Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth’s most sacred record, and baseball never forgave him. Labeled unfairly, burdened by an asterisk, and judged by a narrative that ignored the facts, Maris paid a heavy pri...
In this episode, I explore the strange and overlooked history of what has become an event that rivals the allstar game for American popularity. Through this history, we see how baseball has changed...
Jackie Robinson arrived at exactly the right moment, not just in baseball, but in media history. As television spread into American homes, Robinson became the first athlete millions didn’t just rea...
In the beginning, experts swore television would never matter. Viewers would tire of “staring at a plywood box.” Baseball could never be captured on one screen, and no one would trade the color of ...
In the 1950s, baseball broadcasts on television were expanding, and this fairly new technology was starting to catch up to radio in sports coverage, until a groundbreaking innovation cemented radio...
Like broadcasts and broadcasters of the early days, the 1992 Simpsons episode, Homer at the Bat, shaped the lives of millions. It made people laugh, it connected people more deeply with their favor...
In this episode, I discuss the complicated relationship between radio and baseball, and how, when baseball was resisting, radio was sneaking in through every back door in America. I tell the storie...
Step into the forgotten world of baseball recreation, a unique phenomenon created to fill an enormous void in baseball coverage during the 1920s to the 1950s, a strange blending of truth and fictio...
The story of Kelyn Ikegami developing and completing this documentary is as fascinating as the story itself: a bunch of ragtag minor leaguers relegated to the baseball graveyard, only to resurrect ...
Before Graham McNamee, there was basic reporting of the game by broadcasters, and long dead silences between plays. But the opera singer turned broadcaster changed the way people listening to their...
Radio was floundering in its early days. People didn’t know what to make of it. Baseball owners were afraid of it, and for the first years of radio broadcasting, there was no banter, only dead air ...
In this first episode of Season 4, I discuss a lie I’ve been telling myself for 40 years about who my favorite team actually was, and I begin the amazing journey of baseball broadcasting. Before th...
I sit down with Jeffrey Lambert to have a fun debate about whether or not certain players should be included on record lists, and whether we should be comparing players from different eras in the f...
It’s easy to compare numbers on paper, but what happens when we do a deep dive into the times and worlds in which Cal Ripken Jr and Lou Gehrig lived? In this final episode of Season 3, I pull back ...
I had the pleasure recently of sitting down with prolific baseball author Robert Elias. We talk about the amazing and overlooked life of ballplayer Danny Gardella, the man of a thousand nicknames w...
In this episode, I explore several key factors that would have helped or hurt Gehrig and Ripken Jr in their pursuit of the consecutive game streak. This comparison will also shed light on each play...
Most people know Lou Gehrig as the Iron Horse, as the man who played more games than any other player, until Cal Ripken Jr. They know him as one of the best players in baseball history, period, and...
Cal Ripken Jr and Lou Gehrig are well known for their consecutive game streaks. But what about the third man on the all-time list? Had circumstances been slightly different, his name would be the n...
n the early 1900s, there was no such thing as a consecutive games streak, because nobody followed it. Until a man named Al Munro Elias brought the statistic into the public consciousness. Even then...
The consecutive game streak is not just something that happened with Cal Ripken Jr. The whole, fascinating story involves Lou Gehrig, dozens of aspiring ballplayers, statistical pioneers, and a rol...
