Sports — Podcast — Beautiful Illusions

Jeff and Darron have a casual conversation about the beautiful illusion of baseball. They talk about their own experiences centered around the narrative of baseball as something passed from father to son, delve a bit into the myth and magic on offer through baseball history, discuss the dissonance they both experience at times being Yankee fans, and tell a lot of personal stories about going to games. Jeff describes how his engagement with the narrative of baseball has changed over time, and Darron talks about how through the years he somehow still manages to buy into the naive magical view of the National Pastime. It’s a relatively loose, fun conversation that leaves a lot on the table for future exploration.

Notes:

2:19 - The Yankees beat the Indians 1-0 in Game 3 of the 2017 American League Division Series, see “2017 American League Division Series (ALDS) Game 3, Indians at Yankees” (Baseball Reference) and 2017 ALDS Game 3 Highlights
2:38 - Gleyber Torres
2:56 - StubHub
3:25 - Boston Red Sox at New York Yankees Box Score, August 2, 2019
3:34 - Yankee Stadium
3:36 - We always park at the Harlem River North Lot, exit 6 off of I-87S (The Major Deegan Expressway)
3:55 - It was Adam Ottavino
4:18 - James Paxton
4:52 - Watch Gleyber Torres' Grand Slam vs Red Sox | August 2, 2019
5:28 - Torres' grand slam leads Yankees to a 4-2 win | Red Sox-Yankees Game Highlights 8/2/19 (YouTube)
8:50 - Written in 1908, “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” is the baseball anthem traditionally sung during the 7th inning stretch - listen to a 1908 recording and watch legendary Cubs announcer Harry Caray famously lead the singing at Wrigley Field
9:18 - See “New York Yankees Team History & Encyclopedia” from Baseball Reference, the “History of the New York Yankees” Wikipedia entry, or the “New York Yankees” entry from Baseball Almanac
9:26 - See “Yankees in the ‘70s” from baseball writer and historian Marty Appel
9:33 - Mickey Rivers, Graig Nettles, Ron Guidry, and Thurman Munson
9:45 - Thurman Munson, an avid amateur pilot, died on August 2, 1979 attempting to land his personal plane and crashing short of the runway - see “8/02/1979 - Thurman Munson dies in crash” (SBNation, 2010), “40 years on, Thurman Munson's death remains one of sports' most stunning moments” (Yahoo! Sports, 2019), and “Remembering the Great Thurman Munson 40 Years After His Tragic Death” (How They Play, 2020)
9:48 - Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson
10:05 - Watch Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson almost come to blows in the dugout at Fenway Park after Martin pulled Jackson from the game, which the Red Sox won 10-4, see “June 18, 1977: When Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin clashed at Fenway” (Sporting News, 2019) and “New York Yankees at Boston Red Sox Box Score, June 18, 1977” (Baseball Reference)
10:52 - Dunkin’ Donuts Park in Hartford, CT, home of the Yard Goats
11:11 - See “Three Movements in New Retro Ballpark Construction” (Ballpark Ratings)
11:22 - Thimble Island Brewing Company
14:44 - The Red Sox beat the Yankees 11-0 on Saturday September 6, 2003 at Yankee Stadium, see “Boston Red Sox at New York Yankees Box Score, September 6, 2003” (Baseball Reference)
16:05 - The Yankees didn’t trade for Jason Giambi, they signed him to a seven-year, $120 million dollar free agent contract in December of 2001, see “Giambi tops Yankees' arsenal of new additions” (ESPN, 2001)
16:18 - The Yankees traded Alfonso Soriano for Alex Rodriguez in February of 2004, see “Trades Of The Decade: A-Rod For Soriano” (MLB Trade Rumors, 2009) and “The great A-Rod trade robbery” (Bronx Pinstripes, 2020)
16:34 - Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened in 1992 and was innovative and influential for being the first of the “retro” style ballparks that , see “Three Movements in New Retro Ballpark Construction” (Ballpark Ratings)
16:40 - Eutaw Street
16:50 - Watch Ken Griffey Jr. hit the B&O Warehouse in the 1993 MLB All-Star Homerun Derby and see “Home Run Derby hero Ken Griffey Jr. is still the only player to ever homer off the Camden Yards warehouse” (as of 2018, at according to MLB.com)
16:59 - Legendary Oriole first basemen Boog Powell’s Boog’s BBQ has been an iconic food venue at Camden Yards since it opened in 1992, see “Boog’s BBQ: 25 Years and Still Cookin’ - The beloved first baseman’s BBQ stand has been a hit since the first Opening Day at Camden Yards in 1992.” (Baltimore Magazine, 2017)
18:05 - See the “Bleacher Creatures” Wikipedia entry
20:06 - Of the 30 Major League ballparks in use today, Boston’s Fenway Park is the oldest. It opened the same week the Titanic sunk in 1912, and Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, opened two years later in 1914. For reference, the next oldest currently operating park is Dodger Stadium, which opened in 1962, and 25 of the 30 current MLB parks have been built since 1989. For more info see Wikipedia’s list of current Major League Baseball stadiums and the slightly out of date article “MLB Ballparks, From Oldest to Newest” (Ballpark Digest, 2017)
20:46 - See “The Steroids Era” (ESPN, 2012) and the Wikipedia entry on “doping in baseball”, also check out what is shaping up to be an excellent podcast summation of the era, Crushed from Religion of Sports
20:47 - Mark McGwire
20:53 - Roger Maris hit 61 home runs in 1961 breaking Babe Ruth’s record of 60 set in 1927, watch the 61st homer with call by the former Yankee shortstop and legendary broadcaster Phil Rizzuto , and see “Roger Maris Breaks the Home Run Record” (History) or “61 Home Runs by Roger Maris” (Baseball Almanac)
21:07 - See the “1998 Major League Baseball home run record chase” Wikipedia entry and “The McGwire-Sosa home run chase helped make 1998 one of MLB's wildest seasons ever” (ESPN, 2020)
21:10 - The Yankees beat the Red Sox 3-2 at Fenway Park on September 8, 1998, see “New York Yankees at Boston Red Sox Box Score, September 8, 1998” (Baseball Reference)
21:44 - Watch Mark McGwire’s 62nd homer of 1998
22:53 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 09 - Lying About Santa: Naughty or Nice? from December 2020
23:32 - The funny thing about this story is that despite Jeff remembering it this way and actually having the story triggered in his memory by my previous story, I was not in fact with Sal at this game, nor was Sal there at all with anyone. I was with my dad, one of my brothers, and a different friend, and Sal was watching at home. I actually spent a bunch of time texting various people one morning to confirm this was indeed the case and didn’t want to go down that rabbit hole when we were recording this live, but when I did eventually tell Jeff a few days later, even though he didn’t doubt it he had a hard time incorporating the new information into his version of events, which is in and of itself an interesting example of how memory is a construction and not a snapshot, and is highly susceptible to unconscious alteration as we remember things again and again over the years. We have no real way to identify when our brain has done this, and we often feel the memories we have are completely accurate.
24:35 - Derek Jeter
24:38 - The Yankees beat the Red Sox 5-4 in 13 innings at Yankee Stadium on Thursday July 1, 2004, this game is notable for being the famous “Jeter In The Stands” game, and is undoubtedly one of the best Yankees vs Red Sox regular season games of all time, see “July 1, 2004: Best regular season win” (Bronx Pinstripes), “Boston Red Sox at New York Yankees Box Score, July 1, 2004” (Baseball Reference), and watch the Yankees rally and win in the bottom of the 13th
28:02 - Hideki Matsui
28:08 - The 2003 Yankees home opener vs the Minnesota Twins scheduled to be played on Monday April 7, was postponed due to snow and played on Tuesday April 8, the temperature was a balmy 35° at first pitch, the Yankees won 7-3, and Hideki Matsui hit a memorable grand slam in his first game at Yankee Stadium, see “Minnesota Twins at New York Yankees Box Score, April 8, 2003” (Baseball Reference)
28:30 - Watch the Yankees rally and win in the bottom of the 13th vs the Red Sox on July 1, 2004
28:38 - Manny Ramirez
28:45 - Ruben Sierra
28:50 - John Flaherty
29:17 - See image at bottom of post which was indeed created using Microsoft Paint
29:37 - Chase Field in Phoenix, AZ, home of the Arizona Diamondbacks
31:27 - The Diamondbacks came back in the bottom of the 9th to beat the Yankees 3-2 in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, see the winning hit by Luis Gonzalez off of future Hall of Famer, greatest closer of all time, and absolute Yankee legend Mariano Rivera
31:57 -Watch “...the thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat…”
32:08 - See “Baseball History, American History and You” (National Baseball Hall of Fame) and “The National Pastime” (Our Game MLB Blog)
32:20 - Field of Dreams (1989)
33:05 - Watch James Earl Jones in his role as Terence Mann reciting one of the most famous monologues in movie history from 1989’s Field of Dreams, and while you’re at it watch Ray have a catch with his dad, just because...
33:22 - Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams
33:28 - Shoeless Joe Jackson and the “Black Sox” Scandal
33:31 - Jackie Robinson and the breaking of the color barrier (History)
33:35 - See “Baseball in World War II” (Baseball in Wartime)
34:06 - See “Why are Sportswriters Whitewashing Baseball’s Dark Secrets?” (The Daily Beast, 2018)
34:16 - Mickey Mantle
34:33 - See “The Legend of Mickey Mantle” (American Heritage, 2019), and with an extreme grain of salt see “Mickey Mantle’s 10 Longest Home Runs” (TheMick.com)
34:40 - See “Time in a Bottle” by Mickey Mantle recounting his struggles with alcoholism from the April 1994 issue of Sports Illustrated
36:39 - It’s no accident that today we view Ruth and the early legends of baseball as more gods than men. Aside from being far removed in time, the role of sports journalism and the relationship of sportswriters to players has evolved over time as well. In the first half of the 20th century writers often traveled with the team and ran in the same social circles, in an era before television and easy access to sports through mass media, these men were incentivized to create a mythical greatness around the sport and its heroes, and that’s exactly what they did. In a 2010 article in Sports Illustrated adapted from her Mickey Mantle biography The Last Boy, baseball writer and journalist Jane Leavy writes “The sportswriters’ unstated code of honor was to look the other way. The writers traveled, ate and drank with the team. Their tab was often paid by the team. “You couldn’t write one word of it, the debauchery,” said Jack Lang, the longtime executive secretary of the Baseball Writers Association of America. “It wasn’t just liquor. It was the women.” She goes on to recount a tale from writer John Drebinger, who wrote the lead story for the New York Times for every World Series game from 1929 to 1963, as told to legendary boxing writer Bert Sugar - “Drebby, as his colleagues called him, regaled Sugar with a tale from an overnight train trip with Babe Ruth’s Yankees. “The writers had their own car, and dinner had been served,” Sugar recounted. “They’d cleared the tables, and they’d just dealt out a hand of bridge when the door to the back of the car flew open, and Babe Ruth ran down the aisle naked. And about 10 feet behind him a woman, equally naked, with a knife in her hand, comes running out! And Drebby says one of the guys looks up from the table and says, ‘Well, that’s another story we won’t cover!'”” This began to change throughout the 50’s and by the 70’s reporting on sports and it’s biggest stars, warts and all, by a slowly diversifying set of voices was becoming the norm that continues through today. Long gone are the days of writers and players enjoying easy access to one another’s personal lives, similar incentives, and mutual reasons to construct myths at the expense of hard truths, and the evolution of mass media and communication technology has made this type of construction a near impossibility regardless. For today’s superstar athletes, the fall is merely one Tweet away, and everyone is always watching. Writing about Mantle in the 50’s Leavy says he was “the Last Boy in the last decade ruled by boys, when it was O.K. to laugh at them for being themselves, and O.K. not to know and O.K. to forgive what you did know.” Although Ruth and Mantle had similar skeletons in their closet, Ruth was long gone by the time this change took hold, allowing him to escape relatively unscathed, but Mantle played the end of his career and lived his entire life after in a very different media world.
41:52 - Bob Gibson
42:14 - After the 1968 season, which is now referred to as the “Year of the Pitcher,” baseball lowered the pitcher’s mound from a maximum of 15 inches to 10 inches, decreased the size of the strike zone, and became more vigilant about pitcher’s doctoring balls. Gibson gets a lot of the press here, and deservedly so, for his amazing 1.12 ERA over 34 starts, still the lowest in modern baseball history, he was actually one of 7 starters with a sub 2 ERA that season, the majors set a record for lowest league batting average (.237) and on-base percentage (.299), and entire teams struggled to hit and score runs. The changes were largely seen as correction to an imbalance that was causing offenses to sputter and exasperating fans and were largely effective, as the average runs scored per game increased from 6.84 in ‘68 to 8.14 in ‘69, so while it may be a myth that the mound was lowered because of Bob Gibson alone, he certainly played an outsized role in a unique baseball year. See “After 1968’s ‘Year of the Pitcher,’ MLB lowered the mound. Now, the league could do it again.” (Washington Post, 2019) and “Four stats that showed why baseball had to lower the mound after 1968” (Cut4, MLB.com)
43:27 - The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich
43:32 - Listen to Mindscape Episode 128 - Joe Henrich on the Weirdness of the West from January 2021
44:05 - See “The cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptation” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012), “A cultural species: How culture drove human evolution” (American Psychological Association, 2011), and “How Culture Drove Human Evolution” (Edge, 2012)
44:08 - See “One Thing Humans Are Better Than Other Species At: Throwing” (Smithsonian Magazine, 2014)
44:42 - Watch “Why chimps don’t play baseball” (Nature YouTube Channel)
48:00 - The New York Giants
48:11 - UConn basketball
48:49 - Baseball Reference
49:00 - Tony Gwynn
50:09 - See “Stats to Avoid: Batting Average” (FanGraphs) and “Stat to the Future: Why it's time to stop relying on batting average” (Sporting News)
50:16 - See “State of Analytics: How the Movement Has Forever Changed Baseball – For Better or Worse” (Stats Perform) and “Statistics ruined baseball by perfecting it” (The Conversation, 2019)
54:02 - The new Yankee Stadium opened in 2009
55:40 - “My version” of Yankee Stadium was actually the renovated version of the original stadium built in 1923
56:53 - Lou Gherig
59:43 - Hamilton (the movie version)
1:00 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 06 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics from November 2020 and Episode 13 - What We Talk About When We Talk About Politics Part 2: Just the Facts from April 2020
1:00:30 - Little League Baseball
1:00:45 - The Little League World Series
1:01:05 - Watch Trumbull, CT win the 1989 Little League World Series by beating Taiwan, 5-2
1:03:58 - Gary Sanchez