Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2220: The Baseball Layers of The Onion

Episode Date: September 21, 2024

In a bonus EW episode, Ben Lindbergh talks to screenwriter and former editor-in-chief of The Onion Robert Siegel about his classic Onion opinion piece, “In My Day, Ballplayers Were For Shit,” how The Onion used to approach sports coverage, the importance of headlines and stock photos, satirizing baseball vs. satirizing other sports, why The Onion […]

More than 2,000 episodes retrospectively filed And at each new one we still collectively smile That's Effectively Wild That's Effectively Wild Hello and welcome to episode 2220 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 Rowley of FanGraphs who is on vacation and so I ask you, can you feel it?

Can you sense it? Can you hear it in my voice? Does this feel like extra free content from a podcast whose episodes are all free already? Well, there's a reason for that. This is a bonus episode. No it's not an emergency episode about Shohayotani's great game to go 50-50 and then 51-51. We will definitely discuss that on the next episode which will be out soon. This week, this pod is a standalone interview episode. I will bring you behind the scenes, this was supposed to be part of our previous episode, 2219. I was going to talk to Joe Sheehan

and then do this interview. When you schedule an interview and you book a guest you've never talked to to discuss something that they haven't thought about in a while, you never know how it's going to go or how long it's going to last. And so my plan was to put this at the end of the preceding episode. Bantor first, interview segment second. And when I greeted the guest you're about to hear, he asked about how long I thought it might go. I said, oh, maybe half an hour. Depends how much you have to say. Then before we knew it, an hour had passed. I ended the interview and my guest said, I could have kept talking. I thought this was a fun, pretty evergreen conversation. So I figured instead of smushing it together with an extended first segment and ending up with not a mega

episode, but a mega episode, I'd split them up. We'd call it a bonus episode, which I hope more people might hear than if it had been tacked on to something unrelated and we'd proceed to what was supposed to Be our third episode of the week very soon as scheduled now It'll just be the fourth one So sit back relax enjoy this insight into a subject that I imagine many of you may be as curious about as I was And I'll be back soon with banter about Otani and much more Oh and fair warning there will be some swears in this interview that will not be bleeped for reasons that you will soon understand And if that doesn't pique your interest, I don't know what will. So go go gadget guest.

Well recently I noticed that my favorite onion article about baseball would be turning 25 years old next year. And I made a mental note to try to figure out who wrote it so I could do an anniversary interview. And then my co-host took vacation, I needed people to talk to, and I figured what makes 25 so much more special than 24 anyway. So I did some saluting, discovered who was hiding behind that unbyelined brilliance, and dragged him onto this podcast.

So with us now is Robert Siegel, the author of that Onion article and many more, as well as a prolific writer and director for The Screen, where his filmography includes a couple of sports movies, Big Fan, which he wrote and directed, and The Wrestler, which he wrote. Rob, welcome to Effectively Wild. Thank you.

What an intro. Appreciate it. Well, you have many incredible credits and this onion article, this specific piece does not appear on your IMDB page, but know that it is a significant part of your legacy, at least in my mind. Thank you. Wow. That is beautiful. appear on your IMDB page, but know that it is a significant part of your legacy, at least in my mind. Thank you. Wow.

That is beautiful. I haven't actually mentioned what the article is, and I thought that maybe the most fun way to introduce it would be to put you on the spot and ask you to do a dramatic reading. Now I said maybe you could just select a passage, but the whole thing is only 800 words. You want the whole thing? If you're willing to do the whole thing, you don't have to do it in a crotchety old timer voice. Sure. That might enhance the effect.

No, no, we always read in flat, monotone, deadpan, affect. The humor should speak for itself. You should have to. You never want to try to sell the humor. That's the whole point. And you can curse on this podcast, which you must in order to read this headline. So take it away. It would be a necessity. This is an opinion piece as we often had in the Onion and Op-Ed and the author was, does

he have a name? I don't think it's anonymous. I don't know if that's just because the website has changed so many times that the original name did not agree. I think it's anonymous. I don't know if that's just because the website has changed so many times that the original name did not agree. Well, there's a small, there's a headshot of a crotchety old, old fella. And the headline is, in my day, ballplayers were for shit. Let's begin.

It seems everywhere I go these days, some young fellas gibber jabbering about how great some ball player of today is. It's always Mark McGuire this, oh, we should note this was written in 2000. Yes, August 2nd, 2000. You mentioned 25 years. It's always Mark McGuire this or Sammy Sosa that. Well, of course, they're the best. These modern big leaguers with their blinding speed, cannon arms, and towering home runs,

they've got it all. Back in my day, ballplayers were for shit. I'll never forget my first big league game. It was 1931 at the old Polo grounds in New York. Giants versus the Reds. Dad by my side and Cracker Jacks in hand, I took my seat in the grandstand on a glorious Saturday afternoon. That's when I first laid eyes on him. Out there patrolling the grass and center field for the home team giants was Ducky Leadlegs Cronin. Worst ballplayer you ever saw. Christ did he suck. The very first batter up to the plate hits a lazy flyball right to Ducky. He settles under it and it bounces right off the heel of his glove.

The booze cascaded down from the bleachers like rain. Two at-bats later, Reds second baseman Charlie Fritch, not a very good ball player in his own right, hits a ball to shallow center field. The moment he hears the crack of the bat, Ducky's on his horse. He charges in on the ball as hard as he can, but he can't get to it. Too slow. That's the thing about the old ballplayers. They were very slow.

Today it's like a track meet out there. Players are flying around the bases like gazelles, but in my day, the players lumbered around in their heavy woolen uniforms like President Taft after a big meal. The slowest of them all was Harry Three-Towed Vaughn, the first baseman with the Washington Senators. Legend had it he could turn off a light switch in his bedroom and be in bed 35 seconds later. A guy like that wouldn't stand a chance in today's game.

It's sad, nobody has a sense of history anymore. The modern fan could tell you Barry Bond's on-base percentage, with two outs and runners in scoring position during night games on the road, but he's never even heard of the old St. Louis Brown's shortstop Walter, shitty batter Dugan. They called him that because he was a real shitty batter. He'd swing at anything Dugan would. I swear I once saw him swing at a throw the pitcher made to first base. But he wasn't the only undisciplined hitter of his era. There was Rocky Evers, Hermandor, and Alvin Crowe. Guys like that just didn't take the art of hitting as seriously as they do today. They wouldn't have lasted

two seconds in the batter's box against the Pedro Martinez. Shit, he'd mow them down. In fact, I would put money on a bet that Martinez wouldn't even have to break a sweat to do it. These are tough sons of bitches these ballplayers of today. Cal Ripken plays in more than 2,000 consecutive games. You think any of the old Brooklyn Dodgers could have done that? No way. Fred, big pussy De La Hanty, used to scratch himself from the lineup if he had a blister on his pinky. One time, an hour before a crucial late season doubleheader against the Pirates, he checked himself into a hospital with gastroenteritis because he burped. Talk about gutless. And they were rude. Go to a game nowadays and it's all

a yes ma'am, no ma'am and I'm just trying to do what I can to help the team. Today's players are constantly making charity appearances and they'll sign autographs until their hands fall off. But try getting an autograph off a guy like Frankie Medwick, the bad Chicago Cubs pitcher from the 40s. He'd have torn you a new asshole. And if you were black, well, let's not even think about that. I was at the barbershop Monday getting my usual weekly shave and a haircut when I hear this young whippersnapper in the chair next to me jawing on about that newfangled

Mets catcher Mike Piazza. Did you see that shot Piazza had last night against the Marlins? He asked Gus, one of the barbers. It bounced off the Shea scoreboard 522 feet from the plate and he broke his bat on the play. Do you have any idea how strong you have to be to get a 522 foot broken bat homer? I'm telling you, that guy's the greatest hitting catcher in major league history.

I swear, it took every ounce of strength I had to keep me from standing up, walking over to that kid and totally agreeing with him. Of course Piaz is the best. The old catchers blew, and so did the pitchers, and right fielders too, they all stunk. A bunch of slow, fat, selfish, mean whities. I tell ya, they didn't make them like they do now. Sorry, they didn't blew the last line. I tell you, they didn't used to make them like they do now. Scene.

CB Thank you. A little rusty. CB A little, but understandable given that you wrote this almost 25 years ago. And given that until I emailed you about this, you didn't really remember that you wrote this. No, I needed to… I didn't want to steal anyone's credit. You had asked me if I had written this and I said, probably. It sounds like something I would write. Some of the turns of phrase felt Segal-esque. But yeah, I didn't want to take credit, so you went and checked with a couple on my other possible, there were three guys on the onion that handled, I was kind of the main sports guy at the time.

It wasn't really a staff full of jocks. Not that I'm a jock, but I'm a sports nerd. And I usually was the one to write the sports articles just by default, being that I knew something about sports. And you weren't just the sports guy. You were the guy at the time that you wrote that piece, I suppose, because you joined the Onion in 1994, right? And then you became senior editor from 96 to 99, and then editor in chief from 99 to 2003. So you were... Yeah, yeah. I was basically editor. I mean, the title kind of changed, but I was basically

for all intents and purposes ran it from 96 to 2003. And I was there for nine years total. So yeah, 2003 was my... So we're going on 22 years away, which is crazy. The legend of this article lives on in my mind, if not necessarily in yours. You've written a lot of articles, you've written a lot of movies, maybe they all kind of blend together. And it's a collaborative process, which we will talk about, but everyone agreed. Oh yeah, Rob wrote that. So it was memorable to me, if not as much to you.

And the reason for it, I mean, I risk explaining the joke here. I think everyone understands why this is funny and what you're sort of sending up here, but it is just such a perfect inversion and subversion of the typical baseball mythologizing and hagiography and not just in baseball, do you get the back in my day refrain,

but it is maybe loudest and most potent in baseball. Yeah, for sure. And here, of course, you have turned it on its head. To the extent that you can recall or speculate, what do you think might have led you to write this particular piece? If I were to forensically try to piece together my thought process. You know, you just, they're actually dying out now, but you know, I guess my first thoughts go to that Ken Burns documentary, Baseball, where you've got, it's kind of all the old

timers, the George Plimpton and who are the other sort of baseball, Dave Anderson of the New York Times and you know, all these based... Roger Angel. Roger Angel, of course, George Will, Bob Costas. I feel like 25 years ago and back was a golden age of guys in their 60s mythologizing. Yes, John Thorn, of course. John, yep. Yeah, those are the media members of the historians.

And some of those guys to their credit, they are back in my day people because they remember, I mean, Roger Angel. Right, Roger Angel probably saw Babe Ruth play. He did, we sadly lost him just a couple of years ago, but I couldn't get enough of his back in my day because it was, yeah, I went to see Lefty Gomez or whatever and he's speaking from

experience and comparing some modern player because he just had this incredible mental library of all of these. And he was someone who, you know, he would point out the flaws of the modern game, but wouldn't necessarily pretend that players of that era were better or more athletic. And that's the real fiction that you still sometimes hear, maybe less so than you used to because it's just so demonstratively obvious that players of today are just bigger and better, faster, stronger. I think certainly you'd have to be a crazy person to say the average player was on par then from the average player today. I guess where it gets debatable is like when you discuss, could Babe Ruth have been a, you know, some people might say he'd still be the dominant player in today's game.

I wonder if he could make a team. I don't know. Yeah, that's a frequent and fertile debate, I guess. It doesn't pass the eye test. It almost doesn't make sense that he would be the best player then. You know, you look at a guy like Babe Ruth, he's just so demonstrably out of shape. And you know, in today's game you got your, I don't know, I'm a little out of date, Pablo Sandoval or the Pudgy guys. When I was, you know, in the 90s, you know, you've got like John Crook.

In sports, there's always the pudgy outliers, the John Dailies and whatnot, where it just doesn't even seem to make sense that they're, they can do that thing. But I don't know. I just thought, I don't know if Babe Ruth, um, could he play today? Well, in his defense, he was trim when he was younger. So people are more familiar maybe with the footage of the older babe lumbering around the bases. And he was so dominant that you want to give him the benefit of the doubt. I mean, he was hitting, the year he hit 60, what, the next closest player was hitting,

I mean, he was hitting twice as many as everybody else. Yeah, hitting entire teams easily. And it did become a controversy just a few years ago when the current reliever, Adam Ottavino said that he would easily strike out Babe Ruth. And there was some blowback to that, maybe more blowback than you'd get in other sports. And I think the case is clear in the sense that Babe Ruth would be like, what is this witchcraft? What are you throwing me? I've never seen a pitch that moved like this and I've never played against non-white people in the majors, right? But then the other dimension of the debate is always, well, are we talking about putting Babe Ruth

from 1920 into the time machine and then penciling him into the lineup immediately? Or are we talking about... Letting him train and catch up and... Or yeah, if Babe Ruth were born in this environment, could he still... Right, those are different debates, but both equally unresolvable perhaps. And in Babe Ruth's defense, I mean, back then baseball was really the sport. So it was like anybody who was a good athlete, with the exception of no blacks allowed, for just sticking to the whites.

You know, if you were a young kid, you were playing baseball, you weren't playing football, and you weren't playing basketball. So all the athletes were, you know, he was the best of any athlete at that time. And so you're sort of riffing on, I guess, cool Papa Bell in, to name one player who was not allowed in the white majors, but was playing in the Negro leagues when you have that crack about the guy who turns off the light and 35 seconds later he's in bed. That's the cool Papa Bell. He turns off the light and he's in bed before the light goes out. Right? So, boy was he slow then. Who's my guy? Dead legs? Yes, Ducky Dead Licks. Those are fun nicknames. I faintly remember making up the nicknames. That part was fun. You know, you had the Mordecai, Three Fingers Brown, and they had great nicknames back then.

Exactly. Yeah. I talked last week, I had on a current player named Declan Cronin, not DeadLegs Cronin, who is 6'4", 225", very live legs, I would say. So yes, they're not built the way that they were back then, but the names, the nicknames, half of it, I guess, is, uh, it just sounds so anachronistic to our ears and so colorful. And you kind of came up with some names that remind me of the Tungsten arm O'Doyle meme, which I don't know if you followed, but the, the, there was a famous tweets about Shohei Otani supposedly being the first to do this or that since Tungsten Armodoyle, who was not a real player, but sort of the same fictional school

of let's create a player. That was a fictional 1920s kind of guy. Yes, exactly. Right. So tell me a little bit, I guess, about the background and the part that sports played at the onion, because as you said, maybe not the most sports knowledgeable staff. So at what point and how did the Onion Sports start? And that actually started after I,

that actually Onion Sports as a thing, specifically Onion Sports, that started after I left where they developed. And I believe John Crousen, who was there when I was there, I think he was the main guy who who started that I'm sure I would have been Very heavily involved in that if I had been around at the time But yeah, that was that was after my day when I was there was it was all kind of comic book nerds Everybody I knew was nerds myself included. I was more of a sports nerd

Everybody else there was, you know, comic books and sci-fi nerd kind of, you know, they could tell you anything about Star Wars or, you know. Yeah, I'm that kind of nerd also. I'm just all the different kinds of nerd. There's often overlap between the two. Although you know what, I just, do you know anything about, I'm a little off topic for a moment, the Fanatics Fest? Did you hear about this?

It was at the Javits Center in New York. It was a big, it was like a Comic Con, but for sports. Oh, right. Yes. It was maybe a couple months ago. This was where Libby Dunn dressed up as Paul Skeens, if I recall correctly. Tom Brady was, I mean, it had a crazy lineup, you know, Tom Brady and Mike Tyson and Hulk Hogan and I mean superstars from every sport, but it was just, it was, it was amazing walking

around there. It was like being at a Comic-Con, but for sports and they had never had that before. And I sort of, as a, as a sports nerd, it was like kind of amazing that they'd never had that before. It's going to become a huge thing going forward. It was, it was like kind of amazing that they'd never had that before. It's gonna become a huge thing going forward. It was packed. Well, it's interesting. I've written about this. We're straying further from the topic, I guess,

but there is a sports fandom element to nerd culture franchises these days, right? If you're a Marvel fan or a Marvel denigrator or people who are studying the box office fortunes and breaking down the franchise building. It is very akin to the way that we develop allegiances with sports franchises and analyze them almost from a business sort of perspective. Yep, for sure.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to lead you astray. So I was the sports guy at the Onion and it usually just fell to me by default because I knew who Pedro Martinez was or who else. And no one else could claim that. So what was the process of pitching a sports piece? Was it then, hey, take my word for it, this will be funny? There was a little bit of just trust me, this is funny, which was nice because usually, you know, you'd have to actually argue. How do you argue just trust me this is funny, which was nice because usually you know you'd

have to actually argue, how do you argue with trust me, you know an article. We didn't go, once onion sports came along it kind of, it became this sort of subcategory where you really could make a joke. We never really at the onion cared about well, will everyone get this joke? You know I'm a believer that you make jokes and if only 10% of your audience gets it, that 10% is going to really love it. Like the fewer people who get the joke, the more they love the joke, can feel attached to it. Yes, they feel seen. And that goes for any topic, including sports. So, you know, if something was happening in the world of sports and I wanted to make a joke about

Pete and Kavelia or I don't I don't know why I said him I had a real hot take on Benito Santiago You know that was really gonna crack crack up the sports fans You know, they let me do it and I was the editor anyway so I could kind of jam things past the committee anyway. But yeah, we definitely weren't afraid to go obscure. But we typically made jokes. Back then, something in the world of sports had to kind of rise. It helped if it rose to the level of something that non-sports fans were faintly aware of,

you know. Let's say if something like deflate gate was going on and, you know, Tom Brady was, you know, accused of fucking with the balls. That kind of thing is an example of like non-sports fans probably heard something about it or in baseball. You know, obviously steroids at the time I was there, you know, in the 90s, I was there during the peak of the steroids era and McGuire and Sosa hitting, you know, 98 home runs a year. And that we would make jokes about. We did less Troy Tula whiskey humor And that we would make jokes about. We did less Troy Tula whiskey humor than they probably did when onion sports was around.

There was one from after your time, 2009, a post-PED era headline I like a lot. Turns out Craig Council was actually best baseball player of steroid era. If you judge them on the basis of pure physical ability, you're left with Craig Council. Craig Council. Fake person from the Alias Sports Bureau. If you judge them on the basis of pure physical ability, you're left with Craig Council. Fake person from the Alias Sports Bureau. Craig was clean. He never...

Evidently. I just always feel for those... You wonder the players that didn't take steroids, the best player... I guess that's what that headline was about. The best player who didn't take steroids, you wonder what the hell could they have done? You know in those 90s who was like the best player in the 90s that people will always say well imagine Greg Maddux he was doing this in the PDR or Derek Jeter or Ken Griffey jr. Of course you never know who was doing what just because there's no smoke surrounding them doesn't mean There was no fire and sometimes the people who got popped for a positive test are someone you would never expect. But yes, people do I think mentally era adjust because they weren't

going up against juice players as far as we know in certain cases. And another favorite from that era from the tail end of your tenure, I don't know if this was one of yours, but as a Yankees fan at the time, I appreciated Yankees ensure 2003 pennant by signing every player in baseball. Oh, I remember. Do I take credit for it? Sure. I don't know.

Well, I was going to ask is one reason why you don't recall, I mean, partly is probably because it's 20, 25 years ago and you've written many things, but also is it because it was part of the ethos of the onion not to take credit and because everything is unbyelined and collaborative that once it's out there, it's just the onion staff. It belongs to the world. Well, yeah, well, it definitely helps to be able to just look back. It would be nice to have bylines and then I could actually know if I wrote it. For historical posterity purposes, but is it gauche to say, oh yeah, I wrote that one to claim credit? At this point, it's not.

But you know, we weren't really about, that was by design. I mean, if it worked for the paper and we could have taken credit, I'm sure we would have been happy to. It's just part of the image we were trying to project was that of this kind of monolithic news machine that was stripped of kind of a human element. The idea that news itself is just this this thing that exists independent of humans. It was just part of the onions kind of whole the impression we were trying to create so we we thought no headlines. Plus a lot of

our stuff was just so committee written anyway. You know, somebody writes something and I rewrite it. I did a lot of rewriting. So that's where it really gets fuzzy is because my fingerprints are on other people's articles. TV writers room as you know. Yeah and it helps right because obviously you know Jimmy Kimmel doesn't write his monologue jokes. We don't really know who does. You know and I guess that's probably, that probably helped our longevity in a way too, because nobody was fighting over, nobody was getting jealous or fighting over credit for things. Yeah.

And we also didn't want people favoring, oh, that's written by so-and-so, he's funnier than that article is probably going to be funnier because it was written by so-and-so. Right. That reminds me of some bands that have managed to stay together and get along fairly well for a long time, like REM or my favorite band Sloan, or U2, where all the songs are credited to Barry Buck Mills, Stipe, or Sloan, and then everyone splits the revenue equally and there's less bad blood. And if you're really into that music, maybe you can tell who played a more prominent part,

but no one's individually claiming all the credit. Of course, it helps if everyone in the group actually is an accomplished writer, which is the case with those bands and maybe also The Onion. Is it then problematic, though, if you want to get another job? Now, maybe you just drop the name The Onion and it's respected enough. But if you want to say, yeah, this is what I did. Like, do you have samples or a portfolio so you can... Yeah, yeah, I could, I didn't, but sure, I could pull a portfolio of things that I wrote. It sucks for your legacy, I would say, because I was, you know, I kind of ran it for nine years and unless you're really paying attention, I mean, who the hell is paying attention? I'm basically no different than like a staffer that kind of, because my name's not on anything,

I don't know that anybody knows what I actually did there First to somebody who kind of just maybe passed through for a year or two Yeah, but did you did you work on our dumb century as well? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I was one of the yeah It was one of the main main people that was like right at the kind of peak of my time there yeah, I was the editor of the, it was broken into three sections and I was kind of in charge of the like late latter third, maybe from the sixties to 2000. And it was credited to editor in chief Scott Dickers, right?

But I don't want to fight over, see this is what happens when you start giving bylines. This is why we don't do it. Certainly the sports, if there are any sports stories in there, I could probably take credit. Jokes about Tinker's to Everest to Chance. I'm sure there was some real barn burners.

Yeah. It's gold. Yeah. How much of the value is the headline? Because of course, there are some stories that are simply a headline and nothing else, right? Just a headline and a picture maybe and that gets the job done sometimes. And of course, writers of every bent will complain people only read the headlines. Is that particularly true for the onion or is it less true? Because sometimes the headline is the funniest part and the rest

is almost explaining the joke, but then sometimes there's a lot more material to mine than that one line. Well, we start by pitching headlines and then I think it's still the way it goes. You pitch a headline and then you decide, would this get funnier with expansion or would this be beating a dead horse? If it falls into the beating a dead horse category, then we usually do that as a one-liner. And sometimes those turn out to be the best articles or the best headlines. But if it feels like something where there's just something more to say, then, you know, then we give it a full article. We also have news and brief, which are kind

of, okay, there's maybe two more jokes to be squeezed out of this, but certainly not 10. And that gets a news and brief treatment. So you sort of try to assess the potential for a joke and then kind of take it from there. But everything has to be funny. Every headline has to be funny. You never want to run something where the headline is just a premise that's not funny in and of itself

And then if you read the article it starts to get funny We don't presume anyone's gonna read an article, you know We sort of write to the shortest attention span so absolutely a headline has to always be a function as a joke even if If you don't read the article and what about the stock photo? Because of course that's very important too. And everyone knows the heartbreaking, the worst person you know, just made a great point person who has been identified, I feel for that guy. But you know, you get to know these stock images of the people who

have been appearing in the onion for years and years and something like that. It helps ground you in some cases, particularly in this, in my day, Paul players were for shit story, which by the way, I guess a big difference between ball players were for shit and these shits, which could easily lead to confusion and have an entirely different. They were for shit. Yeah. But having this crotchety looking old guy, maybe that's unfair to him.

Maybe it's a very nice old guy. Now you'd never know if it was just some AI creation, I suppose, but what was the process for finding those people and picking which one went with which thing? Often those were just pulled from Getty images, stock photos. You know, we had this big giant binder. I don't know how it got, I'm sure it's all computers now, but you know, we just had this big giant Getty Image stock photo book and we'd flip through.

In a case of a headline like this, we'd just look for kind of the crustiest old guy we could find, sort of the Wilford Brimley look. And that would be that. And for the more elaborate articles where we really needed to actually stage a photo, then we would, at the time we were in Madison, Wisconsin, we would just literally go out on the street, look, you know, just cast it. We had our graphics department, Mike Lowe and Chad Knackers. Chad is actually the guy who runs The Onion now. Yeah. We'd send them out on the street and we'd say, we need some, you know, we need a hippie to play Jesus, or we need such and such.

Yeah, that was a fun part of it, just trying to cast articles. And then you'd also use friends and family, and you start to see, we would track, oh, so and so we just had in the paper six months ago, you think we could run them again, sure. They'll be wearing a mustache this time. It was pretty janky and piecemeal. Yeah. And did those photo subjects ever object or was it just, well, you've signed your rights away? You try not to outright lie. I mean, a lot of times it was just, we need you to play. There might be a harmless enough article and who's going to object and you just try to get somebody to sign your release.

Sometimes you had to be, you can't be outright deceptive. In the worst cases, it's like in Borat where they probably had to, you know, all those poor suckers would probably technically not be lied to. You don't want to cross too much of a line, but you try to just play it very vague. And I don't know, it never really ever came back to bite us in the ass too hard. Maybe this goes part and parcel with that sort of self-congratulatory aspect of baseball that you were spoofing here, but baseball writers certainly, like myself, I guess like to think that there is this great literary tradition associated with baseball and that baseball writing historically

has been more fruitful than writing about other sports and people will rhapsodize about why that is and what it says about the literary nature of the sport, et cetera. I think there's some truth to that and probably some exaggeration, but I wonder whether that applies to the onion because I am probably just more aware of the greatest hits of baseball in the onion than I am of other sports. And there have been many great onion pieces about other sports as well, but was baseball more fertile territory or was there anything that differentiated? I mean, I guess part of it's just how big is the audience and how familiar will people

be with this, which probably in baseball's case has declined and receded somewhat even since your time there. But I wonder, does anything about that sport or other sports lend itself particularly to satire? Well, a different sport, I think all sports lend themselves to satire and it's just a question of what is the thing to spoof. One of the obvious things to spoof with baseball is the sort of pomposity, you know, old white guys waxing poetic about it is a really rich vein.

You can't tap it too many times or you're repeating yourself, but that is certainly something that is unique to baseball. Although I would say maybe I think of baseball, horse racing, and boxing as like if you look at what the most popular sports were in the 30s and 40s, it was really baseball, boxing, horse racing. So that's where you get the ring lardners of the world waxing poetic about. You get it in boxing a lot, you know, for every article about the- Yeah, your redsmith purple pros.

Yeah. So for every article about the glory of the Gas House gang, you'd get the same thing about Joe Lewis. Definitely that you get. You don't really read that kind of purple prose about the 1942 Rams, LA Rams and Crazy Lakes Hirsch. The super self-serious NFL films, stentorian narration. This is the gridiron. That's the 70s. Right. The Harry Sable. You know, the cold wind blew in from the shores of Lake Michigan onto Lambeau Field. And Walter Payton. Yeah, that's the 70s, 80s thing. But I think baseball is definitely the sport for the pompous shit, which is fun. And then, you know, each sport has its own, you know, in football, it's just, I think, the violence and savagery of it would probably be where you, you know, you're always looking

for what is that kernel of truth. Humor usually is, it's hard to make something funny without mining a certain vein of truth. And that's kind of, for baseball, that pretentiousness is definitely part of it. You know, the glorious symmetry of the diamond. Yes, the divinely ordained 90 feet, 60 feet, 6 inches. It's like Pythagoras, the perfect Pythagorean, whatever, whatever. It's ridiculous. One thing I did want to say in defense of the old players, just to play devil's advocate, because I really do think they probably would get their asses whooped in today's game. But every

now and then you see a picture of one of those and you see them in their baggy flannel. Every now and then you'll see a picture of like a player from the 40s-huh. Yeah. And you're like, and I'm always like, oh my God, he was jacked. Oh, yeah. Lou Gehrig was a unit and Willie Mays was ripped. Right. Yeah. You see, right, exactly. Lou Gehrig, you see a picture of Lou or any of those guys and you're like, because I think

of Al Kailin. I just pictured kind of dad bod bots under those big flannel things. But you see a picture of a Lou Gehrig with his shirt off, you're like, he's fucking cut. Yeah. It's amazing. So when I see that, I think, well, you know what, maybe I'm completely wrong. Issue a correction. It's not too late to retract this piece, ballplayers were actually good.

And they were hitting the same distance. Yeah. Although maybe the ball, I guess, was the ball, did the ball travel farther then? The ball was different. It was moving. The pitches were slower, et cetera. Yes. And there's also the statistical element to baseball, which has been pretty ripe for the onion over the years. I guess you kind of left as Moneyball was coming out. And so you sort of missed, I guess, the whole Saber-Matrician phase. But as a member of that community,

I have enjoyed having fun poked at us by the onion from time to time. Like, you know, there's the 2013 one, which was panicked Saber-Matricians forced to rethink entire sport after discovering they missed it back from Lou Brock on August 3rd, 1975. And up till this year, we even talked about on the podcast recently, MLB loses millions of stats in warehouse fire. And we discussed the implications of that happening. So that's been territory that the Union has returned to.

Yeah, I don't even follow. My peak baseball fandom was, I mean, I'm still a fan. I'm a Mets fan. I follow the sport. I know they're doing really well right now, but I don't follow it with the intensity I did probably when I was a teenager, which was kind of, you know, Darrell Strawberry, 86 Mets was kind of my peak. So I don't even know the stats like, you know, WAR and OPS and I mean those, and now it's been incorporated into the broadcast, like the exit velocity, when did that became like that's a thing now? Oh, very much so. Yeah. Listen to Effectively Wild. We'll catch you up to speed. Don't worry.

Which doesn't, does that even really, I mean, like Giancarlo Stanton has the top exit velocity of, you know, three of the top five exit velocities this year. Does that matter? Well, yes. Some of it is certainly self-evident in that we didn't necessarily need those readings to tell us that Giancarlo Stanton is strong and hits the ball hard, but it is quite predictive of your success. And so it can be helpful sometimes in a small sample to say, oh, well, even if he's not getting hits, he's hitting the ball very hard and that bodes well for him long-term. And so yes, you do get some back in my day, we didn't have to have exit velocities on the broadcast kind of complaints, which I think that is maybe one of the sillier ones because really it's just about how

hard the ball is hit and that's not new and it's not as if exit velocity is a concept. I mean, the ball always had an exit velocity, right? You just couldn't track it and it wasn't really reported. But yes, it is sometimes I think extraneous and maybe TMI, but also sometimes useful from a predictive standpoint. But I wanted to ask just because, you know, you mentioned maybe it's not great for your legacy

in terms of your personal contributions to have been nameless essentially, but it is great for your legacy, I guess, when you do disclose that, hey, I was at the Onion and I was the Editor-in-Chief of the Onion and also I wrote in my day, ballplayers were for shit, but that's because I think the Onion's reputation is still sterling. Now you might have a different and more informed perspective on this, but just as a casual onion appreciator, I frequently see the sentiment even today, the onion still got it, right? Yeah.

And the onion hasn't lost its fastball. And so there isn't that back in my day ism about the onion, which is interesting. No, I don't do that. Yeah, but no one does seemingly, right? I mean, you might get people pissed off about certain political stances, it's such, but in terms of the comedy, I think people feel like the onion despite having turnover, you mentioned Chad Knackers, who's been there forever, but, you know, ownership, migration, website changes, et cetera, but it still feels like the onion, like it hasn't lost the essence of itself

and that it is still funny and that it is still sort of perceptive in picking up on the ills of society and speaking truth to power, et cetera. And so I wonder why that is because it's not just in baseball that people will glorify earlier eras, but it's not just in baseball that people will glorify earlier eras, but it's in comedy too, right? The famous example of SNL and everyone's favorite SNL staff is when they were 12 or whatever, right? And so why is it that the onion is almost immune to that?

You know, when I put out a call for what are your favorite baseball articles from the onion and they spanned decades. Now maybe that's- That's fantastic. Yeah, maybe that's because people of different ages were responding, but I think it's also because the onion has been churning out quality work for so long. Well, I think the facelessness does help with that. So you don't ever ascribe,

you don't think in terms of errors as much because you don't think, well, this person's gone. We don't give you as much to go on. You know, people like to project their own feelings onto that type of thing and say, well, so it was better when, you can't say it was better when so-and-so was there because you have no idea who was there and you have no idea who's there now. So I think that facelessness does kind of help

reduce the amount of, you know of favoritism or bias. And then we also just kind of had a, like a lot of things, there's just a system. I think I certainly, when I was there, tried to really implement a quality control system. And a lot of that comes down to quantity makes quality. When I first got there, the people were bringing in 10 headlines to a meeting

and I said, well, let's get 50. A lot of that I'm sure still is probably in place today, along with other things they've added over the years. But there's just always been a focus on how do we maintain the quality. And some of it is like not probably changed. That's changed. But let's not have too many articles. I always had this kind of philosophy, better to have if I present you with five hysterical things versus someone else presents you with seven hysterical things and three not hysterical things, they've presented you with twice as many things and two more that are hysterical, yet the impression you leave is with it's less, it's more uneven. So people just don't care. You know, no one really cares that there were only six episodes of Fawlty Towers, right?

Or no one ever critis-, it's just not a-, it's not-, or, you know, I guess the baseball example would be Sandy Koufax. You know, no one, he only-, he was incredible, but it was only for six seasons and everyone just kind of projects. You project excellence, you just presume, well, it's going to keep being excellent. I think we just kind of have a system there in place that at least the attempt is to, I think, ensure stability and consistency. We didn't even know in the early days that it would last, you know? It felt like it wasn't clear. I mean, in the very, very early days, you know, you're making up fake headlines

and you're thinking, well, this is a format that could last because you're just plugging, as long as you're constantly plugging new things into that fake headline formula, it should stay fresh. But at the same time time we were like, well, maybe this gimmick will wear itself out. After 500 headlines, maybe people are going to start getting bored of fake news. Yeah, we know what the onion's going to say about this. Instead, that format has really endured. I don't know that I could have told you in 1995 that 30 years on, you could still just plug fresh shit into, or that they wouldn't run out of things to joke about. I mean, there's always

something new, but you feel like, well, it's going to be, we're going to eventually cover everything. But then a new politician comes along and suddenly there's a hundred more things to say about that. Right. So yeah, I mean as long as- Screwing up societally in the same ways over and over again, and then you can keep rerunning the no way to prevent this says only nation where this regularly happens headline over and over because it's still just as applicable. That old tragic classic. So yeah, I'm thrilled that it's endured and it's kind of gone. It's kind of become

a beloved institution while still, usually when you enter the beloved institution phase of your life, there's an implication that you're not as, you're past your glory days, but you're, you know, now you just are kind of comfortably on autopilot as a respected institution, but you know, but the best stuff is behind you. And I'm happy that it doesn't seem to be that way with The Onion. I think it's probably got more readers than, probably got more readers than it ever has. Yeah, and it's particularly striking in this environment where you constantly hear comedians

complaining about, oh, we can't make jokes anymore, which I think is usually overblown. There is perhaps a small kernel of truth to it at times, but the whole I can't be funny without getting canceled kind of stock rant is pretty tired and mostly inaccurate, I think. And yet, you could imagine hyper partisan times, a lot of online sensitivity, maybe the onion wades into territory where suddenly everyone will turn on it. And maybe that happens from time to time, but it's not necessarily that it's moderated its tone. I mean, you still come across onion stories and headlines where you go, ooh, can you still get away with that?

Yeah. But I guess it's partly that the onion in the terminology of today, I guess, typically punches up, right? And that's a part of it. And so you're picking targets that I guess everyone agrees you can go after. Now there are some stories I imagine from the past of the onion that you might not see in the modern day onion, just to name one baseball example, like people will often cite if you look up collections of the best baseball onion articles, which I will link to on our show page, like there's one that's just a headline that's just Newswire special Olympics T-ball stand pitches perfect game. Oh yeah, that was from my era.

Would that run now? That was a one-liner, no article. Exactly, right. Would that run now as a one-liner? No article. Exactly. Right. You know, would that run now? I think so. Maybe, maybe it still would because it's even more of like shocking and transgressive and therefore perhaps too many funny, right? You're not singling out. Yeah. I mean, it's Special Olympics, but you're not making fun of any, you're not putting a face to it or anything. I think we, I think we think we would still do that today. I think that's a very funny headline. Now the 2013 headline, little e-picture just getting fucking shelled, I think that's age just fine. But I wonder what kind of debates go on and whether there would be more consideration

for is this fitting. But regardless of the process, I think it still regularly produces really funny stuff. Funny covers a lot of sins, you know? If it's funny, you don't want to do something indefensible or cruel, but you know, if it's funny, every now and then. I think South Park probably has similar rules. I've always felt sort of a kinship with South Park. They always try to find kind of a surprising angle on things and they're not afraid to be offensive or offend people. But I don't think that they're, I think they have a soul and a certain moral center, even though it doesn't always seem that way. Well, usually the baseball pieces specifically are not going to run a foul of anyone's sensibilities for the most part, but you never know. Are there any baseball or sports stories that you do recall or would single out as you like this one or is it all just a blur?

From my years there? I guess from your years or if there's some other favorite. Not technically a baseball story, but we did a story that I was really proud of, a cover story about, it was at the time where every new team, every team wanted a new stadium. Still the case, yes. Right. We need a new state of the art.

If we're going to be competitive in this league, we need a new retractable dome state of the art thing, downtown ballpark kind of thing. We did an article about the US government kind of saying we need a new, the Capitol building is 200 years old now, we need a new retractable, we need a new state of the art retractable domed Capitol building if we're going to compete with the top countries of the world and stay competitive. It was just a very straight juxtaposition. We took co-opting of the sports stadium language.

I think it was even designed by that, I think in the article, that Kansas City architect HOK, the Kansas City firm that was doing Camden Yards and all the new parks at the time. So that article I thought was really funny. And as a bonus, always the best part is when it gets mistaken for the truth. The Chinese government, no less than the Chinese, it was reprinted in the South China, what is it called? The South China Morning Post. It's one of the major newspapers in China.

I think it's Hong Kong. Reprinted that article and cited it as like an example of the decline in the United States. They completely fell for it. And so this is a sign. I'm sure you get used to that if you're at the Onion People, not getting the joke. But it's especially nice when it's the government of the largest country on earth. And they refuse to issue a retraction. You know, they said this is more, this is symptomatic of, you know, the American, how it was, it was a telling sign of the state of US journalism, how shoddy kind of thing. That was a really proud moment. Something like that, I consider kind of a, that's a sport story.

I'm sure we did, I got him like dating myself, I'm sure we did some of a Cal Ripken when he, I think when he broke his, the Lou Gehrig streak, we did something, but I'm just blanking on all the headlines. 06. 2006, Cal Ripken Jr. moves into eight billionth place on consecutive games not played list. Then we've got voters deny Cal Ripken entrance into Hall of Fame. He just wasn't very good. That was 2007.

Wow, we've done three. That means we've done three Cal Ripken jokes at least. Yeah, probably. Well, he was a famous figure at the time, I guess. Ted, you know, I didn't realize we had such a body of baseball. If you'd asked me how many baseball headlines we'd run over the years, I didn't think- Oh, yeah. I mean, there are seemingly like hundreds of them, right?

It definitely ramped up after I left because of Onion Sports, which was great. And I almost am jealous because I could have just the idea of making random jokes about on carpet ice. Oh shit, it's my wife. It does seem maybe they're a little less likely to feature a particular player now as opposed to just sort of spoofing the sport. And maybe that speaks to the lack of name recognition of your average baseball player today or even your star baseball player for that matter. So you might still get a Shohi Otani or an Aaron Judge centric piece, but mostly it's going to be kind of a big picture baseball

potentially a team or a broadcaster sort of thing, which I imagine might differ when you're talking about other sports that produce celebrities in a way that MLB doesn't so much these days. Yeah. It's kind of, why doesn't it produce celebrities like it used to? Oh gosh, that would be probably a multi-part podcast series. But I guess the general belief is that, well, it's a very regional game these days. So if you add up all the people who watch baseball

on a nightly basis, it's still huge, but it's not on a national level. It's just kind of fragmented where football games are all nationally broadcast and you're aware of what the other teams are doing. And there are only so many games in the season, right? So you can actually pay attention to that as opposed to the 2430 regular season

Major League Baseball games in a given year. And so you watch your team and maybe you're a little less likely to pay attention to other teams and know those names and between that and oh gosh, I mean, many other factors. Yeah. This is another like back in my day thing. I mean, you know, people have charted how people have been lamenting the decline of baseball since like 1870, you know? So like that's a refrain that never ends. And again, baseball is far from dying and is quite healthy in a lot of ways. But also there certainly is some change since a century ago, when as you were saying, it was one of the leading forms of entertainment and sports. So like, like who would be the football equivalent of Bobby Witt Jr. like Bobby Witt Jr. young, like young superstar, right? Yeah, whoever it is,

who's the bigger Bobby Witt Jr. Yeah, like he's got almost no name recognition, right amongst the, you know, the 50th most famous football player, probably is CD Lamb. Yeah. And many more people know him than Bobby Wood Jr. It's partly just that there are so many things competing for our time and entertainment and money and so it's hard for anything to be as dominant except for football, which is the exception. It's the behemoth. Basketball, I don't know, I can't help but think baseball's doing something wrong. You would not be alone in thinking that, yeah.

You'd not be the first to criticize Major League Baseball. When you hear about them, it's like, oh, the uniforms, the stupid uniform thing this year. Or a lot of it is just that reputation for baseball being hidebound and back in my day and the glory years and the golden era and all of that, which again, I guess brings us back to your piece. But there is a reputation, I think, that baseball is kind of a traditionalist and a little regressive.

And that's changed a bit with some of the new rules and the pitch clock, et cetera, but it's had to kind of overcome that sense of stochiness. Well, yeah, in some ways, definitely fewer black players, African American players, but increasing international presence or at least a very prominent international presence. Dominican and... Right. Yes. But not a lot of black players.

No, and that goes hand in hand with baseball being for the elites and it being very expensive to play and travel ball and professionalization of youth sports and you need a lot of equipment and coaching and training and a field and gloves and bats and it's not just you pick up a ball and you have a basket or you toss a football on a field, right? There's just a little more that you need to do to prepare to play baseball and that prices people out, unfortunately. So yeah, there's a long list of ills. There are also a lot of great things about baseball and prime among them is that the

players are actually better than they ever were. So just trying to tie it back to that thesis that you pursued almost 25 years ago. So even though you were anonymous then, you're not now. Oh, thanks. And you finally come forward and shown the courageousness to put your name on this piece. You make it like I'm moving like... Not trying to duck responsibility for this classic column anymore. I'm not hiding anymore. Yeah. People can put it on your Wikipedia page along with everything else that you were responsible

for back in my day. I love this. I love this. Ball players were for shit. Yeah. Well, back in my day and also in this day, Onion writers were the shit, including Robert Siegel who produced one classic piece that is very dear to my heart, but many, many more that we may not associate with him

and he may not even associate with him. But thank you for coming on and reminiscing nonetheless. Oh my goodness, such a pleasure, thank you. All right, well, thanks again to Robert for joining me. I know Americans trust in the government and media and their fellow citizens has been in steady decline, but it does seem like the onion is still a respected institution.

As the onion itself proclaimed in a 2013 story, new study finds the Onion has never been more popular, more beloved, or more respected. Possibly still as true today as it was then. And check out some of Rob's other work, his better known work than In My Day Ballplayers Were for Shit, in addition to the movies he's written and or directed. He also created Hulu's Pam and Tommy mini-series which aired in 2022 and its Welcome to Chip and Tommy mini-series which aired in 2022, and its Welcome to Chip and Dale series, both of which were quite well received. So thanks to a busy working writer for taking the time to indulge my interest in the distant past. If you have a favorite Onion baseball article or sports piece from the distant past or the

more recent past, feel free to write in, let us know. This would not be among my favorites, but the Onion was added again after Shohei Otani hit his 50th home run with a News in Photos item. Just a headline, a photo, no story. Otani cashes in 50 home run futures bet ticket. Well at least that reaffirms that Otani is big enough for the onion to poke fun at him. A few follow ups. Recently we talked about injuries suffered during ceremonial first pitches.

We got an email with this subject line, Torn Achilles heel during a ceremonial first pitch from the KBO. The message reads Hi I'm Hyewon, a Die Hard Dodgers fan from Korea. I was listening to episode 2215 and came across the ceremonial first pitch injuries part. I'm not a KBO fan, I only watch MLB really so I don't get to hear much about what's happening there, but recently I heard how a comedian slash YouTuber injured himself tore his Achilles heel during his pitch. Any links to the clip, which I will include on the show page? It seems he was trying to do an homage to another ceremonial pitch where the celebrity ran from the dugout to the mound.

On his way up, he got injured and painfully pitched through it. He's going through rehab now and looking to make an injury-free first pitch. I believe this was the Korean comedian BDNS, who has a million and a half subscribers on YouTube. I think he was attempting to throw out a first pitch for the LG Twins, and he didn't make it to the mound unscathed, though he was wearing a snappy jacket that said Achilles on it after the injury. Thanks for flagging that, he won, though that's not the typical ceremonial first pitch.

Also we got two more player predictions, well probably we got many more, but these are the ones we heard about. Jackson Churio, who had called a grand slam that he hit earlier this month before anyone was on base. Well, this time he called his 20th home run, the one that propelled him into the 2020 club and made him the youngest member. He called his home run pregame to Ballysports Wisconsin reporter Sophia Minnert. After celebrating with his teammates in the Milwaukee dugout, Churio pointed at Minnert, Teo Dihe he said, meaning I told you.

And another 20 year old was up to the same trick. Jackson Holliday claims that he predicted Anthony Santander's walk off homer for the Orioles on Thursday, quote, I told O'Hern I thought he was going to hit a homer. I know kind of how he thinks and kind of his approach, and I thought he was going to hit a slider for a homer and I mean it was pretty amazing that he did. Can't say I'm amazed by either of these predictions. And Churio clearly is just a prolific predictor of his own home runs. I doubt he has a perfect record. It's the exuberance and confidence of youth. But no. That don't impress me much.

Oh and hey I've been meaning to mention this just for the stat blast completists and youth, but no. That don't impress me much. Oh and hey, I've been meaning to mention this just for the stat blast completists and major math heads out there. Math heads, I said. Math. Frequent stat blast correspondent Ryan Nelson did a stat blast on episode 2217 about the most consistent starters in terms of the length of their starts, and he used standard deviation, which I had suggested, and which worked fine, but listener Ron Trell on Twitter asked what that list would look like if instead

he used the coefficient of variation, which is another measure of the way that data points are dispersed around the mean, but it's the ratio of the standard deviation to the mean. It's good when you want to compare the degree of variation from one data set to another, even if the means are drastically different. I'll link to Ryan's tweet in response, in which he screenshotted some leaderboards. He noted that this doesn't change the overall leaderboard that much, but it does work as a pretty reliable Ryan Stanek filter, so it helps with eliminating the openers.

Mike Lynch and Vic Willis still on top, but it does ever so slightly switch up the 21st century leaderboard, first by pushing everyone down the list, so 2019 Clayton Kershaw drops from 11th all time to 31st, and giving us a new 21st century number one, 2010 Brett Myers of the Astros, who made 33 starts, never went less than 5 and 2 thirds. A lot of 6 and 7 innings outings for him that year. Finish 10th in Cy Young voting, the more you know. As I mentioned, this is a bonus episode, so this is not the end of this Effectively Wild week. I'll be back to Taco Tani and much more soon.

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We'll be back with one more episode before the end of the week. Talk to you then. Romantic, pedantic and hypothetical, semantic and frantic, real or theoretical. They give you the stats and they give you the news. It's a baseball podcast you should choose. Effectively Wild is here for you. About all the weird stuff that players do.

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