EPISODE 182: National League Baseball's Cleveland Spiders - With Eric Nusbaum

Writer/author (and Episode 158 guest) Eric Nusbaum (Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between) returns for a second visit, this time to help us obsess about the curious story of the National League's 1899 Cleveland Spiders - the worst major league baseball team of all time.

While today's current generation of baseball fans will swear that the 1962 NL expansion New York Mets (40-120 record; .250 winning percentage), the 2003 AL Detroit Tigers (43–119; .265), or even the 2018 AL Baltimore Orioles (47-115; .290) might each own the record for on-field futility - none come close to the stunningly woeful 20-134 (.130) performance turned in by Cleveland's first major league team, one that preceded and indirectly influenced today's AL Indians.

The Spiders were a consistently competitive team in the 1890s - loaded with eventual Hall of Fame talents like Bobby Wallace, Jesse Burkett and legendary pitching ace Cy Young. Attendance and ticket revenue, however, were terrible - hindered significantly by Ohio blue laws that prohibited lucrative games on Sundays.

So in the 1898 off-season, team owner-brothers Frank & Stanley Robison took advantage of the NL's liberal "syndicate" ownership rules, purchased the financially teetering but far better-drawing St. Louis Browns, and shipped their more talented Spiders roster to the Gateway City as the "Perfectos" - leaving their Cleveland franchise to founder for 1899, all by design.

Nusbaum takes us through the various layers of ignominy that beset the Spiders' last season of existence, including: losing 40 of their last 41 games (and 70 of their last 74); drawing so poorly by June (a mere 179 per game) that all home games were moved to either neutral sites or visiting teams' home parks; and even proffering a local hotel cigar stand clerk to pitch their final game in Cincinnati (a 19-3 loss).

Plus, how the Spiders helped today's Indians get their now increasingly controversial nickname.

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EPISODE 172: The Forgotten Pro Teams of New Orleans – With Nick Weldon

We point our GPS coordinates this week to the endearingly enigmatic city of New Orleans, for an overdue look into the Big Easy’s chaotic pro sports franchise history – with Historic New Orleans Collection writer (and recovering sports scribe) Nick Weldon (“A Streetcar Named Basketball”).

Although a mainstay of baseball’s minor and Negro leagues since the dawn of the sport’s professional era in the late 1800s (including Louis Armstrong’s well-outfitted, attention-grabbing, but largely lamentable 1931 barnstorming “Secret Nine” club), Louisiana’s largest city has been considered more of a football town over the last half-century – especially after the arrival of the NFL Saints in 1967.

But it’s the pursuit (and occasional success) of pro basketball that has captured the fancy of local sports entrepreneurs most in the intervening decades – providing the Crescent City with some of its most fascinating, yet oft-forgotten sporting exploits:

• The American Basketball Association’s Buccaneers (1967-70) – a charter member, who came within one game of winning the league’s first-ever title, before moving to Memphis two seasons later;

• The National Basketball Association’s Jazz (1974-79) – an expansion franchise known mostly for the dazzling on-court wizardry of local LSU hero “Pistol” Pete Maravich, and not much else;

• The Women’s Professional Basketball League’s Pride (1979-81) – ready-made to take advantage of the region’s strong female collegiate roots and presumptive US women’s success at the (eventually boycotted) 1980 Olympics; AND

• The arrival of the NBA’s Hornets (now Pelicans) in 2002 – finally cementing the long-term viability of pro basketball in New Orleans.

Weldon helps us dig in to all of these points on NOLA’s pro hoops history curve – but also some tantalizing tangents like the one-year incarnation of the USFL’s New Orleans Breakers, and even the “Sun Belt” Nets of the original mid-1970s World Team Tennis.

EPISODE 170: The 1969 Washington Senators – With Steve Walker

When the original version of the modern-era Washington Senators announced its intention to relocate to Minneapolis-St. Paul in 1960 to become the Twins the following season, Major League Baseball moved up part of its planned 1962 expansion by a year to help stave off dual competitive threats of both a new challenger Continental League and the potential loss of its longstanding federal antitrust exemption.

To placate regulators, the American League reworked its plans and replaced the departing DC franchise with an entirely new expansion club – to also be known as the Senators – to commence immediately in its wake for 1961.  After an “inaugural” season at old Griffith Stadium, the new Senators moved to the new District of Columbia Stadium under a 10-year lease.

For most of their second incarnation, the “new” Senators were just as woeful as their predecessors, losing an average of 90 games a season and perennially finishing below .500 – helping preserve the traditional lamentation to which DC area fans had become accustomed: “Washington: First in War, First in Peace and Still Last in the American League.”

But in 1969, when new owner Bob Short successfully coaxed Hall of Fame batting legend Ted Williams out of retirement to become the club’s rookie manager, things immediately changed.  Williams' maniacal approach to hitting helped ignite the moribund Senators to its one and only winning season during its 11-year run – winning 86 games (21 more than in 1968) – and vaulting from last in the previous year’s ten-team American League to just one game out of third in the new divisional AL East.

Attendance at the newly renamed RFK Stadium zoomed above 900,000 for the season (not to mention a Senators-hosted MLB All-Star Game featuring a booming 2nd inning HR by hometown hero Frank Howard), and Williams was voted AL Manager of the Year.  For the first time in decades, it seemed baseball in Washington was “back.”

But, as 1969 Senators chronicler Steve Walker (“A Whole New Ballgame: The 1969 Washington Senators”) tells us, the excitement was not to last; the club soon reverted back to its forlorn ways – exacerbated by an increasingly impatient and already-conspiring Short – who relocated the franchise to the Dallas Metroplex after the 1971 season, to become today’s Texas Rangers.

It would be 33 years until another major league team would call DC home again.

This week’s episode is sponsored by the Red Lightning Books imprint of Indiana University Press – who offer our listeners a FREE CHAPTER of pioneering sportswriter Diana K. Shah’s new memoir A Farewell to Arms, Legs and Jockstraps!

A Whole New Ballgame: The 1969 Washington Senators - buy book here

EPISODE 168: Cumberland Posey’s Negro League Homestead Grays – With Jim Overmyer

Negro League ace historian/author Jim Overmyer (Queen of the Negro Leagues: Effa Manley and the Newark Eagles; Black Ball and the Boardwalk: The Bacharach Giants of Atlantic City) returns for a deep dive into the extraordinary dual-sport career of Negro League baseball AND Black Fives-era basketball legend Cumberland Posey – including the two dominating teams he founded, owned, managed, and played for – baseball’s Homestead Grays and basketball’s Loendi Big Five.

Considered the best African-American hoops player of his time (although not inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame until 2016), Posey was a standout collegiate player at Pitt, Penn State and Duquense before launching his semi-pro Loendi club in 1915 – which he built and led to four consecutive Colored Basketball World's Championships from 1919-1923.

Posey was already moonlighting as a player with Negro League baseball’s Grays starting in 1911, becoming the team’s manager in 1916, and finally its owner by the early 1920s – ultimately building one of the powerhouses of black baseball.  Posey’s Homestead franchise won eleven pennants across three leagues – including nine consecutive Negro National League titles from 1937-45 – and three Negro World Series Championships (against counterparts from the Negro American League) in ’43, ’44 & ’48.

Overmyer discusses his new book (Cum Posey of the Homestead Grays: A Biography of the Negro Leagues Owner and Hall of Famer), Posey’s prodigious talents both as a player and owner (which garnered him posthumous induction in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006), and the Grays’ twin homes of both suburban Pittsburgh and Washington, DC.

This week’s episode is sponsored by the Red Lightning Books imprint of Indiana University Press – who offer our listeners a FREE CHAPTER of pioneering sportswriter Diana K. Shah’s new memoir A Farewell to Arms, Legs and Jockstraps!

          

Cum Posey of the Homestead Grays - buy book here

Queen of the Negro Leagues: Effa Manley and the Newark Eagles - buy book here

Black Ball and the Boardwalk: The Bacharach Giants of Atlantic City - buy book here

EPISODE 165: Pioneers of AAGPBL Baseball – With Kat Williams

It’s our deepest dive yet into the legendarily one-of-a-kind All-American Girls Professional Baseball League with Marshall University Professor of Women’s Sport History Kat Williams (The All-American Girls After the AAGPBL: How Playing Pro Ball Shaped Their Lives).

Widely acknowledged as the forerunner of women's professional league sports in the United States, the pioneering AAGPBL featured more than 600 female players over the course of its twelve seasons between 1943-54 – spanning 15 mid-sized markets across the American Midwest, and drawing sizable crowds – including nearly a million fans at its peak in 1948.

In its first season, the league played a game that resembled more softball than baseball: the ball was regulation softball size (12 inches) and the pitcher's mound was only 40 feet from home plate – a third closer than that of men’s baseball.  Pitchers threw underhand windmill (as in softball) and the distance between bases was 65 feet – a full 25 feet shorter than in the men’s game. 

But, over the AAGPBL’s history, the rules gradually evolved to approach those of full-fledged men’s baseball; by the league’s final season in 1954: the ball was regulation baseball size, the mound distance was 60 feet (a mere six inches closer than the men’s game), and the basepaths were 85 feet long (just five feet shy of those of the men). 

To prove its competitive seriousness, the league peppered its on-field managerial ranks with male skippers of substantial major league baseball pedigrees – including eventual National Baseball Hall of Famers Max Carey and Jimmy Foxx.

The quality of play was consistently high, convincing even the most purist of traditional baseball fans that “the Girls could play.”  By 1947, the AAGBPL was even emulating the majors in identifying and recruiting talent from the fertile playing fields of baseball-mad Cuba – a story Williams helps illustrate with her new profile (Isabel “Lefty” Alvarez: The Improbable Life of a Cuban American Baseball Star) of one of the handful of émigrés who ultimately came to the US to become “All-American.”

This week’s episode is sponsored by the Red Lightning Books imprint of Indiana University Press – who offer our listeners a FREE CHAPTER of pioneering sportswriter Diana K. Shah’s new memoir A Farewell to Arms, Legs and Jockstraps!

     

The All-American Girls After the AAGPBL: How Playing Pro Ball Shaped Their Lives - buy book here

Isabel “Lefty” Alvarez: The Improbable Life of a Cuban American Baseball Star - buy book here

EPISODE 164: Negro League Baseball’s Atlantic City Bacharach Giants – With Jim Overmyer

The curious story of baseball’s Atlantic City (NJ) Bacharach Giants originates from a unique intersection of racism, tourism, and politics.

In 1915, an independent semi-pro “Atlantic City Colored League” was formed to provide an entertainment outlet for the city’s 11,000+ black residents – with the hope being they would attend the games and stay off the boardwalk, a then-booming summer haven for white tourists.  

Two black businessmen active in the local Republican political machine asked an existing area team to join the league and promotionally rename itself after politician Harry Bacharach, the once-and-future mayor of Atlantic City.  When the team refused, the duo travelled south and convinced eight members of the Duval Giants, a black amateur team in Jacksonville, Florida, to venture north and create the foundation for a new independent club instead.

The “Bacharach Giants” largely dominated whatever opponents came their way during the late 1910s, despite persistent financial wobbliness.  In 1920, the team began a three-year stint as an associate member of Rube Foster’s new Negro National League (NNL) – allowing them to retain official independence, but also to coordinate non-league games with the teams from Foster’s largely Midwest-based circuit. 

In 1923, Atlantic City broke from the NNL to help start the rival Eastern Colored League (ECL), where they achieved their greatest success – including winning two league pennants in 1926 and 1927 – though losing both times in subsequent Negro League World Series play to the NNL’s Chicago American Giants.

Beset by rancorous squabbles over player contracts, the ECL folded in 1928.  Five of its clubs – including the Bacharach Giants – formed the bulk of a new American Negro League for 1929, only to see both the league and its team from Atlantic City fold by the end of the season. 

Author/historian Jim Overmyer (Black Ball and the Boardwalk: The Bacharach Giants of Atlantic City) joins to discuss the history of the club, and some of the legends that emanated from it, including Negro League standouts Dick Lundy, Oliver Marcell, Dick Redding, “Nip” Winters, Chanel White, “Rats” Henderson, Claude Grier, and Luther Farrell – and National Baseball Hall of Famer John Henry "Pop" Lloyd.

Black Ball and the Boardwalk: The Bacharach Giants of Atlantic City - buy book here

EPISODE 162: Les Expos de Montréal – Avec Danny Gallagher

We journey north of the border this week to get our first at-bats with the 35-year adventure formerly known as the Montreal Expos, with author and de facto team historian Danny Gallagher (Always Remembered: New Revelations and Old Tales About Those Fabulous Expos).

Created in expansionary haste by the National League in 1969, MLB’s first-ever Canadian franchise was named after the city’s futuristic “Expo 67” World’s Fair, and expected to be domiciled in a new domed stadium by 1972 after a temporary stint at a barely-minor-league field in the city’s Jarry Park.  Chronically delayed and reshaped by preparations for the 1976 Summer Olympics, that permanent home (a cavernous, drafty and still-unfinished Olympic Stadium) didn’t formally arrive until 1977 – with its promised roof not in place until a full decade later.   

The Expos’ locational challenges were only slightly overshadowed by their mediocre play on the field – which, while competitive at times (they had the best cumulative winning percentage in the NL from 1979-83, for example) – netted just one post-season appearance (in a convoluted strike-shortened 1981 season) in the team’s 35-year stay in Montreal.  (The strike-abandoned season of 1994, when the team led the NL East by six games with eight weeks to play, literally and figuratively didn’t count.)

Still, the Expos had their share of talent (buttressed by a reliably prolific farm system) – boasting 11 MLB Hall of Famers (including fan favorites Gary Carter, Andre Dawson and Tim Raines) – and a panoply of memorable characters like Rusty Staub, Warren Cromartie, Steve Rogers, and Tim Wallach. 

When Major League Baseball voted to contract two clubs in 2001, the Expos were targeted as one of them – beset by dwindling attendances and cellar-dwelling records during the latter half of the 1990s.  A ham-handed league takeover that year led to three final lame-duck seasons – including a bizarre relocation of “home games” in 2003-04 to San Juan, Puerto Rico – before moving to Washington to become the Nationals.

Always Remembered: New Revelations and Old Tales About Those Fabulous Expos - buy book here

Ecstasy to Agony: The 1994 Montreal Expos - buy book here

Blue Monday: The Expos, The Dodgers and the Home Run That Changed Everything - buy book here

EPISODE 161: Jim Bouton: Baseball Original – With Mitch Nathanson

From the day he first stepped into the New York Yankee clubhouse in 1962 at the age of 23, Jim Bouton was baseball’s deceptive revolutionary.  Behind the all-American boy-next-door good looks and formidable fastball, lurked an unlikely maverick with a decidedly signature style – both on and off the diamond.

Whether it was his frank talk about MLB front office management and player salaries, passionate advocacy of progressive politics, or efforts to convince the Johnson Administration to boycott the 1968 Summer Olympics, “Bulldog” Bouton fearlessly – and seemingly effortlessly – confronted a largely conservative sports world and compelled it to catch up with a rapidly changing American society.

On the field, Bouton defied tremendous odds to reach the majors – first with the champion Bronx Bombers (making 1963’s AL All-Star team in his second season, and winning two World Series games in 1964) – and later, with an improbable post-retirement comeback at age 39 with the Atlanta Braves.

But in between, it was his memorable 1969 season with the woeful one-year Seattle Pilots – and his groundbreaking tell-all account called Ball Four – that literally and figuratively changed the game (not to mention Bouton’s career) by reintroducing America to its national pastime in a profound and traditional-altering way.

Author Mitch Nathanson (Bouton: The Life of a Baseball Original) joins the show for a look at Bouton’s unconventional life, and how – in the cliquey, bottom‑line world of professional baseball, Bouton managed to be both an insider and an outsider all at once.

     

Bouton: The Life of a Baseball Original - buy book here

EPISODE 159: Chronicling Pro Sports’ “Major” Leagues – With Tom Brucato

Industrial writer and fellow defunct sports enthusiast Tom Brucato (Major Sports Leagues) joins this week’s installment of the podcast to delve deep into his all-new update of what can only be described as the Encyclopedia Britannica of forgotten pro sports teams and leagues.

The ultimate reference work for the discriminating sports historian, the Second Edition of Major Sports Leagues features the most comprehensive listing of (over 1600) “major league” teams to have ever played across 100+ top-tier US/North American professional leagues in 22 distinct sports: baseball, basketball, bowling, cricket, cycling, football (outdoor & Arena), golf, hockey (ice & roller), lacrosse (outdoor & box), martial arts, polo, rodeo, rugby, soccer (outdoor & indoor), softball, tennis, ultimate disc & volleyball.

Brucato walks us through some of the highs and lows of his 20+ year (and counting) odyssey of chronicling the seemingly impossible, including:

• The self-imposed criteria set out for the project – and the “tough calls” of who to include (and not) made along the way;

• How the historical sleuthing process has (and hasn’t) changed from 1990s-era microfiche to today’s broadband;

• A boundless continuum of sports history trivia – ranging from the obvious to the fascinatingly obscure; AND

• The inevitability of a Third Edition, as new discoveries about old/forgotten leagues and teams continue to be made.

PLUS: Your chance to win a copy of Major Sports Leagues for your own reference library!

Major Sports Leagues - buy book here

EPISODE 158: “Stealing” Dodger Stadium – With Eric Nusbaum

LA’s Dodger Stadium – opened in April 1962, and now the third-oldest home ballpark in Major League Baseball – is an American icon. But the story of how it came to be goes far beyond baseball.

The hills that cradle the stadium were once home to three vibrant semi-rural Mexican American communities – Palo Verde, La Loma and Bishop – collectively known as Chavez Ravine.  In the early 1950s, all was condemned via eminent domain to make way for a utopian public housing project called Elysian Park Heights.  Then, in a remarkable political turn, the entire idea of public housing in Los Angeles was defeated amidst a Red Scare conspiracy.

Instead of getting their homes back, the area’s remaining residents saw the city sell the land to Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley – in an opportunistic effort to finally lure big league baseball to the City of Angels – and definitively confirm its status as a “major league” American metropolis. 

But before the Dodgers’ new home could be built, municipal officials would have to face down the neighborhood's last holdouts – including the defiant Aréchigas family, who fiercely refused to yield their home.

Author Eric Nusbaum (Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between) joins to discuss the sordid backstory of Dodger Stadium’s birth, the ensuing confrontation that stunned the nation, and the divisive outcome that still taints the team’s legacy and haunts the city’s modern history.

Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between - buy book here

EPISODE 153: The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League – With Anika Orrock

Award-winning illustrator, cartoonist and unwitting baseball historian Anika Orrock (The Incredible Women of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League) joins to discuss her delightfully visual take on the pioneering circuit that not only helped save America’s pastime – but also became the forerunner of women's professional league sports in the United States.

With the US deep into WWII, attendance at Major League Baseball games by 1943 was dwindling and minor leagues were suspending operations as the nation’s war effort siphoned able-bodied men from pro baseball diamonds across the country.  To keep interest in the sport alive, Chicago Cubs owner Philip Wrigley spearheaded the formation of an all-female league that featured a spirited blend of competitive moxie and girl-next-door femininity that delighted hundreds of thousands of fans throughout the Midwest and garnered significant national publicity.

The quality of play was surprisingly competitive, aided by ex-big league managers like Jimmy Foxx and Max Carey.  The AAGPBL also doubled as a kind of finishing school for its players – all of whom were expected to maintain high moral standards, rules of conduct and even a Helena Rubinstein-contracted beauty regimen – in an effort to project positive and patriotic female images both on and off the field.

Orrock’s Incredible Women blends funny, charming, yet powerful vignettes told by the players themselves, with a whimsically stylized graphic design that delivers a remarkably detailed (and all-ages-accessible) oral history of the pioneering league’s 12-year run – and unique place in baseball history.

PLUS:  The grocery-list stylings of San Francisco Giants’ radio voice Jon Miller!

It’s not too late to plan your own baseball Spring Training getaway at VisitArizona.com!

The Incredible Women of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League - buy book here

Original AAGPBL art courtesy of Anika Orrock (https://www.anikaorrock.com)

EPISODE 152: The Senior Professional Baseball Association – With Peter Golenbock

Spring training is finally under way, and we celebrate the National Pastime with a return visit to the 1989-90 curiosity known as the Senior Professional Baseball Association – with one of its few dedicated chroniclers, prolific sports author Peter Golenbock (The Forever Boys).

The brainchild of real estate developer (and former college player) Jim Morley, the SPBA was envisioned as a kind of Senior PGA golf-type circuit for ex-Major League Baseball players aged 35 and older (32+ for catchers), played at Spring training facilities throughout Florida during the traditional baseball off-season. 

Featuring former All-Star player/labor pioneer Curt Flood as commissioner – and a talent roster that included future Hall of Fame players and managers, Major League batting champions, and Cy Young-winning pitching aces – the “Senior League” drew in big names and sizable media attention, but minuscule crowds.

The eight inaugural teams — the Bradenton Explorers, Fort Myers Sun Sox, Gold Coast Suns, Orlando Juice, St. Lucie Legends, St. Petersburg Pelicans, West Palm Beach Tropics, and Winter Haven Super Sox — averaged just 921 fans per game, roughly half of what Morley and his fellow owners envisioned.

The Dick Williams-managed Tropics were the league’s 72-game regular season leaders, but it was the Pelicans – the team Golenbock just happened to be following for Forever Boys – who won the step-laddered post-season playoffs to capture what ultimately became the SPBA’s first- and last-ever champion.    

Plan your own baseball Spring Training getaway at VisitArizona.com!

     

The Forever Boys - buy paperback reissue or Kindle digital version here

The Forever Boys - buy original hardcover version here

EPISODE 150: Major League Baseball Expansion – With Fran Zimniuch

Baseball writer Fran Zimniuch (Baseball's New Frontier: A History of Expansion, 1961-1998) help us sketch out a nearly forty-year survey of the major leagues’ fitful journey from a regional set of 16 teams confined to just ten US Northeast and Midwest cities, to the 30-club colossus that today stretches across 27 markets across North America.

While the sport’s modern-day wanderlust began in earnest during the 1950s as the Braves moved to Milwaukee, the Browns left for Baltimore (new name: Orioles), the A’s traded Philadelphia for Kansas City, and New York’s Giants and Brooklyn’s Dodgers made haste for California – Major League Baseball entered the 1960s with an urgent need to expand into new markets as the rival Continental League threatened to beat them to the punch.

In 1961, the American League added its own Los Angeles franchise with the Angels, and a new expansion version of the Washington Senators hastily replaced their original predecessors, having absconded to the Twin Cities.  Two more teams joined the following year – New York’s Mets and Houston’s Colt .45’s (later renamed Astros). 

The addition of four new clubs in 1969 pushed the boundaries even further: the San Diego Padres, Kansas City Royals, Montreal Expos, and (ultimately one-year wonder) Seattle Pilots.

Seattle’s MLB redemption came in 1977 when the expansion Mariners joined the American League roster, along with Canada’s second franchise – the Toronto Blue Jays.

Baseball’s last expansion push came in the 1990s, when Colorado and Florida (now Miami) joined the National League in 1993, and Arizona and Tampa Bay were added the NL and AL respectively in 1998.

While rumors of potential relocation of big-league baseball’s current members is always fodder for the off-season Hot Stove (the fate of the Rays in Tampa-St. Pete, in particular), Zimniuch and host Tim Hanlon ponder if further expansion to new markets is in the cards – and if so, where and when?

What better reason to plan your Spring Training getaway at VisitArizona.com!

Baseball’s New Frontier: A History of Expansion, 1961-98 - buy here

EPISODE 147: The Dodgers & Giants Bolt West – With Lincoln Mitchell

Following the 1957 season, two of baseball's most famous teams – the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants – left the city they had called home since the 1880s and headed west to the Golden State of California.

The dramatic departure and bold reinvention of the Dodgers (to Los Angeles) and the Giants (to San Francisco) is the stuff of not only professional baseball lore, but also broader American culture – brash and (especially among generations of New Yorkers) unforgivable acts of betrayal committed by greedy owners Walter O'Malley and Horace Stoneham. 

But, as this week’s guest Lincoln Mitchell (Baseball Goes West: The Dodgers, the Giants, and the Shaping of the Major Leagues) argues, the broader chronological story of America’s biggest-ever pro sports franchise relocation was, and is, not a one-way narrative.

While a traumatic blow to the societal psyche of the New York metropolitan region, the transplanting of two longtime National League rivals was not only inevitable (as the nation’s economic and demographic profiles were rapidly changing), but ultimately crucial to the survival of the sport – as increasingly modern forces like air transportation, television and the automobile began to transform pre-War notions of leisure time and discretionary income.

A culturally and financially booming post-War California quickly proved to be not only fertile ground for baseball, but also a blueprint for US professional sports writ large in the decades that followed.

Thank you VisitArizona.com for sponsoring this week’s episode!

          

Baseball Goes West: The Dodgers, the Giants and the Shaping of the Major Leagues - buy here

Will Big League Baseball Survive?: Globalization, the End of Television, Youth Sports, and the Future of Major League Baseball - buy here

San Francisco Year Zero: Political Upheaval, Punk Rock and a Third-Place Baseball Team - buy here

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"Dem Bums" Brooklyn Baseball Shirt (from OldSchoolShirts.com) - buy here

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EPISODE 144: Year-End Holiday Spectacular – With Paul Reeths & Andy Crossley

We put the wraps on an event-filled 2019 with our first-annual holiday roundtable spectacular featuring the return of fellow defunct sports enthusiasts Paul Reeths (OurSportsCentral.com, StatsCrew.com & Episode 46) and Andy Crossley (Fun While It Lasted & Episode 2) – for a spirited discussion about the past, present and potential future of “forgotten” pro sports teams and leagues.

It’s a no-holds-barred look back on some of the year’s most notable events and discoveries, including:

• The short rise and quick demise of the Alliance of American Football;

• Major League Soccer’s (unsustainable?) expansion to thirty teams;

• The folding of the Arena Football League – again;

• Major League Baseball’s minor league contraction plan; AND

• Raiders NFL football moves on from Oakland for good.

As well as some predictions on what might transpire in 2020, as:

• The second coming of Vince McMahon’s XFL kicks off in February;

• Baseball celebrates the Negro Leagues’ 100th anniversary;

• Las Vegas takes its biggest sports gamble yet with the Raiders;

• The MLS Players’ Association flexes its pre-season bargaining muscles;

• The Chargers and Clippers grapple with second-fiddle status in LA; AND

• Mark Cuban’s Professional Futsal League . . . well, your guess is as good as ours!

Support the show by getting the Ultimate Shave Starter Set from Dollar Shave Club for just $5!

EPISODE 143: Negro League Superstar Oscar Charleston – With Jeremy Beer

Baseball biographer Jeremy Beer (Oscar Charleston: The Life and Legend of Baseball’s Greatest Forgotten Player) joins the podcast this week to discuss the life and career of one of baseball’s greatest, though largely unsung, players – and provide us a convenient excuse for a deeper dive into the endlessly fascinating vagaries of the sport’s legendary Negro Leagues.

Buck O’Neil once described Oscar Charleston as “Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and Tris Speaker rolled into one,” while baseball historian Bill James ranked him as the fourth-best player of all time – inclusive of the Major Leagues, in which he never played.  During his prime, he became a legend in Cuba as well one of black America’s most popular celebrities.  Yet even among serious sports fans, Charleston is virtually unknown today.

In a lengthy career spanning 1915-54, Charleston played against, managed, befriended, and occasionally brawled with baseball greats like Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Lefty Grove, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Jesse Owens, Roy Campanella, and Branch Rickey – with a competitive “hothead” reputation that sometimes brought him trouble – but more often delivered victories, championships, and profound respect.

Charleston played for 11 clubs across at least five different Negro Leagues, and doubled as manager for a number of them – including the 1935 Negro National League pennant-winning Pittsburgh Crawfords – considered by many baseball scholars to be the best black baseball team of all time.

Though he never got the chance to play in the bigs, Charleston was still a trailblazer – becoming the first African-American to work as a Major League scout, when Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey hired him for to oversee his fledgling United Baseball League “Brown Dodgers” feeder club.

A National Baseball Hall of Fame inductee in 1976, Charleston’s combined record as a player, manager, and scout makes him the most accomplished figure in black baseball history – and, without question, beyond.

Oscar Charleston: The Life and Legend of Baseball’s Greatest Forgotten Player - buy here

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EPISODE 142: Birmingham’s Black Barons – With Bill Plott

Journalist-author/Alabama native Bill Plott (Black Baseball's Last Team Standing: The Birmingham Black Barons) joins the show to help us discover more about the legendary Negro League franchise regarded by most baseball historians as the “jewel of Southern black baseball."

The first Black Barons team began in 1920 as charter members of the Negro Southern League, an eight-member circuit that largely mirrored the all-white minor-league Southern Association – right down to the sharing of ballparks.  Three years later, Birmingham made the leap to Rube Foster’s major league Negro National League, black baseball’s highest professional level at the time – soon to feature eventual All-Star legends like George “Mule” Suttles and Leroy “Satchel” Paige.

The team survived the Great Depression by bouncing between the major Negro National and minor Negro Southern leagues during the 1930s, finally returning to the bigs in 1940 via the newly ascendant Negro American League.

The 1940s was the zenith of the franchise's history, catalyzed by new owners Tom Hayes (a prominent Memphis funeral home operator) and sports entrepreneur Abe Saperstein – whose Harlem Globetrotters provided off-season employment to some of the players.  (Reese Tatum, the team’s popular centerfielder, joined the ‘Trotters as “Goose” Tatum, the “Clown Prince of Basketball” – eventually earning greater fame for his achievements on the hardwood than those on the diamond.)

The Black Barons were among the Negro Leagues’ elite teams, winning NAL pennants (though losing Negro World Series’) in 1943, 1944 and 1948 – and featured a who’s who of standout on-field talent such as Lorenzo "Piper" Davis, Lyman Bostock, Bill Powell, Bill Barnes, Joe Bankhead, Ed Steele, Bill Greason, Artie Wilson, Jehosie Heard, and a teenage sensation named Willie Mays – many of whom left for the soon-to-be integrated major leagues.

Birmingham soldiered on post-integration into the 1950s, striving to maintain professional relevance and outlasting most of the remaining Negro League teams in the process; by 1960, the Black Barons had been reduced to a barnstorming outfit, fading into obscurity against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement – giving up the ghost for good in 1963.

Still, the team’s legend – and original ballpark (Birmingham’s Rickwood Field) – live on.

PLUS: Charley Pride gets traded for a team bus!

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Black Baseball’s Last Team Standing: The Birmingham Black Barons - buy here

The Negro Southern League: A Baseball History - buy here

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EPISODE 136: Kansas City vs. Oakland – With Matt Ehrlich

We amp up the intellectual quotient this week with University of Illinois journalism professor emeritus Matt Ehrlich (Kansas City vs. Oakland: The Bitter Sports Rivalry That Defined an Era), who joins for a heady discussion around the most unlikely, yet intertwined of pro sports rivalries – and the turbulent 1960s from which it originated.

Although Oakland, CA and Kansas City, MO are geographically distant and significantly different in numerous ways, their histories actually have more in common than meets the eye, Ehrlich argues, as both cities during the Sixties:

• Shared big-city inferiority complexes (blue-collar Oakland constantly overshadowed by the richer, more culturally diverse San Francisco across the Bay; bucolic Kansas City perceived as the quintessentially Midwestern “cow town”);

• Experienced contentious race and labor relations;

• Countered “white flight” suburbanization with ambitious urban renewal efforts; and, notably:

• Featured civic-championing newspaper sports editors and government officials eager to attract top-level pro franchises in a quest for “major league” status.

Ehrlich suggests that each city’s driving ambitions to secure professional sports teams – and the national attention and civic pride that came with them – helped mutually ignite fierce rivalries (AFL/NFL football’s Chiefs and Raiders; baseball’s first-Kansas City-then-Oakland As) that thrilled local fans.  But even with Super Bowl victories and World Series triumphs, major league sports proved little defense against the broader urban challenges roiling the country during the tumultuous 60s & 70s.

Ehrlich’s thesis features a cast of legendary sports characters like Len Dawson, Al Davis, Lamar Hunt, George Brett, Charlie Finley, and Reggie Jackson – and is a chronicle of two emergent major league cities forced to balance soaring civic aspirations with the harsh urban realities of racial turmoil, labor conflict, and economic crises.

Kansas City vs. Oakland: The Bitter Sports Rivalry That Defined an Era - buy here

EPISODE 133: Baseball’s Original Miami Marlins – With Sam Zygner

We “celebrate” the 2019 Miami Marlins’ National League-worst 57-105 season with a look back to colorful 1950s-era Triple-A minor league franchise that laid the groundwork for South Florida’s eventual ascension to the majors in 1993.

Author and SABR historian Sam Zygner (The Forgotten Marlins: A Tribute to the 1956-1960 Original Miami Marlins and Baseball Under the Palms: The History of Miami Minor League Baseball) joins the podcast to discuss the flamboyant, but little-remembered International League club that introduced Miami to its first taste of high-level regular season baseball. 

During their five years of existence, the original Marlins featured outsized personalities such as eccentric manager (and former St. Louis Cardinals’ “Gashouse Gang” member) Pepper Martin, hard-living lefty pitcher Mickey McDermott, maverick baseball promoter Bill Veeck, and even the mythically ageless Negro League hurler (and eventual Hall of Famer) Satchel Paige.   

In between, the Marlins featured a who’s who of battle-hardened veterans (like 18-year minor league journeyman Woody Smith; ex-New York Giants World Series-winning pitcher Rubén “El Divino Loco” Gómez; two-time MLB All-Star slugger Sid Gordon; former Brooklyn Dodger outfielder Cal Abrams; and major league All-Star fireballer Virgil Trucks) – as well as a parade of future big-league standouts such as infielder Jerry Adair; outfielders Whitey Herzog and Dave Nicholson; and pitchers Rudy Árias, Don Cardwell, Turk Farrell, Jack Fisher and Dallas Green.  

Enjoy a FREE MONTH of The Great Courses Plus streaming video service – including the just-released 24-chapter lecture series “Play Ball! The Rise of Baseball as America’s Pastime” – created in conjunction with the National Baseball Hall of Fame & Museum!

     

The Forgotten Marlins: A Tribute to the Original Miami Marlins - buy here

Baseball Under the Palms: History of Miami Minor League Baseball - buy here

EPISODE 131: Calling Balls & Strikes in Baseball’s Negro Leagues – With Byron Motley

Multi-talented singer-songwriter, photographer, and soon-to-be sports history documentarian Byron Motley joins the show this week to discuss his late father’s colorful career as an umpire in baseball’s legendary Negro Leagues – the subject of his 2007 collaborative oral history, Ruling Over Monarchs, Giants, and Stars.

A child of Depression-era rural Alabama, a teenaged Bob Motley migrated north in the early 1940s to his uncle’s home in Dayton, OH in search of work – and a tryout as a Negro League pitcher.  World War II intervened, and Motley was soon off to the front lines as one of the first African-Americans in the then-segregated (Montfort Point) Marines – receiving both a Purple Heart (shot in the foot during combat) and a Congressional Gold Medal of Honor for his service.

While recovering from his wounds, Motley caught wind of a baseball game outside his military hospital and volunteered to umpire – crutches and all.  Despite earning him an immediate trip back to the battlefield, it set the stage for his post-discharge career ambitions.

Relocated to Kansas City in 1946, Motley supplemented his day job at a local GM plant with persistent attempts to umpire games with KC’s fabled Monarchs, ultimately yielding a decade-long moonlighting career calling contests across the Negro Leagues.  Known for a flamboyant acrobatic style, Motley became nationally known as the most entertaining game-caller in the Negro majors – as much an attraction as the pioneering players and teams themselves.

Though a Major League call-up never came, Motley still broke barriers in Triple-A and NCAA ball, and was instrumental in helping usher in the eventual arrival of the first African-American umpire (his Pacific Coast League colleague Emmett Ashford) in 1966.  

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Ruling Over Monarchs, Giants & Stars - buy here