Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2493: Baseball Has Marked the Time

Episode Date: June 17, 2026

Ben Lindbergh and The Ringer’s Van Lathan banter about Van’s love of baseball, his origin story as a fan, how he got back into the sport, MLB’s resurgence in popularity, advanced stats questions, why the percentage of Black players in MLB fell, how average sports fans perceive MLB’s labor battle, and much more (warning: language). Then (1:25:38) Ben talks to Thomas Gilbert, author of Death in the Strike Zone: The Mystery of America’s First Baseball Hero, about how Jim Creighton revolutionized pitching and reshaped the game, and how Gilbert investigated the many unknowns and misperceptions surrounding the right-hander’s life and death. Audio intro: Gabriel-Ernest, “Effectively Wild Theme” Audio outro: Guy Russo, “Effectively Wild Theme” Link to Van’s Ringer archive Link to Van’s baseball outfit Link to Van’s dad story Link to Chico Escuela clip Link to Ben on Dunn and Pierre Link to B-Ref career WAR leaders Link to wOBA glossary entry Link to Field of Dreams scene Link to Jeter’s dating history Link to The Simpsons scene Link to Death in the Strike Zone Link to How Baseball Happened Link to Creighton wiki Link to Thorn on Creighton 1 Link to Thorn on Creighton 2 Link to EW on pesäpallo Link to The Universal Baseball Association Link to Defector on Coover’s book Link to Ella Black series  Sponsor Us on Patreon  Give a Gift Subscription  Email Us: [e-mail]  Effectively Wild Subreddit  Effectively Wild Wiki  Apple Podcasts Feed   Spotify Feed  YouTube Playlist  Facebook Group  Bluesky Account  Twitter Account  Get Our Merch! var SERVER_DATA = Object.assign(SERVER_DATA || {}); Source

Hello and welcome to episode 2493 of Effectively Wild, the baseball podcast from Fangraphs, presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of the Ringer, not joined this time by Meg Rally of Fangraphs, who is day-to-day with a wisdom tooth extraction, and so I've got two great guests for you. Later on the episode, I will be joined by Thomas W. Gilbert. He is the author of an excellent baseball book called Death in the Strike Zone, the Mystery of America's First Baseball Hero.

It came out right around opening day. I just got around to reading it. I highly recommend it. Thomas is the author of How Baseball Happened, a history of the origins of the sport that came out in 2020, won the Casey Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year. Death in the Strike Zone, I'm sure, will be a contender. It is the first biography of James Creighton, who more or less invented pitching, as we know it today. And by extension, gave rise to the sport, as we know it today. For better or worse, maybe a bit of both. Craton predated professional baseball, died very young after revolutionizing the sport. And so he has been shrouded in mystery ever since, and Gilbert has solved a lot of those mysteries. If you enjoyed my

Ella Black docu-series from last year, which was my 19th century baseball history investigation, you'll like this book. You'll like this book regardless. So stick around to hear Tom talk about it. But before we do our baseball book club segment, we will be devoting most of this episode to a conversation with a cherished coworker of mine and one of my favorite podcast people period, Van Lathen. You may know Van van from one of his many shows. He's a big baseball fan. We've been planning to pod about it for a while. So we're going to talk about his baseball background, how he got back into baseball, how he feels about the evolution of the sport. I will help school him on some stats stuff. We will talk about black players in Major League Baseball or the lack thereof.

Some cross-sport comparisons. Vans read on how baseball's labor battle is perceived. And much, much more. I could talk to Ben about anything. I could listen to Van talk about anything. Hopefully the same will be true for you. One warning, we tend to work blue at the ringer. We don't do bleeps.

And so Van was podcasting by Ringer rules here. And Van is an artist with a swear word. So you will get the unvarnished van in this segment. Be warned. If you're concerned about your kids' tender ears, your tender ears, anyone's tender ears. Blanket language warning here. I'm not sure anyone would want to hear the number of bleeps that producer Shane would have to add otherwise. But you will want to hear vans every word, profane or otherwise.

So let's get to talking. All right, it's time for an incredible crossover event. As seen and heard on CNN, the ringerverse, higher learning. ringer tailgate, raise the roof, and beyond. It's a baseball fan and a baseball van. Van Lathen. Hi, Van. What's going on?

Okay. I'm ready to talk hardball. The OPS of this podcast is way up. I got my glove. Yeah. I got my, I guess this is an imitation, imitation ball here. Look, let me show you something real quick. Let me show you something real quick, then.

Okay. All right, listen. I got several different things. I got the four seamer. Okay? I got the two seamer. Yep. Yep. Okay. All right. I can come down here. Here's the thing about this, Ben. Before I even get into to show you this next grip, here's the situation.

Yeah. I learned this grip from Trevor Bauer. Now look. Oh, no. Here's the deal. Here's a deal. It was a long time. The guy knows his pitching. Okay. Okay. The guy knows is pitching. When I go to, my go to pitching people, you know, I go to pitching next. I go to pitching next. Ninja, right? Oh, you ever seen him? Sure.

You've seen the pitching ninja? But I tell you something about Bauer. He knows his pitching. This right here, sweeper. Yeah. Inside there, you throw it. You don't snap the, that's not what you do. You change the arm when you throw the sweeper.

All right, let it go. You want to throw the sweeper across there. Strikes early in the count. Late in the count, you want to throw a sweeper off the plate. Boom. There you guys go. Get more outs. Wow.

See, I know that. your dad threw a lot of pitches, but he didn't teach them to you. Or he didn't teach you the good ones. He kept those to strike you out with. He didn't want me to pitch like that. Like he always had arms problems his entire life, right? Yeah.

He was a smaller guy and he was a nibbler. So dad had a lot of movement. He used to call himself a junk baller. Yeah. He pitched there. He threw the screwball. He threw the screwball, right? The 12 to 6.

Through the big 126. All right. He threw a fastball, but it had a little funky movement on it. He pitched at Shady Grove High School in Maranguin, Louisiana. Then he pitched for Southern University in Bat Rouge, Louisiana. Then he went on and gotten a little bit of the sugar cane leagues. I don't know if you guys know what that is, it's sugar cane leagues down there in Louisiana. But, you know, my dad could, he really could move it around. It was hard to hit.

Then in the 10th grade, I started to be able to track it. And I started jacking this shit. And he's... Well, for those who can't see, Van, you've come dressed for the occasion. You got your glove, you got the ball, you got the wraparound shades. Yeah. You are inathletic wear for this podcast, which is appropriate. And your display name is Kyle Tucker.

Interesting choice. How did you go with Kyle Tucker? Because I'm trying to do anything I can do to get King Tuck off the Schneid. Yeah. He needs your help. Last night. was a better game for him. He jacked a three-runner.

Now, I will say this, about that homer. It did look like he was still kind of fooled on that pitch. He got the barrel of the bat a little over the play. He was a little early, but he still got, he received got enough to pull that ball out. You ever see, like, kind of reminded me of the Kurt Gibson joint from back in 88? You know how he just kind of flips the ball out of there and he gets a good crack off the barrel of the bat?

That's what took there last night. But we'll take whatever we can get. I think it was a two-hit game for him last night. as well. Multi-hit games going to be good for him. We need him to break eyes as Schneid. So anything I can do to get King Tuck back on top is what I'll do right now. So that's my name today, Kyle Chuck. Wow. That's the sign of a good hitter.

You get fooled and you still get good wood on the ball. So glad. Oh, my God. Chuck could do that. Yeah, I know. Well, we didn't talk about what we were going to talk about beyond baseball, which is a pretty broad topic. But you are among the people in the world who I'm most confident in not planning a podcast with and just hitting record.

and seeing what happens. Planning is, if anything, a detriment to a Van Lathen podcast and away we go. I think that's already clear. I am into it. Look, I told everybody, I was like, look, Ben is like Jonah Hill from Moneyball.

Like, he understands the game to that level. I understand the cultural parts of the game. I understand guys like Raphael Belyard, Mark Lindke. Yeah. Kyle Tucker. Chuck Knoblock. Those are the Kyle Tucker. These are things I understand.

All right. But I want to deepen my understanding of baseball, you know, just moving the ducks around the pond. So that's why I had to tap in with you. Yeah. We've been talking about doing this for a very long time because the first time we met was at a ringer-vers dinner in L.A. years ago. And we were mostly talking about baseball then. And then every podcast we've done since then on any topic, inevitably, you say,

when are we doing a baseball pot? When are we talking about baseball? I want to talk about baseball. So here we are. finally, the much anticipated baseball pod. So tell me about your baseball backgrounds. Was it just passed down from your dad? Is that how you developed your love of the game?

Because you're in Louisiana. You're not close to any MLB teams at that time, right? So it's all, what were you following? Were you going to minor league games or just amateur level? So here's an interesting thing that doesn't get talked about. I've wanted to do something about it for a long time. Shout out to Noah at the ring. or one of our guys, Noah.

Great guy. I love Noah. Okay. Now, this is what I'll say. Baseball is an underrated aspect of black history. It doesn't get talked about as much as it should. In order to access Americana, there were certain things that black folk coming out of slavery

when they were getting into being free Americans, some proximity of freedom. Quote, quote, that they did. And they did all of these things, despite what America would tell you. They bought land, they planted, they got jobs, you know, after slavery, during the times of slavery and places where slavery had been outlawed. They became a part of the American economic and professional, cultural, creative landscape. They always invested into America, and they invested into baseball. they got into baseball.

Baseball was being played where I'm from in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where my father's from in Maryland, Louisiana. Football was a thing, okay? Obviously, later on it becomes a huge thing. Basketball was never really thing for my father, to be honest with you. But baseball was a thing out there in the country that we played. No one is going to tell you that football is not a big deal in Louisiana. Of course it's a big deal.

But baseball with my... ancestral home. Mariguan, Louisiana. If you go to Ventress Cemetery where my father's buried, God rest his soul. If you go all the way to the back, their slaves buried there. And I'm telling you, my connection to my people, always for my family, included baseball at family reunions. My uncle Ray was in an organization. My dad played. Everybody had a different style. Everybody had a different thing to date. But we played baseball. So there wasn't a team around. I didn't go, we weren't going down to New Orleans for Zephyr's games, but we did have the sugar cane leagues and we did have just my father teaching me the sport of baseball.

You almost did the Terrence man monologue there. You were so close. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. That's true. Yeah. And that's why it's so sad that it's dissipating now. That's why I'm glad to see baseball come back and glad to see young brothers out there playing because it's such a big, big part of how we saw ourselves as members of the American experiment

that this particular game and this particular sport, how can you not get emotional, spiritual about baseball? Yeah. And not to date you, but when you were a kid, there were many more black players in MLB, African-American players, to be specific. You can say black. Yeah, just because there are a lot of black Latino players today. But now baseball has been very, very good to me?

That's right. fewer African-American players, but that's maybe coming back a little bit. I hope they're trying. So who were your guys then? Because did you have a team? Or were you just rooting for individuals? So it was Atlanta Braves.

So this is the thing that people don't understand. The Super Station, Ted Turner. Rest in peace, Ted Turner. Ben is a fucking genius. This is why I part in with Ben. There's very little work. I can just come on here with these glasses. I know people can't see me.

Because Ben knows. So there's a lot of things. You watch WGN. And people don't know you had two cable stations that were super stations. And nobody really knew why because we didn't understand, like, media markets and stuff like that back there. Nobody cared. It was just like, we would get the local news in Chicago. They'd be like, okay, we would like watch the Chicago local news.

It would come on WGN. WGM was broadcast everywhere. But that's how I got into Ryan Sandberg. All right. And what was the first basement they had? Mark Grace. Yeah. And the Cubs, but not just them.

Also the White Sox, the guy used to call the White Sox games, you'd hit a fly ball, he'd be like, Cannacorn? It's Hawk. Hawk, Harrelson. Yeah. Hawk, Harrelson, Canicorn, right? And you would be watching Robin Ventura and Frank Thomas, you know, Steve Sacks, play for the White Sox a little bit during that time. And then they had two different teams.

So normally it would be the Cubs in the day, and then it would be the White Sox, like, at night. You would watch the White Sox at night. White Sox had a really fun team to watch back then. But always the brave. and the Braves were the team that I got with, man, Glavin, Maddox, Avery, Smoltz, okay? Later on, Denny Nagel joined the team. You had Markis Grissom, you had Mark Linky,

you had Raphael Beillardt, you had Javreau, you had Javre Lopes, you had Ryan Klesko, you had Jeff Blouser. You had all of those guys together. You had the crime dog, Fred McGriff. Yeah. Okay, you had all of those teams to. together, all of those aces, I remember watching this New York Yankees ripped our hearts out in a game where Glavin had pitched the gym, and then we come in, we give up the home run,

the gym lariatts, and the Yankees never looked back at the total. What a great moment you're reminding me of. Thank you, Vin. Shut up! That is the worst curveball that's ever been thrown. I'm sure Mark Woller is somewhere right now. It's like living his life. He doesn't want to go back and relive this.

But I remember watching that with my dad. My dad was like not mad at Mark Wolder's, but he was bewildered. Just disappointed. He went, he went, what is wrong with that boy? He was like, of course. Like, well, son, look at that curveball. That curve ball was spinning in place. Lay was blasting.

Then that becomes that. The waste, I thought Andrew Jones was going to become the next Mickey Mantle, the way he played in the first two games of that series. Anyway, so all of that stuff is my time. And I'll say something else about just my time, in baseball at that point. Overall in sports, Ben, we had better cross-sport knowledge than we do now. Just like the athletes played more sports than, the fans played more sports did. I'll tell you why. We're all watching SportsCenter, right? Yeah. And because we're all watching SportsCenter,

we're all watching all the highlight packages of everything. So you're watching for your stuff. And then the Save Patrick Wong. You're like, who's that, Patrick Ward? It's Ed Lendross, it's Leclair, it's all of these guys. It's Pete Sampras versus Andre Agassi. It's Michael Schumacher, the race car driver, and Jeff Gordon, all of these people over and over and over again. It's this guy from Austin who used to ride his bike really fast,

and we don't talk about him anymore. But it's like, all of these things are on the same spot where you have to go to get your highlights. So you just had a better understanding of other sports, period. Now you got basketball heads, you got football heads. Not as many people for me have the general understanding of the entire sports landscape as what we had back then. So there was just a better understanding of all the sports in that regard. Yeah, I guess it's the monoculture conversation that we have about a lot of things.

You just got exposed to culture more broadly as opposed to the little silo that we are each in of our own interests. And I guess there was a broader knowledge. Maybe there was less specialized knowledge. Maybe you knew a little less about that sport. It's just like, yeah, you did have two-way players back then. You had Brian Jordan, you had Dion Sanders, you had Bo Jackson, et cetera. And it was amazing that they did that, but it was conceivable in a way that it's really not today, just because you have to be so good.

And it's so punishing physically to do that that it's next to impossible now. And so I guess also you're just expected to know so much about any sport that you've follow. Maybe it's because of fantasy sports. Maybe it's because of sports betting. Maybe it's because we're each just listening to our own single sport podcasts like this one or whatever. But there is a lot more to know. And maybe it goes hand in hand with the advanced stat stuff that you're talking about. It's like, you know, you have to pay really close attention to a sport to have any idea what you're talking about or the people who really pay close attention are going to know that you're a casual, You know, I just be honest with you.

Like you're saying, some of this stuff just wasn't invented. Okay? We were tracking players. RBI average home runs. Okay? That was the thing. RBI average home runs. And everything else, the fucking announcers will fill it in.

Announces would be like, now here's the thing about that cut fastball. You really want to keep your bat inside the zone for the entire time. because if you don't stay disciplined, that'll run right back into your hands, and that's a bat breaker right there. So what you want to kind of do is keep your bat in the zone. You want to recognize early and try to get that ball pulled or else you want to take it and see what the um's going to give you.

And you're like, oh, my God, this guy's a genius. And then, you know, you're in a situation, infield in here. They're going to be extra spots. And then they talk about the things before it happened. Now, here, Hank, if you get a hard, hit ball here the second. Are you going to want to come home with this? Or you're just going to go ahead and take the outs and see what else your bullpen can give you? It's like, I'm going to try to cut down a run if I can't.

The question is, at shortstop with that bum ankles, he's still going to be able to have the range to make that play, stand up and make a great throw. And that added to the game. Now it's completely different. A guy, a guy gets up, he's hitting 265 and somebody goes, he is really seeing the ball well. And I'm like, what? Yeah, 265. He's leading the league.

I'm like, what are you talking about? What are you doing? What do you mean? Like, he's really, just no one cares about batting average at all anymore. There are too many other sports. I had to go deep on war. Like, there wasn't even very much.

And OPS now seems like a OPS, especially OPS, OPS now seems like a kind of like a, that's an entry level stat. Yeah, it's basic. Yeah, nobody was talking about that in 95. Not that I can remember. Nobody was really talking about that. Slugging percentage, slugging percentage in 95 was something that was like, people were like,

well, okay. Cutting itch. Yeah, you're like, you're going to mind. What's bad at average is one thing? What's slugging percentage? What are you talking about? Total bases divided by, what are you? What are you?

Like, what's happening? What's the deal? But now it's, you got war. You got OPS. Yeah, other stuff that I, I really don't understand. I know you get it all, but I still don't watch the game that way. It's interesting talking about the ex-player's in the booth because that's still the standard.

And the booths get bigger and bigger. Maybe you have three people in there now, if not more. And you still often have the ex-player who's giving you the mechanical breakdowns and everything. But once the advanced stats came in and once people could fact-check at home, you'd still get the benefit of someone who played and they're giving you their playing experience. and here's what the player's thinking in that moment. But often then they would make some assertion that was maybe not supported by the facts and then everyone who's watching at home

is checking on baseball reference, wait, that didn't happen, what was he talking about? Or some sort of old school mentality where the people watching at home either think they know better or in some cases maybe actually do. And the broadcaster's kind of giving you some misinformation because they're from an earlier era

and they're saying the way that they understood it at the time and now things have moved on. So there was this big backlash against guys like Tim Mcarver or Joe Morgan later in their career who when they came in were beloved and were seen as sharp

and perceptive and they're predicting what pitch is going to be thrown. But then they're sort of old school by the end and everyone's frustrated with the cliches and wait, you haven't read Moneyball

and you're upset about Moneyball and you don't understand Moneyball and so now you kind of have to bring that playing experience but also have some sense of the stats, or you're going to get drummed out of that business pretty quick? I still don't understand how, because, you know, I watch the games.

I watch the Dodgers. I watch, me and Collegro are watching every game that we can now. We're full on baseball hits. Again, I'm back into the sport in the way I haven't been in a long time. I've always kept up with baseball. Just a pitch clock thing? Is it Otani? Is it something else?

I don't want to get emotional big. Okay. But it was really the death of my dad. Oh, yeah, that brings back the connection. Yeah, when my dad passed away. Five years ago, right? Yeah, five years ago, yeah. When my dad passed away, there were just things about my dad that I did want to let go.

When he was alive, there were things that I felt like I had to let go. Like, playing basketball for me, it's going to get a little deep. I'm sorry to the audience. But playing basketball to me was like a rebellion against my father. It was something we did in the neighborhood, right? Because I didn't grow up in Maryland. I grew up in Baton Rouge. So in Baton Rouge, we would play a little bit of softball.

It was very funny. We had a little softball field. I was playing baseball in the summers. I was playing baseball at school. So, you know, it was, I always play baseball. But the neighborhood guys would play like this little, they have a little softball. They play softball. And there was this like little gulch behind the softball fields.

Like, really like a sandbox situation. It was an empty lot. I lived in Hermited subdivision in Gardia Lane. There was an empty lot where they were going to build a house and never built it. But behind there, there was a lot. a little canal. Canals everywhere in Louisiana. We live near the river. And so it was, it used to be back in the day that if you hit the ball into that canal

in the air, they call it out. And they were doing that to stop you from hitting the ball into the canal. Yeah, you run out of baseballs. I was like, yo, if I hit the ball in the air into the canal out of the field, that's a home run. There are a lot of stories, like actual big leaguers who are like, yeah, I swing this way because if I pulled the ball, then I would break someone's window or whatever. So I learned to go the other way. Yeah. Yeah. So, so me and my man Jacob Petanastro,

we started whacking softballs back there. But even that, my dad didn't like. My dad was like, shout out to dad. But dad was like, man, don't play softball. That's not what you. He's like, he's like, and he was like, and he was also, he'd be like, basketball is not a gentleman's game, baseball is the gentleman's game. So I'd be out there hooping, getting buckets, doing all of the stuff like that. He was like, football is something you do to make you a better baseball player. Basketball is something that distracts you from being the best baseball player you could be. So I was rebelling against him by playing as much basketball. And I did. I played a lot of basketball. But when he died, I didn't want to rebel against him anymore. I wanted to be him and connect with him

even more. And so I rediscovered my love for baseball. I have some of his old baseball stuff over here, like up there that I brought back with me. And I realized how much I loved and missed the game. And how, being away from baseball that entire time kind of changed me as a sports fan. It made me a more cynical sports fan. You have to give yourself over to baseball. You have to invest into baseball. You have to really sit with the sport.

It doesn't give you the instant gratification that a lot of other sports do. So I wanted to rewire my mind back into my baseball mind and I chose the exact right time to do it. Otani, the Dodgers, the pitch clock. the sport is going mainstream again, and until they fuck it up with the strike, I'm going to ride the wave.

You were very upset all last season about Otani batting leadoff, as I recall. I don't like it. You didn't like it at all. Move him down the lineup. I don't like it. I'm a purist. I know that he can run.

But my thing is, to me, you taking runs off the board. Now, listen, I don't want to get attacked because when I said this, everybody was getting crazy. But if you have a guy that's going to hit 50 home runs, and have like 90 RBI. To me, you leaving runs on the board.

Obviously, the Dodgers had no damn problem generating runs. Guys, a kid, they won the World Series. I was proven wrong. I'm just saying, two? Just put somebody, maybe two, maybe three? Yeah. You still get him to bat every first inning. He's going to bat every first inning if you put him in that three,

but you're going to jack the RBI a little bit. To me, that makes more sense. No, you're not wrong. I think even the advanced stats, even the simulations would probably support that often you want your best hitter batting second or a little lower if it's a power guy. Now, obviously, you want your best hitters getting the most played appearances. So that helps. And it's the Dodgers. So they just had so many good hitters that maybe it didn't matter that much.

It was just like when you had Mookie and Freeman and, you know, Teosker and all these guys and even maybe the bottom of the lineup is not that bad. So there are guys on base when Otani comes up again. But I think you had a point there. I mean, Dodgers did okay and are doing okay with Otani batting anywhere in the lineup. But you're not wrong. So you named when I asked you who your guys were as a kid, you named a few brothers in there, crime dog, big hurt. Where did they go? Because the rates, the percentages are way down.

Are there just not as many black dads like your dad who are emphasizing baseball? Was it other cultural factors? Was it just the accessibility of basketball? All you need is a ball and a court and a hoop and that's it. What else did baseball become uncool for a while? What led to the decline of representation of black players in the big leagues? This is one of the most fascinating conversations for me. Because you could ask 10 different guys who understand baseball and you get two different answers, right?

But some people boil it down to a cultural argument that talks about black fathers at homes and baseball being a sport that's passed down from father to son. The problem is that the data doesn't really support that as far as the involvement of black dads in the lives of their sons. A lot of those tropes aren't really supported by any data, right? And what also doesn't support that argument specifically, I'm not saying you made, I'm saying that's let's take these argument by argument. What doesn't support that argument is the fact that you customarily see a lot of involvement in the young life of young basketball players. You see videos now of kids running around and cones. Everybody got cones. What are you eating cones?

What are they getting the goddamn cones from? Like everybody running around with these little cones and they're doing all of these drills and you see these kids, you know, performing younger. You see the juniors playing sports, but those juniors are playing basketball. You're seeing football players with sons who are the best basketball player. Like my man, shout out to Marcus Spears. Marcus Spears, his boys, one of the best basketball players. Let's see if he ends up in LSU. I'm putting that on you, Swagger.

And then you have that argument, you had an argument that was more just straight structural. The question is in places in the South that are underfunded, where football is such an easy sport to get people to glom onto and baseball is a harder one, was there, were you getting as much value out of being a baseball player in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Jackson, Mississippi, as you used to. It used to be back in the day of those resources with the baseball, because baseball was America's pastime. Yeah. Football is now America's pastime.

And Alabama was a baseball hotbed. I mean, a lot of the greats came from there. Yeah. Exactly, right? Georgia, baseball hotbed, right? And so now what you see is as football has become America's pastime, those guys have become football players. And also, there's a, you know, if you are a 275-pound young man and you run a four, five, 40-yard dash, man, I'm going to be for real.

The barrier to entry to you being a great football player is just, it's like a lot lower than it is teaching you how to hit a curveball. That's just a fucking fact. But then you also have something else. You have the weird

cultural existence of Major League Baseball. Major League Baseball is in many ways emblematic of a America, the perception of America, the durability of the American reputation. I mean, there's a time where everywhere we go, we believe that we are the good guys and we are staying up for freedom and all of that stuff now.

Now the deeper people start to look into America, they start to have questions, right? Baseball is almost the same way. Baseball was seen as this pure, unassailable sport that represented the sort of pastoral imagination of, of the American frontier. It took a lot of land. America was about land. It took teamwork. It was an odd sport.

It was a novel sport. The only sport where the defense has the ball. All of that stuff, right? But then people started to look inside baseball in the way they see a lot of dysfunction. They saw rampant cocaine use in the 80s. They saw discrimination and segregation earlier on. Does Babe Ruth the same type of historical figure

that you think that he is if you consider the fact that he didn't have to play against black guys, right? Was baseball ever the pure American pastime that we thought that it was? Then we have all of these numbers and all of this stuff that happens and then the steroid era comes and we're enjoying it, but then we're like,

should we have enjoyed it? The way we feel about baseball, in a lot of ways, the way we feel about our country, it's something that we haven't been sure that we should enjoy in the way that we have over time and maybe we couldn't as much as we wanted to. This is different now. Now, I think there's been a direct effort to look at what Major League Baseball actually is and what it can be.

Open the game up internationally, speed the game up. Like, if not making America's pastime, making something that Americans can connect to. And make the sport as accessible for everyone as it possibly can be. I think they're doing a good job of that, which is why it would be terrible if they fucked it up with the strike. And I think with stuff like that affected black representation and participation in baseball more than anything, right? My generation was the last generation that it was even cool to have an opinion about baseball. Yeah, I've read that the author of a book I'm about to talk to him, he writes about the origins of baseball and how it became the national pastime. And even then, you think of that as this sort of pure thing, but it was driven by this sort of

nativist movement because there was so much immigration in the 19th century and immigrants were coming over from other countries. People were playing cricket. People were playing other sports. And so people were advancing baseball as the national sport because it was pure. It was American. It originated on these shores. And it wasn't truly a national pastime, of course, because a lot of people weren't welcome and weren't allowed to play, at least in the white leagues. But that was the whole impetus really for it to become a big national sport. We think of it in this romantic term, but it was always just sort of us versus them and some people kind of being the other. So it's easy to forget that after a couple centuries pass. I guess there's also the fact that

if you go into a career in baseball and you're a great athlete, it might benefit you in the long run, say relative to football, you're taking less of a beating for sure. But it's also going to take you a to get paid, probably. You're going to be riding the buses, you're going to be in the minor leagues, you're not going to, even if you're a star, you're not going to jump straight from college to the pros and be a star immediately in most cases. So it's kind of a delayed, you know, like if you need to make some money, if you need to get rewarded, then baseball is not always the fastest way to do that. But there's like Ricky Henderson. I know his mom wanted him to play baseball because she was worried about his health. And she figured you're going to last longer if you're a

baseball player than a football player, which very few guys lasted longer than Ricky. So I think she was right about that. But you kind of got to take the long view, I guess, which is tough if you're a teenager and you're deciding which sport to specialize in. One of my favorite athletes of all time. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, no, I know I'm the best ever list. The only guys you can put up there with Ricky are like Ali and Bonds. Ricky is like, today I became the greatest of all time. I love that.

Like, I remember I was watching this interview with Ricky must have been like 9293. Was he on the Padres? I don't know who he was playing for. He played for so many teams. Yeah.

And they asked him, they was like, well, Ricky, they've said that they might want to, they might want to restructure your contract like in the off season. And Ricky went,

well, it depends. on what you mean by re-estructure. And just just anytime he got a single, it was a double, right? And if he got, and if he was on second, he might take third. He also might not hit the ball on the ground at all.

He might just hit that bitch out of the fucking part. He was part Willie May's Hayes. But then it was just funny. I love Rick Higgins. But I'm saying, to your point, Yes. So think about what you just said in the way that it works. So at the same time, we're dealing with Kevin Garnett and Kobe and later on,

LeBron James Dwight Howard, guys like that, and whether or not they should go from being 17 years old to being millionaires. And not just millionaires, but to talk of the town. Yeah. There's something else you got to talk about. When you are a baseball player, it takes you a while to get paid, but it also takes you a while to get talked about, which is not true in the other sports. It's true. You're sports.

Like you is, I'm talking about what means like post Michael Jordan. Yeah. What you wanted to be as well as being the best player in your sport is you wanted to be the most talked about player in your sport. Yeah. The ringer doesn't have a college baseball podcast. Not yet, at least. See what I'm saying? Yeah.

Like in baseball, that happens at first. Who is Bright Harper? What was the guy that, uh, J.D. Drew? Who is Bryce Harper? Who is J.D. Drew? who is Josh Hamilton? It starts there. and then when you go to the minors,

they don't talk about you a little while until you get called back up. And then when you get called up, now you got to adjust to the hitting and all of that stuff like that. So that takes you a while for you. But if you're Kobe or you're Kevin Garnett or whatever,

your rookie season after you have jumped into the league and become a lottery pick, Kobe was 13. Oh, Kobe was 13. Yeah, but anyway, like when you jump into it, you are talked about. You get to go to prom with Brandy. You get to do all of this stuff, right? You get to be a part of the American sports conversation immediately. And baseball is like everything else about the sport. It makes you wait a little bit.

And it's, unless you're Otani, even when you're a big leaguer, even if you're a star, people probably aren't recognizing Kyle Tucker walking down the street, except for you as the world's biggest Kyle Tucker fan, obviously. But unless you're Otani, you know, it's not even like it was necessarily in the 90s with Griffey and with Jeter. dating Mariah or whatever, you know, like these are the biggest stars in sports, whereas now Otanyosides, the biggest baseball players pretty much pale in comparison to the fame of the biggest basketball players, football players, soccer players, certainly. I don't know whether that will change now that baseball's kind of having this resurgence.

So do you think that cultural coolness is coming back? Because attendance is up, TV ratings are up, MLB says that it's a younger audience, younger ticket buyers. do you think that coolness is coming back? I guess also a part of it is that the following for baseball is pretty regional, right? It's local. You're paying attention to your team. Everyone's watching every football team all the time, right?

And it's easy, too. There aren't that many games. They're on national podcasts. I mean, they might be on seven different streaming services now. That's another conversation. But baseball, the fandom, even if there are as many fans, it tends to be a bit more splintered. Right? So you're not getting the same sort of national.

footprint. So do you think that that coolness is coming back or can come back? I think it's coming back. I think the World Series last year was a gigantic event for baseball. There was a whole Kendrick Lamar Drake

narrative. There were two big markets. It was an astounding, incredible World Series. I don't think people knew that baseball could be that thrilling in that way. That type of seven games series with that type of shit on the line.

I think it can happen. I do think these players are going to need a little bit more personality outside of the game. I think guys like, I think Paul Skeen's dating Livy Dunn is a big deal for baseball. I do. In Louisiana, I'm sure it is. LSU! I was going to be the first LSU baby. Oh, actually, that's not true.

That's not true. You know who was the LSU baby? Who? O'Dell Beckham Jr. Oh, okay. Yeah, right. Yep. O'Dell Becum Jr., LSU baby.

Like a big LSU baby. baby. They're dad, LSU, mom, LSU, O'Dell Beckham Jr., LSU, a big LSU baby. So, so like Paul Skein's dating Livy Dunn is, you know, back in the day, the baseball player used to get the hot chick, used to get the Maryland Monroe, used to get the Madonna. Yeah. You know, if you're Konseko and stuff like that, Jeter got them all. The Jeter's lineup is the basically 27 Yankees, okay, murderers Row. Yeah. Jeter got them all. So what I'm saying is, I think that's coming back, but these guys are going to need bigger footprints off of the diamond.

Some of them, baseball doesn't like its bad boys. Baseball treats its bad boys worse than any other sport treats its bad boys. And football, the bad boy is kind of like, you know, I don't, I'm not, I don't want to say bad boy. I don't mean. Not like Ray Rice bad boy, but. Yeah, nah, fuck all that. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about like problematic wide receivers.

Right. Like people like that. Football understands that the wide receiver is a diva position. You know what I mean? You got problems with that stuff like that. They kind of embrace their. bad boys a little bit. Basketball certainly embraces their bad boys. Basketball loves their bad boys. Baseball doesn't. Baseball likes a gentleman player. Doesn't like a bad boy. It should.

You need controversial baseball players. You need baseball players that say the wrong thing the right way anytime somebody puts a microphone in their face. You know, that's the only thing I'd say right now that the game is missing. It's a little bit more difficult now with the way people are on social media and stuff like that. But like a lightning rod baseball player. Otani's great for the game because he's a great guy. He likes to place a wager every now and again. Who cares? Don't get out of here with that.

So it's like he's so good. We forgot about that. The Brendan Soresby of Major League Baseball. We forgot about it. I invite you on my show and you slander show Hey Otani. I love Otani. He's one of my favorites, right? Yeah.

So what I'm saying is that that's the only thing that the sport is missing, somebody that kind of transcends a little bit, because we can't take our eyes off them off of the baseball diamond. And I'm telling you, that's the guy that's going to be black. So we'll know baseball's back in the center of the culture when the wags are back. When we see the players dating the starlets, that's when we'll know that baseball has become cool again, I guess. Maybe Olivia Dunn's the start. We'll see.

So when you came back to the game, when you rip Van Winkled and you, you, you, you, you weren't paying close attention for a while. I'm sure you were, you had some sense of what was going on. I was watching. I was watching. Yeah. When you really reconnected, then did you feel like, wow, game done changed? Like, I need to go back to school now.

This everything is complicated. The stats, this is why I need to go on Ben's podcast. Like, did you feel somewhat left out or did you feel welcomed back in? Like, was the barrier to re-entry too high? There was a learning curve. Yeah. There was a learning curve. Like, you know, I was following baseball and looking at baseball,

but the average baseball fan now is just leaps and bounds ahead of the average baseball fan during the heyday of my baseball watching. They understand situations better. They understand stats better. They understand what they want from their team a little bit better. They understand the financial structure better. They understand their farm system and their prospect system better. better, right? They have, you know, as a college football fan, all of this stuff is second

nature to me. I can tell you guys right now who are, this is so sad, I can tell you guys right now who are in the 10th grade right now that LSU is looking at at all different types of positions. Yeah. The guys who won track meets that also play football that you're hoping get an offer. It's just the way, that's the arms race that exists in college football. That's the whether it is. Young up-and-coming coaches that are at directional school somewhere that you hope to get in as analysts or position coaches for your team, all of that stuff, right? Baseball is that on the cream and the clear. Like, the actual fan that talks about it, I'm not talking about the people that are the casual fans that are talking, but the actual fan that talks about it understands war. I don't know how your defense affects your war. I don't understand that. I don't understand how you, how you, how you, even judge that, right? So it's like, I will say, I will talk about somebody's war,

and they'll be like, I got to put the defense in there, blah, blah, blah, blah. Talk about this person defensively. I'm like, how do y'all, what are the, what are the metrics you use to decide how somebody's, is that an eyeball test? Do you just look at somebody and know that they're a fucking awesome defender? Like, there are guys you can look at it, be like that guy's a hellcat in center field, like Griffey's, but are, is, what are the advanced stats that let you know how many more base hits would have existed if Ken Griffey Jr.

A replacement player for what is this? What's the stat? So give me a replacement level center fielder. And then tell me how many more outs you get with Griffey at center field. What's the staff for that bit? Yeah. So I think the nice thing about war and all these advanced stats is that you don't actually need to know how they work necessarily.

You kind of just need to know the concept of it. If you know war is just this holistic. one value stat that sums up everything a player does as best we can calculate it. Obviously, it's pretty complicated under the hood. But all you need to know is what it's designed to do. And it's actually pretty simple, which is just, hey, we're going to wrap up everything that this player does. And we're just going to put it on the same scale. Because before you had war or any stat like that, it was hard to come up with an overall value for a guy.

Because it's just like, well, I know he's a good hitter. and he's a good base runner maybe. I don't know if he's a good fielder. And then, like, how do you balance those things? How do you weight them? And so you would have just wild estimates pre-war. Like decades ago, you'd have people saying, guys, we're worth 20 wins or 30 wins or whatever.

And now we know that, you know, Otani might be worth 10 wins or something. That's sort of the ceiling. Yeah. But you could kind of say whatever you wanted because no one really knew any better. and the way that war works is helpful because you can take players who have nothing in common. They're completely unalek.

You know, like I think of Adam Dunn and Juan Pierre, who maybe you remember, right? Juan Pierre, you know, my friend Tom used to call Juan Pierre Slappy McPopo. Yeah, well, so it's hard to think of two players more different than Adam Dunn and Juan Pierre. but at least last time I checked, when they retired, they had the same war, basically, just because war could look at, okay, Juan Pierre, he's fast, he steals lots of bases, maybe he hits for a decent average,

he also makes a lot of out, oh, he plays center field, he's got some defensive value, even if he's not a great defensive center fielder. And then you have Adam Dunn, who strikes out a ton, walks a lot, and hits a lot of homers and has no defensive value,

maybe one of the worst fielders of all time when they even let him play the field. How do you even compare those guys? You sort of need a stat like that to put them on the same playing field, so to speak, and say, well, what is this worth? What is that worth? And then you just do the credits and the debits

and you end up with, oh, they come out to kind of the same number. So with fielding, which is just, it's just rolled into war. It's just part of it. If you look up war, it already includes fielding, base running, hitting, the position, the playing time, all of the above.

with fielding, you have stats that basically look at, it depends, because nowadays they can just track everything that happens on the field track with the stackass system. So they just know where you start when the play starts and they know how far you had to go to get the ball and they know how long you ran and how fast you ran. And basically they can just compare all the similar plays and say this is an X percent chance of an out, you know?

And so like you put an average fielder in there, he would have had a 10% chance of making that catch. If this guy made that catch, well, then he gets a lot of credit for that because he did something that most guys aren't going to do. And so you just add up all the plays and all the opportunities, and then you come up with a number that can just tell you he's this many outs above average or this many runs above average. Before they had stat casks and they could track all the players, they sort of did it manually. They had people who were just watching the games and just jotting down, okay, it was in this zone. and you divide the field into this number of zones and the percentage of balls that are,

they go into this zone, you expect them to be caught this percent of the time, and this guy actually catches them that percent of the time, and so he's better than the typical. So you have to, it's all based on observation. It is sort of the eye test, but it's a much more accurate eye test just because you have actual cameras and computers

tracking these people, or it's just like more rigorous, more objective because you're actually not just going with, your gut like, oh, that seemed like a nice play, but actually kind of looking at where did you make that catch? Where was the ball? Similar plays, how often do they get made? So it's kind of conceptually simple, I guess, but it's complicated in practice when you actually have to calculate it. But you don't have to calculate it. I don't have to calculate it. We just have to look it up. So it's not that bad once you get used to the idea or what it's going for.

I want you to guess, what do you think Adam Dunn's? war for his entire career was. I'm going to guess it was like 15 to 20, something in that range. It was 18. 18. Okay. Nailed it. You're pretty.

And where's Juan Pierre? Let me look at Juan Pierre. I just looked at Fred McGriff's. Where would you say Fred McGriff was? Fred McGriff, I'm going to say he's probably mid-50s, maybe. 52. All right. Yeah.

Oh, my God. It's like when you look at war as much as I do, you kind of get a sense, you know, like where people... Oh, shit. Like, Juan Pierre's is 17. There you go. Now, some people might not believe it. They might say this can't possibly be true.

How could those guys have the same value? One guy hit 462 home run. Yeah, right. So he would think that he was a more valuable player. You'd think, right? Yeah. But he couldn't run. He couldn't field.

Juan Pierre was getting tons of plate appearances because he was hitting leadoff. and playing every game. So he was getting 700 played appearances every year. And he's stealing lots of bases and hit for a high average and played a pretty valuable defensive position. So it's hard to put that stuff on the same scale. And so it might lead to doubts because you say,

well, that can't, you know, any stat that says those two guys are the same, that's invalid. But then once you start looking at it, I subscribe to it more or less. I'm not saying it couldn't be better, but it's the best that we can do. and I think it's a lot better than we can just kind of guess, you know? And McGriff, I kind of had some sense just because like 60 is often seen as kind of the cutoff for Hall of Famer. Just kind of a rule of thumb.

And McGriff was just below that. And so he didn't get in with the writer votes. He had to wait for the committees to vote him in ultimately. And he ended up with, what, 493 homers or something, right? He was. So this is my deal with that. Yeah. And I feel this way about Adam Dunn, too.

I just looked it up. Adam Dunn hit 22 homers his last year in the league. He was 34 years old. Yeah. If I can still blast 22 of them, I'm going to try to hang on until I get to five. Yeah. McGriff, 493. If McGriff gets to 500 home runs, the writers put him in the Hall of Fame.

Yeah, he would have been in sooner, I think. Yeah. Yeah, if he gets to 500, he's seven home runs away. And it's because he's seven home runs, a year we got hurt, a year where he got hurt, a year where he hit the foul pole a couple he hooked it inside the file pole a year where fucking Griffey or Tony Gwen robbed them a couple of times

you know he got robbed by Griffey's dad Andre Dawson got him a couple of times you know what I mean? That's the difference between him getting in by the writers and the war now here's the deal how do you measure the war for positions that are not like highly

coveted for defense like he's a first basement right there a great defensive first basement but being a great defensive first baseman is just less important than other positions where a defense is a premium. How do you judge it sent? So war accounts for that in theory. There are these positional adjustments that takes into account. So there's the defensive spectrum, right, which is what you're talking about. It's just like which are the most demanding defensive positions.

You got catcher, shortstop, center fields. These are the premium defensive positions. And then it slides all the way down to first base or DH, if you're. if you even count that. And so the idea is that almost anyone can play first base. I mean, not exactly, right? There's the money ball line about how it's incredibly hard to play first base. But compared to the other positions,

that's kind of where you stick someone first base, left field, when they're not defensively gifted. First base is what I played, by the way. So thank you. It's probably because you were such a great slugger that, you know, they had to get your bat in the lineup. But yeah, you have to hide Adam Dunn somewhere. So you stick him in left field if you can't DH him.

And so war accounts for that, basically, if you're playing shortstop or center field or catcher or whatever, you're getting a boost to your stats every year. And if you're playing first base or DH, then you're getting dinged every year. And it's basically based on the idea that like there's a bigger pool of players who could potentially play this position and play it well. And so you're getting measured against the players who are playing that position. But then there's an adjustment that says like how scarce is this commodity? like, okay, this guy's playing shortstop. Even if you're an average shortstop, that's still pretty valuable, maybe more so than being above average at left field when you're just being compared to other left fielder.

So, you know, and it's all based on like looking at guys who switch positions, basically, and like, okay, what happened when this guy moved from shortstop to second base or something? Well, if he goes from being below average as a shortstop to above average as a second baseman, then you know that second base is a little bit easier to play. And you can make this positional adjustment. And so it's based on the history of position switchers and looking at like if a guy's below average here, he's above average there, which is more difficult. And then you account for that. And it's based on like the actual playing time, how many games you played at that position.

And it adjusts for that. Is it perfect? I don't know. You know, they're tinkering, fine-tuning those very. values, but that's the basic idea. Like, you're going to get credit. You know, if you put up the same stats as a first baseman as some other guy does as a shortstop, then the shortstop is going to have a much higher war because it's just

the degree of difficulty. It's, you know, not as many players can do that. All right. I want to ask you something right now. See if you know. Okay. All right. What baseball player has the highest war of all time?

Highest war, is it, well, is it not Babe, if you're looking at combined pitching and batting? I think it's Babe Ruth, which is, you know, maybe the obvious answer. You know, there are multiple versions of war, too, which is something that some people are put off by. It's like, well, if this stat is so good, how can you have different values? But it's just kind of, you know, different approaches, different sites have their own, but they generally match up pretty well. But Babe Ruth, I think, is the leader just because, you know, it's all relative to your peers, your contemporaries, too. That's the other thing. It's like, as you were talking about, Babe Ruth played in segregated baseball.

So, you know, like, and he was the first guy basically to be like, what if we tried to hit home runs over the fence? That might be a good idea. So then, you know. This is a shocker. It's not Babe Ruth. Which war are you looking at here? I'm looking at the war. It's not Bay Ruth.

Are you on baseball reference? Where are we? I'm on baseball. It's Brady Anderson. In 1996? In 1996. Yeah. No, it's Babe Ruth who's got a 182 war.

Yeah, that's a lot. 182 war. Really, the only guy who's, there's only two guys in the top 10 war whose pictures are going to be in color. Yeah, Bonds. Bonds and Roger Clemens. Yeah, neither of them in the Hall of Fame.

You got Willie Mays there. I guess Willie Mays picture could be in color. It probably is. So Willie Mays is right there at five. Oh, you got Hank too. So those guys are modern era guys, but they're bridge guys to the older era. So you have of players that came in the league after 1980, you have Clemens and Bonds. Yeah.

And it's tough because, like, there's always the conversation in every sport about, you know, like, because war is just comparing to your peers. And so Baybrooth is being compared to other players in the 20s and 30s. And so you could say, well, was Babe Ruth really as talented, as skilled as Mays or Aaron or Shohei Otani or whoever, right? But war isn't really trying to adjust for that. There are other stats that maybe try to adjust era adjust war so that it's like looking at, well, how hard, how high was the caliber of baseball at that time? And so you're, you know, taking something away from Babe Ruth because he's, playing at a time when he didn't have to face the best competition and everything. But wars is usually, it's like, did you dominate your competition at the time?

And then you can make the mental adjustment of, yeah, but he didn't have to play these guys or whatever. Or Ted Williams was away at war. So not that war, but actual wars. So he didn't get war for those seasons when he was at war or whatever. So you can still debate it. But that's what it's telling you, basically. like how much better were you than the people you were playing with and against.

This son of a bitch hit 521 home runs and he missed three seasons. Yeah, he's pretty good. Yeah. Look at old teddy here. And so you look at the World Reader board and it's, you know, it's the names you would expect probably, right? Yeah, no, no, it is. It's Wagner, it's Musils, Rogers Hornsby. Yeah, yeah.

It's everybody whose rookie car can make you a million dollars. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? It's all of those guys. It's the big train. Walter Johnson. Exactly. That's called the big train?

Yes. So it mostly, it matches your intuition, usually, on a career level, at least, when you're looking over 10, 20 years. Like, you know, the guys who are believed to be good generally are pretty good. But then you find out sometimes you look at someone's war and it's like, oh, actually he didn't get on base that much and no one really cared at the time. But now we look back and maybe that wasn't that valuable. Or maybe he looked like a good fielder, but the stats say he wasn't a good fielder.

He wasn't actually getting to that many balls. but maybe he just looked smooth like Derek Jeter, right? Exactly. Yeah. So, Ryan Carey didn't care what his war was because no one knew. Jessica Bill didn't care. He was smooth to them. But on the field, his fingers didn't work quite like they did in the bed.

Okay. That's right. No. You know what's funny here is there's one player as I look at this right now. There's one player in the history of baseball who I just don't believe the numbers. I don't think that they're real. Okay. Try to guess who it is.

I don't think that this happened. You don't think it happened. I don't think this happened. It's an all-time great up here. It's an all-time great pitcher. Like Sy Young or something? I don't think it happened. I don't think he pitched that, but he gave some people.

I don't think it happened. Sy Young has 511 wins and 315 losses. Yeah. Was this son of the bitch pitching twice a day? What the fuck? was when men were men, 400 innings a year. The ERA is crazy, but it's not like, well, 263 for your career ERA is nuts. Yeah, but that was deadball era, part of that.

No one was scoring, you know. He was just, he was a compiler. Yeah, he's just, you know, a bulk guy. But no, I mean, back then, guys didn't throw nearly as hard, obviously, right? So you were saying, you know, like your dad got hurt, right? I don't know how hard your dad was throwing. But he might have been throwing harder than Cy Young. So, you know, guys didn't last.

That used to say if he reached back, he could get to 88. Okay. Well, that's pretty good for a normal person. Yeah, he said if he reached back, but he said more to the point, it was like at 83, 84. Yeah, yeah. That's where he was throwing. And if they blew out their elbow or something, they didn't have Tommy John surgery, right? So they were sort of screwed.

But they were just pitching the contact, you know. And so not to discount it too much, but that was a very different game. So guys were racking up innings totals. And there were no bullpens. And you were just expected to finish every game you started pretty much. So every game for all Sa'i was a complete game. I mean, more or less, you know. I mean, look, he started 815 games and 749 of them were complete games.

And this bitch has 18 saves. They were using Saai out the bullpen. I don't believe it. He didn't know that because they hadn't invented saves yet. But, yeah. Well, it says here on the baseball reference. No, retroactively, he does have 18 saves. It's true.

Yeah. I don't believe this happened, bro. I'm sorry. I need to see. This is like Wilson a hundred point game. Yeah. I need to see it. I got to see it.

We don't even have a radio broadcast of sigh. 511 wins, bro. That's never, no one's ever going to get close to that. No one can get to 300 now. Yeah. Even 250 might be out of reach. So nobody can hit 289. No, it's true.

So do you like this version of the game then? Because, you know, it's different, not just the fact that there's so many stats, but also, yeah, batting averages are low. It's much more about power. And it's, you know, the pitcher usage is certainly different. So do you find this off-putting? Do you want it to go back to 80s brand to baseball? So these are the things that I like about the new brand. I like everybody throwing 170 miles an hour.

You do? Okay. I didn't think that was possible. Yeah. I can't tell you guys how much. In 96, if you hit 97, you was a dog, one of them ones. Yeah. If you hit 97, Randy Johnson, intimidating.

Roger Clemens, intimidating. Yeah. Man, Ms. through that bitch, 105 miles. Yeah. Yeah. Now, the radar guns they used to have, and people always say this, and they try to argue that, oh, guys aren't actually throwing harder than they used to. Because the radar guns they used to have would clock the pitch when it was closer to the plate,

whereas now they're measuring the speed right out of the hand. And so the ball hasn't slowed down yet. So that's true. And so the radar guns back in the day might measure, you know, two or three miles per hour slower than now. But even we have now Velo tracked by the cameras and the computers and everything going back to 2008. And even in that time, it's up, I don't know, four miles per hour, five miles, you know, just in terms of the average.

So, yeah, guys are throwing, maybe Nolan Ryan was throwing 100, but the average guy was not sitting 95, which is where we are now. I first noticed that during that those great Cardinal teams, the Cardinals bullpen stars. Remember the Cardinals had a bunch of different guys. Was the guy's name, Waka? Yeah, Michael Waka. Okay, remember like these guys, the Cardinals had a bunch of different guys. bunch of guys and all of these guys were throwing like 95 plus like the starters are coming out the bullpen.

I'm like, how are we going to beat them? Like, is there anybody out there that's going to try to get you out with a changeup? Well, they are going to try to get you out with a change up, but the change up is going to be 92. Yeah. But, but, but yeah, so that I like. I don't like the fact that nobody steals bases because that's very, very, well, they're still in a little bit more now than they're. They change the rules to make it easier.

So now guys are doing it again. They're still in a little bit more now. But stolen bases is a very exciting part of the game. And it also allowed you to create value for a very specific type of player that I love. The traditional lead-off guy who's very, very speedy, a demon on the base pass, the battle that you have between a pitcher and a guy trying to get his lead. It made the catcher super valuable because you had to have an arm back there who could throw guys out, pick guys off. Sometimes have the no-look pick-off. I love all that little stuff about the game.

Yeah. But I do tend to like this blend of a lot of the traditional aspects of baseball with this sort of futuristic stuff. I love exit velocity. I love that. I play MLB the show, which is a big part of my baseball love affair that I'm in right now. I play probably two or three times, two or three games a day. That's real spill.

Wow. It's true. Like right now, Max Muncie is ranking. Okay. It's July. Max has 49 homers. He's on pace. He's about 85. Okay. How do you fit that in with the EA Sports College football sessions? It's got like season to season.

Okay. Season to season. Yeah. Season to season. So, but like watching the exit velo and like, like, understanding so much how the analytics, what the analytics have done in baseball to me is they have served the game at this point. A lot of people disagree. But I think right now, we have a better understanding of what it takes to be elite in baseball than we do in most other sports, right? And it can't all be about analytics. It is sometimes just about like how you perform. There was no analytical data that was going to tell you that Yoshi was going to come in on short rest and just eliminate the Blue Jays like that.

Like that's in your heart. Like there's a part of this that says that guy's, special in those type of moments and you can rely on him to literally pitch you through a World Series and win a championship. There's not analytics for that. But there are ways to measure what is going to work for you or what is going to be successful an above average amount of time. You have to marry those two things. But if you don't have a guy like that, a guy who has those types of nerves of steel and also has, you know, that, you know, that. tremendous outpitch that you can use

to get guys out at the ends of games, that type of splitter. You know what I mean? You need that. You have to have that. So that's still traditional enough for it to resonate with a sort of caveman baseball fan

with all of the new stuff being like cherry on top. I'm going to be honest with you. It is difficult. I'll look it up right now. It is difficult growing up in the age of Tony Gwynn to look at somebody

hitting 3.0. and be like, there's an elite hitter. It's like, 305 is dope for your lifetime average, or it's dope if you hit 44 home runs. Yeah. Right? It's just difficult for me, like, growing up in the age, batting average is the thing that I'm having the toughest time letting go of.

Yeah. The percentage of time you fucking get a base hit, like, not mattering. It's just difficult for me. That's why I'm in my old man shit. Yeah. Yeah, it's tough because the fan-friendly, spectator-friendly thing is not always the most valuable thing. Not to say that Tony Gwynn wasn't valuable,

because he was. Because when you bat 338 lifetime, then you're on base, even if you don't walk a ton. He still had a high on base percentage because how can you not when your batting average is that high? But sometimes, yeah, like the speedster, you know, there would be guys who would steal a lot of bases, and then you look back now and you say, well, they actually got caught a lot too, and that was bad. And you have to have a certain success rate

to make it analytically make sense for you to even risk getting thrown out. And so sometimes teams become more conservative, and it's just, yeah, but this is fun. And maybe it doesn't help you win. And teams are going to do and players are going to do what gets wins and what gets them paid. And so that's why you need the league to step in and say, yeah, but fans like this brand of baseball. So we're going to try to bring that back, which I think is what's happening now with the pitch clock, with the stolen base rules. We'll see what else with the shift ban, even though I wasn't a big fan of that. The idea of it was, I think, to make the game more familiar to fans like you and make that fun again. And I think baseballs may be ahead of the curve just because it got kind of solved sort of by the next.

nerds like me and my predecessors before other sports did. And so in basketball, you've got kind of like, oh, too many three-pointers and this and that, and what are we going to do and how are we going to fix this? And baseball has already gone through that just because baseball is always kind of the first, right, to be the code is cracked. And then you have to figure out, okay, how are we going to fix this again? So I think baseball, it had the disadvantage of suffering the consequences of that first. But now I think it's coming out of that era first. also. And I hear fans of other leagues who are saying like, wow, I wish we could be more like baseball where we're changing the rules and we're experimenting, which is amazing to me because for years it was baseball so stuck in its ways. They won't do anything different. It's all about the purists and the traditionalists. And now that has changed at least. So that's a good thing.

So OPS for you as a living stat, forget about war. OPS for you is the most important measure of a baseball player for you. OPS is good. Yeah. I mean, you know, as you were saying, like, there are more advanced versions of OPS, but... God damn it! But it's, this is like a,

don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good sort of situation. Because OPS is more advanced version of OPS. All right. You're going to laugh at me, but there's one called Wobah. Oh, shit. Hold on. Let me look this up. Let me see.

Woba. It's weighted on base average, and it's on the beyond base percentage scale. You guys are fucking nuts, bro. Hold on like, wait. Sometimes there's a branding issue with these stats. An advanced baseball statistic that measures a hitter's overall offensive value by assigning different run weights to every type of play appearance.

Instead of treating all of his hits equally, it reflects the actual impact of singles, doubles, triples, home runs. Yeah. And walks on scoring runs. Get the fuck out of here, Ben. What the shit, Doc? One thing we do have in baseball that I think is good is we have the, they're called the index stats. They're just like, you know, on a scale of where 100 is average.

And so better than 100 is good, lower than 100 is bad, usually. So something like there's an index version of Woba that's basically, it's called WRC Plus. Again, a lot of numbers and letters I know to keep track of. But it's basically, you know OPS Plus, right? OPS Plus. Yeah, it's the same concept. It's just like, all right, 100 is average. And if you're better than average, then it's going to be above 100.

And if it's below 100. And so that's pretty simple. And maybe, again, under the hood, it's kind of complicated. But if you're just like, okay, he's, he has a 120 WRC plus. That means he's 20% better than the average hitter. And that's pretty simple, at least. Okay. Let me see who's leading the league in Wobo.

Wobo stars, Wobo sounds like a Star Wars character. Like, who's leading the league of Woh? Yordaun Alvarez of the Astros. Oh, Yorda, that makes sense. Like, yeah. Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, Yonon Alvarez. But he's also, he's third in the league in just regular average.

Yeah. Yeah, he can hit anything. He's good. Yeah. And he's also, as I look at it, he's also leading the league in OPS. Mm-hmm. That's the thing. Yeah, it's like you can, you know, you can parse these stuff.

It's like, oh, OPS is a little bit less accurate than Wobah or But basically, yeah, OPS, it's simple to explain because it's just on base percentage plus logging percentage. And it tracks. You know, you're not going to find someone who has like a terrible OPS but a great Wobah or whatever. You know, they're usually, they're moving in lockstep. So guess who's 13th in OPS? My favorite Dodger. Oh.

El Max Muncie. Yeah, all right. That funky Muncie. Probably hitting even better in MLB the show. But yeah, not bad in real baseball. Baseball. Yeah. Let me,

but I know we can't do this forever because I really could. I could do this forever. I'll say this. I also didn't realize the double Max Muncie thing until just recently. Oh, yeah. There's another, there is another Muncie. Yeah, it's true. I thought, because I was playing the game.

And I was like, Matt, this is Muncie, who also plays third, right? Does he play? I think he also plays third. Yeah. I thought that they were the Muncie brothers. Yeah. And they were from Muncie Land together. Doesn't he also play third base?

I think he does. It's not only that, but they have the same birthday. You're going to play your land. No, it's true. August 25th. Both Max Muncie is born on August 25th. Hold on, this is the multiverse. You're lying.

It's true. Hold on. Let's see. Max Muncie, Oakland. Or not Oakland, whatever they play. Where they play now? They play in a cornfield somewhere in Sacramento. for now.

Maxwell Price Muncie. Yeah. That's nuts. And he's a younger guy, this new Max. That's crazy. Hold on, hold on. Where's the Dodgers Max Muncie from? He's from Texas.

Yeah, they're not from the same place. Yeah, the other one is from California. He's from California. Yeah. That's nuts. So there's never been like a major league baseball feature on that. There has to be some kind of feature, right? The two of the Muncie Boys. Yeah. No? Not yet as far as I know. But no, people have definitely noticed. All right. Is there anything else I can

answer for you before I let you go? No, because I'm going to continue to come back to you. Please do. Yeah. And get more information about the game that I love and I'm the foremost mind in. I am looking at this Wobah. Yep. And looking at the Wobah. Oba here. Ben Rice is third, Wobah. You have Wood, you have Contreras. Soto. Yeah. Surprised. He's a good hitter.

Yeah. The people in New York are all Juan's ass. They pay Juan a billion dollars to act like a cobra at the plate. But they wish that, you know, he got, did a little bit more, but I guess he must be coming on. Yeah. All right. Just let you know, Max Muncie is 11th in Wobah. My favorite Dodger.

Good to know. I'm glad. I love this sport. I love baseball. Baseball is not going anywhere. Last thing I'll say, quickly. Yeah. Don't fuck this up, Major League Baseball.

Yeah. Don't strike out again. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Because, look, I'm an optimist when it comes to this. I think they're going to play next year just because there's so much writing on it, you know, in terms of the popularity and the broadcast contracts and everything else. I think they all realize we can't take a season off.

that would kill our momentum completely. But I want to ask you how you think this is going to play in public, because I'm kind of in this baseball bubble. And we tend to be pretty pro-labor here. And we tend to support the player's side. And so the whole, you know, like the greedy players, they want too much money. Like they should just take what the owners give them, that kind of thing. It's not typically our line here.

But MLB is making an appeal to the common. fan and is saying every other major sport in the U.S. at least has a salary cap. We don't have a salary cap. We're just trying to impose a salary cap like everyone else has, and we're just trying to do it for competitive balance. And I would tell you that the competitive balance argument is a bit overblown, that the baseball competitive balance is not that bad. But people are pissed that the Dodgers payroll is what it is, and other team's

payrolls are what they are. So MLB is not going to say, you know, we want a salary cap because it's going to control our costs and we're going to make more money, they're going to say, we want a salary cap because competitive balance, and we just want to be in line with other sports. And I think it may not matter that much that that argument is really resonating with people, because ultimately it's going to come down to the players and the owners and the people who are actually bargaining, not just the public perception. But as someone who is keeping a close eye on other sports and follows and covers other sports too. I wonder what your sense is of where the public sympathies will lie, because

it's going to be a lockout at first. It's not going to be a strike. The owners are going to lock out the players, which is what happens a few years ago in the most recent round of bargaining. But I think there's still a perception that MLB just kind of wants what every other league has, and so why won't the players get on board? So I wonder what your sense of that is. Okay, there's two things I have to say. The first one is this. What I hear people say, saying that about the Dodgers, I hear that in a specific language. And that's the language of broke-ass niggas. I hear, I hear, I hear, I hear poverty, okay?

Get your billionaire owner, tell them to do a different thing and maybe make a little, we're talking about billionaires playing here. Okay, I hear that. There's some broke-ass niggas. Okay. So I'm going to give you two lists real quick. Okay. I'm going to give you the list of the last 10 NBA champions.

Okay. So Golden State twice. The Raptors, the Lakers, the Bucks, Golden State again, shout out to the Warriors. Denver, Boston, Oklahoma City, and of course the America's team, the New York Knicks. So in there you have the largest market, the second largest market, another large market in Golden State. What I would say are a mid-tier market in Denver, a small market in Milwaukee, and then a smaller market sort of in Toronto. Toronto, you can't really call them a small market. No, yeah, yeah. And you also have Oklahoma City, a legitimate tiny market, right? Okay, but you have parity there.

So you don't have the Lakers, Lakers, Lakers, Warriors, Lakers, Lakers, you have parity there. New York biggest market of all time, and they have one championship in the last 53 years in the NBA. Now, if we go to baseball, last 10 MLB champions, you have the Cubs, Houston, Boston, Washington, Washington, the Dodgers, the Braves, the Astros, the Rangers. Shout out to them.

That's a fun team. Yeah, that happened. And then the Dodgers, the Dodgers twice. If you look at those two, if you're looking at the NBA, football has figured this out. Football, the market doesn't even fucking matter. All right. Football has the perfect socialist. Okay, football has the perfect socialist guys structure to ensure that, you,

your team is going to have a shot at some point if they made the right moves and stuff like that. I get it. Like there's, you know, different markets and different, have different allures and all of that stuff. But football's got it right. Kansas City's going to be in it.

All these different plays, Tampa Bay is going to be in it. All these different plays are going to have a shot, all that, whatever. Do you see a market difference between the list of champions? And obviously, it's not just about the championship. It's about which teams are able to compete.

And also which players are able to stay with the team. that bring them up through their farm systems and stuff like that, or if every team is going to exist as a farm team to the Yankees and the Dodgers, that's deflating and demoralized for fans. But at the top level of it, do you see a huge difference in the list of players teams that are winning in those two sports? Yes, you're right. Yeah.

In other sports, geography is not destiny in the way that now in MLB, yeah, you can compete and you can have a huge high payroll team like the Mets and you still stink. That's possible, too. But it's true. Historically, there's an advantage if you're a bigger spender in the long run, that's going to help.

And it's not a coincidence that the big spenders tend to be New York, L.A., etc. So, yes, I think you're right. Even though there are a lot of different champions and different playoff teams and it's all unpredictable and everything, part of that's just the structure of the sport

being so random. But you're right. It's hard to look at the payrolls of the respective teams and say, oh, this has nothing to do with market size, right? So now, yeah. So this is the deal. This is the thing I'll say. Yeah.

If Major League Baseball feels like it is going to be a better situation for the overall long run of the profitability of the sport to have Ms. stay in Wisconsin for his entire career, if that builds a more robust Brewers fan base, if having the brewers be. Because football has made that decision. Football a long time ago, also a sport, we should say, where the players union has zero power. Yes. Okay? Where the culture of the sport just sort of overwhelms the sport where there was a strike in 88 and fans still came to the games. Okay, there was a replace.

Yeah, every league with a salary cap, the union was broken at some point basically. Right, right. So the football got, but however, having said that, football. Seattle, Kansas City, all that. Is that better for the long-term profitability of the sport? Because football's kicking everybody's ass. So football's kicking everybody's ass in terms of that different sport once a week, all of that stuff.

I'm acknowledging all of this. Would it be better for baseball? Can you sell that to the players in the long run if you didn't have to leave Wisconsin? If you could stay there? Would that make, if you didn't have to leave, I don't know, give me another small market team that's going to be long suffering. Kansas City.

Yeah, I mean, right, there are some Bobby Wood Jr., right? He signs a huge extension. He stays, right? So that, you know, there are many cases where players do stay with the small market. They just signed some early career extension. But yeah, you're right.

Definitely in terms of payroll. There's a disparity. So, but to me, but to me, that's the only thing I would say. I would sell this in a holistic aspect because I am not going to go to players and tell them that they should take less money.

I mean, there's in no way in good conscience, can I do that? I'm not going to go to players and tell them they should take less money. Is there a way, is there a possibility that figuring this out in some way is better for their sport in the long run because a work stoppage right now would be catastrophic? That is what I would say to players. But I'm going to tell them right now, I can make an argument that at his heyday, LeBron James should have been making $250 million a year.

If you paid him what the market, what he was worth, the reason why you couldn't pay him what he was worth is because the market was capped, it was controlled. And we don't do that in other aspects. But in this situation, the only thing that I know for sure is that a work stoppage at this point would be a massive and monumental mistake for Major League Baseball.

amongst, to me, the most bone-headed and fucked mistakes that I can remember in the history of professional sports. If there was nothing that was learned from 94, a season where the Montreal Expos

looked like they were going to win the world season, a season where we might have had a 400 hitter. I think Gwen ended up, he was hitting like, what, 397? I don't know where he was hitting. But he was very close. And like a magic,

A legitimate magical baseball season was happening with multiple storylines, and we got to work stoppage. That was a killer. And everybody had to get on drugs to bring the sports back. To bring the sport back. So what I'm saying is, I don't know if they're ever going to learn their lesson, but I would think right now that they would have to have learned it. The question is, who's going to put the fans first? Who's going to put the long-term profitability of the game first? I'm not asking the players to do that, but they do need to figure it out because they're on a

right now. Well, I'm glad baseball got you back. You're a powerful ally if he could be turned, and he has. And I encourage everyone to listen to Van, watch him wherever you can. You can see him on CNN. You can hear him at the Midnight Boys. You can hear him talking college football at Ringer Tailgate. You can hear him talking culture and politics on higher learning. He's on the rewatchables. He's on Big Pick. He's everywhere across the Ringer Network. And I always love talking to you about anything and everything. And until you can talk Bill into getting a ringer baseball podcast back, we could be the mismatch of baseball for the ringer.

But you're always welcome here, standing invitation. Thank you very much. I'm going to go look up Wobah. Please do. You're going to know all about Wobah now. It's your new favorite stat. All right. Thanks, Ben.

Peace. Bye. Well, Vann's the man. Thanks to him. Hopefully he accepted my trust me bro explanation of war in Wobah. But we are not finished. I've got another great guest for you. You may or may not know the name Jim Creighton,

though he was a member of Mr. Burns' original softball lineup in Homer at the Bat. We'll give them token jobs at the plant and have them play on our softball team. Honest Wagner, Cap Anson, Morikai 3 Finger Brown. Oh, sir? What is it, Smithers? I'm afraid all those players have retired and passed on. In fact, your right fielder has been dead for 130 years. Damn, nation!

Well, he's now been dead for 164 years, and also he wasn't a right fielder. He was a pitcher and an infielder. And the writers of The Simpsons would have known that if a biography of Creighton had been written, but none had until now. And I think the best way I can tee up this segment is by reading you the very beginning of the book. Death in the Strike Zone, the Mystery of America's First Baseball Hero by Thomas W. Gilbert. Here's how he begins. I will tell you a mystery. He was the greatest American athlete of his time.

He was the first famous baseball player. The first baseball card has his picture on it. He threw the first fastball and the first curveball. He is the reason why baseball has a strike zone. His name was James Creighton. You have probably never heard of him. That is part of the mystery. Creighton's career was as bright as a supernova and just as brief.

He died in 1862 when he was only 21 years old. Before that, Creighton was the player little boys pretended to be. Never before seen crowds turned out to see him. Baseball players made pilgrimages to his grave. Clubs were named after him. He inspired a great novel, yet somehow he is not in the Hall of Fame, and most of what it says about him in baseball histories is wrong. The book you are holding in your hands is his first biography. The mystery of Creighton is alive and waiting to be solved.

It is baseball's oldest and coldest cold case. It is a mystery that contains other mysteries, a who-done-it and also a how-done-it. Baseball tends to change gradually. Pitchers throw harder, players grow stronger, run totals, trend up or down. But James Creighton's pitching revolution arrived with the suddenness of a tsunami. It came out of nowhere, swept away the old way of playing, and changed the game in ways that we can feel today. And as the author of those words told me, I'd like to invite the reader along on the journey and on the investigation, and I was actually shocked by how much I found.

When I started the book, I didn't really know if I would feel to finish it. Other people that some of whom I know have tried and failed. And sort of looking at it as a cold case was really a productive way to do it. Let's hear more from Mr. Gilbert. Here he is. Well, these days one compliment you can pay a pitcher is he's a pitcher. not a thrower. In other words, he has some idea what he's doing. He's not just chucking it up there. In pre-modern baseball, those terms had different connotations. Pitching referred to the standard,

straight-arm, stiff-risted, underhand delivery. Throwing referred to the illegal wrist snap release that helps today's pitchers put speed and movement on the ball. You couldn't do that then, unless you were Jim Creighton who didn't do it either, but somehow managed to achieve the effect of it anyway. And in death in the strike zone, Thomas Gilbert makes the case that Jim Creighton was a pitcher, not a thrower, in the 1860 sense. That is, he abided by the rules of the time. But Gilbert also makes the case that Creighton was, in effect, the first pitcher, as we understand the term today. And Tom, you taught me that Jim Creighton was effective, not effectively wild, as some of the pitchers who followed in his footsteps were. But nonetheless, I welcome you to effectively wild.

Well, thank you. It's great to be here. So as best you can, I know this is difficult in a non-visual medium, but can you describe how Jim Creighton pitched? Because it almost defies explanation, but do your best. Well, not only does it defy explanation now, but experts when he pitched were puzzled by what he was doing. Yeah. The whole purpose of the pitching roles that were used up until Creighton, up until the 1860s, was to limit velocity. The game was a little bit like varieties of modern softball where the pitcher's got a little bit to work with, but he can't throw very hard and you can't throw a breaking pitch,

and the batterers are going to all hit the ball hard, and which defense feels most of them clean and turns most of them into outs becomes the winner. That's how baseball used to work. The way they handicapped the pitcher was they told him he had to pitch not throw, which as you explain very succinctly, means the elbow has to be straight, and the wrist has to be outside the ball. So that means that your hands, imagine your arms straight down from your shoulder in a kind of handshake motion.

You could put the wrist behind the ball, but you couldn't do what it's called pronating the forearm. And that sounds kind of technical. There's no other way to describe it. Yeah, you can get technical here on this podcast. Feel free. The two things you couldn't do, let's say, all right, so going back to my straight arm in the handshake position, imagine standing up, holding a ball, so the ball is next to your leg, outer leg, and your throwing hand is on the outside of the ball. And you move the arm back

into a sort of an underhand wind-up position. Your arm will stop about a 90-degree angle with your back. And if you're able to twist the forearm clockwise, you can now get up into a sort of throwing position, which would be used, say, in modern fast softball pitching or windmill pitching, or overhand pitching. You can now snap your wrist in the way that it has the most range of motion, right? That's what they didn't want pitchers to do. So if you look at pictures of pitchers on the 1850s, their arms are going back,

and the ball is on the inside of their hand, and all they can really do to get velocity is you can throw from, you can sort of move your arm as quickly as you can rotate it from the shoulder, but the arm has to be straight. They were allowed to run up to a line, which was 45 feet from the batter. And that was basically almost like cricket bowling was a little bit earlier.

So cricket bowling also started out underhand and also didn't allow you to bend your elbow. You can imagine these poor pitchers running up to a line as though you're pitching horses is the best way to get a modern person to understand it. And you're throwing the ball forward. And in my book I described, I ran into a major league pitcher Tom Browning in a bar and explained this all at length where I can actually show him. and I asked him how hard you could throw that way, and he said 40 to 50 miles an hour, you felt? Okay, from 45 feet away, that's the equivalent of a little bit more in terms of modern pitching velocity,

but it's nothing like normal major league velocity or anything like it. The pitcher was handicapped, and what the pitcher could do in those days was he could change speeds a little bit. He could vary the velocity and the location of the pitch, and if he was really had good control, he could sort of keep the ball away from where the batter really liked it. The problem is, the big problem is there was no strike zone. Yeah. Because the pitcher was on his honor to put the ball over the plate. That's what they did.

And they tried to, you know, they use the limited weapons they have. They could change the angle it came up the batter from. They could keep it high if he liked it low, that kind of thing. But they didn't have much to work with. And there was no need for a strike zone, which is kind of surprising to a modern baseball fan, because the batterers were also on their honor to swing if the ball was over the plate. Yes. It sounds like an obvious design flaw, and yet it had functioned quite well for a long time until Jim Creighton came along and others like him.

And, you know, part of what Creighton did was caused everyone to rethink the whole idea of what the pitcher was for. Right. Because, you know, if you go back far enough in baseball history, the purpose of the pitcher is just to initiate the action. Yes. And as it got more competitive, you know, he's trying to get you out, but he just doesn't have much to work with. So, you know, scores in the 1850s, if you had a 45 to 35 game, nobody would raise an eyebrow. Yeah. So, yeah, so Creighton, the game is getting more competitive and there's pressure, right, to try and get people out, but there's not much the pitchers can do legally to do it.

Creighton has this massive breakthrough, working with his catcher, Joe Leggett, who was older and was sort of an expert at physical training and an early advocate of weight training, which he had Creighton do. we don't know where the whole theory of what they did came from, but they invented a new delivery in which he didn't run up to the line. So there are a couple things he figured out. One was that closing the front side of your body and then opening it in a coordinated way with some acceleration, what we'd call hip torque or hip shoulder separation, that puts a lot more on the ball than running up to a line, which sounds kind of obvious to a modern fan, but they didn't really understand that at the time. So a big conceptual breakthrough. And he's doing something modern

pitchers do, right? He's not running. He's uncoiling, in a sense. And even within the rules of the 1850s, you can throw a lot harder doing that than you could the other way. And he, by all accounts, did not bend his elbow, did not deviate from dead underhand, and he didn't throw in the sense of snapping his wrist the way we think of it. What I discovered working on this was that what he probably did was almost certainly because he threw a curveball. And you can't. You can't. You can't do that unless you get some kind of spin, right? You have to have all breaking pitches break for the same aerodynamic reason. You need to get enough spin on the ball that it will break. In this case, since you're throwing it dead underhand from a very low release point, it's breaking up.

So it's an upside down, what we would call a 12-6 curveball, except it's a 612 curveball. So what it looked like to be the, what he did was he built up the strength in his fingers with weights. and if you can imagine your hand in that handshake position, and then you just flip the fingers forward. You're not getting the wrist snap. The wrist isn't doing much. The fingers are flipping the ball forward with enough force that you get a break. And this is really, really hard to do,

but he was a first-class athlete, possibly the best athlete in North America. I'm saying that because how quickly he became a great baseball star, but also he was good at everything, including when he picked up cricket during some money on the side, he became the best American cricketer in a matter of months. Yeah. And there's no perfect comp here because pitchers pitched differently today. The rules are different. But imagine maybe Tyler Rogers, but from 45 feet away. So it's coming in there

faster than a Tyler Rogers pitch does. Exactly. And I, there we have eyewitness descriptions of people that faced him, we have some evidence. The problem is that a lot of the descriptions of right and are by people who are literally confused. what they're looking at. They don't know what they're saying. Yes. You need the high-speed, slow-motion cameras. You need the edgeratronic cameras that they have today to slow it down, go frame by frame, see exactly how the ball is coming out of his fingers. Then they might have understood how he was doing this. Yeah, I can only see those in my imagination. And it would have helped. Just to talk about velocity, the other thing is that everybody agreed on one thing,

that his pitches were precise and perfectly located at all times, which is, you know, that sort of defeated the whole, it created. It created. the problem of not having a strike zone, which is the batter is on their honor to swing, and yet one unhittable strike after another is coming at it. I did try to calculate his velocity, and it even surprised me because with a few sort of reference points, I think conservatively he was throwing the equivalent if you moved him back to, you know, releasing the ball, 54 people in a batter or whatever pitchers are doing now, counting their stride. You can actually estimate an equivalence in terms of reaction time for the batter, and he was throwing easily over 100.

And so it could have been a lot more than that. So you can imagine what a super weapon he was coming into this environment. And it's not as if every pitcher before him was just soft tossing. You know, they were trying to put a little pace on the ball. But when this guy comes in and the pitches is moving so much faster with pinpoint control and with movement nobody has ever seen before, or you can imagine how dominant he was. And he was so good that in retrospect, people misremembered what he was actually doing.

And this is, I think, one of the most valuable parts of the book where you kind of corrected the record because I was aware of Jim Creighton and his significance, but I fell into the trap of thinking that he was one of the pitchers who had bent the rules.

Because, of course, you know, there were pitchers who pushed the envelope and there were limits on, well, you can't raise your arm above this level. And then gradually they conceded, okay, everyone's getting away with it. Well, just now you can do sidearm. Okay, now you can do overhand. And people were pushing that year after year after year.

And the same with the wrist snap. And so there was a perception after the fact that he was one of these guys who was bending the rules. And what's interesting is that as you document, his contemporaries, his peers, the authoritative sources who faced him and observed him, they had no question that he was on the level while he was alive and while he was pitching. Or at least they had questions, but their questions were satisfied when they watched. And then after the fact, after he was gone and was not there to stand up for himself, then people thought, because imitators of Creighton came along, and in many cases, they couldn't do what he did. And so they tried to mimic it either by being wild.

They had the pace, but not the control. or they were bending the rules a bit. And so everyone retroactively decided, well, no one can do what he did legally, thus, because these guys are kind of cheating. He must have been cheating too. And what is amazing is that as you document, it's in many cases the same people and the same sources

who during his lifetime wrote that everything was above Ford, who then five, 10, 15 years later, or decades later, in Henry Chadwick's case sometimes, were saying, oh, yeah, he was, cheating just the way that later imitators were. And so I don't know whether it is just, you know, motivated reasoning or the failings of memory or whether they had some agenda or what. But as you document, they just didn't understand what he was doing because no one else had ever done it. And so it was almost logical to conclude that he must have been cheating in some

fashion because he was so much better and so different from everyone else. Yeah, it's a real lesson in human psychology. And, you know, I thought of some modern analogies. Of course, you can probably think of something, too. Everyone's supposed to hit home runs, but not everyone is Babe Ruth. Maybe you cheat. Or how about poor Brady Anderson? What was that one home run year he had? 96. Second reference to that season on this episode. Yeah. People decided much later that he must have been doing steroids based on zero evidence, I believe. Well, yeah, anytime someone is an outlier like that, there's going to be suspicions. Right? And some of them are borne out, ultimately, and some of them are more reasonable than others. But you're always going to, you know, because players, since time in memorial, they have tried to get some sort of advantage any way that they could.

Yeah. And I, you know, this whole spider attack thing. I mean, it starts with, you know, you need to have a slider or curveball as as as good as that guys, and you can't do it. Yeah. So, you know, this is as old as baseball. But it does seem like posterity conspired to, you know, really hide Jim Creight. achievements. Yeah. And not only was he dead young, his catcher disappeared for reasons that hadn't

had to have anything to do with baseball. Yes, it's funny. You write a lot about Joe Leggett, his catcher in the book. It's almost a backdoor biography of Joe Leggett.

And for the first half or so of the book, I'm thinking, Joe Leggett, he's the unsung hero of this story. Well, yeah. And then, well, his reputation

gets sullied a little later on. But he is quite an incredible figure because he's the common link, all the early innovators who are sometimes attributed, you know, the creation of the curveball is attributed to them. You make the case it was Creighton. Obviously, people sometimes say it's Candy Cummings or even Ace of Raynard.

And he was the common link. He caught them all. And so for all we know, he may have taught it to them or at least passed it on. And it's just an incredible Ironman showing by him to catch Jim Creighton without a glove. just without any sort of protective gear and to just put his body in the way of the ball. It's, you know, later on, there's much more about how he was in trouble with gamblers, perhaps, and maybe he even threw games, and he invented a new identity and disappeared,

and you'd trace his history, and it's fascinating. But, boy, catchers back then, and specifically Jim Creighton's catcher, they had it hard. It's amazing that they didn't invent gloves immediately, just out of self-preservation. I've seen D-1 college games where there were 10 pass balls. And this guy, Tom Sheber in the Hall of Fame, made a graph where he counted not every game did we have these numbers for.

But for a lot of them, in 1860, how many pass balls leg it had and how many of the opposition catcher had? And it's, I mean, you can't even imagine stopping a fast fastball without any equipment. But there are games when he has won. He has three, he has five, and the other guy has nine, 15, 12. So he was an amazing athlete. And, you know, the thing about those three pitchers you mentioned, it's just, it's not proof that he's the real theoretician behind the curveball,

but it seems like an awfully long coincidence that not only were these three great pitchers all taught by the same guy, but he discovered them all as teenagers. Creighton was a teenager when the Excelsior's somehow recruited. him or acquired him, and there's some mystery about that. Brainerd is converted from an infielder to a pitcher by Leggett, and Candy Cummings is 14 playing on a sandlot in Brooklyn when Leggett says, this kid's got something, and he goes and visits his family and asks for permission to bring him to the Excelsior's and practice. So he's a big part of the story, and it really shouldn't be a shock if you know, baseball.

Pitching is very collaborative between pitchers and catchers and was more so once. Now, one way in which the rules were bent a bit is when it comes to amateurism versus professionalism. And this was, at the time, a bright line, but also sort of a blurry line behind the scenes. Because even though you weren't supposed to pay players, they didn't have salaries, you could still appoint them to a cushy gig. You could perhaps give them real estate. And so because Creighton was such a difference maker, as you document, it appears, you make a pretty compelling case that the Excelsior's were, they were coloring outside the lines a little bit when it came to the incentives

that they were able to offer Craton, which maybe was not uncommon at the time, but he was the biggest prize. It's a tricky question because literally no one ever accused the Excelsior's of crossing the line. There's a rule that says you can't compensate players. That sounds pretty clear. In practice, if I had to take my best guess from

immersing myself in this for a long time. I think they kind of made a in-practice line between paying cash and helping them in other ways. Yeah. Which would explain why the Excelsior's kind of in a roundabout way, without being too public about it, gave him very valuable real estate on more than one occasion. And they got him a no-show job in the Federal Customs House. And this was not, he's not the only ball player of the time that was helped in this way. Yeah. You know, the Brooklyn Atlantics were connected to the Democratic Party, the political machine that ran Brooklyn. They all had pushy jobs, no-show jobs, light-duty jobs. They were taking care of in retirement. But, you know, I have not entirely made up my mind where that line is that you were talking about. It's not like no one ever enforced the rule against professionalism. They did. But I think you have to kind of respect the fact that nobody thought the Excelsior's were breaking any rules with Graydon. And in fact, some of the things that they lied about were not about compensating him in any way, but about the recruitment of him.

You know, I think I say in my book that he's the first known recruited youth athlete by a team sport in America, something that's very common now, obviously. He was brought from New York City to the city across the river, then independent Brooklyn, by the Excelsiers. And this is something totally new. Baltimore didn't do that. They didn't go around recruiting talent. There were little sneaky ways they could sometimes improve their team.

But the whole idea of a ball club was that it was a pre-existing set of social relationships, like a country club or a firehouse or a neighborhood or a company where you would form your best team out of these guys that you knew. You didn't go looking for a second basement somewhere, especially not in other city. So they told this kind of interesting lie that Creighton had grown up in the same neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights or Cobble Hill as it's now called the neighbor. neighborhood. They told the lie that he'd grown up there, and people have repeated this forever. Yeah. And lies are really interesting stuff for historians, right, because they tell you what people are really thinking, what they want you to believe. And there were a lot of lies surrounding his death, as well as his life, which we will get to shortly. But he was, as you document

baseball's first phenom, literally, the first player to have that word applied to them. And he was a sensation. He was not only incredibly effective and valuable, but but also he really inflamed fans' imaginations, and he drew crowds. And this is interesting to me because it sort of suggests that we've always wanted whiffs and we've always wanted dominance. You can kind of draw a line from Creighton

to any number of things in the contemporary game, but you can talk about Jim Creighton the way that we talk about Jacob Misarowski now. And yet we also talk a lot about how we want fewer whiffs. We want more contact. We want higher batting averages. We want more balls in play. We want more scoring.

And Creighton or Ms. Rowski, they are the opposite of that. They are suppressing offense. They are suppressing action. And yet there's something about them that you can't look away. I guess it's just like even if you think that contact is good and you want more runners on the bases and higher batting averages and everything. When someone comes along like that who is just raising the bar. and is just so awe-inspiring. Right.

You can't look away even if you think maybe this is bad for the game in the long run. Well, you know, baseball purism can be a little bit funny. And we all, we're not sure what we want as fans. And, you know, I mentioned in my book, The Robert Cooper novel, Universal Baseball Association, which is sort of inspired by Creighton's story. Yeah. And he, the perfect ball player, this sort of. Christ-like figure is a pitcher.

He's not a home run hitter. You know, Craton's significance, it's really hard to overstate it because he's there at the birth of fandom itself. You know, we think of that people have rooted for athletes and teams forever. And yet, the whole idea of rooting for like a club, you know, a team, they were politicians that had fans and boxers and horses, you know, race horses. But this is a different phenomenon. This is rooting for this.

organization or uniform that you have emotionally committed to. And I don't need to explain it because we all do it. But it literally didn't exist until the late 1850s. And Creighton is a big contributor to it because what it came out of was the Brooklyn, New York rivalry. And it spread. It's kind of funny to read some of the journalistic accounts of the first, the crowds that Creighton would draw where they're not only surprised, but they're disturbed because they think it must represent some increase in gambling. They don't know what this is. Rooting. Right. We should all just be impartial observers, just for love of the game. Why would you watch someone else play ball and care who won? That's what they're wondering.

Yeah. And sometimes, well, we talk about Shohei Otani today, and there are Otani rules, right? And it's, he can be a DH after he is removed from the game as a pitcher, or he can be an all-star as both a pitcher and a DH. And so sometimes a sensation comes along and kind of rewrites the rules, right, or the rules are rewritten for them. And maybe in Creighton's case, it was partly, okay, what do we have to do to recruit this guy and then hide how we did it? And then after the fact, maybe all sorts of things stem from the way that he shook up the order of baseball. And so that's my question, I guess, given that you are a conscientious historian. And, you know, you can always end up with the great man theory of history, right?

And it's always more complicated than that. If you take Jim Creighton out of history and pretend he never existed, do you think that we would have more or less the same game today? I mean, it seems far-fetched to think that we'd be out there, you know, with no strike zone in 2026 and everyone just tossing underhand. So was this inevitable and maybe he just slightly moved up the timeline? or was the way he did it so remarkable that, and in a way that inspired so many imitators, that it did actually change things in a meaningful, you know, butterfly effect way?

Well, I'm going to go with the butterfly because I've struggled with this question, and, you know, it's easy to go with the determinism answer. It's always tempting, and sometimes it's true, right? Baseball was getting more competitive, was going to get more competitive. but here's the counter argument. There are batten ball sports that don't have strikesos. They're plenty of them. I watched a game of Pesopalu in Finland last May.

It's very competitive. You know, they had a professional league for a while. It's quite competitive. They don't have a strike zone. Cricket doesn't have a strike zone. Yeah. Cricket is very, very, very competitive with lots of money, and hundreds of millions of people following it.

I think Creighton's breakthrough turned baseball upside down And it responded the best it could, which is by a series of steps that ultimately gave us a strikestone. But I really do believe that it's indirectly his doing. And, you know, it could have gone another way. Certainly could have. Yeah, we had a guest from England on last week, Adrian Childs, and we were talking about cricket versus baseball and how he had to, when he discovered baseball, just reframe his understanding of how the sport works that, oh, it's not just about the batter and the runner and the defense. it's really the pitcher-batter confrontation and the catcher you could throw in there. And I was saying to him, well, that's not how it started.

They were more closely aligned in the beginning. And the pitcher was just the instigator and started the play. And then it was all about the batter and the running and the fielding. And so maybe we have Jim Creighton to either credit or blame for that. And I guess that's another question. If that's true, if you're right, that he really was this watershed that changed everything. Are we better off today because of Creighton? Now, it's hard to say, you know, the game is still alive and thriving all this long later that maybe you wouldn't want to mess with success,

right? But then again, there are people who think it's gone too far in this direction of just everything being about the unhittable pitcher. So I guess the market has judged that this brand of baseball has met with quite a following and quite a, a state. staying power, but is there any part of you that thinks, gosh, maybe baseball was better as it was originally conceived and maybe Jim Creighton screwed it all up? Well, yeah. I mean, baseball finds a way to correct imbalances between offense and defense, and the batters have had the upper hand plenty of times since.

I think fast pitching was it was a godsent and the curveball. You could imagine the game without it, but I think we're better off with it. And, you know, it makes it even more incredible how forgotten Creighton is because we've only talked about most of the ways in which he affected the game. And, you know, you sit at home on TV and watch the battle over control of the strike zone. And not too many fans are thinking about Jim Creighton, but he's ultimately the source of this. And he would maybe be better remembered as the source of it if he had lived longer. He died at 21, and so he could not continue to tell his story or participate in other people's tellings. of his story. You make the case that he should be in the Hall of Fame, which is pretty persuasive.

Obviously, the Hall of Fame is pretty explicitly devoted to professional baseball, and he predated professional baseball, though he helped bring it about. There is a school of thought that if you are one of the most obvious snubs, then that actually keeps your memory alive more so than if you get in, because there are people who will write books and say, hey, this guy should be in the Hall of Fame. Whereas if you're in the Hall of Fame, well, then you're just another dusty old plaque, you know, you're just a guy who gets forgotten. The counter to that maybe is Candy Cummings. Now, I wouldn't say Candy Cummings is incredibly well known among your average baseball fan, but it was certainly a name that I got to know as I was learning about baseball history because Candy Cummings, ah, he invented the curveball. And as you note, not so fast.

Now, he was one of the better pitchers who came along in the wake of Creighton and kind of copied him. and he did throw a curveball of some sort, but I think you demonstrate pretty compellingly that Creighton was the trailblazer, was the true trailblazer. So do you think that it's not only just that Creighton be enshrined, but that he would be better remembered if he were actually in,

as opposed to being on the outside looking in where some scholars will then make the case that he should be in? Well, I think it definitely has heard his legacy that he's not in, because that keeps you in the public mind, right? The Hall of Fame's full of people you and I would never have barely have heard of, let's say, had they not have a plaque. There's no reason to have heard of Alexander Cartwright or Abner Doubleday, but there's also some major leaguers that are overrated simply because they're on the wall there.

The only book that's been written alleging that, making the case that Creighton has been forgotten unjustly and underrated and should be in the Hall of Fame is mine. It came out this year. Yeah. I quote in the book, a man named Alexander Cleland, who was the idea man behind the Hall of Fame, he was the guy that thought of it. And he was selling the people that own most of Cooperstown and Major League Baseball on this idea in the early 30s successfully. He writes a letter where he says, you know, we really ought to honor the early grates, the pioneers, the amateur grates,

kind of dispose of that whole question by picking a group of Olympians to honor. And he mentioned some names and the second or third one is Jim Creighton. Tim is obvious that Creighton is in this category. Of course, 20 years later, no one's heard of the guy. Yeah. If it were up to Monty Burns, he'd be in Cooperstown. You know, we should add that some of the amateur grates are sort of shoehorned in under other categories, like George Wright. Right, yes.

I mean, he wouldn't really be in as the sporting goods, Magnet. And it helps that Candy Cummings had a story. He had an origin story for the curveball. which is dubious. And also, he lived until he was 75, so he was around to share that story and people printed the legend. Also, maybe it helped that he had a nickname. If you rebranded Jim Creighton as Candy Creighton, that might help. Maybe that would do it. Yeah, there are a lot of candies. A lot of them were called Candy at the time. It's baffling. But that clamshell story that Candy Cummings told is abused.

Yes, right. I spent a lot of my life wondering what that had to do with throwing a baseball, but that's just me. Yes, he was throwing shells through the air and they curved and he thought, huh, Alika, yeah, if I could just do that to a baseball, I'd be a future Hall of Famer. Yeah. Well, I know we can't invent a nickname for Jim Creighton. It would be a historical. But I don't want to give away everything that you find here because this is a baseball mystery.

And so if you're thinking, oh, this sounds dry, it's just the story of a guy who died this long ago. Why do I need to know this? no, it's an investigation, and you are sifting through the archives and you're trying to sort out fact from fiction here. And of course, the great mystery about Creighton is how and why did he die. And you are able, I think, to settle that pretty conclusively. And there's a lot of misinformation about that. And again, not just because this was a long time ago and people forgot, but because people were trying to sell everybody a bill of goods. because they did not want baseball to be responsible for killing Jim Creighton.

And so they were spinning yarns on purpose, seemingly. Yes, that is true. I mean, that's the inevitable conclusion, because not only was the actual cause of death, something that was pretty well medically understood, but his team was, coincidentally, full of doctors. Yeah. There were a lot of medical doctors on the Excelsior's,

and including the president and the first baseman, people that knew Crayinimidly, and I spent some time learning about how his medical problem, which was a type of hernia, was treated in those days. And it was very well understood. And people would wear trusses if they were athletes. So people that got dressed with him knew he had a problem and they knew exactly what it was. And they knew what could happen if it got worse. It's a much more serious problem than a modern inguinal or sports hernia because we have antibiotics and we have surgery that fixes it very easily. They didn't have a surgical option that was attractive at all. It had a really low success rate and would probably kill you. And they didn't have

antibiotics. So the problem that Creighton had was that it was worsening over the time of his pitching career. And the danger was that he would have a loss. Part of his abdominal tissue would lose blood supply. I don't want to get too gory. But as soon as you have, had that, a living part of your body, losing its blood supply, you get gangrene. This is ultimately what he died of, and it took a while. But because he was playing cricket to make a little money on the side, and he left a cricket game a week before the last baseball game he played, which he also left even more in pain, there was sort of a bit of a dispute, an ugly dispute between the two sports over who was responsible. It's just very unattractive kind of controversy. Yeah. Baseball's really

trying to deflect responsibility because he was primarily a baseball player. And if you went to a doctor today with exactly what he had, let's say you're a young athlete or anybody, the doctor would tell you that the two things you shouldn't do is lift weights. Don't violently twist your abdomen. Violently twist your abdomen, which is a description of his pitching motion. So, you know, you can't help but wonder. You don't want to judge too much as a historian from a lack of evidence. But you have to wonder about the silence and about none of these doctors correcting all the misinformation that was out there about he died swinging a bat or he died playing cricket or he died of a burst appendix or a bladder.

You name it. There's something like 30 different causes are out there in the press. All they had to do was say, this is what he died of. I mean, the person who did the death certificate knew what he died of. And yet it becomes a secret almost immediately. Yeah, I rail now against, you know, guys who play hurt. And often it ends up becoming counterproductive because they injure themselves further or they don't even play that well because they're so compromised. And sometimes there's pressure from the team.

Sometimes it's a self-imposed pressure. You know, Aaron Judge or Ellie Dela Cruz or Sean Murphy, guys like that who have hidden injuries either from their employers or from the public or both. This is far worse than that because this is life-threatening. And he had to know that at a certain point, right? I'm sure he did. You know, you can kind of say the excelsers were certainly culpable in this. They were riding him hard. He was a big draw.

He was a competitive advantage. And he was also pushing himself hard. And he was doing double duty. You know, he was a two-way player, but he was also playing cricket on his time off. And he was pitching every inning of every Excelsior's game. And they were not playing as many games. But he was pitching way more pitches because, again, no strike zone. And even though he wasn't wild.

batters would just wait him out and tire him out, right, and hope for a past ball because that's all you could do. And so I wonder what drove him. Now, he was not a man of millions, and so he needed the money, right? But at a certain point, I wonder why the self-preservation impulse didn't kick in. Was it the pressure? Or was it that, hey, he's a 21-year-old kid. We see lots of 20-year-old pitchers push themselves too hard now. So, yeah, I mean, Doc Gooden, when he was a rookie, didn't say, hey, I'm 19. You're overusing me. Right, right. But that's just part of being an athlete. But, you know, it's the sort of big tragic irony of Creighton is how many things that happened to him and bad things are just the most banal

everyday athletic stories in the world now. And yet he was the first. So he's the first recruited athlete. And there's a little bit of whiff of corruption about it. You know, that's not exactly a new story. But it was new when he did it. And then he's overused as a pitcher because, you know, you know what's really bad for your health in baseball, being good at getting batters out? Yeah. I mean, I speak as someone who couldn't comb his hair when I was a high school pitcher. There's plenty of stories like that. But how about poor kid from the slums?

He grew up in the five-point slum of New York City. Yeah. I mean, he wasn't on the street poor, but he was a low, working-class kind of kid, and he's supporting his entire family by his athletics. You know, they move across the river to the equivalent of a Greenwich, Connecticut, suburban house. I realized that going sort of month by month in his final year of 1862 that he was alive, that he's under, for various reasons, including the Civil War, he's under economic pressure.

He's got a lot of people to support. And he plays, he's squeezing the team for more money, in fact, during this season and threatens to leave them for their rival Atlantic because the Excelsior's aren't playing enough baseball. And the no-show job they got him is not available. anymore. The war changed everything. And so he starts playing cricket out of economic necessity. And I think as his condition is deteriorating, and you can kind of trace it in some interesting ways, his workload is going up because of his circumstances. It's very sad. And now pitching, you know, it costs people an ulnar ligament or even a career being overused, but it doesn't

usually kill you. Yeah. So he's sort of an extreme example of the first of many things, and in some ways the worst example. Yes. First max effort pitcher, as you say in the book. And first times through the order effect, maybe, as you document, people scored on him a lot more later in games because he had thrown 250 pitches by that point, you know? Or more. Yeah. And as thorough as the book is, it's fairly compact.

It's about 175 pages prior to the notes and index and everything because there's still just a lot not known about. him and that we can never know as a person in particular. And that's partly because he died when he was 21 and he didn't share much about his inner life. And also because, as you also note, the people who did know him after the fact don't really do anything to convey who he was or what he was like. It's all about his pitching and what a phenom he was, but nothing about what he was like on a personal level, which, as you argue, might be because of that guilt. They didn't want to make him into a martyr, or they felt bad about the human cost of having pushed him.

And so maybe they didn't want to remember him as a person. But there's just really one little tidbit when you note one account that says that he would sometimes stand out there and toss the ball up and down before he delivered, which is very evocative. You know, it sounds almost kind of cocky, but we're really... into that, who knows. But that was just one little window into what was this guy like other than just what kind of pitcher he was. So that must have played to you. You must be so curious about what he was like as a person having spent all this time with these accounts of him. No, it's true. It's a bit

frustrating, although, you know, on another level, I've interviewed in a previous life plenty of major league baseball players, and they're not all interesting to talk to. That is true. It's possible he didn't have a lot to say. Yes. I do think. there was a guilt factor. I mean, people that were very known to be very close to him never said a thing about him. And I was thinking about things like a friend I had who served in World War II in the Pacific and saw a lot of pretty unpleasant stuff. And he was telling me they never had any PTSD. They never had any repercussions from some of the horrors that they saw in some cases perpetrated. But then he admitted to me that he had never gotten together with the guys from his unit.

And that was seen pretty significant. Yeah. I mean, there's, there's some sort of, yeah. I mean, there's some sadness to the story, but how much would it add if we knew what kind of person he was? I mean, maybe something. On a more flippant level, I mean, when people ask me, how do you write a biography of someone that we know, have no idea what he was like? I would say, well, there's a lot of books written about people because of their impact on the world like Jesus or Mohammed. So we don't really know much about them as people. Yeah, I guess Creighton had disciples, I guess, but we hear more about Jesus' probably than we did about Creighton. But in terms of impact on the world, if you could make a formula, a ratio of impact on the world to actual facts about them personally, it's a big number for great.

Yeah. So is that, my last question, is that what you would most want to know if you could have any question answered because you solve so many mysteries, or at least to my satisfaction you did as best as we can hope? And you never know what's lurking in some moldy old newspaper that has not yet been digitized that might be discovered someday. The fate of Joe Leggett was your white whale and you were able to solve that mystery. By the way, another innovation, Creighton, because of Leggett, seemingly was doing weighted ballwork in 1860 or so. When it was almost unheard of. Yeah, and we talk about, oh, cutting edge, drive line, weighted ballwork. Yeah, nothing is new under the sun, right? And certainly not in baseball.

But is there one thing that you were not able to crack that you hope you can someday or that keeps you up at night? You know, I'm not sure what I would want to know about him as a person. I would be very interested in how the Excelsior's recruited him. Yeah. We don't really know. We know that it happened. He was 17. We, it could, I have some, you know, thoughts about what possibilities.

I'd like to know what he was thinking in the 1860 championship series when it looks like Joe Legge was trying to. lose. Other than that, I think maybe we know enough about him, at least I do. Well, we know much more thanks to you. And so I highly recommend the book, Death in the Strike Zone, the Mystery of America's First Baseball Hero. Do check it out. And also, while you're at it, you can pick up Tom's first book as well, how baseball

happened. Outrageous lies exposed, the true story revealed. Thomas, thank you very much for coming on. and also for, I think, delivering an overdue biography of a formative figure of the game. Yes, so that's also another white whale. Thank you for having me on. That was a great interview, and I think you may have understood the book better than most readers. Thank you.

My pleasure. All right, that will do it for today. Thanks, as always, for listening. Meg will be back next time, down an additional wisdom tooth, but no less wise, I'm sure. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively while, and signing up to pled some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad-free,

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And you can check the show notes in the podcast post at Fangraphs or Patreon or the episode description in your podcast app for links to the stories and stats we cited today. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing and production assistants, as well as a recording assist from another ringer colleague, Steve Allman. We will be back with another episode very soon. Talk to you then. Where do you go in a world of bad takes for the good takes on baseball and life with a bad. Silence of analytics and humor, philosophical music. Effectively wild. Effectively wild.