Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1860: Start Them Young

Episode Date: June 10, 2022

With Meg Rowley on the road, Ben Lindbergh talks to a trio of guests. First (4:10), he’s joined by Mr. King, the creator of Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio, to talk about baseball as ASMR, crafting a fictional league, broadcaster, and collection of players, replicating the soothing, white-noise sounds of a baseball broadcast, putting his listeners […]

Though the world is fast asleep, Though your pillow's soft and deep, You're not sleepy as you seem, stay awake, don't nod and dream. Hello and welcome to episode 1860 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, not joined today by Meg R baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, not joined today by Meg Raleigh of Fangraphs. She is still on the road. She will be back on the next episode. And so on that next episode, we will cover all the news that has happened in the past few days. Another manager named Joe get in the boot, Tony La Russa's latest confounding decision, and so much more. We'll be recording that episode on Friday, so that will come your way soon.

But both Meg and I were on the road this week. I went to LA for a few days for ringer meetings, flew in a plane for the first time since the pandemic started, reacquainted myself with the wonders of air travel. You know, you could fly coast to coast in four or five hours. How about that? What will they think of next? And so because Meg was traveling and I was traveling, I scheduled some guests, and I'm going to give you a variety show today. There won't be any song and dance numbers, but there will be a little bit of poetry. This episode will be three

interesting segments, three topics I wanted to talk about. First, I will be joined by a man who goes by Mr. King, who is the creator of something called Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio, fake baseball for sleeping. He has created a fictitious league and a fictitious broadcaster alter ego, and he creates essentially baseball ASMR, old-timey baseball broadcasts that double as sleep aids. So he'll be up first. After that, I will be joined by John W. Miller, who has written a couple of pieces recently about the state of youth baseball and the way that private baseball clubs and travel teams and expensive showcases have

changed the culture and the economic calculus of Little League and youth baseball in general and have priced some people out of baseball, what that might mean for the sport and what can be done about it. And after hearing that John talk about the state of youth baseball in the U.S., I will bring on another John, two more Johns, actually, to tell you about something that you can do to help if you're so inclined. Some of you may remember, I hope you remember John Poff, a former Effectively Wild guest. John was a major leaguer, briefly. He had two cups of coffee with the 1979 Phillies and the 1980 Milwaukee Brewers, and he first came up as the subject of a stat blast on episode 1349

when we discovered that he is the player in Major League history who has the most starts for anyone who only played in September, which is not necessarily a distinction one would want, but it did make for an interesting career and an interesting story. And he was a poet, and we didn't even know it, although he did know it, so we talked a little bit about his literary leanings and career. And then years later on episode 1739, I believe, when Meg was on another trip, John joined me and was a delight. We talked a lot about his career and his interests outside of baseball, one of which was helping bring baseball to Native American communities, specifically the Standing Rock Reservation in the Dakotas. Well, he is back at it and he has ramped up his efforts in that area.

He's helping put together a program and he's raising some money. And so he will be back to talk about that along with two friends and colleagues who are helping him, John Bravebull and Artists Taken Alive. So they will talk a little bit about the reservation and the culture of baseball there and their efforts to supply equipment to kids and provide baseball instruction, which I think is kind of cool and will be heartening after that second segment about some of the barriers between baseball and some kids. So as mentioned, Meg will be back tomorrow. We will cover more newsy subjects then, but I hope you enjoy some interesting conversations with interesting people. And at the end of those conversations, I will, as always, provide today's History Minute, past blast, historically wild, whatever we're calling it. Still haven't settled on a name, but I will have a fun fact for you from 1860 to tie it all together. Let's get started. Well, I am running a risk by leading off this episode with our first guest today because I

don't want you all to fall asleep immediately. I would like you all to stay awake and listen to the rest of the episode, but I hope that that will be possible because our guest is here today, not as his alter ego, Wally McCarthy, the voice of the Northwoods Baseball Radio Network on WSLP-AM, but as the man who goes by Mr. King, the creator of Wally and of the program he appears on, Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio. Hello, Mr. King. Hello. So I want to share with you an email that we received earlier this week, not from anyone who knew that we were going to be doing this interview, but it happens to be convenient. This was from Thomas, and he wrote in to say,

it just occurred to me that for me, baseball is the ultimate ASMR. I didn't even understand the concept of ASMR, if I'm being honest, until this thought occurred to me. Is this not how we all got hooked on baseball in the first place? It's meditative in that it moves at its own pace. Its sounds have a murmuring quality with the occasional punctuation. It features real emotion, but as spectators, we are detached from it to some degree. Its pastoral quality also soothes me. The lack of moment-to-moment intensity separates it from all of my other favorite pastimes, even music. It seems to check all the boxes.

I don't know why I'm telling you this, and I guess it's not a question. I would just love both of your wonderful people's respective opinions. And I'm guessing that your opinion would be, yeah, I agree with that. So your program kind of leans into that quality of baseball. When did you begin to pick up on and appreciate it? Well, that was a great, by the way. Yeah. Kudos to Thomas. Yeah. So I played baseball a little bit as a kid, as most of us did, I assume, and was just absolutely terrible at it. Just, I mean, maybe the worst of all time. And then as I sort of became a teenager and stuff, it fell away from my life entirely until probably it was in my late

20s. And I got into it because my friend would always listen to Cubs games on the radio, my roommate. And yeah, that's what got me in for sure. And what made you decide to start this? You started it, I guess your first episode came out in January. And it seemed like at that time, I mean, it was the off season. We didn't know whether there would be a season because the lockout was still on. And so it seemed like all we might have would be Northwood's Sleep Radio. Ultimately, we got baseball.

So that's nice. But what made you decide to start this project? It's a couple of years ago, I sort of had an idea for a kind of sleep aid podcast that was kind of the original idea would be like an NPR station with different, really boring shows. And I sort of I don't know how I eventually was like, why isn't there, there's got to be a fake. I thought this already existed. I'm like, somebody's got to be doing fake baseball. And I didn't find it. And I was like, I'm going to try that. Yeah. Well, it was good timing. I read an article in Bloomberg recently that's all about how white

noise has become a big business on music streamers. Like the headline is Spotify podcasters are making $18,000 a month with nothing but white noise. I assume you are not making $18,000 a month with your effort. That would be great. You could be, apparently. Maybe you're trying too hard because you have white noise, but you also have other stuff. You could have just done the white noise and you'd be rich. I'm way overthinking this. So tell us about the program and the league. And maybe I'll play a little clip. But for those who have not had the pleasure, how did you conceive of this? would be boring and you're in a you're listening to teams that don't exist so you're not really

ever invested hopefully because i sometimes would fall asleep to a west coast baseball game but the ads would i would always wake up with these terrible screaming ads um so that's sort of where i was headed with this like i wanted it to sound like a small town baseball game wanted to sound like it was coming out of an AM radio and there's never any, like I'm not yelling when there's a home run or anything. Right. Something that's not ever going to jar you awake. Is there anything that could break Wally's calm? Is there anything that could get him

standing up in the booth and raising his voice? I don't think so. Yeah. He's seen a lot of baseball. I mean, he's been calling games for 30 years, right? So I guess, yeah, nothing phases him anymore. That is true. We often get listeners writing in to say that they fall asleep too effectively wild, which I try to take as a compliment, even though we are not explicitly putting out this podcast to put people to sleep. I think maybe it's for similar reasons and that we generally use pretty measured tones and we don't have ads. And so hopefully there's a pretty consistent sonic palette there and people find it soothing.

I guess I hope that they then go back and maybe listen to what they fell asleep to. But it is nice that people feel comfortable that they can do that, that it's soothing in some way. feel comfortable that they can do that, that it's soothing in some way. So would you take it as an insult, as a failure if someone were to listen to one of your broadcasts all the way through? Are you not doing your job if they don't make it that far? Some people have written me and said, I don't sleep to this, but I listen to this while I'm doing work or sitting in traffic, which I found sort of strange, but hey, go for it. Now, there is a real Northwoods League. It's a collegiate summer league.

This is not that. That was unintentional, I assume? That was unintentional. That was unintentional. You've not been served any cease and desist or anything? Not yet. Not yet. We'll see.

Good. Well, even though you are trying to put people to sleep, there is a lot of work and creativity that goes into this, obviously. It may not matter to people who the players are, but you still have to create them and you still have to come up with backstories for them and figure out what they're going to do in the game. So tell us about that, about writing the script. I assume it's a script and just about creating a league that feels lived in and real. Yeah, that's sort of where I started. I was like, well, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to need a league. I'm going to need teams and I'm going to need players and positions and all that.

So I worked on that part for way too long. That was sort of like a creative procrastination project. And now my wife makes up most of the players what's the the key to a good fake baseball name i think a good fake baseball name is um i like to mix um like ethnically uh ambiguous first and last names that's uh that's a thing i like i like uh nicknames like a right right-handed pitcher named Lefty. It's a good one. Yeah, so that's where I started with the teams and the league. And then I write a script, and my old pal Phil Hunter does most of the ads, which are my favorite part, I think. Yeah. And voices them also. Yeah. Yeah. It reminds me a little bit of the great Robert Coover book, the Universal Baseball Association, just the idea of creating a league in your mind, essentially. So I wondered whether there's more info on this league and on these players and teams than comes through on the broadcast. I mean, do you know the history of the teams and the league?

And do you know what kind of season everyone in the league? And do you know what kind of season everyone's having? Like, you'll have to say that you make some comments sometimes and say what so and so stats are. Are there full stats for everyone in the league? Or are you just kind of dipping in and out? There are not full stats, although I did have a guy write me an offer to put that information together. So I mean, have at it if you want to. You want to go there? Yeah, that's fine. But no, I don't get that deep i i try to have a little backstory in there but mostly it's it's so like the very early like the announcing the players and the top of the first is sort of where there's any kind of storyline and then the rest of it is kind of white noise although i do always have a an-field disturbance of some hilarious kind.

That's my other rule. Yes. What year is it in these games? Is it a year? Or if it is a year, are you trying to evoke a certain period of baseball broadcast? Or is this just supposed to be timeless and we're unable to pin down exactly when this is all happening? It's sort of geared towards more timeless, but I do make mention of the website and stuff. So it's contemporary, I guess, but it's not set in like the 70s or anything. Although on your website, Wally looks like he is dressed for the 70s or maybe the 80s, right? So that's my father's.

My father was a radio DJ in the 70s, and that's his headshot from like 1978 or something. Perfect. Okay. So he is sort of a man out of time. Then I was going to ask whether you had any production background or radio background yourself. I don't know whether you do, but I guess you grew up around it at the very least. A little bit, yeah. And I'd done a few voiceover projects where I had to do some very basic audio editing.

But yeah, these days it's not as hard as it used to be. Yeah. And I guess just having a one-person booth is a bit of a throwback. I mean, you might still get that certainly in the Northwoods League, let's say, or Indie Ball or the Miners. But are you trying to evoke a certain period at least with the style of the broadcast? I mean, you don't have a three-person booth with a stat person and a play-by-play and a color person and a ex-player there to provide analysis. It's just Wally just by himself. And there's a lot of space to breathe. There's a lot of silence and kind of background noise. And I guess it seems like in a lot of broadcasts now, there's a lot less respect for silence,

maybe, or at least a lot less tolerance of silence. Someone always has to be saying something, it seems. Right. Yeah. No, I guess in that sense, it is kind of a throwback to like a Vin Scully or Bob Uecker. Right. And also there's just practically it's much easier just to have me do it whenever I have the time and not have to try to work in someone else on a script. Right. For that part of it. And have you had need for something like the program that you have created yourself here? Have you had issues sleeping? And if so, what have you done to try to address them?

I do occasionally have issues sleeping? And if so, what have you done to try to address them? I do occasionally have issues sleeping. And yeah, I've tried different sleep podcasts, like the Sleep With Me podcast works for me about half the time. Also, I'm a fan of the white noise or like rain noise. Yeah, I have an eight month old daughter and she has a white noise machine in her office. I guess it's her office. It used to be my office. Now it's hers. But she sleeps there. And I have started to use that too, not just to sleep, but also if I'm working. I'm someone who can't really write or concentrate if I'm listening to podcasts, let's say, or even music mostly.

So I will put on the white noise just on an app on my phone just to help me concentrate sometimes. So I don't use it to sleep as much, but I find a lot of uses for it. So I would imagine that a lot of people have found your show and have found it very useful. So have you heard from a lot of people who have said, yeah, this is hitting the spot for me? Yeah, I've actually, I was surprised at how many people reached out and thanked me for making such a boring, relaxing thing. Yeah. And many of them, many of them had specifically mentioned that they don't care about baseball, don't know anything about baseball. I just, for whatever reason, this scratches the itch. Yeah. And I guess two of the three episodes that you've put out so far are

about two hours, and the second one is two and a half. That was a long one. Are these re-listenable? Do people find that they can still fall asleep to them if they put them on having heard them before? I guess if they fall asleep in the middle of the broadcast, then they could always just listen to the second half and they won't have heard it before. But I wonder whether the predictability of it, if they have heard it, would hinder its use as a sleep aid. I feel like after you get past the second inning, it's basically just white noise. Yeah, I've heard from people that like, I can't get past the third inning. I have to find out what happens. Yeah. I guess you don't want the games to be that remarkable, though.

You wouldn't want them to be like, oh, you have to find out what happens next or how this thing ended. Because if there were actual suspense or something extraordinary happening, then people might want to stay awake to hear what happens. Right. That's bad for my business. Bad for business. Exactly. So tell me about the production process is there sort of a constant sound bed of white noise is it just standard white noise or is it some sort of fan noise or

or does the white noise double as the fan noise there's a bass that is like a white white noise that goes runs the entire length of the broadcast. And then during the play-by-play, there is a fan noise and various other things put in there, bat cracks and vendors and organ noises and whatnot. And these are all sound effects that you've found. I assume you're not in the Foley booth swinging the bat or something. I do some of the vendor calls, and I have some friends do some heckles here and there that I put in there. But yeah, I got them off of like a sound effects website or whatever, bat tracks and crowd noise and stuff like that.

And does the crowd noise vary? I mean, that just constant white noise, do the fans react to events or are they just as unfazed as Wally is? There's a looping bed of just kind of – it's like a crowd noise loop. So that never changes. If something – like when there's a goat on the field or something, I will put in a little swell of applause and cheering and whatnot. But it's mostly pretty constant. I don't want that to be too jarring in any way. Right. Exactly. So what are your plans for the future?

I know you have a fourth episode in the works that's coming sometime soon. Is there like a season that you have in mind that this will end at some point or could this just keep going indefinitely? That is a question I have thought about a lot and I don't know if this just goes on endlessly or I don't know. I don't know. People will always have to fall asleep, so the need will continue to be there for you. I know that you have gotten a decent response in terms of audience and people listening. Have you been surprised by the number of people who are tuning in? Do you have any kind of target or is it just sort of, hey, if one person finds this helpful, then it's probably a very very small potential audience but if it if the numbers look decent i'll decide then if i want to keep going or not but i'm surprised by how many listeners

listeners it's getting so far for a relatively new show right it's a thousand thousands of people are listening to this at this point about a thousand a week, which seems pretty good. I don't know. I'm not in the podcast ranking. I don't know those stats really, but that seemed to me, I was pleasantly surprised. Yeah. I'd be interested to see if you had stats for just the listener percentage. Does it decline as the episodes go on? Because with a lot of podcasts, you will have some people dropping out at a certain point. Either they just lose interest or something else comes up or whatever and they don't finish. But if you are doing your job right, then in theory, everyone should finish because they should fall asleep. And then they will just let the whole thing play to completion, whether they are conscious or not.

So I bet you have good stats for listener retention, unless you could factor in consciousness somehow, but that would go against the point of what you're hoping to achieve here. That's true. Is there any way that people can support your efforts here? I know there is a way that people can donate to Wally by Wally a coffee on the website. Are you looking for any sort of assistance, either with production or financially? It would be great. It'd be great to actually get a few real sponsors if my numbers look good,

you know, like a pillow company or something. Right. Something where it would fit into the universe of the sleep baseball. Yeah. I guess we've passed the universe of the sleep baseball. Yeah. I guess we've passed the peak of mattress company sponsoring podcasts, but that would thematically work well for you, I guess. Again, you would have to demonstrate to your sponsors that any of the listeners are awake, which might be a problem because not great exposure if everyone's asleep, unless there's like a subliminal messaging aspect

to this where it somehow filters in by osmosis even if they're asleep i like that that's something i'm gonna look into that's devious that is devious how many teams are in this league because of the three broadcasts that you have published so far, you have had the Big Rapids Timbers have played a couple of games. The Cadillac Cars have played in a couple of those games as well. So how much potential for variety is there? How many teams? How many players in your mind? I think there are four teams right now.

So there's the Manistee Eagles, the Tomah Wisconsin Tigers, Big Rapids Timbers, and the Cadillac Cars. And I'll probably add a couple more in there. Yeah. Is this taking place in a particular geographic region? Yes. So all of these towns are actual Midwestern, northern Michigan, Wisconsin towns. And is that where you grew up or are located roughly? I live in Chicago, but I've spent a lot of time in Wisconsin and Michigan. It's our cat skills. Right.

Uh-huh. I see. And is all the production done? Do you use Pro Tools or Audacity or GarageBand or some other software for all of this? I use Adobe Audition. Uh-huh. I see. And have you had to figure it out as you've gone on or did you have enough production

expertise coming in that you were able to draw on pre-existing skills? I've learned a lot since I started, but I was kind of familiar with Audition before, so it hasn't been too much too steep of a learning curve so far and have you learned anything from episode one to episode three or four which is in progress now about what works and what doesn't well i i feel like it's when i did the first one and i edited it the pace when i listen to that now the pacing between pitches sounds way too fast. So I've deliberately slowed that way down, put more space in there. Yeah, I find it hard to listen to them because all I hear is like, oh, I wish I would have done that way differently. Yeah, I was going to ask about the pace or about your cadence as Wally, because have you estimated what portion of the time you are talking roughly?

Do you know? I mean, what's the longest silence or white noise infused silence that you are comfortable leaving there between comments? I feel like it's usually about once you get into the meat of the game, it's about 10 seconds between pitches and I sort of let that breathe. And then I end the shows with like 10 minutes of just the white noise fading out slowly. Right. Yeah. I would think that probably the pace of play, which is of course a great concern in major league baseball, you would not want a pitch clock necessarily, a 14-second pitch clock in Northwood's sleep baseball, because if it's taken a long time and it's lulling you into a sort of soporific state, that is what you want. That is not what Rob Manfred wants, probably, theoretically, but that kind of plays into your purpose here, I would think.

That's true. And I've always liked really long baseball games. So are you, like me, also an opponent of what I call the zombie runner, the extra innings automatic runner? I mean, do you want games to go on into extra innings or is it just that you want the standard inning to take a long time? I don't like the zombie runner. I don't like the designated hitter, but we don't need to get into that. That's not a hill I'm prepared to die on. Yeah, my dream has always been to go to a night game at Wrigley Field. It goes into endless innings, and the sun starts to come up at like 4.30 in the morning over the lake.

That would be great. Pitchers hit for themselves in Northwoods baseball? They do. Okay. Well, that's another way in which it's timeless or out of time, I suppose. That is true. Do you have a favorite character or a favorite occurrence that you have come up with or a favorite ad that you have used it? I mean, it almost it reminds me of Welcome to Night Vale at times, I guess, with the production quality of it. But maybe without the supernatural paranormal events, although you could always slip that in there. And I don't know that anyone would bat an eye, especially if they're asleep at that point.

But have you thought of getting into just sort of any absurdity? of getting into just sort of any absurdity or are you going for kind of like a Lake Wobegon prairie home companion style? Just, hey, it's a small town and small town people doing small town things. I like to put a little absurdity in there, like the Toma Tigers story that it was started by a Japanese businessman. Right. The milking magnate of Madison, as he's known. And he also owns a Japanese team, and then he does this random exchange.

So that's how the Toma Tigers ended up with one of the best pitchers in the world. Yeah. You also have, I guess, recurring characters, recurring bits, maybe sponsors. I mean, essential oils and so forth being mentioned? I mean, who were kind of part of the fabric of Northwood's baseball or of these broadcasts that you think of as people in your mind, maybe? I always think of Giovanni Gasparro and his drug PSA. And, yeah, there's a character called Ed Uncle Hat,

and those are both voiced and written by Phil Hunter. And, yeah, I can picture those people. They're real to me. Right. Could you give us a little taste, maybe a little snippet of WALL-E play-by-play, just to give people a sense of the style here. You can use something that you have used in an actual broadcast, or you could come up with something off the top of your head. No, I can't.

Maybe just call a pitcher or two. I'm putting you on the spot here. Yeah, I can't do that. That is terrifying. Performance anxiety as Wally, if you're asked to do some Wally live, I guess. To do a live game, that would be a disaster. That would be a disaster. Well, I don't mean to put Wally or you on the spot here. He's such an old hand at this.

That's true. It's second nature for him, but this is Mr. King. This is not Wally McCarthy. You are different people. The starting pitcher for the Tomah Tigers this evening is the sensational Hiroki Nomo. He enters tonight's game with a record of 5-1. Nomo is on loan to the Tigers this season, part of Mr. Fukuda's famous randomized exchange program with the Kyoto Cardinals. And the Cardinals get to enjoy watching Wapaka native Dusty Bluth attempt to play baseball.

I'd say the Tigers got the better end of the exchange this year. Do you feel different in any way when you embody Wally, when you get behind the mic as Wally? Do you have to put yourself in any sort of separate headspace? Well, it's funny. When I first thought of doing this, I was like, oh, I need a baseball voice. I need some sort of character voice. And that proved to be impossible to keep up over six hours of recording.

Like a Brockmire style exaggerated baseball broadcaster. So I basically just settled into, I'm sure my cadence is based on Pat Hughes, the radio broadcaster for the Cubs who I've listened to for years. And so I just sort of use that cadence a little bit and just try to remain calm. But it's pretty much my voice. But so otherwise, it wouldn't be sustainable. I don't think if I was putting out an accent or something. Right. And he's always calling games from Foghorn Field. Do all the games in the league take place there? Or is he someone who doesn't travel? Is he like late career Vin Scully, where he doesn't travel is he like late career fin scully where

he doesn't really make the road trips anymore he's been in the biz for so long no he makes the road trips he was he was in tomo wisconsin and got it cadillac and whatnot uh-huh okay so is there anything that we have not covered about the league or about the broadcast that you'd like to point out here? Because there's a lot of care and a lot of attention to detail. Again, I guess you're almost working harder than you need to here because it could just be white noise and people will sign up for that. But you're putting a lot of creativity and idea generation and name generation into this. So are there any other little tidbits or details that you'd like to cover while we have you here? You can learn more at sleepbaseball.com. There you go. I saw when Kevin Goldstein wrote

about this at FanCrafts earlier this year, there was a scorecard of the first contest. So have you kept scorecards for all of these broadcasts? I do keep scorecards, yes. Absolutely. Wally keeps a nice, neat, orderly scorecard, it looks like. That was actually his scorecard based on the script I sent him because I had lost the scorecard. But mine are often not that neat. Yeah. I guess this does harken back to an era when you had remote broadcasts, right? This does harken back to an era when you had remote broadcasts, right?

And we don't even have to harken back that far because this was happening during COVID in many cases where announcers were not making the trips. But I mean, even going back to when you had announcers who were getting the scripts, right, and were not actually watching anything and they were just trying to make it sound as if it was coming to life. So have you gone back and read anything about that or listened to any old baseball broadcasts? There are various archives and repositories online where you can hear that sort of thing. But I guess the challenge always was making it sound like you're actually there and you're not just sitting in a booth reading a ticker and having some sound effects. I've listened to those a long time ago. I hadn't thought about that. I forgot about that entirely, but I'm going to go back in. Cool. It's a great idea. All right. Well, I think a lot of listeners will like this and enjoy this. I guess we're almost competitors in this market of baseball-themed audio content that people can

fall asleep to. So having you on here, it's very gracious of me to welcome a new entrant into the space. I wouldn't want anyone to abandon Effectively Wild as their sleep aid of choice. I don't think there's any danger of that. I think we're different things. Yeah. And people sleep every night, hopefully, most people, not always me, but I try to. So there are a lot of hours in the night or whenever you sleep and there are a lot of nights. So I think there's room for both of us. I think this baseball sleep aid space is big enough for both Effectively Wild and Northwoods baseball. We'll see about that. I'm pushing you out. Northwoods baseball. We'll see about that. I'm pushing you up.

Well, you can find out more at sleepbaseball.com. As I noted, there are three episodes up now. There should be a fourth coming sometime this month, and you can find it on Spotify, on iTunes, on all of the usual places that you find your podcasts or you can stream them on the website. So, Mr. King, thank you very much for coming on and for producing this. It's my pleasure. Thank you so much. All right. Everyone still awake? Still with me? Great. Let's take a quick break and we'll be back with coach and journalist John W. Miller to talk about the state of youth baseball in the U.S., why in some ways it's getting less accessible and how that could contribute about the state of youth baseball in the U.S., why in some ways it's getting less accessible, and how that could contribute to the demographics of the Major League Baseball population. John will mention the Game Changer app that's in use in a lot of little leagues and

youth leagues. You can keep score and do some statistical analysis in there. There's also a function called the Plays Announcer, which reminds me very much of Northwood Sleep Baseball. As you input events in those games, an automated voice will do the play-by-play for anyone who is listening from afar. So if you've run out of Sleep Baseball episodes, that might help you sleep too, or at least help you keep track of your kids' games.

Anyway, we will be back to rest once in a while. And I'm really glad you're still around to guide me. It seems to me we walk a hundred miles. miles. You know how much I've always liked this cabin. It's quiet and I get a chance to think. Well, my previous guest played baseball as a kid and loves baseball as an adult. I could say the same and so could my next guest. The pipeline of youth player to adult fan is a pretty important one. And if kids are deprived of the opportunity to play baseball as kids, they may be less likely to care about baseball later, which is just one reason to pay attention to problems in youth baseball. And there are indeed problems, as explored in a recent feature in America Magazine called How America Sold Out Little League Baseball, which was written by my next guest, John W. Miller.

I'm going to quote a little bit from a few paragraphs of that piece to set the stage. The privatization of American youth sports over the past 40 years is one of those revolutions of late stage capitalism that should shock us more than it does. We have commodified the play of millions of children into a $19.2 billion business, weakening volunteer-based programs that promise affordable sports for all children. For millions of American families, paying private for-profit clubs, euphemistically termed travel teams, thousands of dollars a year to organize athletic games for their children is now an unquestioned way of life that shapes family routines, work schedules, and commutes. The youth version of baseball, born out of folk games played on village greens and codified in New York City around 1850, has been fundamentally transformed by private clubs. Baseball and its sister sport, softball, increasingly mirror the growing inequality in American life, dying in cities and booming in the suburbs.

Baseball is also the major sport most likely to shrivel in our lifetimes simply because it is not loved by a majority of American youth the way it used to be. The piece also includes a quote from former Major League catcher Charlie Green, who's now a minor league coordinator and coach for the Milwaukee Brewers. And what troubles Green the most, the piece says, is not pushy parents, showboating players or bullying coaches. It is this simple fact. Baseball is no longer a game that is for everybody. It's become a white elitist sport, Mr. Green was talking to there is my guest, John Miller. He is a journalist, but he is speaking from experience in this piece because he's played baseball in college. He has coached high school baseball. He's scouted for an MLB team, and he's coached many youth teams. He also worked for a for-profit baseball company for amateur players for four years. John, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. Great to be here to talk about youth baseball. Yeah. So I grew up playing baseball in school and with my friends. I did not formally play Little League baseball. You did, even though you did not grow up in the United States. So explain your baseball upbringing. I grew up as the child of Marylanders

who moved to Belgium in the 1970s. My joke is they fled the terror of the Ford administration. And they dropped an anchor in Brussels. And Brussels in the 80s had a massive expatriate community, which had about 20,000 Americans living in Brussels. So effectively, a small American town. And it had a very vibrant Little League. The first girl ever to play in Williamsport in the Little League World Series, Victoria Roche, was from Brussels. And her dad was my coach. And it was a really exciting and fun thing to do for all the kids. And everybody played Little League baseball. I think we had 800 to 1,000 kids every year in this league. And I just loved it. I was a little kid

growing up in Belgium, but here was a slice of Americana that I could channel into. And I just fell in love with baseball, irredeemably. 35 years later, I'm still obsessed with it. And that went until age 15. And after that, I played club baseball. Then I went to college of the US. I played at Mount St. Mary's in Emmitsburg, Maryland, went back to Belgium and embarked on a career with the Wall Street Journal and journalism and did some other baseball stuff and moved to Pittsburgh in 2011 for the Wall Street Journal and had given up baseball at that point. But in 2016, I had a bit of a midlife crisis and I quit the Wall Street Journal and I made a film for PBS and I wanted to get back into baseball. And so I Googled Pittsburgh baseball coaching job and what popped up was this private club.

And I knew nothing about this. So it's kind of like I jumped from 1980s Little League into the new reality without any transition. And what a shock it was, Ben, to learn that nowadays, good 11-year-olds, their parents pay $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 to play on a team. Players sign contracts. You have this Game Changer app, which chronicles players' statistics with the rigor of almost a fan graphs, just like the sort of mimicking of professional sports, which I was not prepared for. I think what made the piece interesting was that I did come at it with fresh eyes, not having any experience in modern youth baseball and not having any transition. So it was all kind of a shock to me. And because I was there as a coach, not a journalist, I kept the name of

the club and players' names out of the piece. But I think the detail of it grabbed a lot of people's attention. region and by person, but could you sort of sum up how the youth baseball experience worked, say, when you were growing up in the 80s and the 90s and how it works today and how those differ? Yeah. So the essential model of youth baseball, and I use the word little league to include, obviously, the major kind of organization, but also includes a lot of other volunteer-based leagues. But the essential framework is everybody makes a team. Nobody gets cut. There are rules that enforce full participation. So everybody has to play at least two innings a game and get one at bat. And you try to make the teams even. So you have all the kids in the community playing who want to. And then you have between three and 20 teams per age group. And the teams are supposed to be even. So different leagues have done this

differently by either a dad's draft or coach's draft, or you just do a random system. And it's all volunteers. So nobody gets paid to coach. So generally parents coach. Umpires are usually volunteer, but sometimes I think recently they've been paid. But essentially the culture is a volunteer culture and it's a participatory culture. and it's a not too competitive culture, although obviously a baseball game, you're trying to win it, but basically it's inclusive. At the end of that regular season, and this is true for the old way of doing it, the Little League, localities or towns make all-star teams. And so what you see in the Little League World Series, for example, it's those all-star teams.

It's the best players going off to play in these tournaments, which, you know, from Belgium, I had access to, which is extraordinary. I mean, I could play on a team that had a chance to go to Williamsport. I mean, we came within one or two games. I never made it. in Maine. So there's a structure there that can take you from this participatory thing all the way to this global tournament. So what happened was over the past 20 years was parents who had means after their kids were eliminated from those tournaments early on would say, well, why don't we get these guys together and we'll pay for them to travel around and play other tournaments. Then you had a whole privatized structure kind of getting set up and that has started to offer an alternative to that more inclusive way of doing things. The fee, by the way, for this Little League model was between $100 and $200 a year, sometimes less, but essentially almost free, cheap enough that any family could reasonably afford to participate.

Whereas now? Now it goes from 2,000 or 3,000 to 10,000. It depends on the program. And a lot of these, I didn't realize this, but this is a lot of people's livelihoods. A lot of young guys start clubs and they're out there to make a living out of it. They're out there to put money into a 401k. They want to hire people they know to work for them. And it's America, so why not start a business?

Right. And you mentioned the private baseball and softball business model relies on scaling up to as many teams as possible. If you can get 20 teams of 12 players each, each paying $2,500 a season, that is $600,000 in revenue. With part-time coaches making only a few thousand dollars a season, the equivalent of $10 an hour, if you include driving to practices and games, club owners can easily make several hundred thousand dollars a year. So you can see why that becomes a lucrative business and why more and more people have wanted to get into it, I suppose. Yeah. And why wouldn't you if you're 25, especially now? I mean, I live in Pittsburgh and a lot of the economy here in the last 30 years has been, you know, wrecked by globalization and jobs for men in their 20s have been harder to find in this part of the country. And so if you're a baseball

guy, instead of going to work in the factory, you know, it beats selling insurance if you can hang out with kids and make money coaching baseball, why wouldn't you? Was there a watershed that led to this new structure? Was there a certain event or a certain league that just started this gold rush for pay-to-play baseball? So I am not completely authoritative on this, but I know that Perfect Game, which is an organization which runs tournaments and runs kind of what they call showcase tournaments where good players can get seen by professional scouts, is a really important company in the history of this and has been there since the 1990s.

And I did interview Brad Clement, one of the executives or president of Perfect Game. And so his defense of the system is that it's really a system set up for elite players and that you can still have participatory baseball for the base of the pyramid and that players up the pyramid can then play for travel teams and the

parents, players who are better, you know, can have a chance to travel more and play better baseball. The problem with that argument is that, you know, baseball is this particular sport where once you siphon off the best players, the game kind of falls apart. If you don't have strike throwers and catchers and shortstops at age 11, you know, it becomes a game where it's a bit boring because the ball sails to the backstop. And low-level baseball or basketball or soccer, kids can run around and you score a goal where you don't, but there's still action. Whereas in baseball, when you take the best players out of it, the action goes away and the weaker players don't have anybody to imitate and model. And it

kind of falls apart. So that's something I noticed very heavily where now the mid-level players, in order to keep playing any baseball at all, they have to go pay the fee. And so I would get players come to the travel club who were just average players, but they just wanted to play normal baseball and there wasn't any left. The baseball that was left wasn't any good. There was no strikes and the game was too slow and boring. And so their parents were forced to pay this fee. So I saw it as like a tax on like recreational baseball at all. Right. Yeah. And you mentioned in your piece, amateur baseball, youth baseball, still very popular and quite popular even relative to other sports, maybe with the exception of basketball has more participants among the six to 12 age group you mentioned there. So what has happened, it seems like there's been a decline in participation by percentage,

which maybe is inevitable just because there are so many sports, so many non-sports entertainment options. It's hard to get people to do any one thing. But you also noted that there has been a greater tail off when it comes to, say, 13 to 17 year olds that you don't see maybe in some other sports, because I've kind of thought that baseball had an advantage in the sense that you don't have to worry as much about head injuries. Right. Which is a great concern among parents when it comes to football or even soccer to some extent. Not as big a concern injuries and long term health issues with baseball. So you think that would be a selling point. So do you see worrisome signs in just the overall participation, or is it more about the demographics of the participants? I think both. I think, like you said, a lot of teenagers lose interest because it's not as widely supported in the culture anymore,

and because it is hard to get that kind of mid-level experience. If you're 14 or 15, your choices are either you commit to nine months a year, super intense, playing with other really intense kids with very ambitious parents who want them to play in college or play professional baseball. And the whole atmosphere is just not that much fun sometimes. Some programs are good. And it's important to say that there's a lot of good coaches doing this in a good way with fees that are reasonable and that are not too crazy. But there's also a lot of programs that aren't reasonably too intense for your mid-level player who just wants to play baseball for fun, which used to exist in the form of Little

League till age 15 or there's Pony League and then other programs that offer to kind of, again, mid-level recreational experience. And so you're kind of losing the middle in that sense. So yeah, one thing, and I'm, you know, as somebody who has lived most of their life in Belgium, something I see with kind of more clarity than maybe than a lot of Americans, but the divide culturally, you know, I live in the city in Pittsburgh and to get this job, I had to drive half an hour North, you know, past the target and the strip malls and the grocery stores to get to a place where baseball was popular. So in my neighborhood in Pittsburgh, there's a bunch of baseball fields, but you almost never see baseball on them because people in cities and, and yes, I mean, there's obviously the

decline of African-American kids, but I think it's all just in cities, just the vibrant little leagues just aren't there anymore. And so that obviously comes with a racial disparity. And I think in the last 30 or 40 years, the number of black major league baseball players reflects that, which has gone from around 20% to under 10%. And that obviously comes from when and where kids get to play baseball. And so I'm very aware of that. In the club I was working, there was only a few children of color amongst hundreds of kids, which was shocking to see. And you go to a tournament and it's just incredibly white.

I could go to these tournaments in Ohio and play teams with like insane names, like, you know, hardcore. And there's a team called the Young Vets. And it's very kind of very red America, meat and potatoes names, and just not a lot of diversity. And so it's obviously a problem and everybody knows it's a problem, but it's really hard to figure out what to do about it because you can't make kids want to like a sport. Like if kids don't want to play it in cities or for whatever reason, that's their choice. And that's,

you know, that's okay. Why shouldn't they have fun playing a sport they want to play? Right. Yeah. Another prominent baseball figure from Pittsburgh or popular in Pittsburgh, Andrew McCutcheon, he wrote a great piece about this for the Players' Tribune back in 2015 called Left Out, where he talked about these economic challenges and the racial disparities and how he and his family had trouble just affording baseball when he was a kid coming up. And just to quote from him, he wrote, all the scraping and saving in the world wasn't going to be enough for my family to send me an hour north to Lakeland every weekend to play against the best competition. That's the challenge for families today. It's not about the $100 bet. It's about the $100 a night motel room and the $30 gas money and the $300 tournament fee. So he was lucky and we are all lucky because we got to enjoy Andrew McCutcheon, but who knows how many McCutcheons we are missing out on because of these economic barriers.

I read that piece and that was a great piece and Cutch is really great to highlight that. And, you know, there are programs I know of in the Pittsburgh suburbs who try to do that kind of thing and try to get, you know, offer scholarships. But it's also a geographic problem in America. Like who's going to drive the 15-year-old kid half an hour every day to play baseball far from his home and school? I mean, it's not that easy. Even if you have the goodwill, you know, baseball is a team sport and you have to get a bunch of people together. And that can be logistically very challenging.

sport and you have to get a bunch of people together. And that can be logistically very challenging. There is a guy I met in reporting the story and kind of learning more about this named Nelson Cooper, who's a former college player in his 20s, who's a black guy who started a program in Pittsburgh called Pittsburgh Hardball Academy. And I know that every city has something like this. There's one in Philly called the Anderson Monarchs. I talked to their director, Amos Huron. And every city has this kind of volunteer-based and sort of low-cost travel-based organization that is now offering these kinds of things. So I would say to the listeners, they should seek out whatever organizations in their city and see if they can help and see if they can support them. Because these are organizations,

these are the guys doing the work. And it's not about photo ops. They're actually coaching kids, offering kids a place to play, helping them get into college as a kid from Pittsburgh who's going to Ole Miss to be the shortstop who Nelson helped get recruited. So yeah, there are some heroes, the helpers, as Fred Rogers liked to say, there are some helpers doing the good work out there. The typical makeup of a travel ball team, are those kids or their parents, do they have professional aspirations? Are they specializing in baseball year round? I mean, when I was a kid, I was pretty good at baseball, but I was not very competitive and I certainly didn't have any professional hopes. And frankly, I didn't even care that much if my team won. I

just kind of wanted to go out there and have fun and liked playing non-organized games just with friends in the park, that kind of thing. And I know? Or are they getting pushed into that, in many cases, by their parents? Or is it just like, well, junior is going to play baseball, and we can afford for junior to go to this league, so we will? So in my club and this part of the country, I would say more the latter. There's more just the sense that this is a fun recreational thing to do. A lot of the kids, their ambition is to just play in their high school. I mean, the high school teams around here are pretty good. And so there's a lot of school districts where there might be 90 or 100 kids trying out. And if you're 12 or 13, you think, well, I'm going to get this, play here, and I'm going to try to make the high school team.

I know that in different parts of the country, like in Florida or Arizona, I heard about this one league or travel baseball circuit in Florida, where you have a bunch of ex major leaguers coaching travel teams. And so that's an insanely high level with, you know, a lot of kids who think they're going to play professional baseball. And there is like in each club has a handful of kids who, you know, legitimately have talent to play in college or professionally. And so they get a little more attention. And there's like a pecking order of clubs too. Like my club was sort of mid-level, but there's a local club. It's called Beaver Valley. It's kind of the titan of Western Pennsylvania travel baseball. And so the better players then go to Beaver Valley. They travel more widely. They get seen at more tournaments. They go to these perfect game tournaments and

get recruited. And so every region has the equivalent of that Beaver Valley club, which is kind of like a Titan club amongst the lower ones. So on those kinds of clubs, it's more ambitious, more pushy, more players have a legitimate shot of playing professionally or playing in college. But again, for a lot of people, this is just like what youth baseball looks like now. So what has MLB done and what could or should it do to help fund alternatives and make sure that there are more pathways for people to play the sport? Because I've heard people from MLB site survey results and say that they have found the connection between playing as a kid and rooting or following as an adult to be very strong, that playing baseball as a youth is maybe the top predictor of becoming a baseball

fan later in life, not that it's the only way to do it. But you would think then that MLB would have a strong incentive to try to push people into baseball so that they will become the next generation of baseball fans. Have they done that? Are they doing that? Are they doing that? Could they do more? That's right. So yeah, they've been aware of this kind of demographic problem for a long time.

And there are a few things happening. Some are more helpful than others. MLB helps fund this Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities program, which a lot of the people I talk to say, depending on the city and team, but can often amount to a photo op basically where the MLB club is happy if they get a bunch of kids, including a bunch of kids of color, smiling and playing baseball for one day a year. And it's hard to get the kind of actual baseball playing and actual coaching and the kind of repetition of it where you have, you know, real seasons and real games and real coaching going on. That's harder to kind of make happen from the top down. So it depends on the grassroots programs like the Hardball Academy and Nelson Cooper that I mentioned. They also have some pretty aggressive marketing campaigns like the Play Ball campaign, which

encourages informal baseball, which I kind of like. I think that's a good MLB ad campaign where you just see kids having fun playing catch. That's something that I think is incredibly important to reinforce that as Tom Gilbert in his How Baseball Happened book points out, it is a fault game and it starts out with informal playing in the 19th century and just kind of mucking around and figuring out a fun way to do it. So I like that MLB has kind of latched on to that informality part of it with their Play Ball campaign where you don't need a lot of structure to play baseball. In essence, just playing catch is

playing baseball. And they've done some things like the Dream Series or other alternatives for older, more established players that are not your typical showcase tournament. Although maybe even to get to that point, you have to have been in showcases or on travel ball teams perhaps. But I know they've made some efforts in that area, but you would think it would be a big focus for a league that has a ton of revenue. That would be a good way to put it. And I don't know, you mentioned in your piece that maybe MLB seems more concerned about making revenue right now than what's going to come next, which has kind of been a consistent theme. It's like extracting as much money out of the game that exists now as opposed to trying to future-proof it in some respect. And that's a discussion that comes up in a lot of ways.

And that's a discussion that comes up in a lot of ways. For instance, the segmentation of the streaming market and the fact that in order to watch one MLB team's games, you might have to sign up for various streaming services and cable packages and who knows what. And some of that maybe is future-proofing because you figure, well, people are going to keep cutting the cord. We want baseball to have a presence on these streaming services. have a presence on these streaming services, but also it can be another barrier if you have to sign up for Peacock and sign up for Apple TV Plus and whatever else to find your baseball. So sort of similarly, you'd think that maybe even greater resources would go toward that. And I don't know whether you have heard anything about that or whether people are even really looking to MLB to be a solution here, or whether this has to be more of a grassroots on a local level kind of fix. You hear a lot of frustration with Major League

Baseball. I went to the American Baseball Coaches Association convention in Chicago, which is a convention this year in Chicago, which is a gathering of amateur coaches from all over the world. And there's a lot of talk of baseball development and a lot of talk about shrinking player tryout pools, youth and high school teams, and a lot of frustration with MLB not doing enough to increase the base of the pyramid and not doing enough to market itself as something that's kind of accessible and fun. And the problem is, too, a lot of it depends on the team and the city. You know, in Pittsburgh, Pirates are owned by an ownership group, which is for loathe to spend money on anything. And there's a lot of frustration about not having resources or not sort of very

top-down and photo op based approach where if marketers can get the kind of picture that looks good twice a year, they don't really have their finger on the pulse of who's actually playing baseball. And they don't really know how to get a bunch of kids playing. Because I mean, it is really hard. I tried doing baseball development work in Europe, where I would go into schools in Belgium with a bunch of gloves and a bunch of balls and try to teach Belgian kids how to play baseball with occasionally comical results, like the hitter hits a ground ball to shortstop, runs after the ball and tackles the shortstop because he thought that that's what the rule was. Anyway, my point being that it's very difficult and it's very difficult to make baseball fun culturally. Like you can't just like spend a

bunch of money and expect kids to fall in love with it. You have to have people in the community who care, who are coaching, who are doing the work, who are showing up Tuesday, Thursday, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. and hitting a zillion ground balls and making sure it's fun and making sure it's not boring. And that's really hard work. And it takes a lot of coaches who know what they're doing and who care about what they're doing.

And so I think things do need to change. And there has to be, I don't think Americans can take baseball for granted anymore. Like, it's not something that is going to be there if people stop playing it, bottom line. And for people to keep playing it, you need to make sure that young people think it's cool. Right. Yeah. And, you know, as technology plays a greater part in the game and you have all of these tools that can help you get better at baseball and maybe better instruction, I think it's more and more important to have access to that. And some of that has become more affordable over time.

But if you are playing for one of these travel ball teams and at these showcases, you're going to get seen in front of those cameras and radar readings and all the rest. Right. And that can help you get seen, that can help you improve. And so if there is not an equity of access to those tools, then the people who don't have them could potentially get left further behind. And that's a problem. And you mentioned in your piece, baseball is becoming a mostly white country club sport for upper class families to consume like a snorkeling vacation or a round of golf. The way it's going, all pro players are going to be rich white kids from the suburbs or Dominican or Venezuelan, one major league front office analyst told me, me being you in this case. And that's not great. And I wonder what that means for the quality of play in MLB because on the one hand, the players who get there in many cases, they have had access to instruction that would have been way better than previous generations

had, right? I mean, if you were in a local little league and you just had a parent volunteer coach, maybe they were helpful, maybe they were enthusiastic, but if your family could afford to send you to some private coach and facility and batting cage and all the rest, or you have a batting cage in your backyard or whatever it is, and you've been training that way since you were a kid and you were on all these teams and showcases coming up. Well, by the time you get to the majors, I mean, maybe you get there faster than ever. Maybe you're better at an earlier age, which is something we have seen with a lot of players. On the other hand, if you are excluding a lot of players from entering that pipeline, then you are restricting the talent pool. And granted, it's an international game and the international participation has grown. And even if you're reaching a smaller percentage of the domestic population, that population is growing. So you're still reaching a lot of people. But I wonder what toll that takes on the quality of play're still reaching a lot of people. But I wonder what

toll that takes on the quality of play if there are a lot of people who have the talent to play, but don't have the opportunity. Yeah. And that's the funny thing. I've heard a lot of front office people complain about the impact of travel baseball and that it makes players into more individual players. You know, one thing that was frustrating to me was I loved the quality of the baseball that I was able to kind of lead with the kids. When I was 11, there was no guy with college experience who was explaining sophisticated bunt defenses or just basic cuts in the outfield. And that is what I was teaching them.

I was teaching them basically running a high school program for 12-year-olds. And when it worked, it was great. Like my last season, we were 31 and 12 and we had a blast. Like we really did well. And it did seem like it was this really cool thing to be able to do, to be able to teach. Like 12-year-olds who are playing good baseball is really fun. And it's better than 12-year-olds playing crappy baseball. I don't see why it wouldn't be.

But the systemic thing is just very destructive for the game in that, yeah, you're taking away something too. You're taking away something from the community aspect of the model where every kid had a chance to play baseball. And obviously, in the writing, I am exaggerating a little bit and leaving out a lot of places where people are still doing it in a community way. But the big systemic trend, like you said, it is privileging kids who can afford it and the better players. And it's turning baseball into something that maybe more like, I don't know, maybe like music

would be a good analogy that you only get to play in the orchestra if you're a good musician and everybody else just doesn't play music. Whereas I happen to think that music is for everybody. I think baseball is for everybody too. And so you're losing that democratic part of it where it's no longer something for everybody. It's something for the kids who happen to be born with the gift or born with parents who can afford to help them develop their gift. Right. And I'm sort of inherently skeptical of baseball is dying arguments just because we've had baseball is dying arguments going back to almost the birth of baseball. It's just the constant, right, forecasting the demise of the sport. And yet there is something to it relative to other sports and just as a percentage of the American mindshare.

And you do document some problems here that even if baseball doesn't go away, you might not like exactly what it's becoming or it may not be as good as it could be or as widely available as it could be. So your piece was published in mid-May and it generated a lot of discussion and responses. So what was the tenor of many of those responses? Did you sense that there was a lot of frustration that this piece kind of became a flashpoint that people were like, hey, yes, this? My job is just explain the truth of what's happening. And I think that the reaction, there's a lot of like knee jerk. Oh, well, this is terrible. Like who can afford to do this?

And, you know, we've all sunk to this horrible level of capitalist kind of rot. Like everything is terrible. And there are a lot of people who are kind of happy with the way it is on different. I belong to different Facebook coaching groups. And there's a lot of people saying things like, well, if you want to go play, they call it daddy ball. That's kind of the shorthand for bad recreational baseball. If you want to go play daddy ball, go play daddy ball. We want kids who can play good baseball. For people who can afford it and who think that your responsibility as a parent is to make enough money to pay for whatever your kids want, for them, it's crazy not to want better baseball,

not to want travel baseball. And I do hope that I helped replace the word travel with private club, because I think travel is a bit euphemistic. And that what's really happening is that these are basically little companies whose books are closed, so you don't see what they're making. I think part of the value of my piece was pointing out the basic economic structure, which we talked about earlier, that there are people making a lot of money doing this. It is one of those things that is hard to think about how you might go about changing anything because it is so structural and it is what people want at the end of the day. If your kid is 12, you want the best baseball experience possible. And if you can afford it,

it's a no brainer. And I don't really blame families or players who like it. And like I said, I saw programs that were really well run where coaches were really good and there was a very good ethos and other programs where people were miserable and parents were frustrated and yelling at their kids. I mean, it runs the gamut and not everything in the old way. You know, you could have a dad who played his kid who was a tyrant and wasn't very good at shortstop every game and made everybody miserable. So a lot of the reactions has just sort of been making those points and kind of decrying

the loss of something precious. The funniest reaction was somebody who said, well, when I was growing up in the 60s, my coaches were like, they were all veterans and they were all kind of, you know, drunks, but we had a great time. Yeah. Right. Bad news bears style. Bad news bears style. That's right. And so, yeah, I mean, again, I love baseball so much that I think if it exists, even in this current structure, I mean, it's still baseball and it's still fun. And there are a lot of things that we pay a lot of money for that, you know, we probably shouldn't. I mean, I'm from Belgium and I'm not going to lecture anybody about health care, but there's a lot of things in this country where we're spending too much money on them, but we still wouldn't give them up. Yeah, right. I mean, that's the issue, I guess, is that you're not going to have a lot of success if your way to fix this is to go to wealthy families and say, hey, do not use your money to send your kid to this high-level league because it's for the good of the stereotypical little league parent who is ranting and raving and yelling at coaches and umpires just because if you have invested thousands of dollars to send your kid to this league, then maybe you do expect some sort of preferential treatment or you are more upset if things don't go your way. So this piece did generate enough discussion that you have already written and published a follow-up, which is entitled Nine Ways to Get American Kids to Fall in Love with

Baseball. Again, that came out this week. So what are some of your prescriptions? Some of these are about changing baseball itself, and some of them are more structural when it comes to how leagues are organized. So a lot of this, again, comes out of my background in Belgium, trying to get Belgian kids to get into baseball. And you have to create consistent action. I mean, this sounds like a, it sounds so obvious that I almost feel like it's a cliche to say it. But if you're not generating consistent balls in play with kids, you're failing. A baseball game cannot be a tryout for a kid to see if he can throw strikes. To me, that is just the height of insanity. And when I see that happening, I drive by a game sometimes, I just lose it.

What are you doing if the kid is just throwing balls to the backstop? So you basically have to change the rules until you get that consistent action. So for me, that can be anything from one strike or two strikes and you're out. I like to play a scrimmage game with teams I coach where it's one strike and you're out with either me pitching or a machine. And so you're basically creating a ball in play every 10 to 15 seconds. And so in a couple hours, you can get 10, 15 at-bats for each player instead of two or three. So that's one idea. Coach catch instead of coach pitch, where you're just creating a more comfortable environment for the pitcher,

and you're getting rid of past balls, and you're just setting a tempo. When I coach, I like the game to be like a basketball game, where you're throwing strikes, making plays, running off the field. And again, creating a sense of urgency and excitement instead of that kind of dead feeling of Little Leaguers falling asleep, which is kind of the cliche, like in the Peter, Paul and Mary song, right field. So anything that goes against that. So those are a couple ideas, playing with teams of four or five. There's a guy in California named David Klein. It was a program called Speedball, which is three teams of four or five, where you have one team hitting, one team playing infield and one team playing outfield. And then you have rules that speed up the game. You have shorter fences, so home runs are easier, have more home runs for kids, which is exciting.

He does coach pitch till age 10, then coach catch after that. Smaller balls, so kids can throw strikes more easily. It is kind of crazy that little leaguers play with the same size balls as grown men. I think there should be a middle ground between rapacious private clubs and then daddy ball. There should be some structure where it's okay to pay coaches who are good, but not to have the kind of aggressive profit margins. It's kind of more like a nonprofit European sports club model where there's a structure that is essentially public, but where you're paying coaches who are good, who are not anybody's parents, and you can kind of bring the level up. And so that would be a good model. I mean, culturally, Little League is opposed to paying anybody. So that's one thing that could change. And it just takes individual initiative. It takes people just doing something on their own. So I point out the kind of cultural value of playing catch. And this is so important. I mean, when I

ran teams anywhere, I mean, I say, if you're not playing catch every day, it's kind of pointless. Like the only way you get better is playing on your own backyard baseball and making it part of your kind of the way your body moves essentially. And you can't do that with one practice a week. So making playing catch a kind of cultural thing. And if I were the dictator, I would institute mandatory catch playing in schools. Benevolent dictator who just mandates playing catch. I like that. Although I guess even then you need a space to play catch, right? You can't play backyard baseball without a backyard or a yard or some sort of green space, which it seems like some of these initiatives that you're discussing here are designed to lower that barrier to entry, right? Because, you know, basketball, you just need a ball and a hoop, right?

And the idea that, oh, baseball, you need this big field and you need bases and you need bats and you need gloves and you need all this specialized equipment and you need this number of players. But there are ways that you can do it with just a few players in a relatively small space. So I think it does make sense to preserve some of those essential elements of baseball and get people into the game, and then maybe they can find a place to play in the full version.

But I did wonder about that nonprofit clubs on public fields. I mean, is that dependent on funding from government in some way? Or would you see that be more of a community initiative? I think there are a lot of public fields from my experience, although now they're being rented out to private baseball operators. And often what we see here, I'm sure it's the same all over the country, but somebody will have a piece of land and whereas they might have farmed it 50 years ago, or they might have sold it for development, now they're building baseball fields. There's a guy in the Pittsburgh area who's a plumber, and he has built two complexes now at baseball fields.

And every weekend, he gets 20 to 30 teams in there paying $1,000 each to play a tournament. He hires the umpires, he buys the balls, and now that's his full-time business. So we talk a lot about the private clubs, but there's also a whole economy which has developed to cater to these clubs. And so those fields, the baseball fields now that, you know, when I was a kid, I'd fly to America from Belgium and I knew I was over America when I saw the diamonds. And my heart would sing and I would think, wow, this is America. This is the land of baseball. And so now those fields are owned by plumbers from Pittsburgh who charge money to play on them. And so you do need the public fields,

but there are a lot of public fields. Just around me, there's five of them in my neighborhood in Pittsburgh. And again, there's not, to my liking, not enough baseball being played on them, but the fields are there. I think it's just the coaching kind of, the people who are kind of baseball coaches who want to do it for not a lot of money just aren't around in these neighborhoods to kind of make it happen. Yeah. I had that experience this week, taking a flight for the first time in years and passing over some diamonds and being heartened by seeing that. So you mentioned the smaller balls. That's something that Tom House, the pitcher and coach tweeted about recently. You linked to that. He noted, we ask little leaguers to throw the same five ounce baseballs as MLB

players. I believe this should change. And I remember being a little kid and just having trouble using a regulation basketball. I mean, I just like, I couldn't get it up high enough to be in the hoop and it was like just too big to hold basically. Whereas I didn't have that same problem with a baseball. It's not so huge that I couldn't hold it. A softball maybe was a bigger challenge, I think I recall, when I had tiny hands. But do you see this as being about just like the intimidation factor of a baseball and it's hard and it can hurt? Or is it more about the size and the grip ability? I think the grip and just making it comfortable.

Yeah, by the time you're 12 or 11 or 12, it's not a big deal. But if you're a six or seven, it does feel more difficult. And there's definitely a lot of fear in early stages with baseball and taking that away to me is really important. saying you can never get hit in the face because you aren't going to get hit in the face. And it is important to sort of allow that experience to happen, but in a way it's a bit less dangerous. So getting hit in the teeth with a baseball that is soft seems to me like a better, obviously a better outcome than getting hit in the teeth with a hard ball. But what I'm saying is, it's important to have the possibility of getting, like you're not going to not play catch because the kid might get hit in the face. Like you have to create that risk and let the kid react in a way that will teach them to catch the ball slowly but surely.

And so just making that safer, I think would be valuable. And I think we have to try all kinds of things. I know that in Holland, which has a great baseball culture, and in Japan, they play baseball with a smaller, softer, more rubbery ball, which I have played with and coached with. And I think that works out quite well. All right. Well, I will link to both of these pieces. I recommend everyone check them out. My daughter is not yet Little League aged. I have not

had to think about her baseball or softball career if she wants to have one, but it won't be that long before I'm thinking about that. So it'd be great if we could fix all these issues before then. That would be wonderful. I'm sure that will happen. We'll just snap our fingers, but it's good to document the problems and the challenges at least. And I think these were pretty thorough, comprehensive looks at the subject. Again, you can find them in America, which is the Jesuit Review. It's not an inherently religious subject. But then again, I went to a Jesuit high school and a Jesuit university, and I'm not a religious person. So I guess that is okay. But you can find John on Twitter. He is at JWM Journalist, and his website is johnwmiller.org. Thanks so much for joining me, John.

Thank you, Ben. I'm sure you're going to make a great Little League coach. Thank you. All right. Well, if you're wishing for a way to help bring baseball to everyone, get kids into the game, I have good news for you because there is something you can do. And on our next segment, we will hear all about it. So let's take a quick break and we'll be right back with former Effectively Wild guest and former major leaguer John Poff, as well as John Bravebull, an artist taken alive from the Standing Rock Reservation,

to hear about their efforts to bring baseball to the reservation and, you can be slow That's why I'm here in Wrightfield Just watching the dandelions grow All right, well, for our final segment today, I am joined by three guests, one of whom will be familiar to some of our listeners. His name is John Poth, and he is rejoining us today. He's a former major leaker who has been on the show before. John, welcome back to Effectively Wild.

Thank you. And John is joined today by a couple of friends and colleagues here. One is John Bravebull, who is the radio station director of KLND in Little Eagle, South Dakota, which is on the Standing Rock Reservation. John, welcome. Thank you. And thank you for having me. And we are joined by one of John's colleagues and also a director of the Community Alliance Group on the reservation, Artists Taken Alive. Hello, Artists. Well, hello, Ben. And thank you for having us. I am one of the officers of the Community

Alliance Group. We have an awesome director. Her name is Kim Olson. Got it. Okay. Well, I will ask you about that group and your work. But just to bring everyone up to speed, John, for those who have not heard your first appearance on the show, and I hope that they will go back and catch it, and I will link to it and recommend it. But could you give a little capsule summary of your life, which could be a book, but if you could do it at an interview-length answer, I guess,

encompassing not only your baseball career, but your many, many other careers before and after, just a little life summary of a very full life. Sure. I'll try to go fast. Grew up in Ohio and went to Duke and played baseball there. Played basketball my freshman year. They still had freshman teams, non-scholarship, of course. And then signed as a free agent with the Phillies, whopping $500 bonus in 74 and seven and a half seasons in the minor leagues, a couple of months in the big leagues, months with the Phillies Brewers. And then after that, I was, well, then it does get a, I studied, first thing I did after playing ball was become a licensed acupuncturist. And then that wasn't going to make it for us in the 80s and 90s as a family. I married my wife, Patty, and we have two children, Clay and Jayma,

granddaughter Marley. And so I went back to school to be a teacher and live in the country. And we've done that in northern Michigan for the last 25 years. And so that's probably more than you wanted to know, but that's writer and a poet. And we talked about that a little bit last time. And we will maybe hear a little bit of your baseball poetry before we finish here. But we talked about this briefly last year, too. But how did you end up getting interested in Native American culture and going out to Standing Rock? Really two sides to that, I suppose. Back in my 20s, I started reading. And I talked about this the last time, that for some reason it didn't work. I was an old English major. Those books didn't work on road trips. And I started reading Native American history and different books. Oh,

like Black Elk Speaks was one of the first ones I found in a bookstore back there in the 70s. I was just so shocked about how much I didn't know. And in that way, I have had since that time an interest in Native American matters and so forth. But then strangely, I have had since that time an interest in the American matters and so forth but then strangely I just had a feeling in 2007 and that is a long story and I just wanted to go out to South Dakota to think about things and try to write about something and I really stumbled onto in a sense the Standing Rock Reservation and wound up there doing this little writing project. And I was looking for a place to see the sunrise. And man, I found the most

magical place at that time, I thought, the Sitting Bull's Grave, the one that's near Mobridge, South Dakota. And I sort of sneaked there three early mornings and watched the sunrise and had a really interesting week there. And on the way home, I took this shortcut that took me by a bullhead. And it was a Saturday morning and something was going on at what looked like fairgrounds right off the road. And I jumped out and saw a little kid and said, what's going on? And the little kid said, it's the powwow, moron. And I sat and watched a traditional, what I think of as a traditional Lakota celebration or powwow. And was pretty much transfixed for that afternoon.

I kept going back. One thing led to another. I always wanted to do baseball stuff with kids in a really small, deep rural America. And Bullhead, by golly, that was the place. And with my son and a friend in 2017, we tried going to Bullhead the week before the powwow to do just free baseball, taking gloves and getting refreshments and so forth. And I had a good heart about that and did my best. And it wasn't what then set out to be the biggest thing in the world. And it wasn't.

And I wasn't sure what would happen. The COVID hit and all the different things. And I wasn't sure where I would be going with that. And this year, I really feel lucky and happy about meeting with John and Iris a couple weeks ago. There are things, I don't know if we'll get to them, talking about the annual Wachipi and Bullhead, this VJ Day celebration the second week in August. There are things about that that ours and John and I sort of worked together on last year. It was really cool. But the baseball thing, I didn't know where that is going. And now I think it can go in a really good place because there is this larger community of McLaughlin. It has a nice, cool-looking field.

I sat in that parking lot. I'm always attracted to little league fields and traveling. I like to see them in these small towns. And I sat there the first time I came out there and just thought things over all these years ago. So they're trying to get things going there, and I'm trying to raise money to get them a bunch of stuff because the kids need gloves and balls and T-shirts and caps and and all of that

and it's fun to provide them and uh so i've got this we've we've got a plan if uh artisan and john agree about about getting things started and i and i'll just be a it's community driven it's this the community alliance and people there and i'm trying to help. That's the way I see the plan right now. John and I just can jump in whenever they want. But that's kind of the background of me going out there and what I'm thinking about for this year. Yeah. I was going to ask if artists or John, if you want to jump in too, if you could tell us a little bit about the area just to give people a feel for the reservation and how many people live there and the history of the people or the reservation or however much you want to share about the community and its past would be

wonderful. Oh, all right. This is artists again. And I first met John and I think we did that virtual celebration, right? Yes. And because of COVID, nobody could go out into the community. So my late brother, we did a virtual one, and we did it over KLND because our people were missing the sound of our music, the Lakota music. They call it powwow. I like calling it wachipi, our celebration. And we did that, and that's where I first met John. And from there, that forward, the following year, last year, it was really nice.

It was the first time ever held. It might have been held years ago, but we did a sunrise dance. And these are some of the things that our people have lost over the past 100 years so i want to give the whoever is listening standing rock is located between north and south dakota on the border and we have an estimated 12 000 enrolled members we have maybe close to nine nine thousand that live on a reservation and then when you break it down into the communities or districts, which we call them, Rock Creek called Bullhead and Lilygull called Running Antelope, Wakabala, Kennel, Porcupine. Those are the smallest communities.

And then we have the three large communities, Cannonball way north, and then you've got Fort Yates, also known as Long Soldier, and then you've got McLaugh also known as Long Soldier and then you got McLaughlin also called Bear Soldier so we have a vast array of communities and I really really thought that was awesome what happened last year when we did the sunrise dance because that just tells that's just an indicator that you know our ways are going to come back because we do have our own ways as as Native Americans or Indigenous or whatever you want to call us but we do have our own ways that was that was taken away from us a long time ago so it's coming back and John is one of the is one of the instigators I don't know if that's the right word to use but he's one of them that helped open the eyes up of the community.

And that's the first time that we ever participated. It was the first time on the reservation that we are aware of that that had happened. I was really, it was a good, awesome feeling to see the sun rise up and to hear our music playing and john and i do not know that that many people were going to show up that early in the morning but we had that dense grounds filled with people and i'm very thankful thankful for that i want to jump in and talk about i want to jump in and talk about that a little bit if it's all right the story for behind that is that i have a friend on in rock creek or bullhead named Matthew Yellow Earrings. And he's a couple of years, I'm 69. I think he's two years younger than me. But anyway, I really come

to consider him a friend. And a couple of years, two, three years ago, I asked him if he was going to go over to the powwow or like cheapy for that afternoon. And he said it wasn't like when he was young when people would get up at sunrise and have a coffee and start dancing. And I just couldn't let go of that and wound up suggesting to him, well, why don't we try to get a sunrise dance going? And then with his supervision and the crucial artists and John's radio station and the people there, that the sunrise dance happened on Sunday, that second weekend. And it was. It was just for me, personally. It was.

I told one really good guy there, Charlie White Buffalo. I told him I just wanted to see the sun come up over the ridge and people dancing. And he's a great traditional dancer. And I've got to get this photo from him because the sunrise came up and he was sitting there in his regalia with his granddaughter on his lap and got a picture of it but anyhow that was so that's some of this about from my point of view it really got started because Matthew Yelloway rings remembered what things were like. And artists what other kind of work does the Community Alliance group do? Well, actually, the Community Alliance was formed last April of 2021.

And it was formed because we wanted to work together with everybody in the community. So what happened there is that we formed the community, they formed the meetings and they went on. And June, last June, a year now, we've been actually, we're a nonprofit. We are involved with the Lutheran Church. The Lutheran Church is a beautiful church that was sitting there. And they allowed us to do our meetings and have our activities. There's a whole array of things that we've been working on and and one of the things that one of our members his name is jonathan sam said he would love to have the baseball for the children again and he's very active with the youth so we gave him the reins for

that and then i told him about john puff so I know things are going to work out and it's open it's just not open to one area it's open to any of the children that may want to come and participate so he had a first meeting during memorial that Memorial Day weekend I don't know if they met or not because we we got a lot of rain up here. So I was telling John Braypool, I said, I wish we would have got Jonathan here because Jonathan is well aware of what the needs are. And I wanted him to give us a little bit update. But it's starting now. He's going to start doing the youth baseball starting from, I think they call it T-ball, and on up to regular ball. I don't know.

Yeah, I was going to ask John Brave, well, I guess if you could answer whether there has been much of a history, a tradition of baseball in the area, whether there's much interest in baseball or whether there have been programs like this on the reservation in the past. So for me, I grew up in the Bay Area. I grew up in Redwood City, California. I was born here and then I was out there by the time I was three. And baseball was very important to me. I played on one kind of team or another until I was injured at 17 and

no longer able to play. But it's not about being the best hitter or the best runner or whatever position you played. For me, it was about what you learned working with other people, what you learned as a team. And in my corporate life, a lot of that had carried over. So then fast forward to getting a phone call, can you come fix the radio station, signing a contract for three days in 2016, and then being here ever since. Because of things like this, a perfect example of that is when I first met John, he asked if we could broadcast a baseball game. And I said, sure, I guess. So me and my cousin Nate, we drove out there, we set the equipment up in the car, and we watched this baseball game from the front seats of the vehicle with headsets on, live on the air. And when I realized that there wasn't really a baseball

culture here, was the way I was calling it, and the way he was calling it and the way he was calling it you know i knew the positions i knew it was going on and he it was just so much fun because he would be like yeah i hit it over there but you can't catch it like that if you're gonna put your hands up like you know it's just the examples it was so much fun and it was so funny and then when we got off the air i was like have you never done this before and he said well i played baseball in jail and i was like what and i realized that there wasn't you know i can't speak for growing up here but just in my experience i know they have diamonds and i know they they maintain them but it's not as important in the culture as it is outside of the reservation. But I think

if we bring that, you know, basketball is really big here. And I think if we can, there's a lot of people who aren't good at basketball. I'm 6'2", and I wasn't good at basketball, but I could hit a baseball and I could catch. So there might be a lot of kids out here that are good at sports, but they just don't know that baseball is their sport. And that's why I think this is so important. And I love the way that when I go back to Redwood City, I still have a friend that calls me Johnny B from the Astros because that's how he knew me. Or, you know, whatever various teams I play on my high school team we still meet up i didn't go to my high school reunions or any of that but i still go have lunch with them every time i'm in california so there's definitely that camaraderie that i think every kid here needs

and we need we need that kind of stuff and and the reason why I support all of this is because we're dreamers. And we follow our dreams. Like literally, that's part of our culture. When I met this man, he told me that that's part of what got him here. So I knew that's one of the reasons why we needed to support these ideas and these things. And I told him the first time I met him, it's going to take a while, but it's slowly catching on. And that's the important part of it. Another thing about living here that I'm adjusting to, because again, you know,

I didn't grow up here is the negative reactions first. And I know that we did a great thing with the sunrise dance and I felt so disheartened that my friend John left here feeling like maybe he had overstepped. And the first thing I did the next day was call him and tell him how important it is and how that first negative reaction is just, whether it's in our DNA or whatever it is, it's just how it goes. But then people slowly came around and then now everybody talks about it like, you know, it was great.

And I always make sure that this man gets credit for that because it was part of his dream and we all made it happen. And John, the other John, John Poff, I was just talking on a previous segment about youth baseball just in general across the country and how important it is if you are going to become a lifelong baseball fan, how much playing baseball as a kid can help. And you can speak to that from experience probably, right? Because you were a little leaguer before you were a big leaguer, right? So what was your initial introduction to playing? Oh, yeah. You know, it's funny. I feel like I'm the last generation of kids that grew up playing pickup games for fun. But as I've gotten older, everybody says that.

Everybody younger than me. But, yeah, I had a passion for baseball as a child. And it isn't really quite the same about kids getting out there and just it's enough to catch ground balls for the day or something like that. And it's organized and so forth. And there's a pretty good, for this little town, northern Michigan, there's a pretty good youth program now. But there wasn't anything there.

There isn't anything there. And South Dakota is kind of interesting also, because as I understand it, there really isn't high school baseball. American Legion is very big in South Dakota. That's probably partly a weather thing. But you have to sort of work to get access to baseball there. And the thing that I'll say, I said this a couple of years ago on that broadcast I was talking about earlier, and I don't think I said, but the feeling I have is that if kids in the west of the Missouri River river there i would say i would say indian country that's where it's not just standing rock but pine ridge and cheyenne

river and rosebud and so forth if those kids just had the same access to playing ball that i did where everybody had a ball and a glove and there was a field somewhere and if there wasn't you would wear out the base pass and somebody's in some vacant lot. If kids there in that country had access to playing ball like I did, there just isn't a doubt in my mind that there's a future major leaguer in that part of South Dakota someplace and North Dakota and all that, you know, 12 years or under or whatever, if they could just start playing ball. Now, there's good athletic kids everywhere, but baseball, as John was saying, is more of a kind of a universal sport for kids growing up to be really ultimately competitive at the major league level than basketball and football. And so anyhow, I don't know if that answers your question, but it's just a...

And there isn't a ton of stuff to do in these places in particular. One of the reasons everybody played ball when I was growing up because there was like one channel on TV and who wanted to watch that junk? And there weren't many things to do. And there isn't a ton of stuff to do there. And in small towns like where I live, but in that part of South Dakota also. So it would just be a good thing, I think, to get kids playing ball. to get kids playing ball. Well, tell me a little bit about your past efforts, the past summers, what you've been able to do, the money you've been able to raise and how the kids have taken to it. And I guess what role you have played. I know one of your many careers is being a teacher. So you were used to instruction and working with kids and you have kids of your own. So I know you've taken some hands-on role and some organizational role.

So how has that gone in the past and how will your latest efforts hopefully differ? Went out there in 2017 with my son and friend, Ron Tommy, and we got to know people and got kids out there playing. But it was really always just this, it was just this week in august kind of thing and uh was hoping i but i mean i left a lot of equipment and uh we raised money just from friends and you know uh and but people were quite generous i mean you know we'd raise a little more every year

starting out with a few thousand dollars and a few thousand dollars more and so forth but it wasn't like it was just a week and it was like trying to get kids started, but it wasn't like anything like creating a culture, which is why I'm kind of excited about what might happen now. I feel good about what I tried to do. We tried last year, just didn't work to do much of anything, except I did help kind of instigated getting the old field reclaimed, a little excised field, and the school grounds crew did a great job of getting it looking like a field there when you drive into Bullhead. But my accomplishments, such as they were, were quite modest, and I'm not proud or embarrassed about it. I had a pretty good heart and tried hard and all of that. But this kind of thing where it's starting with the Jonathan Sam and the community

alliance and it's starting in June and where hopefully raise some money to really have some stuff it's just so important for the kids to have stuff a friend of mine that was a one of the reasons things didn't go so well in Bullhead after 2019 about baseball was the good friend there, the guy that I really felt, I just really liked the guy. His name was Emmett White Temple Jr. And he was 55, and he died suddenly, unexpectedly, that summer of 2019. But he said one time, he just made the point, the kids they need t-shirts and hats and stuff and get that stuff but also gloves you know those are not horribly expensive but they're not cheap either

and i got a big thing about wanting to to just after so whether there's a certain point of like come to five practices or whatever or just but pretty soon getting the this is your glove kind of thing so hope that answers your question. So you're trying to raise $20,000. You've got to go fund me here. I hope some of our listeners will help you get toward that goal. And if you are able to raise that much or whatever you're able to raise, will you be taking a direct hand in distributing it? Or artists, will you be helping out with that too?

How will those funds be apportioned? I'll say first artists that this is kind of like our second board meeting for this project. So you can overrule me, but if we get some money and I can help, I wasn't planning to go back out right away, but if I can help and I'll go out and make a trip specifically to get stuff and help distribute and help if I can help with the... Look, it's not starting off with kids. It's not the biggest deal

in the world that I played in the big leagues. It's not like I'll be there for magical instruction, but I'll help in any way they want. And I'll go out there if we get some money together. I'll go out there. I'll go out there on my own dime, of course, and I'll go out there and help if they want me to and stay for a while and artists would the community alliance play some part in those efforts as well yes yes yes yes they will currently jonathan sam is is the one that is really heading up the baseball program and he's he's committed and when he gets committed to something, and I don't think John has met Jonathan yet, but when he gets committed to something, he does it.

And he's thorough, and he just loves the children. He just loves what he can do for them. Because some of our children have a hard time. Some of our children don't have that support Some of our children don't have that support. Some of them don't feel that compassion. But when they play baseball, you should see all the families that show up to watch the little ones play or watch a game. It's just such a good feeling.

So he's even incorporating a concession stand so the high school kids can you know raise money for whatever their endeavors are going to be through high school the volleyball team basketball team the drama team all of these other organizations they have in school so he's open we've opened that up for them and then we work right directly with the city of mclaughlin who has a baseball field so it's going to work out i know it is because it's done with prayer you know it's done with with that commitment from jonathan so and he's got all the support there's about i'd say about 15 of us in the community alliance group you You know, we have a webpage, too, if you want to check it out. Yes.

And you'll see all the things that we have done. We've had kickball in the park. We've had all kinds of things going on. So we keep ourselves pretty busy. And this is a volunteer group. Nobody gets salaried but our director. And she's there. We've got an awesome director.

So it's a good thing. And I'm really proud to be part of it. And I'm really happy to have met John, John Poff, because this is really awesome. Thank you so much, John, for all you're doing for us here on Standing Rock. Well, I want John to take us out with a poem. Well, I want John to take us out with a poem. But before we close, is there anything, either John or artists, that we have not covered yet that you think people should know about this fundraising effort or just about the reservation in general? I don't want to overlook anything that should be mentioned. I just wanted to say, you know, whatever John thinks that he didn't accomplish so far, I have to say that he's wrong because his donation of the wiffle ball bats and that KLND distributed went a long way to get people interested, get kids interested. I know I had people come back and ask for their cousin. Can my cousin have one? You know, and we got all those went really fast.

The shirts that he made. I mean, people hold on to shirts like that, like trophies. And they just were very proud to be involved in that. Even the books he donated that we gave out helped. And to know that somebody else outside of the reservation cares about them is huge for these kids, huge for the community, huge for the dancers. We had more dancers show up at that morning celebration than I ever expected. And that's because somebody's putting it on for them and recognizing them. And I just wanted to thank him for doing that for Standing Rock.

Mm-hmm. Well, that's wonderful. I hope that people will join in in supporting those efforts. And I just wanted to thank him for doing that for Standing Rock. Well, that's wonderful. I hope that people will join in in supporting those efforts and we can provide any updates that are available as that progresses and hopefully as you see some fruits of that labor. So, John, last time you were here, we talked about your writing and that led to the publication of some additional work. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the work of yours that was printed or reprinted as a result of your first podcast appearance? Yeah. After that podcast, you read that baseball enlightenment poem and Paul Worley, a poetry editor for North Dakota Quarterly, is now chairman of the language department at Appalachian State, but he's still a poetry editor for North Dakota Quarterly, is now chairman of the language department at Appalachian State, but he's still a poetry editor, contacted me and they had an issue come out just recently with six poems of mine. So yeah, that means a lot to me. Yeah. And those are online,

and I will link to that for anyone who wants to find it too. But if you would be so good as to read us a selection from that collection, your choice, whichever one floats your fancy. Oh, I guess I'll do the, if it's not too long, I'll do the Sestina because it's about baseball and it's got, even though I wrote it way back in the 90s, it's got Native American stuff in it and somehow seems appropriate. And so I'll just launch into that if you're okay with it. Yes, please. All right. Baseball Sestina. I will say I wasn't familiar with it until I was like, this form until I was 40. Sestina is a 39 line poem. It doesn't have rhyming. It's a repeating pattern. The words that in the first six lines are repeated in a set pattern for the rest of the

poem. So, all right. Baseball Sestina for Enos Slaughter. Who was a coach of yours, as people may recall from last time. Oh, yeah, yeah. My coach at Duke. And he made this, we've talked about this little comment too. All right. Baseball Sestina for Enos Slaughter. An old ball player broke off a plug of tobacco and said, when you get to the ballpark, check which way the wind is blowing and get yourself a good ball to hit. I took that native advice to heart, but it was years before I felt it in my hands. You see, I rode the bus, he took the railroad. The ocean is a whale highway, but America is a railroad. Many times I've crossed it, rolling

my own tobacco into homemade cigarettes, cupping there in my hand the eternal promise of addiction, a part that's beautiful, filled with hope and native flowers, but always just around some corner, blowing out of reach, like this smoke is blowing across the continent. At ten, I played ball down by the railroad. The leather and dirt and grass and wood provided a native thrill. My dad sat in the stands smoking tobacco. Did his thoughts ever run out past the parked cars? Up to a whole world, he once hoped to hold in his hand. Once I had a home run, the audience gave me a hand. As I circled the bases. I felt the wind blowing across my every molecule. This was a new park to be in, fantastic, like a railroad to the sky. When original Americans smoked tobacco, America was like this, something tremendous, a native splendor. That first home run is with me yet, a nativity scene enshrined in memory of my wrinkled, weather hands now shake still I remember past the tobacco.

Sometimes I think what was once me is now blowing far off on the other side of the railroad where we used to play. The graveyard is also a park. We drove all night to get to Cleveland and parked six blocks from the stadium. The natives rushed to sell us junk and we felt railroaded by the ticket takers. Still through the prism of clapping hands I see myself there one moment real, one moment blowing into nothingness like a dream of Indian tobacco. There is a park where natives invaders smoke the same tobacco, where the sound of one hand clapping is known, and where the wind blowing and the railroad whistle are the same. Well, thank you very much. That was wonderful. I appreciate your sharing it. Thank you. So, thank you to all of you for coming on, John Poff, and also John Bravebull

and Artists Taken Alive. And I will link to the Community Alliance website that Artists mentioned, communityalliancegroup.org. And I will also link to the GoFundMe that John has started and that I hope some of you will consider supporting. It's at GoFundMe.com slash F slash old time hyphen baseball hyphen part hyphen six, the Roman numerals. That will be easier to click on than to type in probably. But thanks to all of you, John. Great to talk to you again. And John and Artis, nice to have you on for the first time,

and I wish you well with all of your efforts. Thank you very much. Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you, Ben. Thanks a lot, Ben. Really glad to be on and with Artis and I wish you well with all of your efforts. Thank you very much. Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you, Ben. Thanks a lot, Ben. Really glad to be on and with Artis and John. Appreciate it. All right.

Well, thanks to Artis and the two Johns. I made a little donation to get them started. And if you also think it's a cool cause, I hope that you will consider chipping in too. So check the show page or your podcast app description to find the link to the GoFundMe. And now I will end this jamboree with the latest edition of today's episode number in baseball history. Maybe I'll just use a different name for this segment every episode. This one, of course, concerns 1860. And as always, it's from Richard Hershberger, the historian and saber researcher and author of the book Strike Four,

The Evolution of Baseball. Richard is an Effectively Wild listener, and he wrote in to respond to our discussion of the zombie runner rule last time and the fact that, as written, it seems to contradict other rules in the books about how runs are scored. Well, with his historical perspective, he notes, Regarding your discussion of how the zombie runner rule meshes poorly with the existing rules about runners touching all the bases and the like, this is a perfectly normal process over the history of the rules. You start with a coherent set of rules arranged intuitively, then you add an amendment. You might try to insert it in a logical spot, or you might simply tack it on to the end. Either way, the result is not going to be quite so coherent or intuitive as before. Then you do it again, and again. Gradually,

you get an incoherent mess. The solution is to periodically go back and completely reformat the rules. In the 19th century, rules changes came so fast that they had to do this once or twice every decade. Then the pace of change slowed down. They only reformatted the rules once in the 20th century with the 1950 set, and the most recent time was in 2015. This is neither a defense nor a condemnation of the zombie runner rule. They could and should have done a more careful job of integrating it into the existing rules, but the experience of baseball history makes it unsurprising that they did not. And today's year-themed fact from Richard is right along those lines, because it concerns some

confusion over a rule in the early history of organized baseball. In this case, in 1860, people weren't quite sure how force plays worked. When was the force still in order and when was it not? We take that for granted today, but they had to hammer it out at some point and that was still happening in 1860. So, quoting here from a letter to the editors of the Sunday Mercury, a New York paper, August 9th, 1860. Will you please give your opinion on the following points of baseball? Baseball, of course, spelled as two words. The first striker has made the first base.

The second striker knocks a high ball, which is not caught on the fly or on the first bound. The pitcher throws the ball to the first base and is held and puts the second striker out. The ball is sent to the second base before the first striker gets there. Now, is the first striker out without being touched with the ball, or can he return to the first base, the base not being occupied in consequence of the second striker being put out first? Yours, etc., baseball. Now, Richard writes, it's being a high ball is a red herring. It explains why the runner from first was wavering and shows why we don't let pitchers field if we can help it. But the question applies to any uncaught ball, more typically a grounder.

The ball is fielded to first base, putting out the batter. The question is whether this breaks the force play on the runner from first. Can he be put out simply by tagging second base? Here is the Mercury's answer. A case in point occurred in the match between the Atlantic and Excelsior clubs on Thursday last, and in the third inning, as will be seen by reference to the report, when Flanley and Reynolds were decided out by the umpire in accordance with section 18 of the rules, which says, when a fair ball is struck and not caught flying nor on the first bound,

the first base must be vacated, as also the second and third bases if they are occupied at the same time, and players may be put out on any base under these circumstances in the same manner as the striker when running to the first base, which, of course, precludes the necessity of touching the player with the ball. For if a ball is held by an adversary on the first base before the striker touches that base, he is out. As there is no provision for the player under the circumstances pointed out by our correspondent returning to the first base, notwithstanding as it is vacated, it is to be presumed that he has

no right to do so, but must vacate, that is leave, the first base. The decision of the umpire in the point referred to at the match on Thursday last has given rise to much discussion. In our opinion, it was strictly in accordance with the rules. So, Richard writes, I suspect that this Atlantic Excelsior game is what prompted the letter. The umpire ruled that the force still held, and the runner put out with a tag to second. The editor argues for this interpretation because the rule required the runner to vacate the base and included no provision removing this requirement when a trailing runner was put out. There was in fact no consensus about

how to interpret this rule. Other umpires and editors argued, using a modern vocabulary, that of course the force was broken when a trailing runner was put out. It seems to me that the Mercury editor had the better argument from a strict reading of the rule, while the opposition had the better argument from the intent of the rule. The baseball fraternity soon reached the modern consensus, and we no longer see runners being put out this way. The actual rule was not clarified until years afterward. There was no need once everyone knew what the existing rule meant. And as always, I will link to the sources on the show page. Thank you, Richard. I hope that they don't reformat the rules to be more consistent with the zombie runner. I hope that they just do away with the zombie

runner. That would be my preferred solution. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay ad-free, and get themselves access

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and so we will talk to you soon music music music music music music music No, no, no You've got to go No, no, no You've got to go

Stand for what's right Driving a standing rock tonight