Endless Thread - Pitch Perfect

Episode Date: March 29, 2018

With spring finally here and the MLB's opening day upon us, we're talkin' baseball -- the funny, the memorable, the peanuts, the hot dogs.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.

Produced by the ILAP at WBUR, Boston. What's up, Snoop Siebertson? Oh, God. Hey, Ben. What was that? I don't know. It's the response you deserve. Do you know why I'm calling you, Snoop Severson?

Um, for my rapping skills. No, definitely not. You've never heard them. All right. So Snoop Severson is the Snoop Dog style nickname I made up for you. Snoop has a lot of nicknames. It turns out Snoop doggie dog, we know that one. You've also got Big Snoop Dog.

That's with 4Gs because it ain't nothing but a G thing, baby. Snoop Lion. I know that one. Yeah, the Rastafari nickname. Uncle Snoop. Snoop Zilla, DJ Snoopadelic, the dog father. Okay. This is the part where you have to tell me where this is going.

Okay, okay. I'm telling you this because Snoop has about as many nicknames as he does side gigs in different sports. Really? Yeah. I'm going to prove it to you with a Reddit thread. You ready? I'm ready. Okay.

All right, we got basketball. Oh, basketball. Did he just shoot a three pointer? He drained a three. Okay. All right. I'm impressed. Okay.

Football. He's catching a pass of some sort. Yep, not bad, right? Hockey. Snoop on ice. Is that cricket? Snoop playing cricket. Okay. Come on. It's pretty good. All right, here's the last one. Baseball. Snoop just went over the fence to catch a ball in some sort of baseball game. And we ended on baseball because we're going to talk about baseball today. You play softball, right? If you'd come to one of my games, Ben, you would know that. Oh, man. Well, you got a new season about to start, so I'll come. Okay, good.

Are you a pitcher? I am the pitcher. Oh, man. Okay. I think you're going to like this episode because we're about to talk about a pitch. Okay. You're going to pitch me this story, Ben? Right over home plate?

Well, it's a little bit of a curveball, but I'm looking for the strike zone. I am in the zone, man. Okay, I'll be the judge of that. Okay. What should we call this one? I'm going with pitch perfect. I'll take it. I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and this is Endless Thread.

A show featuring stories found in the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. For our first story, we've got our producer, brother-in-arms, Josh Swartz, in here. Josh, tell us about Randy Johnson. So Randy Johnson was one of the best pictures of all time, Hall of Famer. Okay. And he had this iconic look, thick mustache, grimy mullet. He was really tall, six foot 10 inches tall. And this led to one of my personal favorite athlete nicknames of all time, the big unit.

He kind of reminds me of a grumpy Viking. Like his look is like a dour Viking. Definitely some kind of Viking. I completely agree. And the most famous moment of his career probably happened in 2001. But it's not the type of Hall of Fame moment you'd expect. It's March 24th during a meaningless spring train. training game and he winds up to throw a pitch.

Oh, no. Guys, I actually know where this is going. So do I. So the big unit winds up to throw one of his wicked fastballs. And I want you guys to watch the video of what happens next. Okay. Randy Johnson winds up for a pitch. I have watched this video so many times, many, many, many times.

Okay, the pitch does not make it to home plate. It seemingly just turns into an exploded poof. like a pillow exploding or something in the air. A poof of feathers. You can almost hear the sound of the impact. Basically, what you guys are saying is Randy Johnson exploded a freaking bird. Morning dove, morning dove, to be specific.

So what happens next? Well, it's basically chaos. A Giants player walks over and picks up the dead bird and shows it off to everyone. One of the groundskeepers runs out and tries to sweep the feathers up with his broom, which was a bad idea. and he ends up picking up the feathers by hand.

And the umps rule it a do-over, so basically it's scrubbed from all the official records. So this is not the type of thing that the internet easily forgets. It's also been nearly the top post on Reddit like many times. It was the 17-year anniversary over last weekend, and it was almost on the front page, I think, and there's a certain Redditor who did something famous with this video. Yep.

He posted in the Never Tell Me the Oddly. community, which is where people post crazy things that you don't believe actually happened, except there's video evidence of them happening. Okay. So lots of people were commenting on this, and Reddit user 110-1-0-1-0-0-0-2, aka Andrew, caught wind to this whole thing and decided to comment on it. I was really bored, and I had nothing better to do, and I thought I should, you know, be a rebel and tell them the odds on the Never Tell Me the Od subreddit.

See, never tell me the odds has one rule, which is to never actually calculate the odds of these things happening. Okay, but this guy did calculate the odds of that bird getting hit by Randy Johnson's pitch in that exact moment? Yes, yes, he did. But this wasn't some basic math problem. He really committed to this. It's a simplified model involving the volume of birds in North America and the volume of pitches in North America. So the space that a pitch takes up versus the space that the birds take up, what is the probability that the birds and the pitch are in the same place at the same time?

His quote-unquote simplified model also involves the radius of a baseball, the landmass of the United States, the density of a typical morning dove, and the path a baseball takes after leaving a pitcher's hand until crossing the plate. And together you can come up with a rough approximation of what the probability is. Okay, but Josh, we are podcasters, not mathematicians. So I think we should just cheat and fast forward to the answer. Yep, I am right with you.

Andrew did determine that there was a 0.000-0-0-0-0-0-0-9% chance that Randy Johnson would hit a bird with any given pitch. That's five zeros if you're keeping track at home. I am, and my incredibly nuanced in math expert translation is that this is a really, really, really unlikely thing that happened. Yes, I mean, obviously. But the best part is that other nerdy people actually responded to Andrew's comment with suggestions about how to improve his calculations. And they zeroed in on one particular detail about the location of morning doves across the country. In my model, I just assumed them to be uniformly distributed across the U.S. And, you know, there could be some biases for the bird being in more places that are closer to the coast.

and then also baseball stadiums. There's more people closer to the coast. So maybe it's more likely that there's a morning dove. Maybe the probability is higher because of that. Or maybe there's a lot of food in a stadium, so there's more likely to be morning doves there. Andrew is actually kind of famous on this particular subreddit for posting odds of all sorts of things, right?

And almost getting banned, which is a thing that can happen if you break the one cardinal rule of never tell me the odds. Like, you know, one day, one day no commenting allowed. Banned for a day. Yep. That's the correct terminology. So he's like a Reddit outlaw. Roaming, never tell me the odds, and stirring up trouble wherever he goes. Has he ever been officially banned? He says he's only been banned once for calculating that he had a zero to 70% chance of not getting banned.

Of course he did. That sounds about right for Reddit. But did Randy Johnson get banned from baseball for murdering a bird? Oh, it wasn't murder. Come on. accidental bird slaughter. Bird slaughter, at least. He did not. He retired after a long 22-season career, and now he's a professional photographer. But he was never really able to escape his unintentional bird assassination,

because check out the logo for his photo company. Is that necessary? It's a bird, a dead bird on its back with feathers floating up above it. In his defense, and I think the MLB has said this, Randy Johnson is reportedly a conservationist. So I think he was kind of sad about this, too. Okay, I'm going to wipe this bird slaughter from my brain with some baseball-related shower thoughts, Ben. Oh, let's do some shower thoughts. Yeah, these thoughts that you have in the shower that they can be kind of existential.

Usually they're just kind of quirky and funny. Do you want to do one? Yeah, definitely. Okay, baseball is really the only sport where the goal is to hit the spectator. haters with the ball. That's pretty good. This one is, thanks to baseball, I'm allowed to F up twice before I actually get in trouble. The old three strikes roll.

I like that. It's pretty good. Okay, I love this one. The Los Angeles Angels baseball team is directly translated as the the Angels Angels. That's true. Okay, I have another one that's kind of, kind of like that. Here we go. The minor league baseball team for the Milwaukee Brewers should be called the microbrews.

If I knew for a fact that my dad was not on Reddit, I would think this was all him. Deep shower thoughts, man. Okay, let's crack a beer and take a break. Okay. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics. Country music.

Hockey. Sex. Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcast.

There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the Creative Studio from WBUR's business partnerships team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help.

Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. Okay, so before the break, we heard about pitcher Randy Johnson exploding a bird with a pitch, which we are sad about, and the morning dove community is probably also sad about. But we've now got a pretty feel-good story to counteract that exploded bird's sadness. We do. Meet Steve. I'm doing pretty good. How about you? The Stevie James, as he is known online, lives in California, but he's from New Jersey.

Mets fan. And a lifelong sports fan in general, mostly because of his dad. We would go out every Saturday morning and we'd go get hot chocolate and a bagel, and then we'd read the sports section, and then we had to either go play tennis, basketball, throw a football around or throw a baseball around. And so it was Steve's dad, Jim, who took him to his first sporting event ever on August 22, 1998, a baseball game, Seattle Mariners versus the Chicago White Sox. It was a big deal for a couple of reasons.

Number one, the game was in Seattle. Steve's family lived in New Jersey. My dad happened to, he was going to be going on a business trip. So he asked me, he said, I know you like Ken Griffey Jr., do you want to go to this game? Number two, Ken Griffey Jr., centerfielder for the Mariners at the time, an MVP, a 10-time gold glove recipient. He had a great personality. He could field. He could hit for contact. He could hit for power. He was just good at everything. And he was just a real likable guy for a kid of my age. Steve was just four years old at the time. But even at that tender age, he already knew how to heckle like a true sports fan.

So one of the fondest memories I have of this is one of the guys on the Mariners, He was in the batting circle, and I made the comment that he looked like a girl, not knowing that was not the right thing to say being a four-year-old kid. And the guy turned around at my dad. We still to this day don't know which player it was, but my dad always claimed it was Alex Rodriguez, so I like to think that's who it was. I remember my dad put me up on his shoulders, and if I'm not mistaken, I think it went to extra innings.

It did, by the way. The Mariners won 5'4. in the 11th inning. The feeling of the crowd when the Mariners won that game, I think it was a walk-off hit from the D.H. Martinez was unforgettable. Steve has been thinking about that game a lot recently.

A couple of months ago, Steve got a package from his dad's sisters. Inside, there was some baseball memorabilia, some pictures of Steve and his dad, and the ticket stubs to that 1998 Mariners game. His dad had held on to them all of these years. It was pretty cool.

It made me pretty emotional. I don't get emotional that often, but... But these were difficult circumstances. Steve's dad had died a few months before. It was relatively unexpected. I had been told he had five years left. It was early dementia, the early signs of dementia, and I guess the medications he had taken didn't mix in the way.

They were hoping they would. probably a day or two before he had passed was the last time I talked with him. Steve posted a picture of the ticket stubs from that 1998 Mariners game on the baseball subreddit. The post took off. Redditors offered their condolences. Some shared their own family baseball stories.

It was cool to hear other people's memories, too, because I, in a weird way, helped other people relive their memories with their fathers that may or may not have passed away. A couple days later, a comment popped up in the thread from Mariners Official. Yep, the official Reddit account for the Seattle Mariners. It read, Our Deepest Condolences, how does another game in 2018 sound? Maybe August 22nd versus the Astros? August 22nd, 2018.

20 years to the day since Steve went to his very first game with his dad. We can't promise another Edgar Martinez walkoff, they wrote. But let's make it another win. I can't even describe the feeling that I had when they did that. I mean, I know he's going to be there watching with us when we go. My plan is to take my daughter, if I can, if she's feeling up for it, if she's not going to act up on the plane ride and stuff like that. So her first game can be at Seattle also.

Steve's daughter is three months old. His dad never met her. Steve never even told his dad that he and his girlfriend were expecting, mostly because they were having complications and they didn't want to get ahead of themselves. But his daughter is doing great. I think it would have been very emotional for me for him to have met my daughter.

I wish he could have. I know he would have tried to teach her sports like he had taught me, and it would have been cool for us to try and teach her together. I would just tell her he was a special guy. He was there for me when I needed to talk with him was very important to her dad, taught him the right morals and to be a good sport when he played sports.

Hopefully my daughter will get my dad's jeans in the sports area. I see my dad and my daughter pretty often, like her facial expressions and stuff like that. And I'm hoping she has a love of baseball like I do and my dad did. honestly. I hope she could continue on that tradition with her children and her children's children. Steve's tickets for August 22nd are waiting for him at Safeco Field. The Mariners will be waiting for him too. They've invited him onto the field for batting practice before the game. It'll be his first time back in Seattle in 20 years.

But you know what is not coming with him to that game? Those 1998 ticket stubs. I'm not the most safe person with. stuff. So I don't want to possibly hurt them in some way or lose them or something like that. Fair enough. You know yourself. That's good. Yeah. Yes.

Okay, Ben. I have one final shower thought for you. Okay. I'm ready. Okay. The options, go big or go home, mean the exact same thing in baseball. Hmm. I like it. All right. Let's take it home. No morning doves were harmed

in the making of this episode. Also, today we learned Randy Johnson is a conservationist. I don't know if that was just some spin from Major League Baseball after people got mad about everyone joking about the bird's death. But, hey, if any major sports organization should be able to put a spin on something. Get it, Emery, put a spin on something. All right, get back to the Dad Joke Subreddit where you belong. Okay, not a home run. Fair enough.

I'll walk off. Ayo! Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR Station. in partnership with Reddit. Our show is a dream realized by Jessica Alpert, who, when we ask if she likes the episode we've put together, she says, W-T-F. Iris Adler is our executive producer,

and she makes sure our stories meet the bar of... Mildly interesting. Mix and sound design by John Parati and Paul Vicus, who, whenever we go to record in the field with them, they remind us... Nature is... Lit. Our web producer is Megan Kelly, who looks at our attempts at writing web copy and goes...

Aw. Our intern is Chris Uly. who when we put him on a task, he politely says, Hold my beer. Our advisor is Michael Pope, and we slack him all the time to make sure he's not. Out of the loop. Our theme music is by Squelcher.

This week's shower thoughts were from Sorry What Guy, Orange Goose, Necro-toxin, nickel dime, and Dragonbalk 100. Shout out to Celebrity U.S. Here Comes the King, also known as Snoop Doggy Dog, also known as Uncle Snoop, et cetera. This week's episode, Art is by Reddit user Chris Hartis. We've got a link to his work on WBUR.org.org slash endless thread.

We are also on Reddit. Endless underscore thread is our username if you want to send us some art or send us a story tip. This show was produced by Josh Swartz, Endless Threads, Amory Severson, and me, senior producer and host. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'll let myself out.