Infinite Inning 391: The Shohei Ohtani Trade Deficit

0:00Earlier this week, Scott Besent, who, according to some sources, is the secretary of the Treasury, went on Fox and said, we Americans are presently paying crazy high gas prices, not because of our war of choice in Iran, which taught that country that it could choke off the straight of our moves without consequences, at least consequences that they couldn't handle. Because Ukraine is not only selfishly refused to be overrun by Russia, it's been hitting Russia where it hurts, oil refineries. There's a moment of disillusionment in every American's life when you find out how often our government has aligned itself against democratic nations in favor of some despotic alternative. It's a lot like the day you learn that, at least after a certain point, the Beatles didn't like each other all that much, and all that upbeat, happy singing, it masked

1:00some darker aspects of their personalities. All that stuff we were taught in school about liberty and the beliefs of the founders and framers, it was probably already kind of dented once you learned about slavery, but the idea that it was good for them, but not for anybody else. That's when, even as a type, you begin to suspect that there just might be some hypocrisy going on here. And it never changes. Ukraine isn't the only actor with agency in that war. It's Russia that started that war. And Russia that keeps it going, but energy prices have gone up at least in the official view of our Secretary of the Treasury, rumored because they just won't be good little boys and girls. And surrender. I don't know, man, you're unwillingness to be a hostage, devladimir putt, and it's really inconveniencing us, you know? Earlier, Bessence Master had deprived the Ukraine of our support, and they were supposed to just fold then. It seems to me that one lesson is not that they're being obstinate in fighting for their

2:04freedom, but perhaps we backed the wrong course. But of course, it's never our fault. Have you ever had that sort of friend and acquaintance, or leader, the one for whom things go wrong? And it's never because of something they did, never any error they made. But always the sinister action of some other party to quote Amy Mann, it's not going to stop until you wise up the Pittsburgh pirates, a team that would win no championships between 1925 and 1960, a 35 year run of frustration, futility. Now it clips by the nearly half century, since the we are family team won the World Series in 1979, entered September 1938 with a seven game lead for the National League pennant. These were the pirates of Archivon and the Wainer Brothers, though Paul was 35 and coming out of his peak period. He hit 280 and you might think, well, I can live with that, but that was the first season

3:05of his career when he had hit under 321, 321 had been his previous floor. The pirates got a big year out of a player I talked about back in episode 218, rookie left fielder Johnny Rizzo, 25, who hit 301 with a 368 on base percentage, 514 slugging percentage with 23 home runs and 111 RBI's. Vaughn was about a nine war player as baseball reference figures it. It's the only year they rate him a big defensive plus the knock on Vaughn as a fielder. And this is one of the reasons besides the existence of P.W. Reese that when he later went to the Dodgers, he shifted over to third. He had to stop and plant before he threw. So the kind of fluid, graceful plays that a shortstop needs to make when they throw on the run that really wasn't something he could do. But if your shortstop, this is sort of a Derek Jeter thing, right? If your shortstop hits that well, you can kind of live with the odd infield hit or in Jeter's case, outfield hit. I should also mention first baseman Gus Sir who had a nice run from 1933 through 1939,

4:12taking walks, hitting 290 or 300 and hitting a bunch of doubles and triples. Imagine a marked grace type who played in a tougher ballpark than Riggly Field, which is what Forbes Field was by a lot. So what were home runs for grace in a later era and in a different place for Sir were balls off the wall that he got to run out for three baggers. On the pitching side, the pirates had a more anonymous crew from our perspective. The rotation was, and again, the names won't mean much. We've talked about some of them in past episodes of the show, Russ Powers, Jim Tobin, Sy Blanton, I believe we touched on him recently, Bob Klinger, Ed Brandt, and Red Lucas. And the team also had a solid fireman in Mace Brown and a rarity for this time, a second quality relief arm in Bill Swift. This was a group that was solid without any of them having the kind of long runs that would have put someone in the hall of fame. Tobin, I have mentioned him also back in 218, was a knuckleballer, and he anticipated

5:13a later pirates pitcher Rick Rodin and also being the kind of pitcher who you didn't necessarily have to pinch head for in the late innings. Later on with the pravesee would actually have a three home run game. It's important to point out that Mace Brown did not have a great year. However, as a reliever, he pitched in 49 games that led the league and went 15 and 8 in that role with a 362 ERA and 5 saves. And no, that's not a modern closures, I don't know, 195 ERA, but modern closures generally don't pitch. Well, they definitely don't pitch three innings at a pop or more, and that's what Brown did. Meanwhile, the cubs had been struggling under manager Jolly, Charlie Grimm, who wasn't Jolly at all. He had in fact gone into kind of, well, in my notes, it says Fudge State, but I clearly meant Fugue State due to his inability to get his team off the deck. Maybe it was a Fudge State. Maybe he was snacking excessively a kind of compulsory eating that went with being depressed.

6:18Who knows? Mostly he was kind of Jolly played the banjo. We've talked about that a lot in the past as well. Catcher Gabby Hartnett took over as player manager in late July and the cubs, who much like this year's Phillies were probably due to bounce up a bit just due to their innate talent started playing at 100 win pace. The pirates spent the first three weeks of the final month just ambling along at 12 and 10, but simultaneously the cubs were barely losing at all. They swept a double header at Forbes Field early in the month to tighten the race, and later on in September kicked off a 10 game winning streak. They were seven wins into that streak and just a game and a half back when the schedule sent the pirates to Wrigley Field for a three game set and assuming you've been following along and can do a very simple equation 10 minus 7 equals 3, you can guess what I'm about to tell you. In the first game, the pirates were completely shut down by a sore armed dizzy dean.

7:19Now the pirates were just a half game up. Now I went into this in a whole lot more detail back in that prior episode I mentioned. So I'm not going to recapitulate this particular comic book adventure panel by panel, but you can always go back to 218 and the archives should you want that granular version. The loss to Dean who is at the end of his career, his arm having been all but reduced to the kind of sad looking meat that you might think twice before using in your soup stock set the stage for what would be one of the most famous games in baseball history for a long time up there with the 1951 shot heard round the world between the Dodgers and the Giants. The fight said to say that it was a back and forth game that was tied 55 going to the bottom of the night. It was getting dark by then and the umpires held a conference thinking that they might call it for darkness, but then they said, well, we can give it one more frame. Mace Brown was on for the pirates.

8:20He retired Phil Cavareta to open the inning, a high quality hitter and then Carl Reynolds, the outfielder who years earlier had had his job broken by Bill Dickey. Then he got ahead of Hartnitt, no balls and two strikes. Brown didn't waste one at that point or if he tried to, he missed. Hartnitt pulled the pitch out to left for a walkoff homer. That was September 28th, 1938, the homer in the Glowman. It was one of the most wonderful things that ever happened to me. Hartnitt said right after the game. That's one ball I'm going to keep. I wonder if it's still out there somewhere, either in the Hall of Famer in possession of the family or even some auction house somewhere. You know, no one is supposed to be in the Hall of Fame for any one thing that they did. I think Hartnitt was such a good player that he would have been in regardless, but it's easy to imagine that years later when the writers were voting on him that they thought back to this moment and that was what put them over the line, clinched the case for them.

9:24The pirates were blown out in the final game of the series by a score of 10 to 1 and left Chicago down a game and a half with four to play, but they were just spent. They went one in three against a very good red steam, a team that would win the next two national league penance. And that was that said columnist, heavy boil in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. It must have been written ages ago by the baseball gods that come September 28th in the year 1938. The pirates at all costs were not to win the ballgame. When the sun first hung out to light the earth, it must have been timed so that at a certain second, the earth's revolving would bring on the mantle of approaching dusk to doom the pirates. When it was all over, the understanding in Pittsburgh as crushing as the finish was, was that well, maybe the pirate shouldn't have been writing so high to begin with, they were good, but the offense was just okay. The pitching was the same, the defense about average as well.

10:27It just happened that the correction, when it came, caught up to them all at once. They nearly escaped it, making it to the last week, but it finally pulled them down. But if you have to place blame, who do you pick? Say, Pytrainer the manager for not getting better performances out of his players, face Brown for throwing the fatal pitch, Paul Weiner for hitting like the 35 year old he was, owner and general manager Bill Ben Swanger for not assembling a better roster, or do you say Scott Besson style, that it was Gabby Hardnet who was in the wrong. If he hadn't insisted on hitting that home run, we would be in the World Series. What would you have had him do instead? Take a pitch he knew he could hit, we don't do that in baseball. We expect everyone to do their utmost to win, just as in the real world, we expect everyone to do their utmost to survive. But I guess that's not how our leaders figure it these days.

11:29Stop defending yourself when you're attacked, stop trying to win when you're losing, cut it out, it bothers us. And if, in making us happy, you fall into slavery. Just know that your reward will come later. A better world awaits you in the gray lands that we call the infinity inning. Well, hello there and welcome back to the show, Infinite Inning 391 in an ongoing series.

12:34I am as ever, Steven Goldman-Jor, Canviviel Host for this time travel trip to the past on a mission to better understand the present, the vehicle, the time machine being, the national pastime, the game of baseball. And as ever, I thank you for being here and I'm very grateful that you're choosing to spend a little bit of your time together with me. I think this will end up being a slightly shorter show this week, not for any real reason, except that a story should be the link that is required to tell it properly. And this week's two tales came out on the slimmer side. That said, I don't know if you can hear this, but I was fine all day, but as soon as I sat down here at the microphone, my voice just started fighting me for, I think the first time all some, it's still summer, right? Is it officially autumn either way with the changing seasons? I guess something is affecting me, something in the air as ThunderClapp Newman had it. I feel like Frank Sinatra at the end of his Capitol Records period for George Harrison

13:37just before the Dark Horse tour. So as much as I look forward to our time in consultation, conference, commiseration, all three, I think the less time I subject either of us to this, the better. I'll tell you folks, I've been doing this podcasting thing for nine on ten years now, as you well know, I never stopped mentioning it. I've had the clock running ever since the beginning and I have days like this and I've tried everything. It could be hot water and lemon. It could be hot water and honey. It could be hot water and Tabasco sauce. Nothing really works for more than a few minutes. I just turned into late career Bob Murphy. If any of you heard the beloved Metz radio play by play guy Bob Murphy, he had a lovely voice but late in his career, he just always got frogs in his throat and it was still a pleasure to listen to him. But everyone's just sort of go down there and he'd have to live. And it was a little bit intimate, let's say that sound on the microphone.

14:38There are many things that might happen to us in this life for which we should be asked for consent before we are led to participate in them and someone making noises that should only be between them and their ENT. I feel like is in that category. Do you think Vince Scully ever had source wrote Night's He Must Have, right? In the thousands of games that he called, but I don't recall hearing one. As Hector of Troy said to King Prium and Shakespeare's as you like it, Steve Garvey tonight. Never happened. Briefly at baseball prospectus this week, I wrote about the sale of the angels away from the ham fisted at best, Arty Moreno, to Stan Cranky and what it means to be an owner or a leader in general when we are mortal but the things that we supposedly have as our possessions are much longer lived than we are.

15:39And so we are not owners, we are mere caretakers or temporary guardian and it could be a ball club and it could be a mountain. Either way we have kind of an obligation to treat it as something that is only transiently hours and leave it in a condition in which it can be passed on. Speaking of leadership and things that need to be passed on. I have never taken a macroeconomics course in my life. I hope listeners like my pal Rob Mainz will correct me if I screw up this next bit. I wanted to just share this with you because it's on my mind today. It's about Shohei Otoni's trade deficit with the Dodgers. Now if you've read any of the coverage of Dodgers ownership lately or listened as I did this afternoon to the Pablo Torre Finds out podcast, you may be thinking that the Dodgers have a bit of a trade deficit with themselves. There's some real onanistic finance going on with the Dodgers. That explains how they've been doing it I guess.

16:40I know it seems that they have a bottomless pot of money but I'm on to something else here. Something broader and more general and it's just about concepts of things that I don't think as Americans we are well educated in. I don't know if they do it better in other countries either but I had a pretty strong public school education in a good system and a good college education but as I said I never took a macroeconomics course and as much history as I took and I took a lot. I took as much as I was allowed to take. This probably doesn't surprise you. A lot of the monetary issues that underpinned most are much of what has happened in human history at least for the last three or four centuries. We're not really invoked in a way that one could come out of school and be an adult and understand the economic issues that were affecting their own lives. And that's why I very specifically want to talk about the devastating trade deficit the Dodgers are running with Shohei this afternoon the president of the United States

17:43rumored threatened to cut trade with everyone with whom the United States has a trade deficit and said we would be better off if we cut trade with Mexico and Canada and all these other countries because we buy more from them than they do from us. I hasten to point out that in the early 19th century Thomas Jefferson tried this. It was the embargo act of 1807 and in response to conflicts with the English and French Jefferson just said okay we just won't trade no more trade. That's it we're going home. There's a political cartoon of the time that I think was reproduced in every history textbook I've ever had in which the embargo act is pictured as a snapping turtle with the anagram name O'Grabby. One found this O'Grabby the Yankee sailor says because the Yankee sailor was forced to stay at home. The Yankee merchant no longer being able to trade overseas this would tend to hurt the bottom line and it did but just to be really basic about this and again folks like Rob

18:44and others in the audience who are more versed in this sort of thing can correct me if I'm wrong but I do believe that many of us run a persistent trade deficit with McDonald's. Say you're hungry and that's what you choose to eat. You go down to the store and you drop I don't eat there so I have no idea what McDonald's prices are just now but let's say you go there and you drop between $15 and $20 on a big Mac a large fries and a coke. McDonald's has bought nothing from you so you are running a $20 trade deficit with the golden arches and yet you aren't hungry anymore and now you can go off and do the things that will make you money similarly when Detroit is hungry for aluminum it sends cash to Canada Canada sends metal and Detroit builds cars which it then sells here and elsewhere for more money than they spent on the aluminum but no metal means no cars no cars means no car factory which means unemployed automotive workers which means no one is buying anything

19:45at least none of those guys and so wages decline because of the high unemployment no one can afford to buy any of the goods that we make that we're not selling overseas anymore because damn those Canadians they take more from us than we give them now they're not taking anything and we're not taking anything and in that scenario our trade deficit with Canada will go down but we'll also go broke in that sense the Dodgers run a massive trade deficit with Chohayotani over the life of his contract and outward to 2043 due to deferrals of fakes year by the way they will pay him $700 million less in real terms because of inflation but he has bought nothing from them that said he has allowed them to get other things that they want to win championships and thereby to sell tickets and thereby concessions and souvenirs and so on remember the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark throw me the idol I throw you the whip that's an exchange of goods for goods in the case of the Dodgers and show hey it's an exchange

20:49of cash for services those services being pitching and homers although he's not doing much of either right now due to his sort of need he has something the Dodgers don't have just like China has rare earth metals we don't have them we might have them but it's not cost-efficient to mine them here necessarily and it would take years to get up to speed on that well they've got them in abundance so we send cash they send rocks and yet we're running a trade deficit because they haven't spent anything not directly because here's the thing because the dollar is the reserve currency of the world when a foreign country has a trade surplus with us we get goods they get pieces of paper with dead presidents on their faces or the digital equivalent thereof they have to do something with all that cash where has it often gone it comes right back here in the form of investment and again I am ignorant but right now I would guess that said investment is mainly supporting AI companies borrowing their assets off and the federal government's own massive budget deficit trade is complicated folks but it's not that complicated so think think about show hey

21:54o' tawny think about every time you go to the store and buy something and they don't buy from you tell your friends tell your relatives we are lost not in the infinite inning but in the land of the relentlessly stupid by thinkers you find two dimensions two complex let's play it out in some scenario in which the Dodgers could break the contract with o' tawny and say as our leader just did we're losing 70 million dollars a year on this deal because o' tawny doesn't buy 70 million dollars a baseball and services from us well they could do that they would arguably lose a lot more than 70 million dollars but they can try I've often said that the overarching theme of this program over its existence has been empathy going in search of it finding it defending it but a close second is the value of critical thinking and knowing what's going on because the more you know the less you can be lied to always reserve the right to think and on that note I will reserve the

22:59right to take a break on the other side I want to apply that idea of empathy and critical thinking to a different aspect of that 1938 pen and race in which the pirates fell so frustratingly short and a catcher who took some of the blame but why let's find out together on the other side welcome back are you refreshed are you ready to tackle one more tale I hope so because I want to conclude this episode on blame with one more note on that 1938 pen and race it was inspired by the run that the Dodgers are on right now as I record these words the Dodgers have a nine and a half

24:03game lead on the National League West and they and the Brewers are as close to a lock for the post season as we have this year the Brewers have an eight game lead the difference is that the Brewers haven't been sputtering for the last 10 weeks or so through the season's literal halfway point game number 81 the Dodgers were 52 and 29 even for those of us like me challenged by advanced math figuring their pace at that point was pretty easy just multiply by two the Dodgers were pointed at a final record of 104 and 58 it would have been a great season by a great team about what we would have expected but since then they've gone 31 and 28 which is in that attire is like kissing your sister territory I wouldn't know I haven't tried it but that's what I've heard it's a pace for 85 wins over a full season that would still be wild card territory in this season of compression and compromise clubs but it's far from inspiring if you want to cherry pick in a way that's maybe

25:06a little more arbitrary than the halfway part halfway park is that a stadium where they only play four and a half innings is that the wrong brothel and Nevada you only get what you pay for your at halfway park that's why our prices are so low our motto is only starters no closers I'm at halfway point I'm referring to the last third of the season about 50 games and in that span the Dodgers have only gone 24 and 26 during the first half they outscored opponents by 423 to 279 since then they've outscored them by just three runs 264 to 261 obviously injuries have had a big part to play in that but will be better positioned to assess what went wrong and how once it's all over win or lose in the post season now that said that doesn't mean that we'll get it right one of the odd or comments I saw on the pirates last minute loss of the pennant to the cubs in September of 1938

26:14came from the same post gazette columnist I quoted earlier who to blame he asked he said his inclination was to focus on Al Todd who Al Todd was the starting catcher for the 1938 pirates he's a fun player to think about simply because his chance came so late at an age when another player might have gone home and opened a liquor store which is what Al Todd eventually did but a lot later because despite the lateness of the hour he made good in all other regards he was a completely anodine backstop he came up with the fillies in 1932 after they spent a rule five pick on him and snagged him out of the texas league he wasn't from texas he was actually from Elmyra new york nice coincidence because that's the same Elmyra I talked about last week where Mark Twain spent summers and eventually his eternal rest Todd was born in 1902 and didn't get anything like actual playing time

27:19until 1933 the fillies always needed bodies and he just had to buy his time so again do the very basic math he was a 31 year old rookie in 1933 and that should have been the end of it he had just over a hundred games with the fillies in his first two seasons and hit a glorious 214 with a 247 on base percentage and a 257 slugging percentage you remember Jim Tobin who he'd end up catching he could hit a lot better than that Todd had just nine doubles in that span with no other extra base hits and just five walks he was terrible and yet because it was the fillies and they had nothing better to do and no one better to play he got a chance to stick around and while he never became Mike Beaza or Gabby Hartnett he was fine assuming the scarcity of captures who can both hit and field and crediting him something for being a decent receiver from 1934 through the end

28:20of his major league career in 1941 he hit 283 with a 314 on base percentage in a 3 91 slugging percentage in 736 games during those seven years there were 16 major league catchers who had at least 1500 played appearances the future Hall of Famers led the pack of course definitionally with Hartnett Ernie Lombardi and Bill Dickie at the top in terms of offensive production as for the mere mortals Todd was right in the middle just a very acceptable performer assuming you didn't have one of those three guys and the pirates didn't and they rarely have that said the 1935 trade that the pirates made or or Bill Ben Swanger made to bring Todd West out of Philadelphia must still be on the long list for one of the worst in team history the pirates gave away a veteran catcher of roughly the same hitting ability Earl Grace and a 26 year old pitcher or rookie

29:21Claude Passo now Passo wouldn't turn into an all time great or anything but he would be a very reliable major league pitcher for the next 10 years or so the Phillies passed him along to the Cubs after a few years again it's the Phillies and he went 124 and 94 with a 296 ERA for them in about 1900 career innings including one twenty-win season G could the Cubs use him this year and there have been a lot of bad trades in Cubs history but that really is one of the good ones anytime you can get a pitcher who has a run like that for you in return for a backup catcher you've done a good job still though Todd's career in Pittsburgh as much as it cost is a cost for celebration again he got his chance and made the most of it imagine if a current journeyman like Tyler Heinemann had parlayed his 2022 run with the pirates when he was also 31 into a half dozen years of regular play and not just regular play but competent regular play it really hasn't happened

30:27too many times it didn't happen for Tyler Heinemann it hasn't happened in the catching department there have been some late blooming pitchers you can think of but not too many players who had great career starting at age 31 so why blame him for the pirates going soft in September well he had kind of created unrealistic expectations for himself he had an off year but only by the standards of what he had done the year before in 1937 by which time he was 35 years old he played 133 games which was a lot for a catcher back then there weren't a ton of everyday catchers there were still a lot of teams who assumed they would have to split the job because of the wear and tear of the position and he hit 307 with a 330 on base and a 428 slugging percentage including 18 doubles 10 triples and eight homeers again in a different park some of those triples would have been home runs it wasn't that good a season he still never walked taking only 16 free passes in 534 play

31:30appearances so that his on base percentage was a fraction below the national league average that year and on the defensive side well this is kind of interesting he was charged with zero past balls in 128 games which is lovely but is also just a conspiracy by the official squarers 11 wild pitches were charged while he was catching and the wild pitch past ball distinction is often an arbitrary call by the squarers concurrently national league base runners tried to steal on the pirates more than any other team perhaps because Todd and his back stops a lot of them the highest success rate on the circuit so far from being a great defensive catcher at least that year he was very much a mixed bag it should have been obvious that Todd had not turned into a 300 hitter at 35 but I guess some were disappointed in 1938 when he dropped to 265 to 96 375 grounded into 25

32:32double plays and yeah allowed five past balls he did have a much better year throwing and the number of attempts against him dropped by half but what are you going to do call out a civic institution like Paul wainer for being old out Todd once bought dizzy dean in the minor leagues and Todd got the best of him this was one of his few claims to fame this would have been around 1930 when dizz was 20 and Todd was a fix set 28 Todd said that later he also fought Zeke Benura a man of similar statue and that Benura had knocked him out with a shot to the side of the head this would have been in the early 1950s when both men were in their 40s and were serving as minor league managers the next day said Todd some smart reporter noting the size of Zeke and myself had lined it the battle of the bulges and on that note let us bulge into one last break I have an analogy to make about a later career and altats and then we'll conclude episode 391 once again thank you for

33:33dropping by I'm so glad we had this time together I feel like someone else said that and altats apparently crushing disappointing slide from 1937 to 1938 reminds me a bit of the rick serone story you will recall that the Yankees great catcher thermon monson died as the result of a plane crash in 1979 it was a very emotional event at the time in november of that year the Yankees dealt three players including their starting first baseman chris chambles a second base prospect domisok Garcia who turned out to be not half bad but he wasn't going to play with willy randolph on the field and a youngish left hander Paul meribel they went to the toronto blue jays in return for serone outfielder Todd will born and lefty tom underwood serone born in nework new jersey and an alumni of new jersey seat nahal university coming in after a tragedy was primed to be amazingly

34:40popular if he did anything in pinstripes but there was no reason to have that expectation even though he was a former first round draft choice cleveland had picked him seventh overall in 1975 a year when the entire first round was pretty much a loss for everyone he hadn't hit in the minors or the majors he was still only 26 but he was 269 games into his major league career and had hit only 228 with a 283 on base percentage and a 3 24 slugging percentage you probably remember or know what happened next serone surprised everyone at least for a moment relatively he had only 250 278 402 in the first half although that's showing a little more punch than he had to that point in the second half however he got hot averaging 304 361 460 averaged them together and you get his final line 277 321 432 with 30 doubles and 14 home runs he drove in 85 runs he

35:48really was kind of clutchy the Yankees in part due to serones performance 103 games and they were swept in the ALCS by the world but that wasn't serones fought he went for for 12 with the home run and of course again he helped them get there this was the kind of performance to make a full hero out of a local guy or really anyone who would come in and make you feel hope after such a sad thing had happened and also given the standards to which we hold catchers that's an all star catcher in a lot of years but it didn't happen he never hit like that again he remained better than he had been and he had some value in a reserve or platoon role the last five years of his career in which he caught for the Yankees redsocks met and expose he hit 298 351 400 against lefties and maybe he didn't do all that much against righties but most teams don't even get that much from their second line catchers the year after serone became the italian stallion he slumped to 244 276 342

36:55the Yankees finished first in the AL East in that season's attenuated first half but went only 25 and 26 after the long labor war under the rules the owners set up the Yankees still made the playoffs there were three rounds to the postseason that year anticipating the current setup serone hit very well in the first round but went pretty cold the rest of the way going five for 31 that's about 162 and hitting just a single home run as the Yankees beat the a's in the ALCS then lost a six game world series to the Dodgers blaming him for the loss in either season would have been like blaming ALTOT for the pirates lost in 1938 and that would be true in almost every scenario except if Todd told mace Brown to throw one down the pipe I know heartnet will never expect a slow ball with no mustard anti mustard even you got any anti mustard it's so crazy it just might work does pitchcom

37:56have a button for that in 1938 pitchcom was two 10 cans connected by a string so I'm pretty sure there was a opacity of buttons to go around pitchcom should also have a button for evading fault or assigning blame sometimes blame is necessary but all too often it's an evasion or an oversimplification there's an old line I read somewhere that when you point your finger at someone you're also pointing three fingers at yourself try it you'll find out it's true like a lot of teams the 1938 pirates were short say one good pitcher or one good bat and they managed to defy the gravity of that shortfall for a while but the baseball season is long and in the end they couldn't keep up it happens to a team or two every single year though generally not quite as dramatically as being decapitated by Gabby heartnet with a few days left in the season you can locate that shortfall almost anywhere including but not necessarily ALTOT who was doing the best with what he had better

38:57than you could have expected even it would be far fairer to assign the loss to a collective failure or just bad luck and try to have a better plan and more depth next time or better yet just say that it was a good team and we had a fun ride right up until the end and rather than point fingers just sit back and look forward to next year G but I hope the owners allow there to be a next year until then bring on the anti-mustard and speaking of condiments if you want to catch up with me on social media please head over to stevingoldman.bsky.social you can also write us by which I mean me at infiniteinningatgmail.com and there remains a Facebook group simply go to Facebook search on infiniteinning bang you're should you wish to support the show and I very much hope you do please visit patrion.com slash the infiniteinning and I would like to welcome our latest supporter Gregory Gregory thank you so much

39:58all of you make it such a pleasure for me to do this show because week by week I'm running less of a trade deficit isn't it cool how that works here of a rudimentary kind available at the hyphen infinite hyphen inning.creator hyphen spring.com original soundtrack available gratis a casual observer music dot bandcamp.com finally should you find yourself with the proverbial moment to spare please go to the pod catch reviewer choice and rate review and subscribe and if your pod catcher doesn't let you do those things set up an import export business and bring in a whole lot of aluminum I guess we're going to need aluminum a Howard theme song which you are hearing and have been listening to throughout the episode was a co-composition of myself and Dr. Rick Moring who reminds you that Stan Lee really made a mistake when he called iron man iron man iron his cheap brittle stuff he really should have been tungsten man and yeah the us mind zero tungsten too China has all of that so who are we even kidding Avengers assemble I didn't even think he liked

41:02that kind of thing the Avengers I mean not tungsten and so if I can just survive recalibrating my expectations I'll be back next week with more tales from inside the infinite inning.