up by Geronimo Barroa. Geronimo, I think. Geronimo.

There you go. I told you. Which is a match. So there's your one. But you go. I told you. Which is a match. So there's your one. But then we have Mark McGuire. So not a match. But then after McGuire's Matt Stairs match, from Matt Stairs to Scott Spezio match, Scott Spezio to Scott Brocious match. So there's a streak of three.

But then after Brocious, we have Raphael Bornegal, which does not match. But then Brent Main rounds it up in a ninth spot there, which is a match. So that's five out of eight. Similar story, 1999 Baltimore Orioles did that on April 21st. 1951 New York Yankees did it in the last game of the season, I believe on the 29th of September. And Cleveland in 1956 on May 19th did it as well. That streak of three is the longest streak, if you want to answer that question as well. The longest streak is three, which also seems unreasonably low. But there's a lot of letters out there, it turns out. So it's hard to get them to match up.

It's just how probability works. What I'm getting from these first two answers is we need to play more Major League Baseball games. We need a bigger sample. It's too small a sample for these improbable events to happen. Yeah, we'll check back in the year 4800 and maybe we'll have one somewhere around there. Yeah, it's what everyone says about baseball.

There are not enough baseball games. It's a common complaint. Season's too short. Okay, Max says, I was making the most of my MLB TV subscription on opening day Eve and wanted to watch some of the best games from last season. As I was finding myself wanting for more uplifting Shohei news, I went back and watched the game that he started on June 27th, 2023, in which he

had 10 strikeouts and two dingers. In the bottom of the second inning, Luis Renjifo and Chad Wallach, yes, Chad Wallach, were thrown out by Yasmany Grandal at second base for the first and second out of the inning. I thought that was an effectively wild way for consecutive outs to be recorded. How rare is this? What's the record for the most consecutive outs coming from people being caught stealing?

So it's a whopping three, believe it or not. Three is the highest we've ever gotten. There are a myriad of ways that we've gotten to that three in a row. Some of them three outs in the same half inning. Sometimes they span from one half inning to another and, you know, could be pickoffs, caught stealing. But it has happened 11 times in the history of baseball. As far as we know on record, that goes back to 1916. So a little over 100 years here. we know on record that goes back to 1916. So a little over 100 years here. We have, just as an example, first one is 1919. We have the Boston Braves were batting and they got three outs in a row on the base paths. They got picked off twice in a row.

In the next half of the inning, their opponent got picked off to make the first out. So three consecutive pickoffs spread over to half innings. We have a couple where we have three players in a row caught stealing. I will note in 1983 on August 24th, the Orioles in the extra innings, which is maybe the wildest part of this, were the only team in the history of baseball to be picked off for all three outs in their half of the inning. It's never happened anywhere else. Tippi Martinez.

Yeah. So I was not familiar with that story. That is quite the outcome. I bet they were not very happy about being picked off three times in one half inning in extras. Next up, Kellen, Patreon supporter, says, the first four Marlins starters of this season will be left-handed pitchers. They were Jesus Lizardo, A.J. Puck, Ryan Weathers, Trevor Rogers. The streak was finally snapped with right-handed pitcher Max Meyer.

Has this happened before? So four is not the record, and it's not particularly close, actually. So the record appears to be 12 for the New York Giants in 1930. So they had 12 straight starters to start the season that were left-handed. Four exactly has happened 17 times and five or more has happened eight times. So the previously mentioned 1930 Giants at 12, we have the 1950 White Sox at 11 and the 2004 Kansas City Royals at 10. And then the New York Yankees in 1981 at nine. We have two teams at six with the 46 Phillies and the 49 Cardinals, and then two teams at five, the 17 Red Sox and the 1917 St. Louis Browns to round it out there. So four is

actually pretty high up if you rank them, but it is not anywhere near close to the number one at 12. Yeah, I don't know if it matters that much. I remember a Russell Carlton study at Baseball Prospectus from a decade or so ago. There's always a Russell Carlton study where he looked at whether it mattered whether you break up your lefties and righties in the rotation, assuming you have any righties or pitchers of the opposite handedness. And he found it didn't really seem to matter that there wasn't really a carryover effect based on whether the opponent had seen a lefty or a pitcher of the same handedness. But yeah, so this was only a third of the way toward the record. The 1930 Giants, you mentioned, I guess, Carl Hubble involved there among the famous Southpaws back then.

Yeah, and a note on that, you know, you may be wondering what's just the overall record. I think a lot of people probably know this because it was relatively recently. In 2014, the Rockies started 20 consecutive games with a left-handed starter. Right. So they just had the left-handers going and they were rolling and they just let it go. Right. So a lot longer than 12, but to start the season, 12 is the record. Okay.

We're passing the halfway point with a question from Cam, Patreon supporter, who says, I have an odd stat blast request, as if most of them aren't odd. My fantasy baseball league mates and I have terms for two very specific and frustrating pitching performances. The first is a paddock, when a pitcher is pulled in the sixth inning while being in line for a quality start. The second is a Darvish, when in the sixth inning while being in line for a quality start. The second is a darvish when a pitcher enters the seventh inning in line for a quality start but allows enough runs to finish without one. Through the power of StatHead, I discovered that while Chris Paddock does have a knack for it, Jake Odorizzi is the undisputed king of paddocking. However, the darvish is more difficult to query. Would it be possible to figure out who has blown the most quality starts in this way, both all time and in recent history? And is this something that you Darvish does indeed do more than most other pitchers? I in the email response here, I kind of threw a little shade at Cam here and calling his proposal hilariously off base.

Maybe that was a little rude, but it is probably true. So of the two hundred ninety nine thousand starts on record that have had a pitcher go into the seventh inning, two hundred and seventy thousand or so were quality starts through the sixth inning. So 90 percent of the time, if you are allowed to go more than six innings, you had the quality start entering that seventh inning. OK, so generally, if you're have if you are allowed to go more than six innings, you had the quality start entering that seventh inning. Okay. So generally, if you've allowed four or five, six runs, they don't let you keep going.

It makes a lot of sense. So of those, about 9.5% of the time, they lost that quality start by allowing more runs after the sixth inning. That would be the Darvish, as Cam calls it. Right. the sixth inning. That would be the Darvish, as Cam calls it. So, about 9.5% of the time. Hugh Darvish himself only Darvishes a little over 2% of the time. So, well, well, well below the historic average. It's 2.1% to be exact. To be fair, to credit kind of the thought process here, since 2000, the overall Darvishing rate is about 2.7%. So from that perspective, you Darvish is merely just a little bit better than average.

But historically, he's way better than average. I imagine that's because pre pick a date long ago, basically, they just always went. Even if they allowed six runs, they just were allowed to keep going. And if they allowed five more runs, they just kept going and they kept going. Right. So they were less likely to be pulled when they got into trouble because they just were allowed to keep going. And if they allowed five more runs, they just kept going and they kept going. Right. So they were less likely to be pulled when they got into trouble because they just were allowed to keep going. Yeah. So if he's 2.1 versus the recent league average of 2.7, I guess you could say, I wonder if he should, like, if you adjusted for

how good you Darvish is, is that not that great? Is he more above average than his darvishing rate is better than average? I don't know. I guess the fact that he's better than average means that he maybe gets more opportunities to do this, but probably not fair to hang this on him, to name this fumbling the bag after him because he doesn't really do it that much. I didn't ask you in advance, but do you happen to know who would be a better pitcher to name this after if we were going to redub it after someone who really deserves it? Yeah, so there's a few names out there. And of course, they're old timey names,

which makes it fun. So the ones that have done this the most, I'll kind of go top six, the most. I'll kind of go top six ascending. So Bobo Newsome did this 77 times. For reference, I think Darvish did it five times maybe, so a little bit different rate there. He did it in a quarter of the times he was allowed to go past the sixth with a quality start, he blew it. So 25% of the time is a lot more than the 2.1. Some other ones, Ted Lyons, 78. Early win, believe it or not, 79 times. But to be fair, it was only 17% for him. He just pitched in a lot of games. Epo Rixey is at third place at 82. Red Ruffing has done this 90 times. And the all-time leader with 92 Darvishes is Burley Grimes, who did so in 25.7% of his opportunities, which is also near the top as a percentage. So, he leads the way in total aggregate Darvishes or maybe Burleys or Grimes. And 25.7% is near the top as a rate as well. Okay. Yeah, I'm looking if we set, let's say, minimum 20 total starts into the seventh, then you have Elmer Netzer, maybe 57.1% Darvishes.

That's not good if you're Darvishing or Netzering more than half of the time. What if we do post-2000? Can we come up with a contemporary or relatively contemporary person who's done this fairly often who would be more of an apt selection than Darvish? We are going to blast on the fly here. Yeah. The stats can be done. So, since 2000, the number one here would actually be Doug Wachter. You're really testing my pronunciation here. He debuted in 2003. Wachter, I think. Wachter.

He carried a quality start into the seventh 43 times and blew it six times. So that's a 16% rate. Okay. Eight times higher than you, Darvish. So if we want a Wachter. Yeah, Fernando Nieves is near the top as well. Ricardo Rodriguez, J.D. Martin, not household names per se. So I think this is where we're finding maybe some of those pitchers that aren't quite as talented to be blowing it 10 times the rate of UDarvish. Right. All right. Let's go with Wechtering then. I like the sound of that.

Okay, next question comes from Terry, who says, Dodgers rookie Landon Knack gave up a homer to the first batter he faced. Doesn't it seem like that happens a lot or at least more than would be expected? The batter is probably sitting on a get it over fastball and blam. Is there any way to easily check that? And for me, there was. I forwarded it to Ryan. That's right. It was pretty easy to check overall. You know, we do have the dates of everyone's pitching, so we just take the earliest date. And the answer is no. In fact, it's very, very slightly the opposite. So since 1916, again, this is play-by-play data, about 2.12% of the time a batter has hit a home run.

So that's the overall rate all batters, you know, against every pitcher. In a pitcher's debut batter-faced, the rate is 2.05%. So just a little bit less than a tenth of a percent lower than at the overall rate. So maybe it's because the pitcher is more likely to walk a guy because he's nervous or hit him with a pitch because he's nervous or something like that. The first batter face rate is a little bit lower than the overall rate. Probably not statistically significant, but no, that is not a statistical fact, even if it sounds like maybe it would be. Yeah, it sort of makes sense that it wouldn't be true

because it's your first time facing that pitcher. Generally, the pitcher has the upper hand, right? That's right. And the batter gains with the familiarity effect. So you would sort of expect that the batter would be at a relative disadvantage the first time he's facing a pitcher. I mean, yes, I guess it's the first batter he faced. So you might think, well,

he's going to be nervous. And as you said, right, that might lead to more walks or more wildness or more hit by pitches, not necessarily more homers. Again, it's not going to be a pitcher at his peak in his prime, presumably. He just came up. So there are a lot of factors here. But I guess it's mostly that we remember it, right? It's just more salient, more memorable when we're getting our first look at a guy and blamo, blast, it's a home run right out of the gate. It probably just stands out to us more when that happens. And thus, we're likely to conclude that it is more likely to happen when it's probably

actually not. Yeah, that's right. Okay. Second to last question actually comes from me. I was wondering about streaks of ascending or descending games played. This was prompted by Trevor Story's season-ending injury because I was looking at the progression. He went from 142 games played in 2021 with the Rockies,

and ever since he signed with the Red Sox, it's been downhill playing time-wise and, well, any way that you slice it wise. 94 games, 43 games, and then only eight before he suffered his season-ending injury this year. I guess if we were going by percentage, we could say the trend actually started with 2020 because he played 59 out of 60 possible games that year. But we're just going with the raw totals. So I wanted to know the longest streaks like that, fewer and fewer and fewer games played, and then the opposite, increasing numbers. Yeah, so maybe I'm an optimist here. I actually started with the increases first. So for pitchers, the record is eight consecutive seasons with increasing game totals. And there's actually some pretty big names here. Number one, Nolan Ryan, who he started in

1966 and he pitched two games that year. And then in the following seasons, he pitched 21, 25, 27, 30, 39, 41, 42. And then at that point, I think 42 starts, you start to cap out on how many games you're able to pitch. Yeah. So he wrapped up at 42. The next name, another big one, Tim Wakefield, went 13, 24, 27, 32, 35, 36, 49, 51. So again, 51. I can't recall.

That's a little before my ball-watching days. Was there some reliever in there there or was that just 51 starts? There must. Yeah, he was sort of a swing man for a while. So, yeah, there were 17 starts only that year. There you go. So that's part of it. Kind of started to transition to the bullpen there. And Jose Mesa, similar story here. Six games to start, then seven, 23, 28, 34, 51, 62, 69.

And he was an all-star those last two years as well. So good, good, good, nice. And I don't know if this is a coincidence or not. I noted it here. All three streaks were to start their careers. So it wasn't where maybe there was an injury and they got re-ramped up. It was just, you know, we startramped up it was just you know we start and you keep pitching well and you get more starts and more appearances so makes a lot of

sense yeah if we look at decreases for pitchers it's also eight is the record this time only a two-way tie so we have Theodore Breitenstein way back in 1894 to 1901. He actually led the league in appearances in 1894 with 56 before following that up with 55, 44, 40, 39, 26, 24, and then three, which ended his career in 1901 with three at age 32. So kind of an early exit there. I guess timelines were probably a little bit different in the 19th century. But then a much more modern pitcher also tied for that record, Craig Breslow, who he had 77 appearances in 2009, then 75, 67, 63, 61, 60, 45, 15.

Interesting enough, though, he did not end his career that way. He actually did have a little bit of an upswing for a couple more seasons before he called it quits there. For position players, it's actually a little bit longer streaks. So on increases, we have the record at nine, two players tied at nine. That is Jerry lump. Uh, he started his career with 20 and then went 40, 81, one 26, one 46, one 48, one 56, one 57, 158. He kind of also started reaching that territory where you're hitting your mathematical limit

on how many you can play. And then in the, again, 19th century, Ned and or Ed Williamson, it depends on which resource you look at. In 1880, he started his career with 75 games and then went 82, 83, 98, 107, actually led the league with 113 in 1885. And then 121, 127, 132, all of those seasons with the Chicago Cubs ending in 1888. And then lastly, there is no tie. If we look at decreases in games played by a hitter, the record is 10 by Jim Fregosi.

In 1969, he just missed the perfect season there with 161 and then went 158, 107, 101, 90, 78, 77, 58, 49, and ended his career at age 36 with 20 for the Pirates. So 10 consecutive seasons, the first couple within a realm of, you know, just everyone needs a day off here and there. And then I'm not sure, I didn't look too far into it, injury, performance. He became not a regular for the rest of his career, sitting kind of half of the games for most of those seasons.

Interesting. Yeah, I guess if you're a position player, maybe there's just more increments. I mean, you can sort of explore the space more so than the ceiling, I guess, for a pitcher, at least lately is a little lower, right? So maybe that's part of why the position player streaks are longer. But I noted that Theodore Breitenstein, you mentioned that his major league career ended after 11 seasons. And when he was 32, he then went on to play 11 more seasons in the minors through age 42. So he was just getting started.

He was halfway through his pro career when his major league career ended. I suppose in those days, they were all making like $16 a year anyway. So it probably didn't matter if you played the majors or the minors. It's probably all the same anyway. Yeah, there were some minor leagues that were more desirable for some reasons than major leagues at the time. And yeah, Jim Fregosi had a pretty interesting career. Interesting because he was traded for Nolan Ryan famously, infamously, who was also mentioned

in this stat blast. And then, yeah, injuries. And he was a superstar, really, when he was younger and then declined as physical issues accumulated. So 10-season descending streak, that's the number to beat or to try not to beat. It's within reach for Trevor Story. He has four seasons in a row. He just has to go seven games played next time, then six, five, four, three, two, one. He will have beaten Jim Fregosi, but for his sake, I hope he snaps his streak. Craig wrote in one of his game recaps, this was a Pirates-Phillies game, Pirates 9, Phillies 2, Jack Sawinski hit a grand slam and Andrew McCutcheon hit his 300th career homer.

He was also credited with a steal of home when he was the front end of a double steal on which JT Real Muto airmailed the ball to center field while trying to nail the trailing runner. Craig wrote, if I was a crazy billionaire, I'd hire someone to analyze every steal of home in baseball history to see how many of them were horseshit like that, as opposed to cool Jackie Robinson in the World Series style straight steals of home. I bet it's north of 75%. When my researcher was done with that, I'd have them do a horseshit check on inside the park home runs to see how many were outfielder mistakes as opposed to a function of hit placement and wheels. We just talked about that on the podcast recently. Craig concluded, I have lots of great ideas. I just need some money to see them through. Or you need Ryan Nelson and his RetroSheet database, no billionaire required. So what did you determine? Yeah, so I didn't really meet his criteria,

so he doesn't have to pay me because I didn't analyze every single steal of home in history. There are a few that were a little too tough for me, so I just left them to the side. So the starting point here, this is one that's actually pretty tough to look up. There's not a lot of categorization for how base runners move outside of just stolen base, right? So there's lots of different ways, believe it or not, that base runners can move around. So how I started was I found every event where a run scored without a ball being put in play. That was my baseline. That's happened 31,587 times. So the vast majority of those, a little over 20,000, were pass balls or wild pitches. Man on third, ball gets away, runs home, right?

So that's the bulk of it. But from there, we get into some smaller categories. We have 2,300 or so box with the man on third. We have about 2,000 pickoffs with an error, you know, picked off and either dropped by the fielder or bad throw by the pitcher and allows a guy to get to third. And then now we kind of get into territory where you might be actually able to consider these steals of home. That first group, I don't think they get logged as steals, but some of these could. So we have 2,591 times that a runner stole second or third, and then an error allowed that same runner to continue on to

home. I think depending on how it's written in Retro Sheet, sometimes those are considered stolen bases of home, sometimes they're not, but that's kind of that genre of ways to get home. We also have 392 times, and this is really what I think Craig is speaking to, where a runner stole second, And this is really what I think Craig is speaking to, where a runner stole second, and the throw went to second, and then that runner went from third to home. That's 392 times where the runner at second was safe, and 267 times where that runner at second was out. We also have 463 times where there was some other nondescript type of error that allowed that runner to advance home.

That, again, I think would go kind of towards Craig's thought here. 71 times where I titled this category, Who's to Say? There's no way to know exactly what happened. It just says that a runner scored. No other details. Probably mostly in kind of older games. kind of older games. And then finally, I found 2,655 times that a runner truly did steal home before anything else happened. He just went for it. 2,655 times. So out of all of those, Retro Sheet only identifies 3,136 times that a runner quote-unquote stole home. And I've concluded that 2,655 of those are

true steals of home. So, in my opinion, it's actually kind of the opposite. Something like 85% of the quote-unquote steals of home were really their steals. Now, my intuition was that maybe since 2000, those numbers have dropped, thinking that people used to be bolder back in the day than they are now. And to some extent, that's true, but to some, it's not as well. So, rather than just rely on RetroSheet, I again kind of went through and categorized things in my own way. So in all time in history, if you look at that true steals number as a percent of non-passed ball, wild pitch, balk, or pickoff, 41% of the time in all of history were they true steals. Since 2000, it's only 23% of the time. So that kind of jives a little bit with Craig's number

there saying 75% of the time there was either someone else running, there was some other type of error, there was something where the guy threw it away. And so someone quote unquote, stole home. But there actually are ways RetroSheet doesn't count those as steals home. So if you look at the statistical record, those would not count. But I think that's the question that he was trying to get after. And so if that's the case, he was pretty close, 75%. The numbers show 76.4%. Beautiful. Well, superb blasting as always. You are a great resource for the show. Thank you so much for all of your contributions, whether you are actually delivering them in person or whether I am filtering them through you. It is really handy to have you

helping out here. Much appreciated. Great talking to you. Everyone look up Ryan on Twitter at rsnelson23. Anything else you'd care to plug while you're here? No, thanks again for having me. You know, it's always fun. And I would like to shout out the editing assistants because this would have been 15 minutes longer if you didn't cut out all my stumbling over my own words that I wrote. So appreciate that assist there. Well, this has been a blast. Thanks so much to all my guests and to you for listening. A few follow-ups for you. First, after Jordan Montgomery left Scott Boris in favor of Wasserman, we wondered whether any of the other so-called Boris Four would ditch Boris before their next free agency. Well, we weren't the only ones wondering. Other agents were too. Here's a tidbit from a Ken Rosenthal column. Cubs centerfielder Cody Bellinger said Jordan

Montgomery's decision to leave Scott Boris for the Wasserman media group led to him getting numerous calls from other agents trying to recruit him. Bellinger, who could opt out of his three-year $80 million deal at the end of the season, said he intends to stay with Boris. I've definitely gotten blown up, but I've confirmed multiple times that I'm definitely not leaving, Bellinger said. I've told Scott that. I had nothing but positive experiences through the whole process. I guess that process worked out better for Bellinger than for the other three. Also, since Montgomery has now made his debut for the Diamondbacks,

facing, ironically, Blake Snell, whom he out-dueled, Snell got shelled again. Shelled might be a bit strong, but he wasn't good. We answered a listener email about why these late-signing free agent starters like Montgomery and Snell weren't ready sooner. Why couldn't they have prepped for the season and ramped up on their own? Well, back in February, Tom Verducci quoted Scott Boris, insisting that they would be ready.

The piece said, Under the supervision of Boris's roster of trainers and support staff, Snell is training at a Boris facility in Newport Beach, California. Montgomery and JD Martinez are training at one in Florida, and Bellinger and Matt Chapman are training at one in Arizona. Boris promises, quote, They do not end up behind in any way when they do report to camp. I took care of this years ago, Boris says.

I've spent millions on sports training facilities and instructors. I can conduct a spring training. As I said last time, it was kind of confusing for me that it took them that long to get ready. We propose some possible explanations. But Patreon supporter Michael pointed out that maybe they were wary of fully ramping up, lest their UCLs sproing before they signed. Solid point. Sign the contract, then take the risk. We've also been talking about Blaze Alexander, who hit his first Major League home run, a Blaze of glory, and about the influx of Blazes in baseball. Blaze Alexander is the first MLB Blaze spelled B-L-A-Z-E. A number of people have pointed out that there have been other Blazes by different spellings, B-L-A-I-S-E. Blaze Ilsley briefly pitched for the Cubs in 1994.

I was aware of the more conventionally spelled Blazes. That didn't seem so noteworthy to me. Maybe that's because I went to Catholic school, so I heard a lot about St. Blaze and Blaze Pascal, but Blaze by any spelling, not that common a name. We also talked about the purported 516-foot home run by Florida Gators two-way phenom Jack Caglione. I noted that the Gators don't use StatCast, and as far as I know didn't use TrackMan either. I wasn't sure what system they do use to come up with figures like that. I've subsequently learned that they use YakkerTech, which someone described to me as the RC Cola of tracking technologies. Not to say that it's any less accurate, but it's certainly less common.

We also talked recently about my affection for John Sterling, talked about my memories of listening to him on the radio when I was a kid. Didn't even talk about my memories of hearing him in the car back before there were smartphones and we could easily access the score. Nothing like depending on that radio broadcaster voice as your sole link to what's going on in the game. Signal fading in and out, hoping it'll last a little longer. Anyway, we shouted out some of the best and or worst Sterling home run calls. Andrew Mearns at Pinstripe Alley ranked all of them. I'll link to that on the show page. Finally, one other thing I'll link to on the show page. Neil Payne did an interesting analysis of just how disappointing the White Sox are.

We talked about which team has the worst vibes. I don't know if I was definitive enough. Aside from the fact that the farm system is on the upswing, that is a truly soul-sucking team. And Neil showed that it's quantifiably one of the most disappointing of all time. you look at how well-positioned it seemed to be a few years ago and what has happened since. If you want to give us good vibes only, you can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad-free, and get themselves access to some perks. Becca Bolton, Michael Heimowitz, John Marsh, Thanks to all of you.

Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only. Monthly bonus episodes, playoff live streams, prioritized email answers, discounts on merch and ad-free fan crafts, memberships, and so much more. Check out all the offerings at patreon.com slash effectively wild. If you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site. If not, you can still contact us via email. Send your questions and comments to podcast at fangraphs.com. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast

platforms. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectivelywild. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at ewpod, and you can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash effectively wild you can follow effectively wild on twitter at ew pod and you can find the effectively wild subreddit at r slash effectively wild check the show links for a list of upcoming mlb ballpark meetups for effectively wild listeners you want to go to a game you can sign up for one thanks to shane mckeon for his editing and production assistance meg will be back with me next time talk to you soon That's why I love baseball Special guest is preview series pitching and pure poetry That's why I love baseball

Effectively wild Effectively wild Effectively wild Baseball Podcast