Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 2319: Going By the Book

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

It’s a baseball-book bonanza! Ben Lindbergh rounds up the authors of three new baseball books for conversations about their work and our relationships with the past. First he talks to John W. Miller about his biography of Earl Weaver, The Last Manager, Weaver’s wiring and sabermetric intuition, and the diminished role and reputation of managers. […]

Hello and welcome to episode 2319 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from FanGraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer. Meg Raleigh of FanGraphs is on vacation, and so, as I was last episode, I will be joined today by three guests. By the way, two of our guests last time were fans of collectively four teams, the Braves, Orioles, Rockies, and White Sox.

All four of those teams lost on the day that episode was posted appropriately. They are a combined one and eight since those conversations. So mostly things not really looking up. Though the White Sox, I guess, got a win on Thursday when a new pope was announced. The first American pope, Robert Francis Provost, AKA Leo XIV, he's from Chicago.

And so naturally the first question on everyone's mind was, well, is he a White Sox fan or a Cubs fan? He's from Chicago, and so naturally the first question on everyone's mind was, well, is he a White Sox fan or a Cubs fan? He's from the South Side, and yet initial reporting suggested that he was a Cubs fan, which would have been a bad beat for the White Sox, and then subsequent reporting suggested that no, this was fake news. He may have been born to a Cubs fan and a Cardinals fan, amusingly, but he is in fact a White Sox fan. The Chicago Sun-Times dug up a photo of him wearing White Sox gear at the 2005 World Series. So the White Sox may have been blown out

10 to nothing against the Royals on Thursday, but at least they have a Holy Father. And I have a not so holy Trinity of podcast guests today. The ghost of Effectively Wild Past, the ghost of Effectively Wild Present, and the ghost of Effectively Wild yet to come. No, not quite. I'm doing a baseball book roundup.

Now, some of you remember that when Meg went away a few years ago, I did four book interviews in one episode, episode 1876, which I believe is still the longest episode of Effectively Wilde other than the 10th anniversary show. So this time I've exercised some slight restraint and have invited only three authors on, so I'll be talking first to John W. Miller about his biography of Earl Weaver, The Last Manager. Then I'll be talking to Will Bardenwerper about his book, Homestand,

which was plugged by last week's Patreon guest. And finally, I will be welcoming on one of our own effectively wild listener and Patreon supporter, Jacob MacArthur Mooney, to discuss his excellent new novel, The Northern, which I was happy to blurb. And this wasn't intentional, but there turned out to be a theme to these three books

and these three interviews, because they're all to some extent about the past and what has changed and what we've lost and is something essential slipping away? Or are we wearing rose colored glasses and making too much of bygone days? There are a lot of commonalities that will come up in these conversations. So let's get to them and roll right in of bygone days. There are a lot of commonalities that will come up in these conversations.

So let's get to them and roll right in to our first segment. Effectively Wild newly released baseball book club is in session. Effectively wild. Effectively wild. Effectively wild. effectively wild.

Okay, I am joined now by John W. Miller, rejoined for the first time in a few years, I should say, because he is now a biographer, a baseball biographer. He has written The Last Manager, How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball, which I'm holding in my hands. No one can see that, but I assure you it's true. Here's some book sounds so you know. John, hello.

Congrats on the success of the book. Hi Ben. Thanks. Great to be here. So, The Last Manager has been described as the first major biography of Earl Weaver. There was a biography by Terry Pluto who had co-authored a book with Earl while he was still managing. So this was decades ago and yours is a deeper retrospective look. And I'm curious about why it took this long. Because it seems like

there was some pent up demand here. This book became a best seller even without the effectively wild bump, which is a testament to your work, but also the interest in the subject. And I always think to myself that there is no one in baseball who has not been biographied. It seems to me that many more obscure figures than Earl Weaver have had multiple, several biographies. So why didn't someone or many someones beat you to this topic? That's a great question, because I'm not a baseball beat writer. I'm not really in the constellation of people

who cover Major League Baseball. Terry Pluto, by the way, was the ghostwriter for the Weaver on strategy book. And there's two other books, Winning, which is a memoir slash strategy book from the seventies. And then Proper Autobiography, it's what you learn after you know it all that counts.

Ghost written with Barry Steinbeck. So that's four books actually, but they were all done before Earl Weaver retired. And then, you know, his legacy has only grown the light of Moneyball. He's in the book Moneyball, he's in the Schwartz book, the numbers game about the history of baseball,

numbers in baseball. And I don't have a good answer to that question. I thought somebody would beat me to it. I mean, you had magazine profiles. Tom Verducci had one where he called Roweever the Copernicus of baseball. So his legend, his shadow, if you will, was always there. I happened upon it because I was covering

the steel industry for the Wall Street Journal in Pittsburgh But they knew on the sports desk of the Wall Street Journal that I was obsessed with a Roe Weaver And so when he died in 2013, they said well, why don't you write his obituary? And now as I was writing it, I had the same thought you did I thought you know Why has nobody looked at his legacy looked at where he came from what his origin story really was You know It was the kind of of the perspective of his retirement

and then death. And so he had to sat there for years and years and I, after leaving the journal and making a film and had another project in me, thought to try this one. And I was kind of curious about why he hadn't been valorized even more. I mean, he has by sapermetric thinkers who look at him as a real innovator. And yet,

why does Billy Beane get a book and a movie? Why the A's? Why Beane and DePodesta? If Earl is out there decades earlier and is saying some of the same things about on base percentage, then why is there no major motion picture made about that? Is it that he was doing it based on intuition and a little legwork that was feasible at the time? Is it just more, I don't know, does it lend itself more to, well, I guess a business book, Michael Lewis comes along and sees the business parallel there, but really it could have been Earl Ball all along.

I think it's because he has all these other facets. I mean, he was a horrible alcoholic, which makes him kind of a difficult person as a human being to wrestle with. He was kind of a cartoon character in his fights with umpires. I mean, that's how he's known to a younger generation of fans. And you know, baseball nerds like us might know his role. But I think for most of baseball fandom under 40, he's kind of been forgotten in some ways, except for, again, the cartoon aspect of

him going out and telling the umpire, you're here for one reason. And so the more complicated and his role in using information, I mean, he was the first manager to use a radar gun, which is a huge deal, as well as the first manager to keep picture, batter, and matchup data available in the dugout to make in-game decisions. And he is credited in the Schwartz book and in Moneyball. And I don't have a great answer to why nobody jumped on this 15, 20 years ago or made a film about him because he is a larger than life character,

not just as a strategist, but I say he's comparable to Babe Ruth and Yogi Bear and Pedro Martinez for his repartee and the comedic aspect that he brought to Major League Baseball. I was gonna ask whether having those four books is a boon to you as a biographer or whether it's a drawback in some ways, I guess

maybe he sort of stole your thunder. Maybe that's why there hadn't been more biographies, because he wrote or co-wrote the Earl Weaver story himself. So did he take some of the material that you might have been the first to or does he perhaps present a biased perspective at times that's tough to untangle or is it just a pure good to have that primary source to rely on insight? I think you actually hit on the answer to your question. I think that people thought his story had already been told and four books is a lot of books

and they were pretty interesting and good. I mean, I read the, it's what you learned after you know all the counts when I was a little boy. And that fascinated me. I found his voice just like really different, really complicated, interesting, funny, deeper than most baseball voices, the way he thought about things. And of course, I then fell in love with the story further by reading Tom Boswell and Roger Angel writing about Earl, because your writers loved Earl. But for me, it's a total boon.

I mean, it's really a rich field to exploit because of digital archives, making local newspapers available to anybody with an Internet connection and a credit card. So for example, in Earl's memoir, he talks about his favorite uncle, Uncle Bud, and he sort of offhandedly says, Uncle Bud was a bookie,

and he took me to baseball games all the you know, Uncle Bud was a bookie and he took me to baseball games all the time. So then it takes me a few minutes to find out that Uncle Bud is a low level kind of mafioso who is running illegal baseball gambling operations. He's a bad person. He gets drunk, he shoots his wife in the hip. His first wife died at home of a gas overdose

that he reported as a suicide. This is a dark, violent, angry type character who Earl is calling his favorite uncle and is saying, this guy took me to 100 baseball games a year. Then you can look at the time Earl spent in these little towns throughout the Midwest and the South and the minor leagues and find a bunch of stories about him, without having to travel to all these towns. He's always giving you little clues. I got drunk in this town and got into

this fight and you can find out what actually happened through newspaper coverage. I thought it was for a rookie biographer like me, it was luck really to have all that material that I've been reading my whole life basically, and to be able to chase it up with modern technology. I traveled a lot. I went to St. Louis and Atlanta, or in the South, little towns in Georgia where he was

playing baseball in the late 50s and 60s, now Myra in New York, in Rochester, all these places in Baltimore, in Florida. So I went to all these places using my reporter training, but also learned how to be a historian through taking his raw material and then using archives to go deeper. One of the things you write about is that he had a deep understanding of himself, which is not to say that he was at peace or was well adjusted necessarily, but he did understand who he was.

And I wonder whether that was reflected in the books that you read of his. Was he a truthful teller of his own story? Because sometimes people have their own personal perspective on things that may or may not match the objective reality. And then there's always the, you know, especially before baseball reference and retro sheet, all sorts of inaccuracies and details that aren't quite right. So did you fact check him and find him to be wanting or generally quite accurate? Mixed bag. I mean, he glossed over the, the darkness and the violence of his youth. I mean, in one interview in the eighties, he says, well, uh, he says, a psychiatrist friend

said that the reason I'm so combative is that Uncle Bud was always kind of messing with me, which to me kind of hints at some kind of physical abuse, which he does not kind of talk about openly. And the alcoholism is not never really addressed in his writings. There is a kind of like narrative of failure and deep disappointment and depression that he writes about pretty honestly and accurately, which again is part of the number of clues that Earl Weaver kind of gave me. And he uses the word depressed and there's not that many athletes who will talk about I failed and I got really depressed as sort of their narrative.

So he's accurate in the kind of big arc of the story of failing as a player and then having this long purgatory in the minor leagues and emerging successful as a major league manager. But the details are often one great example is he was a pretty good player and he was team MVP three of the first four years in the minors, had a very good walk rate, good batting eye, good defense, was selected to play one major league spring training in 1952 and actually played quite well and may have merited a promotion to the major leagues and was kind of screwed out of a job by his own manager who wanted to be the backup infielder himself.

And he never talked about how successful that spring was and how good he was as a player, partly because I think he gave up after that and he threw in the towel and became a sort of problem employee for the Cardinals and they didn't want to help him after that because he was always drinking and fighting. So he's not honest about how promising he was and how he self-destructed after getting one bad break there. Yeah, as you cover in the book though, that's kind of a fascinating sliding doors scenario because he had excellent minor league stats up to that spring and he really tanked after

that after he didn't make the big league roster, which you note that another manager who comes up often on Effectively Wild, Eddie Stanky, demoted him essentially because he wanted to be the backup infielder, a player manager. And that was very demoralizing to Earl, who was looked on as a real legitimate prospect at that point. And as you note, given his physical limitations and tools and everything,

he probably wasn't a budding superstar one way or another, but if there had been a different decision, if he had made the opening day roster, who knows, right? Like maybe he manages to have a playing career and maybe he was wired in such a way that he would have become a manager anyway. And if anything, being a player in the big leagues helps you become a manager. But I wonder the timeline could have been different.

He could have ended up somewhere entirely different. It might not have been the Orioles. He might not have had the charmed career that he had, which was partly his own doing, but also partly the players who were in place at that time. So I'd love to know the alternate history of Earl Weaver, big leaguer. It's a great question.

And I'll put his story so relatable. I mean, I went to play college baseball and got into four games and got very depressed myself. Anybody who's played sports has reached that moment of the highest level they can get to and then they fail. That story, I found it very human and made him very vulnerable, I think, for me and for the reader too. He's such a great, lovable, underdog character where he falls flat on his face and then he's always striving and never quite making it, never quite getting the recognition and respect that he wants until the very end. And I write, he was a great talent evaluator because he knew the

bar between major and minor league talent because he was the bar. And one thing I think too that story illustrates is the way that Major League Baseball was run as a business back then. They only invited 40 people to spring, 40 men to spring training and they kept you know whatever 25 and the rosters were a lot less flexible. They weren't just shipping guys in and out and having like a minor league camp down the road. The minor league camp was you know way off somewhere else in the south. It was a lot more binary. He was on the major league team, he thought he was going to make it, and then he was gone.

As opposed to he's in major league camp for 10 days and they put him in minor league camp down the road and maybe there's a good shot at AAA next year. It wasn't that fluid. It was your up or down and he felt he he was down, and he sort of counted himself out after that. Some great managers who were also quotable and characters, that tends to make them underestimated. Casey Stengel, for instance, before he showed up with the Yankees and was suddenly winning the World Series every year, and then people realized, oh, he's the professor, he's clever

underneath the word salad and the Malapropisms. But Earl doesn't seem to have been really underestimated as a manager. I mean, he was a great quote, but in a more thoughtful and less silly way, I suppose, just in an incisive sense. And he was angry. And I guess that kind of became a large part of his reputation. But his teams were just so successful, he didn't really have a period where he was losing before he broke through. And so I guess it was hard to write him off. Was there ever a period where people failed to recognize his managerial genius?

There was a time when they thought maybe he was too big of a problem because of his drinking and his fighting, that they would have to keep him away from the limelight when he was with the Orioles. But he just kept winning. I mean, the record is extraordinary. It's one losing season in Fitzgerald, Georgia in 57, and then 26 winning seasons in a row, and then one losing season in 1986 with the Orioles, and then he quits for good. So basically it's 26 uninterrupted winning seasons and in the 70s they thought about firing him because he would pass out in the clubhouse and he really was like a big problem alcoholic but he was so successful and I mean that's the reason the book is possible at all too is because he was such a great winner. I mean he still has

the highest winning percentage since 69 of any manager with over a thousand wins, although Dave Roberts will pass him when he gets to a thousand wins. So he's still arguably the greatest manager of the modern era. His team in 69 and 70 is still the only team to win 108 games or more in back-to-back seasons. He won 100 games his first three years in the major leagues. The Orioles won five of the first six American League East titles right after Earl took over. So for a rookie manager, he was 37 when he got to the major leagues. He won right away and never stopped winning.

So you're right. I mean, but they made fun of his appearance, you know, and when he first came up in 68, Dick Young wrote him, he doesn't look like a baseball manager. He looks like a basketball, not a basketball player, a basketball, you know, because he was short and kind of round. And there was always like a kind of comedic joke going on, but it was never overshadowed by his genius. And they use that word a lot, genius. And he was respected as a winner.

But he was also so much of a problematic person to deal with that you always had to contend with that too. And that was always the risk for him was that he would go too far and there would be some, you know, he once pushed a reporter hoping the guy would push him back so he could punch him. This was in the early 70s. And so he would do things like that. And there was always kind of a permanent crisis around him,

but he never did go so far that they would unequivocally have to get rid of him. People sometimes suggest that Bobby Cox, the all time ejections leader, that there was a tactical aspect to that, that he was really riding umpires to kind of cow them to try to get more favorable calls for his team. Was there any element of strategy to Earl's harassability?

Was he trying to intimidate umpires? Or was it purely just a manifestation of that darkness? It was all the above. I mean, he sometimes would nudge the other coach on the shoulder next to him on the bench and say, you know, watch this. And so he knew he was performing.

Umpires said that he would get, he'd be more animated at home because he knew that certain moves would get the crowd riled up and he would do it more often when the team was struggling. So that suggests there was a strategic part to it. He himself said it was all those things.

It was to entertain the fans. It was to motivate his team to show that he cared, which is really the essence of his leadership, was this deep seriousness which he injected baseball games with making his players care by showing that he was so invested in their success. But there also, I mean, there was this violence, this anger. When he says to the umpire,

I'm going to knock you right on your nose. That's the violence of his upbringing coming up. He expressed regret after he retired for his behavior and wished he had been not so volatile. But once it became part of his identity, his players expected it, his behavior and wished he had been not so volatile. But once it became part of his identity, his players expected it, and he kind of diffused the tension around playing professional sports.

I mean, players said it would be funny or fun. Earl went out there, they would take bets on what inning he would get thrown out. It was part of the Orioles' DNA, which was successful. So once it was successful, he kept doing it, players expected it, and so he kind of had to keep on going. So as best as we can figure, what was it exactly that enabled him to be so ahead of his time and to have these insights that really didn't take hold until all sorts of

technological tools were widely available? I mean he had a strategic sense that came from his upbringing as a street hustler gambling culture, where he'd go to games with his uncle. He knew what to look for in making an assessment of risk, of probability. He didn't go to college. When I started my reporting process, I called his daughter and I said, I'd like to do this book about Earl Weaver,

and I'm curious about where his ideas came from. I wonder if he had any books about statistics or anything like that when you were growing up. She said, honey, no, we didn't have any books. He read the paper. He was literate and cultured in a way of working class people in the 20th century. He'd read the daily newspaper,

but he was not sophisticated in terms of his mathematical education. But he had the sense of odds, odds making that came from his upbringing, the sense of decision making based on learning about probability and learning about possible outcomes. And so he had these managers in the miners who sometimes would collect data on how certain pitchers fared against other batters and vice versa. And when he got to the major leagues, one of the first things he did was ask the Orioles

for an office to give him a list of all the statistics of his hitters against opposing pitchers and his pitchers against opposing hitters. And then just use that in a very rudimentary way. I mean, now I think we'd say the sample sizes weren't large enough, but to have any information at all, I mean, I think it's partly a reflection of how backwards baseball was back then

when you'd have a guy hitting 220 leading off because he was fast, or a middle infielder hitting second because middle infielders are supposed to hit second. So there were all these kinds of customs that were entrenched in baseball culture. And then Ken Singleton told me he got to the Orioles in 1975 and he was shocked because the first thing Earl said was, you're going to hit leadoff.

Ken said, well, I'm slow. I'm really slow. You're crazy. Earl said, no, you have a 400 on base average. I don't care if you're slow. You're going to bat leadoff. For Earl, that was just kind of a common sense thing to do, but it was revolutionary. So I think the answer to your question is just the kind of practical street smarts and having the courage to say, I don't care what this looks like, I'm going to bat a slow bat or lead off and have that kind

of the edge that he was looking for. And again, being willing to implement it and what we now call like beginner's mindset or growth mindset, I think is the most inspiring part of the Earl story that he really did hang a sign in the clubhouse that said, it's what you learn after you know it all that counts. It's very Ted Lasso-esque, very kind of new agey in this kind of openness. And then Tom Boswell, he wrote to me,

his favorite Earl saying was, everything changes everything. So on one hand you have like this this coarse, vulgar, brute guy. On the other hand, the same person is preaching openness to new ideas, openness to growth, to changing the way things are. That makes him a great character and a great leader and a great innovator, so that when the radar gun comes along, he's the one raising his hand and saying, sure, I'll try that.

Yeah, not so much Ted Lasso temperamentally in other respects, but in that one way, yeah. It actually amazes me that he walked away when he did, because he has this incredible run, and then he retires after 16 seasons when he's just 51 years old. And then he did have this brief comeback in the mid 80s that didn't go so well.

And he was kind of doing it for the money and ultimately wished that he hadn't. But you'd think, I mean, given the passion that he had for the job, I guess that was a double edged sword because it made him so good. But then it made him so burned out that he just couldn't do it any longer.

But that seems so young to me now to walk away at 51 with that track record and to live another 30 plus years and not come back except for 85, 86. That's kind of incredible. Well, I think one thing you could do, Ben, is find a picture of Earl Weaver when you're the age that you are right now and compare the wrinkles, because he lived a hard, hard life and smoking three packs a day

and drinking four gin and tonics after every ball game and being in hotels six months a year. It does wear somebody down. And he was burned out. He said, the only thing I've cared about since I was four years old was baseball. And I find that part of the story inspiring and kind of wonderful that somebody didn't feel

they had to lie to themselves or to their audience about what was in their heart. And it was no longer in his heart to be a major league baseball manager. And so he quit. And there's this kind of the simplicity and elegance to that. And there was this beautiful send off, of course, when the Orioles fell short of winning the ALEs,

but the fans all stayed to end the 82 season and they gave him the standing ovation, even though he had lost. And Howard Cosell said it was one of the most incredible things he'd ever seen in sports. And it was kind of ruined by the comeback that was just for the money, as you said. And he had this great line about,

just once in his life, he would like to see the sun set, not behind the left field bleachers. And he gave this interview to the Washington Post, too, that I found where he says, you know, maybe professional sports is not really worth it. Like, you can't see your family the way you should, and I'm jealous of the people

who could see their kids on the weekends. And there's, again, that kind of thoughtfulness that would erupt from time to time, where you just kind of be, like Tom Boswell wrote, that he would be floored by Earl's self observations and his kind of truth telling about what life in the major leagues was like in a way that is fearless and that, you know, nowadays people really just tow the corporate line about how great it is to play major league baseball. But the cost of it, Earl was willing to talk about that too. And I think that makes him

an interesting character. So you write something to the effect of he made himself obsolete because he popularized these strategies that then were embraced by the sapermetric movement. And then that has led to a diminishment of the manager, at least when it comes to their power and authority. If we can do another alternate history scenario where Earl does not come along and preach the gospel of on base percentage and three run homers, et cetera, although he was very into pitching and defense too, which wasn't so much at least the defense parts, the money ball mantra.

But if we could just then snap him out of baseball history and sadly your biography as well, how would that change him out of baseball history and sadly your biography as well. How would that change the rest of the timeline? Would we still get the same data-driven baseball that we have today on the same timeline? Bill James was around, obviously, the technology, the data is going to come in one way or another, but would it have been even more slowly embraced or would we not even notice a difference? I mean, clearly you probably get to the same outcomes because Earl was an aggregator of ideas as opposed to thinking of all these things for himself. I mean, he would take ideas from other people.

That's how he thought about collecting data on batteries and pictures. And the Orioles' success certainly pointed the finger towards what was working as far as approaches. Bill James notes this in his early books, that the Weaver Orioles are a good example of how drawing a lot of walks can really help you and throwing strikes,

is a very good strategy. I think it's less interesting and less fun without Earl Weaver in the picture because he's such a unique character, and comes from such an interesting part of America and American history. I mean, 1930s St. Louis and the street wise guy culture is a fun part of American history and that's where he's from. And you definitely get the same people asking the same questions over time. I just think it's a lot less fun without Earl Weaver.

So you talk a lot about the romance of the manager. How can you not be romantic about managers? And it's right there in the title, The Last Manager, the idea that they don't make them like Earl anymore, that the game doesn't even allow a manager to have the influence that Earl Weaver wielded. So I have a few questions about that. First, do you think managers were always overrated? Did we always over valorize the manager? Because

it is true that a manager could really put their stamp on a team in a way that they can't today. And we do kind of lament just the lack of different strategies and approaches to the game just in general among teams, whoever's setting those strategies, but they did really have a way to say, I want this kind of player. Sometimes they could even have a hand in signing, recruiting those players. And then there could be different strategies that they would deploy. But perhaps we were always making too much of them just because they were very visible and often their stamp might not actually help the team.

Maybe it would hurt the team and they just look brilliant anyway because they were doing something that was visible. So do you think that there was kind of a correction in order when it came to valuing managers and devoting as much ink to managers as was historically done. I definitely do because in the 70s you'd read reports in the winter they'd say, you know,

Billy Martin's coming to town and that's going to change everything. And teams, the owners would think, you know, if I get the right manager, it's going to turn the sad sack team into a pendant winner. And once in a while that would happen. Billy Martin was a great manager. Hydra pitchers, he's going to run their arms into the ground, but for a year or two, it might be great. So a couple of famous examples, and the narrative was so compelling of, we have this new general, he's the greatest general in baseball, and he's going to change his team.

It wasn't really true. I mean, it really did depend more on the talent, more on the players. And Earl Weaver was the first one to say that, that when he got to the majors and they were so successful, he's like, well, my job is to sit here and say, come on, Frank, come on, Brooks, referring to Frank Robinson and Brooks Robinson.

But that's what made him great, is he knew what was about the players. And what's remarkable about his record is that he basically had three teams. I mean, they had the great super teams there around 69 to 72, 71. Then they had the pitching and defense squad that with players nobody's ever heard of today, like Rich Coggins and now Bumrey. And then the sort of more power driven team with Eddie Murray and Cal Ripken towards the end. and then this sort of more power driven team with Eddie Murray and Cal Ripken towards the end. And he won with all of them and he recognized that his job was to put them in the right places and let them play. And a lot of managers in his situation might try to overmanage, might try to say, you know, we have these players and they have to do it my way and if we want to bunt a lot,

they have to bunt a lot. I mean, Gene Mock famously kept on getting jobs even though he was not a winning manager, but he was seen as one of these great generals who had these great strategies that would lead a team to victory. And that wasn't true. And so I think recognizing the limits of the manager, I think that is a correction that was necessary.

But you've also lost the personality, kind of the fun of the drama of having this character on top who is beloved or bedeviled, depending on how the team's doing, and is willing to say outrageous things and act outrageously in a way that enhances the comedic and the spectacle of Major League Baseball. But at the end, nobody's really figured this out. John Thorne, the major league baseball historian, told me this is the last unanswered question of analyzing

baseball and nobody really knows what a difference a manager makes. I mean, look at the Orioles right now. They're in the toilet in the American League East and Brandon Hyde is on the hot seat, but how much has Brandon Hyde actually hurt the Orioles this year? There's no possible way to answer that question, right? Some pitching would have helped. And also more three-run homers and on base percentage and everything else. But you did make me realize as I was reading this,

because Earl has nicknames and managers don't have nicknames anymore, I realized. I mean, you just mentioned Jean Mock is the little general and John McGrath is the little Napoleon. And most Hall of Fame managers had nicknames. And I guess this goes hand in hand with just the lack of romance about managers. Now, I was trying to just see like, am I ignoring some amazing manager nickname? And I know there's kind of a conversation about maybe we've just lost the art of

baseball nicknaming in general, even when it comes to players. But you still got some great player nicknames, but manager nicknames just about extinct. I found this article from a few years ago about Philly's manager, Rob Thompson, and it's about how he has many nicknames. And I got excited like, okay, what are, what are his many nicknames going to be? And it's like, he's got 15 nicknames. And I've never been so disappointed because all of his nicknames are just variations of Thompson, basically. They're just like, is he Tomper? Is he Tombo?

Is he Tops? Is he Tums? Is he Topper? Okay. None of these is very interesting. So like, these are not the classic kind of, you know, journalistic, uh, lot of Tory nicknames that we're talking about. It used to be more fun in that regard. Yeah. I mean, Earl, they would,

they had nicknames for him that were so violent. It's hard to believe. Like they nicknamed him son of Sam after a serial, a serial killer from the seventies. Yeah. Ayatollah. Um, the ones he hated were the ones that made him sound short. So he, he hated Rooney after the Hollywood actor Mickey Rooney or Toulouse-Lautrec after the French painter. But yeah, I mean, that was part of the kind of the freedom, I think that writers had and that players and managers had

before everything got corporatized, immediate trained that you could call somebody something derogatory or funny and it might stick. And Earl definitely played into that and was part of that culture. I mean, I had a lot of fun just looking up nicknames for the book and just figuring out, if you were like a teetotaler, they'd call you like preacher or lady.

If you were short, it would be like pepper pepper or a string if you were tall, that kind of thing. But yeah, it's a good point about managers. I had not thought of that. Reece Hoskins said that sometimes he calls Thompson five nine. And I was thinking, wait, is that a hype thing? But no, Rob Thompson, he's listed at six foot at least. No, it's just his Jersey number. It's just so boring. So we got to bring back the good manager nickname maybe, but you do have managers now who will be hall of famers and who have accomplished resumes. You mentioned Dave Roberts, who will soon surpass Earl in one way.

And you have Bruce Bochy and you have Terry Francona. But I'm wondering if these guys will have biographies. Will anyone want to write the biography of Dave Roberts or will it just be kind of like, well, he worked very well with the front office and the Dodgers had all the superstars and to his credit, he kept them happy and all pulling in the same direction and he was the right manager for that team. But can you identify a specific Dave Roberts strategy? Like what is Robert's ball exactly? Managers don't have that so much anymore.

So I wonder whether the managerial biography will be a dying breed. Will this be the last manager biography? Didn't Dusty Baker smoke a joint with Jimi Hendrix? Dusty Baker, now that's a colorful breed. Will this be the last manager biography? Didn't Dusty Baker smoke a joint with Jimi Hendrix? Dusty Baker now, that's a colorful character. So yes, but you know, he's no longer active. So maybe he was the last really fascinating manager personality. So for the book, I interviewed a dozen current managers and I was fascinated by them as belonging to like a system where they

reminded me a lot of CEOs I covered at the Wall Street Journal. They were very polished. AJ Hinch could be a banker. These guys are really smart. They understand contract law and free agency rules and all these things. But Dave Roberts probably had the best quote summing up this current reality when he told me in the old days, a manager would say, it's my team,

and now we say, it's our team. Because they travel with 75, 80 people, trainers, agents are always around, different kinds of coaches, mental skills, all these different kinds of things that didn't exist before, when it was just 25 players, a manager and his five coaching buddies. And So I think the story now is more about the system they're in. I really enjoyed interviewing old ballplayers. I hope that what you're hinting at isn't entirely true that

the real juicy human stories are going to be harder to tell or can't be told anymore. I hope that's not true. I hope that people as they get older will fess up if you will and tell us the truth about what it's like to be in the major leagues and what the politics and jealousies and the juicy narratives are. Because if people are willing to share those stories with writers, then you still have books and you can still have manager books.

But when there's so much money involved and everybody's media trained, it's a lot hard to get to. Frankona is funny, to be clear. So I'd read a Terry Frankona biography just for the chapter about that concoction that he has in his bulging cheeks with just seeds and everything else stuck in there. It's just an abomination, but I'd like to read about it. He's a great character and a winner, clearly. He's one of the people I tried to talk to for the book

and I couldn't get to him, but he's a legitimate heir to Earl Weaver. And I think his dad played in the Oriole system in the 60s too. Yeah, and you note in the book that Earl Weaver, he paid attention to managers when he was a kid, and he would watch them and study them and emulate them. And of course, he wanted to be a player first and foremost and then pivoted to managing.

But still, the fact that a kid could just really look up to a Major League manager and say, that's what I want to be and have a little bit of hero worship or see a manager as an idol. I don't know that we will see that so much anymore now that managers are middle managers. Wouldn't you say though that the fantasy of being a manager is still alive and well and that's why, a big part of why we have, you know, fan graphs and fantasy baseball been? Yes, but I think it's to be a GM now or to be a Pobo, right? It's a general manager, not a manager. You want to be the moneyball person up in the suite, pulling the strings and signing

someone, I guess. You're not, you're not, you're not chewing tobacco and picking dirt on umpires. No. Yeah, probably not. So I do want to not over romanticize those things though, because I guess in some ways that Imperial manager, that tyrannical manager was kind of a product of a worst time in some ways. I mean, you'd have managers who were really kind

of having abusive relationships with players and really playing favorites and stymying players careers. And then you didn't have free agency. And so players didn't really have an option. They couldn't go anywhere else. And so they were just sort of stuck if they were in the dog house and you didn't have a union or a strong union that could protect players

and have their backs and everything. And so if a manager was inclined to be a tyrant then they could make a player's life pretty miserable. So in some ways, it's probably better that it's more of a collective thing now than it is just one guy with unchecked power to do whatever he wants. Absolutely.

Bobby Valentine told me he once got demoted because his manager didn't like the angle of his flip on a double play feed. Yeah. He was a shortstop and that was enough. The guy didn't like the angle of his flip on a double play feed. Yeah. He was a shortstop and that was enough. The guy didn't like it, he was gone. And you're right, I mean, there's a kind of totalitarian aspect to the old school where managers, I mean,

they could punch players and not have repercussions. I mean, Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson, you know, went at each other with their fists and then dug out. And that was not an isolated incident. I mean, it would happen pretty regularly that a player and a manager would get into a physical fight. Yes, we can welcome that those days are gone. Also, the casual alcoholism and

the difficulty of men talking about vulnerabilities and feelings, and how the only solution was to go to the bar and drink your face off if you felt anxiety. It's definitely a healthier universe that we're in right now. Although managers, I'm told, still do hit the bottle during losing streaks. And Earl Weaver, he never had a chance to evolve in a world where there might be a psychologist to talk to or a 12-step program that would be made available to him. And so he just kept on soldiering on in that world he came from and I think doing the best he could.

But yeah, the culture of Major League Baseball teams in that way definitely is a lot healthier today. And I guess the obvious question is, would he be a manager today or would he have become a manager today? And I guess there are multiple ways you could approach that. If you took the Earl Weaver of the seventies and said, do you want to manage given today's circumstances? Maybe he'd say no, thanks, unless you take the reins off and let me do whatever I want,

which probably wouldn't happen. Or if the same person were coming up in this environment, would he still gravitate toward being a manager given that you don't have the same potential to do what you want the way that he did? And you know, I guess with that not being available to you, would he just do it anyway, because this is the best available and on the margins, he'd still be able to make something of a difference? Or would it just not appeal to him anymore? Well, he'd have to get sober first. Yeah, hopefully. I think though that his character was geared for managing and there's two ways in which he would be a great manager today and which his qualities as a human being would still be very valuable to teams.

One is his sense of using information to help players, that he was a player who became a manager. He had a great sense of what would be helpful to actually help win baseball games, and that he would be a great triager of all the data coming out of front offices and figuring out, what are this mountain, this fountain hose of information?

What's the three pieces that are going to help a 22-year-old player who didn't go to college? What can I give him to give him an edge? And so I think that would be a valuable skill that managers still have to use, have to apply themselves to getting all this information and communicating it in effective ways to players. And then his leadership.

I mean, I think he communicated a sense of urgency about winning games that was contagious, that really helped his players play more intensely, play harder, and that nowadays would be very valuable, that there's a kind of a sense of, you know, letting players do their thing, but you know, every organization, every room does need a leader.

You need somebody who says, this is the way we're gonna do it. And it matters how we carry ourselves, how we go about this. And you have to be with that picture or you shouldn't be here. So I think his leadership would still be a really valuable quality. And I think his leadership would still be a really valuable quality

and I think would help win baseball games. Okay, I can't let you go without asking a question about Earl Weaver baseball just as a video game guy. So, Weaver on Strategy is a very influential book in the 80s, but Earl Weaver baseball, similarly influential in the video game environment. And you talk about how this came to be, and he had a kind of John Madden-esque impact on this game and didn't program it himself, obviously didn't even play it himself.

It's just sort of disappointing to me and also to the developers, it sounds like, who just tried to introduce it to him and he just wasn't into it. But he was very into the simulation aspect of it and imparting his knowledge, and that does really seem to have made a difference. This was not like they made the game and then had a licensing deal and he just slapped his name and image and likeness on it.

He really helped them build this thing and this game continues to be an influence. So for listeners, I mean, this is EA Sports and they made Madden football in the 90s, which made, you know, billions of dollars with a huge hit. But right before Madden football, they made Earl Weaver baseball and they wondered who the John Madden of baseball was and then they decided it was Earl Weaver. And they flew him out to California thinking they would have like a kind of cursory meeting and they would get his name on it. And he would be, you know, an advisor,

but not very important or influential in the creation of it. But it turned out that he was there to coach baseball, if you will. That he insisted on explaining how baseball worked, how bunt defenses worked, how cutoff plays worked. And he really wanted them to know everything that he knew and he wanted to earn his $50,000 check or whatever it was. And so they spent two days

in a classroom with Earl Weaver whiteboarding baseball for computer technicians, programmers, and obviously taking cigarette breaks every 90 minutes. So he'd go smoke a rally on the balcony. But he really wanted them to know exactly how baseball worked. And for example, he would tell them, you wanna have a fast guy in the seventh hole because then you can bun him over and then the top of the order can knock him in.

And they asked him if they could put a feature where Earl would kick dirt on the umpire. And initially he resisted, then he said, okay, they deserve it anyway. He refused to play it, but it was a massively important game because it was the first season-like sports simulation of its kind. The first that combined arcade play with strategy and numbers. They put an Ask Earl button in there. And Brian Stroh, who's the vice president at the Pirates, told me that was the one game his dad let him play as a kid because his dad told him, I know Earl Weaver is smart,

so this video game must be making you smarter when you play it. Well, the book is The Last Manager, How Earl Weaver Tricked Tormented and Reinvented Baseball. It will make you smarter to read it. It's author and my guest is John W. Miller. Thanks, John, it's been a pleasure.

Thanks Ben, it was a pleasure to talk baseball with you. Well, funnily enough, while John and I were talking, a managerial firing was announced. The Pirates parted ways with Derek Shelton and elevated his bench coach Don Kelly to the role for the rest of the season. That'll fix what ails him, I'm sure. Maybe Don Kelly will be a managerial genius.

Let's take a quick break and I'll be back with Will Bardenwerper to talk about his book, Home Stand, Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America. Ladies and gentlemen, we wanted to bring somebody special in to throw out the first pitch for our second season. Hey, boys, is it good to be back. Let's make some noise for your 2022,

Vartavia Muckdahl. Go Dahls. Well, entering 2021, Major League Baseball restructured, would be one way to put it, Minor League Baseball, downsized, contracted, subtracted from 160 to 120 teams. And this is a change that we've discussed a fair amount on Effectively Wild and have largely lamented

in the sense that we're in favor of there being more high level pro baseball and affiliated ball and greater access to baseball across the country. Seems like it's good for the brand, good for the sport. In fact, my cohost Meg, she did some Sabre Awards nominated research back in 2020 about how this would affect the minor league baseball map and how it would change people's access to baseball

at various levels and how far they'd have to go to get to a game, et cetera. But we did not fully commit to the bit and spend a summer watching minor league baseball or below minor league baseball, not quite professional, amateur ball in a town that had previously housed one of the teams that was removed in this culling by Rob Manfred and the other owners.

For that, we have to bring on Will Bardenwerper who did just that and wrote a book about it, which is out now. It's called, Home Stand Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America. Welcome Will. Thank you for having me.

My pleasure. So what inspired you to take that next step? I think a lot of us looked at this and thought, well, this isn't great. Unless you were an MLB owner or commissioner, I don't know why you'd be happy about it. Okay, rounding error, the balance sheets will be a little bit more balanced, great, happy for them.

But few people took the steps that you did or took it personally, I guess, even though you weren't personally affected. It wasn't like, you lived in a town that was losing one of these teams. So what was it that really struck a nerve with you here and made this seem sort of symbolic of larger issues that you had been bemoaning?

Sure, so I first caught wind of this in the fall, I guess, of 2019 when the rumors began to circulate that this is something MLB was considering doing. And at the time, I mean, I had played baseball from when I was as young as I can remember, all the way through two years of college. And I also, more recently at that point, had been doing quite a bit of reporting

from, I guess you could say, small town America. So I kind of just connected the dots of what I knew about baseball and what I had sort of grown to appreciate about some of these communities and concluded that this was just most likely not a great development for the 40 or so communities that were slated to lose their teams. And at the time, it looked as if there was going to, in fact, be one final summer, so to speak, of baseball before this contraction was enacted. As we all remember, that January, February of 2020

is when COVID emerged, and with it went that final summer. It was the first summer in the history of minor league baseball that was canceled in its entirety. And I guess we can discuss in a little bit if you'd like, you know, how this book actually came about, but that was, that was really the, the genesis of it was just this, just this kind of just innate sense that, that this just wasn't going to be great for, you know, a large chunk of, of, uh, of our country.

But also that you saw it as reflective of larger trends that you, you found a little bit disturbing, I suppose. One of the blurbs on the back of the book is by Robert Putnam of Bowling Alone fame. So there's this idea of alienation and we're all in our silos and it leads to polarization and it leads to loneliness. And so you seem to see this as reflective of larger trends.

I did, I mean, I think there's any number of them that are, that touch on the subject. And I had to be careful in the book not to go down too many of these rabbit holes for too long without losing the sort of the forward narrative momentum, because, you know, a lot of these topics are ones that could be written, you know, an entire book could be written about just that one element. But you're right. I mean, I saw this to an extent as a, like another manifestation of this sort of winner take all

economy where, you know, you have a handful of cities that have these massive payrolls and can afford to pay an individual player close to a billion dollars. And, you know, then you have these 40 communities who are going to lose their entire team to save essentially one, you know, minor league or one major league minimum salary or what some MLB superstars will earn in two or three games. And so that aspect of it seemed less than ideal

and kind of aligned to socioeconomic issues that have plagued some of these communities already. Like a lot of these were towns that hadn't necessarily been doing wonderfully for the last few decades. And this was kind of one of the few affordable, fun things they had left to bring people together. And now this was also, you know, being taken from them. So that, you know, that was one part of it. And then, you know, maybe even as or more importantly, was the fact that I saw these ballparks as civic assets, you know, serving a valuable cause of bringing people together in divided times when, you know, it seems as if people are kind of at each other's throats and it was nice to have a place where everyone can kind of put that aside and come together with their friends and their neighbors

and, you know, have kind of a healthy experience. And so again, it seemed like something that we should really be fighting to preserve, not getting rid of. So I was telling you before we started recording about my minor league or indie league experience a decade ago now, co-running the Sonoma Stompers and then co-writing a book about that.

And when I told most people that I was spending a summer in Sonoma, California, they thought that I had sort of pulled one over on the publisher, like, oh, you got a summer vacation in Sonoma. It didn't quite work out that way. We were very busy, but the surroundings were lush and there was lots of wine if you want that, but you went to Batavia, New York, which is not known as much of a tourist destination perhaps, but home to the Batavia Muck Dogs then and now,

who were once the Batavia Muck Dogs of the A-ball short season New York Penn League, now defunct. They were most recently a Marlins affiliate. And now they're the Batavia Muck Dogs of the collegiate summer league, the perfect game collegiate baseball league. So how did you decide that your subject would be Batavia?

And it seems like you really fell in love with the place. And after reading your book, I feel like I know the main destinations and historic sites of Batavia. Like I could stroll into town and go to the coffee shop and greet people by name and they would say, who are you? Oh, you must have read Will's books. That's why you know my name.

But tell me about how you decided on this place. And for people who are not as aware of Batavia, tell them a little bit about the baseball background and just the town in general. Yeah, yeah, well, alas, the coffee shop you reference is no longer the coffee shop closed. is no longer. The coffee shop closed, and that was really one of the little gems of Batavia that I had discovered and grown to enjoy. The brewery, though, is still there. I was actually up there last week for a little

event and meeting some of the folks I had gotten to know and become friends with. So, yeah, the Eli Fish is still going strong. If you're in town, you should grab an IPA there. But yeah, the coffee shop sadly did not make it. But yeah, so the way I found myself there, it was just purely sort of serendipitous. When I learned about what I thought was going to be this final summer, I put together a proposal to write a book on what we expected would be the final season of the Appalachian League, which was a low minor league played down in North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and had a very rich, you know, over 100 year history. And again, when that season was canceled, unfortunately, that book also died, that idea

for a book. But I managed to salvage the research and the reporting I had done in the form of a Harper's magazine article, in which I basically just told the story of what had made that league special and the connection that these teams had developed with these communities and what the loss would mean for them. And that article attracted, you know, decent amount of attention and a lot of readers seemed to enjoy it. One of whom was Bill Kaufman, who features prominently as a character in my book.

And he is, he lives outside Batavia, lifelong Batavia season ticket holder, as were his parents and was his daughter. And he wrote to me, and he's actually a writer as well, a very talented writer as a matter of fact. And he wrote to me and he said, I loved your article, it resonated so much, so much of what you wrote about these Appalachian League communities and their teams reminded me of what we had

up here in Batavia. Would you like to come up, I'll buy you a beer. We can talk about it. I was living outside Pittsburgh at the time. It was about a four-hour drive. I said, sure, I'll come on up. I met him. He introduced me to some of his friends who were also loyal Muck Dog fans, and he explained how they were standing up this collegiate woodbat summer league team to fill the hole that had been left by the Departure of the minor league affiliate and so it occurred to me You know what? Maybe the story is the death of baseball or the death of affiliated professional baseball

but it's you know the rebirth of baseball in this new sort of incarnation in the form of this collegiate team and so that's how how this book was was Born essentially and you're right I did I really did grow to on a personal level like so many of the people collegiate team. And so that's how this book was born, essentially. And you're right, I really did grow to, on a personal level, like so many of the people I had the opportunity to meet in the course of spending a summer up at Dwyer Stadium, they were just tremendously welcoming, eager to get their story out. I mean, I think it was something, it became clear to me just how much they treasured this experience and they were excited by the chance

to tell the country, so to speak, about it. That made it very fulfilling. Had that not been the case, I don't know how this would have ended up. And Batavia's population is about 15,000 and it's a town that has seen better days from an industrial standpoint, I suppose, or just from a traffic standpoint, people visiting, et cetera. standpoint, I suppose, or just from a traffic standpoint, people visiting, etc. And so as you make clear, the Muck Dogs games are big attractions. There aren't that many places that you can go and hang out communally at night in Batavia,

like the Muck Dogs game, like Dwyer Stadium. And so that would be a big loss if it were lost. And so what part does it play in the fabric of that town, just sort of representative of small towns, you know, this is the stand in for the 40 other places right across the country that have been deprived of affiliated ball. And it really is a stand down. It's a great way to say it because I've heard responses from readers all across the country that tell me that, you wrote about Batavia, but so much of what you wrote could apply to the town that I live in. And so I think that's a fair statement and an important statement.

But I think one of the things I try to communicate, and this is obviously not news to you and probably to a number of your listeners, but maybe it will be to others, which is just trying to communicate what it is that makes sort of this small town baseball experience distinct and special and different from the major league experience,

really the major leagues of any professional sport, not just baseball. A lot of it at the most basic level comes down to just the price, $99 for a season ticket. And as a kind of a consequence of that, you have the same people often going every night. It just really becomes a part of the fabric of their summer. And then logistically, just the ease

with which you can get to the stadium. It's right in a middle-class neighborhood. People can walk out their front door and be in their seats three minutes later. Contrast that with the experience of trying to just get into a major sporting event, and particularly for older people. I write about people that are in their mid-80s and have been going to games regularly for

most of their lives, and that's just something that you wouldn't see necessarily going to like Citi Field or Yankee Stadium, places that it's just difficult physically to get in there as an 85 year old. And so that intergenerational element I thought was special where you see grandparents getting together, you know, bringing their children and then their children bringing their children. So you have three generations together, multiple nights a week all summer long, kids playing catch along the right field line. And it really did seem more like a community picnic or a family reunion than a major sporting event.

But I thought that was something kind of special and distinct. Yeah, and one thing that I was curious about heading into this book, and you do address it and talk to people about it, is going from affiliated baseball to a collegiate league. So when I was with the Stompers, they were at the second to lowest rung of the independent baseball league ladder. This was the Pacific Association, which didn't

last long post pandemic. And now the Sonobas Stompers still exist, fortunately, but they're part of the California collegiate league. And I don't know that we could have sold a book based on that if we had said, oh, we're going to take over this amateur collegiate summer league and run it according to saber metric principles. I don't know that that would have piqued a publisher's interest the way that it did when we said professional team. Now it's a very long way from affiliated ball. And so the level of play comparing the Pacific association to California collegiate league might not be vast. And yeah, you're talking about low A short season ball here, but there is a difference as much as MLB

might like to pretend otherwise as you document in the book. And so what does that do to sap some enthusiasm from the spectators? Is it just, well, we'll take what we can get and if this is the only baseball, then we're gonna come out and watch this baseball. But does it do anything to the attachment, not just the level of play, but as you note,

just that sense that we have a connection to the parent club. We're not big league, but we're minor league. And so we might at least, there's a better chance that we will conceivably see someone who will be big league someday and then there will be a connection to our town. No, I mean, that's a great question. And there are really a lot of layers to it

that you allude to there. Yeah, without a doubt, something was lost and there's just no getting around that fact. When you ask any minor league fan, you know, about their team, the first thing they're gonna tell you is who they saw there, you know getting around that fact. When you ask any minor league fan about their team, the first thing they're gonna tell you is who they saw there at one point. When I was down in the Appalachian League,

they loved to tell me about how Noah Sendergaard pitched against Jacob deGrom in this tiny little town of Bluefield, West Virginia. And that's something that you're just not gonna see when you're looking at a collegiate team assembled of mid-tier Division I to Division III players, where you're lucky to get more than one guy that breaks 90. And then just on a more kind of, I don't know, symbolic level,

you're right. Some of these towns really did derive a sense of pride from this direct pipeline to these big cities. I wrote a lot about Pulaski, Virginia. And they were the Pulaski, Virginia, and you know, they were the Pulaski Yankees and they're wearing Yankee pinstripes. And this is this tiny little town in remote western Virginia, but there was this direct connection to Yankee Stadium, you know,

the house that Ruth built. And there was something kind of magical about that. And it gave them a real sense of identity and pride. And you can't replace that with an assembly of collegiate kids, however well-meaning that effort is. So you're right, something was certainly lost, I think for some of the purists, some of the enthusiasm was lost with that just because it was just harder to get excited when the quality of play is just not going to be as strong. But on the other hand, like you also mentioned, the communal aspect is still there. It is still a place where you can go with your family and have a good time and escape some of these stresses that may be present in other parts of your life.

And the owners of these teams, in some cases like the one I write about, Robbie and his wife Nellie, really do work 20 hours a day to put the best possible product out there with the resources at their disposal, to make it a fun environment and enjoyable for everyone. And the game itself, in a very strange way, had its appeal in that it was a little bit of a throwback, rather than just having overpowering pitching coupled with the occasional home run,

like kind of the major league game has moved in that direction. I mean, here you saw stolen bases, bunt, hit and runs, even errors, were kind of amusing in their own way at times or wild pitches. And so there was a lot of action, even if maybe that the quality

or the talent level wasn't the same. You talk in the book and we've talked on the podcast about diamond baseball holdings, even if maybe that the quality or the talent level wasn't the same. You talk in the book, and we've talked on the podcast about Diamond Baseball Holdings, which is this private equity group that is snapping up minor league teams, affiliated minor league teams, left and right and owns dozens of them and multiple teams in the same leagues, which you didn't used to be able to do. And we keep kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop. It just seems like this can't be good, right? Like nothing good can come of this.

We know how private equity groups, they often just strip things down to the studs and they're more interested in short-term profit maximization and they're looking at this purely as a business and an investment and not some sort of social good. And yet, as you note, it seems like so far so good, at least, you know, relative to how bad it could be.

And they have largely kept the same ownership groups in place and haven't done a whole lot of layoffs and have deferred on the running of those teams. And so are they lulling us into a false sense of security? Is there going to be some nightmarish outcome of this or do you believe that there could be such a thing as a private equity group investing in profit maximization but also serving the community in a symbiotic way? Yeah, I mean, like you, my gut initially would tell me this. Just look at, if you look at their impact

on any number of other industries, it typically doesn't end well. But like you said, to give credit where credit is due, so far, from what I can tell, they've kept the owners, not the ownership groups, but the local management intact. I think they're smart enough to know that in many cases, there is a winning formula already kind of in place that probably doesn't need any dramatic overhaul.

So from that standpoint, like you said, so far so good, I think where my concern would come in would be, to the extent these balance sheets, for whatever reason, begin to look less good, it's gonna be a lot easier for them to make decisions sort of detrimental to these communities from afar than it would be if they were local owners, as had been the case in many instances for these teams before. So for example, I write about Popcorn Bob in my book, this colorful character in El

Mayor, New York, who's been making popcorn from his secret recipe for decades. And the owner, the owner is Robbie Innelli, worked the same concession stand with him. And so they're back there literally running the register while he's making popcorn. So if for whatever reason they concluded, we can't afford, we need to make layoffs, it's going to be a lot harder for them to fire Popcorn Bob than it would be for an investor in New York City for whom Popcorn Bob is just a number on an Excel spreadsheet that can just be deleted. So that's where my concern would be, things kind of go south, then what decisions would they make

since they are a lot less invested in the community because they're not part of the community. And I guess the last thing I would add to that, and maybe this is like a middle ground where it's not the nightmare scenario, but will we start seeing some degree of like the home deposition of minor league baseball? That's what one professor of sports business mentioned to me,

where they noticed that something's working really well in Mississippi, so let's try it out in Maine or in Washington state. And that can lead to kind of just outcomes where you kind of begin to lose these local idiosyncrasies and eccentricities that have always made minor league baseball special, where you start to apply these like cookie cutter approaches

to the business. So that would be another thing I'd kind of keep my eye out for. So one thing I wanted to ask, since a lot of this is looking back and there's a lot of nostalgia for your own childhood experience and you played some college ball and you grew up loving baseball. And so some of that is just what we all do, which is kind of looking back to more innocent days or so we think of them, right? And, you know, that can be kind of a distorted picture in many

ways. The past was worse, right? And, Right? And so there's always a temptation to lament what was lost or even to, you know, cross over into yelling at clouds territory or just be kind of reactionary. And how many old baseball players do we hear generation after generation talking about how the young players these days, they don't know the fundamentals and they weren't like back in our day, right? So how did you kind of gird yourself against that given that your topic is along those lines? So, you know, you talk and I know you don't lead

with your military service, you're not fishing for a thank you for your service, but you did enlist after September 11th and you served overseas and you were deployed to Iraq and saw combat. You mentioned that one of the things that sort of sustained you that you clung to while your unit is seeing heavy casualties is you're thinking of this bucolic ideal of small town America and you're fighting for that.

You're fighting to preserve that way of life. And there's certainly truth to that and gosh, whatever you have to do to get yourself through that experience, right? But when you come back and you're writing this book, how do you then approach this and say, I don't want to fall prey to just, I want things to be like they used to be just reflexively, but no, this is actually worse than it was. Yeah, I mean, that's tricky. And you kind of hit the nail on the head of this tension that I was certainly aware of and tried to inform my writing so that I didn't kind of go overboard in either direction. But like you said, I mean, I guess one thing, I don't remember who I was talking to, I think it was actually Charles Gibson,

the former ABC News anchor, and I was having a discussion with him about the book, and he said, there are always those who are critical of people who romanticize baseball, in their writing or in film. He's like, but I plead guilty, because there's just something about it that is kind of romantic, at least to certain people.

So to some extent, that's just, I think, the nature of baseball and what some would contend makes it special and not necessarily something to be embarrassed by. But I guess connected to that too, like you said, I kind of always did have this, probably like a lot of people, you kind of put it up on this pedestal. And for me, it was just kind of always this sort of symbol of, like you said, something kind of, I don't want to say innocent, but that, you know, always reminded children of their fathers and adults of their childhoods and things that they would like to then pass on to their children.

And yes, of course, I mean, it was never, I mean, it was never that way, probably in real life. But it doesn't mean that we necessarily should sort of happily surrender that part of it in favor of a future where you don't even imagine it in that way. I mean, one thing, I guess one little vignette from the book that touches on this a little bit

is Roger Kahn. I talk about the boys of summer and how he, in the 60s and 70s goes and tries to track down Some of the 1950s era Brooklyn Dodgers and these were guys of you know All-star if not Hall of Fame caliber players and he discovers them doing things like serving drinks at the VFW Working construction on the World Trade Center What that was kind of getting at was that they were still part of these communities and and and they were still to some degree accessible to to the fans.

And of course, like you suggest, like I'm not arguing, oh, that's the way things should be. I don't think anyone would argue that if you're the best in the world at some skill, you should have to necessarily work construction for the rest of your life. But at the same time, I think the pendulum has now swung so far in the other direction where superstars are making almost a billion dollars and journeymen are now making, you know, tens of millions of dollars, that some of those connections that kind of made it special and connected fans to players, you about how there was this greater divide and barrier between the athletes and fans or media members. And, you know, you don't want to be anti-labor and they should get theirs, right? What they're entitled to, they're generating lots of revenue. And if it's going to go in the owner's pockets regardless,

then I'd rather the players have it. But there is something, I suppose, that's just different, you know, and it's hard to say, well, how do you roll that back or would you want to? I mean, we've talked about, well, gosh, it'd be great if we had completely different societal priorities such that teachers and nurses and, you know, people who are doing all these good things but are not getting the publicity that an entertainer does,

if they could somehow be extraordinarily well compensated and we could just completely recalibrate how we operate as a society, that seems a little ambitious. But yeah, there is something to that where even if every step along the way you say, okay, yeah, it makes sense that it would work that way and I don't know how to change it exactly.

And yet there is something to the way it used to work. I guess the one place where we differ perhaps is when it comes to stats and data about baseball. I figured. Yeah, pretty pro that as a fan grass podcast. And I get what you're saying. And we've certainly acknowledged that there are unintended consequences of this and how it shapes the game in ways that may be fan unfriendly, but I would just stick up for the idea that data can tell stories too. And that's one of the things that drew me to the game historically and continues

to now, and that's just, that's a case by case, that's personal preference, right? Some people's eyes glaze over when they hear about a launch angle or something, and other people perk up. So I think that there is a possibility to tell human stories using that information, but it is a fine line, I acknowledge. Yeah, I get that.

And you know, my son even, I see it now, you know, as a young kid, like, you know, there are elements to the data aspect that are probably valuable for kids. And my son, even, I see it now as a young kid, there are elements to the data aspect that are probably valuable for kids. I mean, it's a great way for him to learn math. So I don't dispute that. I do think that maybe we risk kind of leaving them behind. And so I think to the extent we can find a balance

where you preserve some of that more old-fashioned, if you want to call it that, storytelling with the incorporation of data, that would be great. My concern is that when I turn on a game now, at least, I feel like I'm just being bombarded with data that is sometimes just, I think, used as kind of a crutch in lieu of the creative challenge of telling, you know, real stories. And I think back, you know, to my great uncle, who was a Brooklyn Dodger fan and kind of

tells the story you hear about, you know, common to that generation of like sneaking the radio into their bed and listening to, I think for him it was Red Barber, the Dodger announcer. And, you know, he, you know And decades later would vividly recall the imagery that Barber would use to bring these games to life, to this kid in his bedroom. And now when I turn on games, sometimes to me it sounds like a computer simulation,

that there's very little of the human and very much sort of a focus on technology. I think Vince Gulley said something along the lines of, I'll trade you any amount of data focus on technology. I think Vin Scully said something along the lines of, I'll trade you any amount of data for one story. So anyway, that's just the other side of that. I think we could probably agree that there's a happy medium to be found somewhere in the middle that could appeal to fans of your temperament

and of my temperament. Yes, yes, we can have a meeting of minds for sure. We try to do that on this podcast. Do we do it successfully? I don't know, we can have a meeting of minds for sure. We try to do that on this podcast. Do we do it successfully? I don't know. We'll see. But the other thing I sort of struggle with is that I acknowledge that this diminishment of human interaction is probably bad on the whole and that we end up just retreating to

our corners and it can cause this sense of isolation. And yet I tend to like it personally. And so I feel like if you live a lot of your life online, you can end up in all sorts of echo chambers and ecosystems and get radicalized. And I hope that I have avoided that. And maybe it's that I was the last sort of pre-internet generation

before it was completely inescapable. But I'm married and I have a daughter and I have a dog. And if I get through a day and see those three, that's a good day for me. It's not bad. I'm kind of a homebody, I guess is the thing. And so, and maybe it's okay if you have that family around you, that's one thing.

And if you don't, then you feel the absence of that. But when you describe certain say automated processes, you know, a frictionless check-in at a hotel, I'm like, yes, sign me up. That sounds great. If I don't have to call customer service, if I can do this in some automated way, that sounds amazing. Now there are times when I long for human interaction when I get stuck in some sort of automated system or chat bot that hasn't helped me at all. And granted, there's probably a different social utility and value to that sort of routine interaction than there is to being at a ballpark with a bunch of regulars who you actually develop social ties to. But yeah, I'm not a huge small talker, possibly because I'm constantly talking on podcasts and I have no words left in me

after that. But, but yeah, I try to balance that because I acknowledge that, yeah, we're losing these kind of common shared spaces. And that might have deleterious effects. And yet, I'm part of the problem. I'm working from home and you'd have to twist my arm to get me to go back into an office, for instance. Well, I mean, I think, first of all, I would never suggest or presume to say that, you know, what makes a lot

of the people I write about happy will make everyone happy. You know, I mean, people are different, for sure. Although I think it is, you know, kind of beyond dispute that as a country now, you now, there is a loneliness epidemic to the extent that the Surgeon General wrote a prominent piece on that. And so, are there people for whom loneliness is not a problem or who prefer to be by themselves?

Absolutely, but I think to the extent that we do have places for people to come together, it's better to have that than to not have that, I guess is the way I would say it. And I've personally saw just so many examples of, like talking back to some of the older people that I wrote about, the 80 year olds,

contrast their experience walking into these bleachers day after day and being greeted with friendly and familiar faces saying hello to them, versus if they were like in an assisted living community, for example, which I've also seen in my life. There's just no doubt in my mind that there was something sort of psychologically invigorating and sustaining about that and just healthy for them.

And then also, I guess there's an interesting middle ground maybe. There was also kind of this other group, people who may not be small talkers, may not have actually done a lot of interaction at the games, but there was something that they found comforting about just being around other people, even if they weren't interacting. So like Bill Kaufman, the writer I talk about, he talks about how there's this one gentleman and he'd come kind of an eccentric character from Rochester and he'd come about an hour to these games.

And it took multiple summers for him to even inch his way kind of close enough to Bill's gang to introduce himself and say hi. And he was a little awkward, he kept to himself. And eventually they did get to know him after a long time. But he obviously found something just very enjoyable about being in a crowd, even if he wasn't kind of interacting with others in the crowd.

I also read about this guy, Ernie Lawrence, who would be rosaries kind of quietly by himself. And I would talk to him, but he was very happy to just kind of sit on his own and take in the game without chattering constantly to his neighbors. So there's people come in all types of shapes and sizes, but I do think there's something about the ballpark that most of these people found to be particularly appealing.

Yeah, it's true. I live in Manhattan, I'm an apartment dweller and there is kind of a comfort that comes from just the proximity of people. Now the close proximity I could do with that. I'm comforted by the fact that there are people all around. If I hear them too loudly, then I wish they would go away. But there's something to the idea in an abstract sense. Yeah, it's because I used to live in a bigger building and I was on the 40th floor and there were many people on the floor. And so there would be noise and people coming and going. And in that situation, paradoxically, when I had many neighbors, I knew none of them. And now I live in this older, quieter, smaller building. and there's only one other person on the elevator bank, and now we actually know her

and have sort of a meaningful relationship with her, and that's kind of rewarding in a sense. So yeah, it can work out. And I know that it's gotta be bad for us that we're all glued to our phones constantly, and yet you will pry mine out of my hands, my cold dead hands, that's what it would take probably. But yeah, look, there are all sorts of studies

about the possibly negative effects of that and the positive effects of social interaction and you get to a certain age and it can literally prolong your life to be around people and talk to people and see people and have meaningful relationships. So one last thing maybe, so I am with you, more the merrier when it comes to minor league teams and affiliated teams, and certainly no skin off my teeth for MLB to bankroll that and I wish that the league would.

And I think you could even make a case purely from a business perspective, which is the language that they speak. Hey, invest in the product, right? You want more people who are interested in major league baseball? Well, have more minor league baseball teams. That's one way to do it. And I think though, let's play devil's advocate for a second here, just for the sake of conversation. If MLB is saying, well, we have improved our player development process to some extent,

it's more efficient now. And the number of rounds in the draft dwindle and the number of minor league teams dwindle, you're almost certainly gonna miss out on someone. But let's say that you know you have all sorts of ways to practice more efficiently and practice off the field and not even in games and there are sports that have more of an academy system and you don't have to have the trial and error of playing thousands and thousands of games to figure out what works and what doesn't. If MLB says, sounds nice, yeah, in the abstract we want more baseball too, but why should we be on the hook for that? Why should we

subsidize that? If there's a demand for it, then why don't the communities supply that themselves? Which I guess some of them have just out of necessity. But basically, we're Major League Baseball, why should it be our problem that there's a little less baseball in all of these markets that are not Major League? Yeah, I mean, that is essentially the argument I think that they would put forth. And, you know, I think that just introduces a few questions, you know, one of which is just on purely business terms, I think, you know, you could make a case that this just isn't the smartest decision for the long-term health of the sport

that you're a custodian of or, you know, an owner in for the reasons that you just articulated. And then, you know, I think it just also introduces this question that I raise in the book, which is just, you know, what is baseball? And if you are going to sort of cloak yourself in the mantle of this, you know, Norman Rockwell, Americana, which, you know, baseball has not hesitated

to do when they market themselves, you can't then also just be, you know, just a ruthlessly cold-blooded McKinsey-esque, you know, business person that will make decisions that directly harm the communities that you've been kind of selling yourself, you've been using to help market yourself historically. So there's just, I think, a little bit of hypocrisy there that I found troublesome.

And then I guess the last thing I would say is that there are also sort of second and third order effects that I think are going to be potentially harmful to the sport beyond talent development. And one of them is the fact, and I think it was, I can't remember if it was the general manager of the Royals who mentioned this, but when you cut the minor leagues and you cut the draft from 40 rounds to 20 rounds, who's really getting cut? It's the people who are often the future ambassadors of the sport.

You know, so those late round draft picks, yes, they didn't make the major leagues, but they were going to be the people who go back to their home communities, become high school coaches, college coaches, little league coaches, and, you know, help introduce a new generation to that sport. So even though they didn't make the major leagues, you know, if you see the minor leagues as providing other benefits to the sport beyond just cultivating the next Bryce Harper, then I think it becomes more clear, you know, some of the ways in which this is going to have a negative long-term consequence. And then the last one, I guess I would also just add, and again, I think points to a little bit of maybe hypocrisy

on the side of MLB, because on the one hand, they've acknowledged that the number of African American players, I think is at its lowest level since shortly after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. So that's a problem that they're certainly well aware of. But by cutting the draft in half, I had a good number of player development people and scouts tell me that that's going to just make that worse because what's going to happen is you're going to end up with a league that's largely comprised of either foreign born players or American products of expensive travel leagues and collegiate programs which have historically been predominantly white.

And the reason for that is that if you are a major league team and you have half as many picks, are you going to kind of take a flyer on a player who, you know, may possess some degree of raw athleticism but hasn't had the opportunity to play in those expensive travel programs from when they were a small kid or not? And so there's gonna be less risk taken and more of a premium placed on kind of what's considered like a sure thing. You know, again, it's one of those maybe unintended consequences of this decision that could, I think, push the sport in a direction that, you know, I don't think they want to go. Well, did you emerge from your summer mucking around with the Muck Dogs more of an optimist and feeling like, yes, we can still preserve the heart of the country and we can all come together? Or did you develop even more anxiety that something precious

and essential is being lost and can't be recovered? Maybe. I don't want to, it sounds like I'm hedging, but I think a little of each. I think I, you know, my eyes have been opened to some of these economic forces that are going to make this more difficult to preserve. For example, I wouldn't be shocked if a few years from now when this current contract between these minor league communities and the major league parents expires if they go from 120 to 90 and we see another round of contractions. So that's worrisome.

But on the other hand, on the more positive optimistic hand, I think I certainly emerged with a recognition of just how important baseball is to these communities and the lengths to which they will go to preserve that. So I think from that standpoint, I'm encouraged. And if you just look at minor league baseball in general, it seems to be in a very healthy place, you know, uh, as far as its popularity and just the general business model seems to be an appealing one.

Um, so, um, for the, for those reasons, you know, I'm encouraged. So I think we'll just have to wait and see, wait and see what happens. The book is called homestand small town baseball and the fight for the soul of America. I have had the pleasure of speaking to it. It's author, Will Bardenwerper. Go check it out. Will, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Okay, one more quick break on tap. Time to switch from narrative non-fiction to fiction, and I'll be back to complete this trilogy with Jacob MacArthur Mooney to discuss his novel, The Northern. Effective mode, so far.

Well, I have mixed feelings about being asked to blurb books, which doesn't happen all that often, to be clear. I'm not that famous. I don't think Ben Lindbergh recommending the book on the back is gonna sell that many copies, but it does happen every now and then. And I feel obligated as a writer to help out a fellow writer.

I feel flattered. I feel like I should pay it forward. I have requested book blurbs in the past. Maybe I will again in the future. So I feel like I should do my part for the book blurb industrial complex, even if it's kind of dying these days. Anyway, the downside is you have to read a book,

or at least I feel obligated to read a book or want to read a book, and while I generally like reading books, it does take a while and you might not like it. And I do always feel like I should read the whole thing if I'm actually gonna put my name on it and tell people that they should part with some hard-earned money to go buy it.

Because who knows, what if it gets bad in the last few chapters? What if there's something secretly offensive just buried on the second to last page? And here I am with my name on the cover telling everyone to go buy it. So I do like to read the full thing. And I don't always accept if I'm pressed for time,

but I am very glad that I received one blurb request because I like the book quite a bit and I want to tell everyone about it. And that is the purpose of this segment. The book is called The Northern. It is written by a longtime Effectively Wild Listener and Patreon supporter, though I promise that's not why I agreed to blurp the book.

That is not a Patreon perk. But Jacob McArthur Mooney is the author of The Northern. He is the guest on this segment. Jacob, welcome and congrats. Thank you, Ben. This is the first I'm hearing that the Bendenberg verb is not useful. Yeah, now I tell you.

It's like, this is the first I'm hearing of it. Ibergh verb is not useful. Yeah, now I tell you. It's like, this is the first I'm hearing of it. I feel like I've made the right choice here. Yeah, I'm sure your publisher was rejoicing. We got Ben Lindbergh. Oh, we got it made. Now we're set. And here I am puncturing your dreams. But Happy Pub Day, the book is out. It is hot off the presses. So go pick it up. It'll still be warm from the printer potentially. And The Northern is a novel, which it does say on the inside in case you were unclear on that,

but also you know it's a novel because there isn't a 10 word subtitle as there is with every other nonfiction baseball book, including mine. It's just The Northern and it is a lovely book that I think pairs well with Homestand, which I just talked about with its author, Will Bardenwerper. Now, you and I had an exchange about this a while back

and I was talking about how sometimes it's hard to do a podcast interview about a novel, and I love novels and most of my reading is actually novels, but it's a little easier when there's sort of a built-in well-known subject like baseball being contracted in the minor leagues or Earl Weaver. You can talk about those things and kind of talk around the book. Whereas with a novel, you don't want to give away too much of what actually happens in the novel, but you have to give away some of it or people might not know what you're talking about. Though there are some real life baseball analogs that we

can talk about because this is a baseball novel in every sense of the word. So what is your elevator pitch? What do you tell people when they ask you what the Northern is about? Yeah, I suspect that what I tell people who are, you know, general population versus what I tell people who are baseball people or baseball adjacent people is a little different, because I can go into a bit more detail on it. I can just, you know, it's a baseball book. It's got a baseball player on the cover

is what I tell my aunt or something. And what people always want to tell people who might not be baseball fans is like, don't worry. It's not just about baseball. Right. Which. In fact, to the point that I was slightly nervous about the giant obvious baseball player on the front cover, too,. There was a version of the cover that had like, the

motif was like the car that they're driving around in instead. And that's where we started with it or something. And now it's going to be for car people. Right. Yeah. You don't want to scare anyone off who's like, Oh, do I want to read about baseball? But this is a safe space, obviously. And, and it is true. We always say this about baseball movies too. Oh, it's not just a baseball movie. And that's always true, I think, if it's done well, assuming it's not a documentary. So obviously, there are themes here that are not just about baseball, but it is very much a baseball book.

Yeah, I mean, I tell people it's a baseball book. It's definitely a labor novel. It's about work. And it's a travel novel, and it's a coming of age novel too. So it's set in the summer of 1952 at a fictional, but only lightly fictional, I suppose, low minors unaffiliated baseball league called the Northern that straddles both sides of Lake Erie on both the US and Canadian sides. It's about a trio of salespeople, essentially, an adult and two children that are traveling from their home in Minnesota to the area covered by the league to try and find licensees

for their new baseball card company that they're working for. This is not terribly dissimilar from some real things and some real tactics that real baseball companies used in the early days of the post-World War II boon for baseball cards. Fleer is the obvious analog, I think. Bowman probably out there too. Leaf to some degree as well, when folks were trying to break what would eventually be declared a monopoly by TOPS back in the

day. They did so in a handful of different ways. And one of the ways that some companies got up to trying to do this was, okay, we can't get into the major league club houses because those guys are all sort of signed up already. But if we make a longer term investment into the minors, could we sign some guys up on spec and then when they eventually come of age or figure out how to get the curve ball and make it to the majors or something, then maybe we can we can use their licenses at that point too.

It was a long elevator ride for that pitch. Yeah, I guess that's true. But we're like several hundred stories up now. Well, I used to live on the 40th floor and depending on how many other people were on the elevator and how many stops you had to make, you know, you might have fit most of that in there. Yeah. And a nightmare of an elevator pitch is when the guy like stops the elevator midway through

on you and just keeps talking. Yeah. Press the emergency stop. I've really got to finish this pitch. I'm not done yet. That wouldn't sell the book for me unless I had to buy it to get out of the elevator. But I guess that's part of my misgiving also about blurbing is that usually I'm getting asked to blurb a baseball book and I read about baseball for a large part of my day as it is.

And so much as I love baseball, I don't always want to relax during my downtime with more reading about baseball. And yet in this case, it really was a pleasure. And I did want to ask you a little bit about the baseball card wars that this is based on. And I'll just say like, this is good for me because it's, you know, it's a dual citizen, like we're crossing the border here. This is Canada, it's Western New York, Batavia, the setting of the previous segments book, Homestand is mentioned one time in this book. So connective tissue, some segueing there.

So, fish hair universe. Yes. And you are Canadian and so you come by the Canadian content, honestly here. And tell me a little bit about the historical research that you did or that you were already aware of whether it's the baseball card wars or the analogs for this league that coach and the two kids who are accompanying him are visiting. one volume, very sort of breezy history of baseball cards by the Dave Jameson's book called Mint Condition. It sort of made the rounds among kind of baseball people, especially a few years back too. And there's just like a one-off kind of throwaway reference to some of the things that what we would call now startups we're getting up to, to try and break into the monopoly and break down. Tops, in the point of the era that the book is in, it's more of a duopoly because the tops

and booms are starting to pair up at that point. So that's a big one. In terms of the Northern League itself, I mean, there is a Northern League. It's not the same one and it came across many years later. There are two, the Can-Am League and the Pony League. Let me get this right. Pennsylvania, Ontario, New York League were probably the major ones. All of the teams in the league share a name with actual historical clubs and some of them are ongoing too. A lot of these towns, they'll kind of reuse baseball team names for different

franchises over the years to select the London team and the Northern. It gets their name reused a couple of times. I think the Buffalo team is the Bisons, which is currently the AAA team there now, too. So there's that as well. I just think it's really important to do your research and especially for historical novels,

situate yourself correctly and know where things are and know the legal history for these things. But then once you set that all up and you know where you are, it's just a setting. It's like anything else. You can play with it and you can move things around. The more logical timeframe for the book is a few years later, to be honest. Bowman versus Tops, which was the kind of right to privacy case that suggested that baseball players had a, you know, they had a right to privacy and by extension, they had a right to license their image if they so chose to just sort of forego that privacy for commercial gain. And that case was in 1953, which means that all of this talk about licensing and everything that we're talking about really more logically should happen like two, three, four, five

years later or something. But like I wanted the kids to be a certain age in the book and I wanted the kids to be born during World War II. So sort of pushed it back. So always really interesting to sort of make that balance too. I believe you got to do your research and everything and kind of understand the universe. But once you kind of understand it, it's like anything else.

It's the substrate for play in the end. And you can kind of mess around and do your own stuff. Yeah, and I guess you don't want to be a show off with your research and just- No, I'm perfectly happy to be a show off. I just know it's probably bad art, to be honest. Yeah, you don't want to make it ostentatious. Like you're just dropping facts left and right

about little towns or the era or the baseball league or something. It has to be organic. It has to flow and suit the story. And I think it does. So you mentioned coming of age story and also road novel, two classics. So just a blend of both. What do you see as the hallmarks of those genres or why did they work for this story that you wanted to tell? Yeah, I mean, they're definitely hallmarks of baseball fiction. I mean, baseball teams are always going on road trips, and there's always sort of an inherent sort of travel component there too. For most people, you know, growing up,

most people who are baseball fans, there's a coming-of-age element to the history of being baseball fans, too, right? It's so familiar, hand down, and it's sort of part of their own sort of identity, too. So it's there for both, certainly. I'm like terrified of like falling into sepia tone nostalgia when I'm writing about, you know, especially in the 1950s and baseball. And I'm just, there's a, these are all sort of inputs that are going to glaze over some eyes out there, I think, too. So trying to fend that off, but to fend it off in a way that doesn't feel like I'm doing like, very telegraphed culture jamming or anything, you know, like I, I don't want to, in the same way, I want to show off research. I don't want to sort of show off modernity either, too, right?

Like I want to live in it, but it should feel contemporary because it is contemporary. You know, it's 1952, but a lot of the concerns and kind of worldview that's expressed by the characters are kind of more 21st century, too, right? Even so we talk about labor and everything, too. And how we talk about small towns and sort of like references to like, you know, race and everything that's in the book, too, that I do feel is like maybe an imposition that I'm putting in there as an author standing in a room in the 21st century that is not of the time. But I'm perfectly happy with that, to be honest, because I think that a historical book is the product of its time that it's written in and the time that it's set in.

There's a conversation between those two things happening all the time. I don't know if that answers the question, but it answers a slightly different question that was in my head, maybe at the same time, too, which is how it goes in these things sometimes. I'm asking the questions here, Jacob. You can have me on your podcast if you want to come up with the questions. We can talk about your book on your podcast, but you can have me on for some reason, but yes, I do think that that's actually another reason why this is a good pairing with the previous segment.

Cause we were talking about not wanting to valorize the past or over valorize it and suggest that things used to be better, that we've lost something essential. And while that might be true in some respects, also a lot of things were worse or certainly not better. And the human condition hasn't changed that much. And so in your book, you do have these communal experiences of, well, the kids and coach traveling together in the car,

maybe spending too much time together in close quarters, if anything. And then everywhere they go, they're at these ballparks in these little towns and people are coming together. But there's still a lot of alienation happening here. There's still a lot of loneliness. There's still a lot of anxiety. And obviously, the proximity to World War II is meaningful here and so coming off of that and just what that did to the psyche of a whole generation or multiple generations,

that's clearly leaving an imprint here. So even though there are aspects of this that are sort of, it's baseball, it's small town, it's the 50s, I don't think that you're just sweeping under the rug any of the problems with this era. Yeah, it's such an interesting time to write about sort of historiographically too, because especially the early 50s, we sort of, the broad narrative of especially like American and the full Canadian history into that too sort of demands a story of rebirth and sort

of, you know, shrugging off the past of that time. And that's very much in the culture of how we think about the early 50s too. But it's also a time dominated and populated by men and women walking around with, again, what the 21st century would call PTSD too to sort of recreating, you know, in the rubbles of society, you know, the next thing as well. You know, my grandfather fought in World War Two and took shrapnel to the head and everything in Belgium after D-Day. And you know, this was personality changing stuff. Like he, you know He came back a functionally different person, able to do and stand by and get through things beforehand that they couldn't get through.

Afterwards, much shorter temper, just a different person on one side and the other too. That touched on and is a big interest in the book, I think. That's sort of like the idea that this is a time of rebirth at a sort of broader cultural sense but there's like a real psychological denouement happening too with most of these men but also women and everybody else too. And this is of course on the continent that did not have much in the way of actual fighting happening on it to a degree far beyond in Asia or Europe as well.

Yeah, my grandfather fought in Italy and I believe he took some shrapnel too though, not in his head, but I never knew him unfortunately, so I don't know how it changed him if at all, but I know that's not uncommon certainly. Was there a particular influence when it came to baseball stories or just fiction in general? Because in my blurb, I made a WP Kinsella comp because I don't know, I figured Canadian, that'll play well maybe. But also- No one's written a sports novel in Canada without having that comp in the last three

years. I'm sure. Yeah, they're like, oh, no, they're WP can sell a comp. But I think there's something to that also, just the actual comparison. But I wonder whether you were modeling this on anything or thinking of any specific baseball stores. Yeah, I mean, there's a handful of books that definitely could help create the interest in the area of low minors and

independent baseball. I mean, the only one that has to work is one of them, certainly, to talk about present company too. And that's one that I wrote that in my, you know, when you publishing a book, they ask you for comps and inspirations, everything too. I remember that was one of them as well. Lucas Mann has a book called Class A about the Clinton Lumber Kings, high A Midwest league, I think, baseball team. He was like an Iowa Writers Workshop guy and then after graduating, he went to Clinton, Iowa and hung out with his baseball team for a year and sort of followed them around. It's a wonderful book. I think it's my favorite. It's nonfiction. I think it's my favorite baseball book as a pitch for that too. Emily Neiman's book,

which I first heard about on this podcast of all places in 2020. It came out in 2020, but like I feel like everything I listened to in 2020, I know it's 2020 because it was like a COVID thing. I don't remember it happening in that context. But maybe it was just before something that happened. That's a novel called the Grapefruit League, which is a bet. You can imagine the Arizona Spring Training League too, and did a really good job of humanizing the breadth of personalities and lifestyles that come with professional baseball, too, for everyone from like, folks working at

the ballpark to like the star shortstop for the team that's there too. Cactus league by the way, not Grapefruit. Cactus league, sorry. I even said Arizona. Grapefruit league should be the sequel. Yeah. Emily can do a parodged one about the other spring trading league. Yeah, because it's the Arizona.

It's also just set in like Scottsdale and stuff too. I like that book a lot, and that was another one that I remember is kind of a, and then that's sort of other sports ones too. There's a guy up here, passed away young, sadly, about 10 years ago named Paul Quarington, whose sport is mostly surprise, surprise hockey up here, but did a similar sort of thing where he wrote very sort of

like, you know, close to the land and very psychologically accurately about sports teams and sports cultures and fandoms too that I think was a big one. The coming of age aspect to this I think is really interesting because I guess part of that, one of the tropes is sort of, you know, you discover the failings of adults and guardians and loved ones,

and you start to see them as an adult would. And in this case, there's just sort of a sense of displacement and uncertainty because the boy's father was killed not long after returning from World War II, or so they think. There's some question about the actual parentage here

and the timeline of the relationship and Coach who was sort of a friend of the family but is now clearly more than a friend of the family. And so there's just a lot of not knowing exactly, I guess they grew up with their dad abroad when they were born and then he just comes back and doesn't last very long and they're just really starting to perceive the flaws in coach, who's a generally nice guy, but he has his foibles and his quick temper and his insecurities. And so I don't know whether this was modeled on anyone in particular or this relationship or anything you were drawing on in your life,

but what did you want to convey about adolescence here or the maturation process? Yeah, I certainly set out to imagine myself as the analog for the narrating kid in it, Chris. And I came to understand more and more as time goes on that the character that I'm probably closest to is actually Coach as well. And I think that makes sense because I have an 11-year-old son too who's kind of right in the wheelhouse for that. So I'm clearly seeing myself more in the struggling adult as much as the somewhat know-it-all kid at the center of

it too. So yeah, I mean, I think you've nailed it. I think that's what coming of age stories are about. They're sort of indications or milestones along the way of understanding the fatality of adults and by extension the world too, especially at that age. Because I mean, there's coming of age stories that are about people in their 20s and there's coming of age stories of people in their 40s. Yeah, we're always coming of some age.

Yeah, exactly. For that age, and then when I think of a 12-year-old, and again, I'm parent to an 11-year-old, so ask me again in a year. But I think that it's about flickering online into a world where you can make reasonable evaluations of the behavior of adults too, and tie that into a kind of a topography

of kinds of adults and kinds of people too. And I think that that's what's really happening there. And there's all kinds of things sort of happening alongside that in the book, and there's sort of traumas in the moment and everything too that come and go that sort of spice that in different ways too that I won't get into because I don't want to speak too much about specifics in the book. But that's what I think of when I think of coming of age, especially for that age, for like a 12 year old and everything. And it's always a worry when you're writing

about like, is this a realistic kid that I'm doing or am I doing the magical sitcom child? Who's like, you know, exactly as grown up as he has to be in the moment for the joke or something. Yeah. Right. Like, I'm always worried about that. Is this a, you know, I always talk about the precocious kid. And of course, all kids and stories are precocious because they have to be just sort of be a storyteller in some way for you. Right. Right? And like, what do you do with that? And there's other kinds of kids too. So how do you make the other kinds of kids happen? My workaround for that

was basically to have two kids to have my narrating precocious kid and my non-precocious kid as the second one to just sort of be along for the ride. But we say we spend the whole book with Chris only as a narrator. I guess it gets harder the older you get as you come of more advanced ages and you're further removed from your own childhood and also contemporary kids, which if you have a son roughly this age, that's probably helpful, I would imagine, just in not exactly nailing the references here, since we're talking about the early 50s, but in other aspects. But I think of this sometimes because, you know, I'll read everything that Stephen King writes, and he's one of the greatest

when it comes to capturing that kid's outlook. And yet, now that he is older, I feel like those powers have weighed in somewhat. I still love him and immediately read everything he releases, which is, that's why I can't blurb too many books, because Stephen King's keeping me busy, because he's pumping out a book or two every year. But- And you always wonder whether it's the time or the age that's making it hard, right?

Like, is it like you're reading it or something? Is it the period of time and how kids were in that time that strikes you as off, or is it the age that's misaligned or something? Two and a half, the same concern. Right, and I guess it could be that, yeah, you're reading sort of a period piece and you might not necessarily know what is anachronistic.

But yes, I think that's the issue with Stephen King, because he will still sometimes write kid protagonists, and yet they have the same cultural references that they did in Stand By Me, or whatever. You know, it's like he hasn't really updated, like, their kids who just happened to listen to a lot of classic rock and watch old movies and stuff. And it's like, you know, write what you know,

but on the other hand, yeah, you have to go out of your way to justify it and suggest that this kid is, you know, write what you know, but on the other hand, yeah, you have to go out of your way to justify it and suggest that this kid is, you know, an old soul or something, which I identify with because I kind of am and was, but these are really old souls in Steve Rankin's case lately anyway. I don't think that was a problem

with the Northern to be clear, but it does become clear to Chris that Coach is not really great at his job. And I don't want to give away too much either, but yeah, he's working for this fictional four corners baseball card company, which is sort of struggling to begin with. And then he has a pattern. He has a script when he goes into these clubhouses and he gives his pitch for why the players should fork over their five bucks

or whatever it is to sign away their rights. But if he is challenged or questioned in any way, then he's kind of knocked off kilter because he can't really think on his feet. And Chris is kind of better at that than he is in some ways. And he's almost the adult in some of these situations, but there's a frequent role reversal there, which is really interesting. But I do love just the car and the period automobile. And that's always on the verge of breaking down potentially, too.

And, you know, you're going from town to town and you're always looking for a place to stay or somewhere to eat and you're just there's a constant feeling of displacement, which I guess is the point. But that also works well with the novel because you just feel like you're never really at home or you have a home but you're not in it. You're only connected to it when you call your mom at the end of the night to check up on her. Part of what I like about the structure of a road novel, too, is that you're always propelling forward and everything, but most road novels will have

those recurring check-in moments that kind of resituate you every time. And in this one, it's the car and the phone call, too. So they have to get in the car to go from point A to point B. And they're always telling different people when they get in the car than they were last time, because of what happened since the last time they were in the car, too. And then the car has its own sort of drama that's happening on the side, too. And the phone call was the same. Each new phone call, they have 24 hours of experience because they promised to their mom

that they would call every night on the way back too. What I like about the structure of a road novel is that you usually have those in some way. You have those sort of check-in points, you know, checking into a hotel every night in a road novel. So you're reading a book about a touring musician or something. There's like sound check every day and that's always sort of in to the book as a way to sort of keep time too. How that works and like this is very sort of granular kind of nerdy writer stuff. But like, I like to have

the people do that structuring tricks. They always sort of find the things in their road story to like come back to, you know, there's scenes like four or five scenes in some novels where they're like chucking into a hotel or boarding an airplane or something, too, and you kind of see it as sort of a structuring trick. And the character of Reg, who's the main baseball player, he is a very complex and fascinating character, and I won't give away all the layers of that character

because he's not quite who and what he seems to be at the beginning. But he does have sort of a modern mindset where he's thinking for himself and he's a cerebral and he's standing up for player agency and player empowerment here in an era that discouraged that. And as you were saying with the baseball card rights kind of prefiguring that movement for player rights and knowing your worth and holding out for your value, there's a little bit of that that you can see here and yet a far from perfect messenger in the form of Reg. Yeah, Reg is already was fun to write. He's an interesting guy and I don't think of him as the villain of the story per se,

because I don't think the story really has a villain outside of the pressures of, you know, keeping your head above water in business and whatnot. You know, I'm pretty interested in reading about, you know, there's a lot of physicality borrowed from Kurt Flood in that character because he's such an important figure in the history of baseball labor as well. A lot of the visual descriptions of Reg La are from him, not the character, but the rest of it too. I was borrowing from him. It was really interesting.

What I like about writing about Reg is one of the things that's most interesting and fascinating to me about writing about kind of elite athletes and pro sports is the least athletic Major League Baseball player, which like Reg Lowe would be if he made it because he's like bumming around in the lowest tier of baseball. And if he made it, it would be you know, a real surprise, right? So he would be a very low end MLB player, potentially, if he had success, right? The least athletic Major League Baseball player is if I met them, would be a very low end MLB player potentially if he had success, right? The least I feel like a major baseball player is if I met them would be the most

athletic person I have ever met, right? And that's always so interesting to think about too, right? Like you, there's a line in the book where like, you know, it's like going to the orchestra, you go to the orchestra and everybody on the stage is a genius and you don't think about it because you're just sort of one of the people, you know, tooting around on the French horn or something in front of you.

And it's all sort of blends in. One thing that was like oddly inspiring, putting the book together is, you know, who Chris Coughlin, so that becomes when the World Series is like a pinch pinch hitter and everything. He ended up I think there was a couple of stops in between. We end up in the Blue Jays I think in this last year, 2017, 2018. Most famous for getting on first and then somebody, I think it's Kevin Pillar, hits

a line drive. This is like some mid-season game against the Cardinals. And Chris Coughlin is like, at one point, he was like a first-round draft pick, I think. Right? But was just a guy. Seemed like the least athletic. pick, I think, right? But he was just a guy. Seemed like the least athletic. Yeah, the lucky of the year.

At this point though, you know, he's just a guy and he sort of seemed like the least athletic guy on the baseball, on the Jays and everything. And he's just, you know, plugging away as trying desperately to hold on for one more year in the show, kind of, you know, lifer. Anyway, somebody probably Kevin Pallar hits a double and he takes off from first and play at the plate. Yadir Molina is the catcher for the Cardinals. It's a meeting between a Hall of Famer and a guy at the plate. Molina has to like, I don't know if he doesn't sprawl, but he takes a knee or something to try and get the ball with a little bit up the line. And Chris Coughlin does the most graceful

thing I've ever seen. He just leaps Superman style into the air and clears Jeter Molina completely. He does not nail the landing, but he touches home plate, untouched by Jeter Molina and does a front flip over to land. And I always think about that, that the guy, a guy on the Mujays with, you know, maybe a bit more pedigree once upon a time too, but you know, a 30, whatever, three, 34 year old guy trying to get some at-bats is capable of things that are extraordinary and we don't recognize it because of the nature of sort of blending in on these organizations too. And I always think of Reg that way too, where Chris can't stop being amazed by him as physically and aesthetically

and how he sort of is among people too. And that stands out in Windsor, Ontario, where he's playing and Buffalo where he's playing and Erie where he's playing and everything too. It doesn't stand out if he was making a major league roster or something. But I think that's what's interesting about writing about kind of elite athletes is like, I think we vastly underestimate what the word elite means in that context. You know, you have spent more time with the athletes in your career and your life than most people. So I think that you maybe have a bit more of an understanding of it, but that like fascination of them as if they were

cartoon characters, I think is grounded in reality and ever present whenever like, you know, folks on the outside like myself are thinking about them. Last thing I wanted to ask you about one of the ideas in the book that has stuck with me for months, because I had early access is this idea of single site versus second site and there's this divide in the way that some of the characters process the world so coach and Mikey the younger brother these are single site guys and Chris and perhaps Reg or at least Reg wants to be a second site guy. So what is the distinction between single and second site?

It's kind of part of the same thing. This sense from functionally less athletic people like Chris is and not to surprise anybody but myself too, and other people, that there must be a thing about them that gives them knowledge of their body and space, that sort of like, you know, extra sense that they have that the rest of us don't have, and it means that their perception of time is different in some way, too. And then there was a, there's like an old New Yorker profile of a pre-presidency Barack Obama, it might be like the first Obama sort of story and the New Yorker that says like he,

I forget who wrote it, but there's a reference. I think this was like talking about him working a room and he says he has kind of the writerly sense that he is simultaneously experiencing him interacting with people and thinking about it after the fact at the same time too, so like second sight. So that was sort of picked up as this idea of a elite athlete or somebody who relies directly

on unintellectualized understanding of where their body is and where objects are in space, so also like a fighter pilot or something, too, has the ability to see something once and unthinkingly react. This is however many bits of a second you have to decide whether to swing or not, or try to identify it's a breaking pitch or not, you know, as a hitter. And then other people don't have that. They have second sight. They have the sense of the Obama example of like simultaneously experiencing something and considering it as well, intellectually, you know, whatever you want to sort of add

or be one is attached to it. And single-sided people have a series of outcomes and abilities and superpowers and then second-sided people have them as well. Chris, like probably most narrators and novels, to be honest, is a second-sided person by nature. Obviously, you know what, probably most authors as well, probably most podcasts, so it's me too, Ben, I imagine. And then we would probably, a lot of us would pretty love to be the other kind, because it carries with it all of these sort of abilities that seem rarer and more wonderful. But, you know, at some point, it comes to terms with who he is and what his skill set is and what his sort of life path might be too.

Yeah, it's an interesting classification system. I hadn't quite thought of it in those terms before, but ever since I read the book, I have kind of evaluated people or myself in that way. So it's left a lasting impression and the ending has as well, but we won't get into the specifics of that. I'll just say that it's thought provoking. I'm still processing it. And I will just say that people will want to get to the end of it, even if they aren't blurbing,

just to consider the ramifications and the implications. And this is your fifth book, but it's your first novel. You are a poet, and there's a poetry in this book as well. But it's also just a good yarn and a good baseball story. And you mentioned the cover. You actually can judge this book by its cover because both are really good. In fact, as much as I like the book, the cover might be better. So I think, yeah, the cover might oversell how excellent this book is, as great as it is. That's how much I like the cover.

Well, we will shout out Ian Sullivan Cant, who did the, he's an artist who did the cover design too here in Toronto. Fine work, Ian. Yes. If you're the kind of person who just likes to display books in your home, then that's another reason to get the Northern. You don't even have to crack this thing open. I recommend that you do, but if you just put it face out or you're a bookseller

and you're in a little indie bookstore, you want to just put the Northern just face out on that shelf. At this point, you could just go to the bookstore and take a picture of it and frame it in your house. I guess you could do that, but that's, don't deprive Jacob of your revenue. He worked hard on this. So the book again is called The Northern. If you want to read the book

or The Brilliant Blurb by Ben Lindbergh, you should go check it out. And the author is Jacob MacArthur Mooney, who has also joined me on the segment. Good talking to you, Jacob. Thank you, Ben. Really appreciate it. 2319! We have a 2319!

All right, thanks to all our authors. We may have more book talk to come, not book talk as in book TikTok, book talk as in talking about books. One small correction to last episode's stat blast, Ryan Nelson looked up the longest team winning or losing streaks in a certain game number of the season.

But when he did that, he queried for season streaks, not game streaks. So he didn't account for missing games in certain seasons. Didn't affect that much. The longest losing streaks he mentioned were all correct, but he did say that the Dodgers were tied for the second longest active streak with 13 consecutive wins in game one 16s.

That should actually be 12 because there was no game 116 in 2020. And he noted that the all-time record was 20 straight wins in game 143 by the New York Giants ending in 1930. That should actually be only 19 straight wins because there were some early season endings in there. Also credit to one of last episode's guests, Brandon, for saying that the Orioles should have traded for Luis Castillo Well, they just did they acquired Luis Castillo from the Mariners However, it was Luis F Castillo not Luis M Castillo Which is probably the one Brandon meant. That will do it for today

I thank you as always for listening and I will thank you with even greater depth of feeling if like Jacob MacArthur Mooney, you support Effectively Wild on Patreon, which you can do by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild and signing up to pledge some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going, help us stay almost ad free and get yourself access to some perks as have the following five listeners, Matthew Pasceski, Colin Briskman, Dave, Sally Gaskell,

and Emily. Thanks to all of you. Patreon perks include access to the Effectively Wild Discord group for patrons only, monthly bonus episodes, playoff live streams, prioritized email answers, personalized messages, discounts on merch and fan graphs, memberships, and so much more. Check out all the offerings at patreon.com slash

effectively wild. If you are a Patreon supporter, you can message us through the Patreon site. If not, you can contact us via email. Send your questions, comments, intro and outro themes to podcast at fangraphs.com. You can rate, review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms.

You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can find the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash Effectively Wild. And you can check the show page at fan graphs or the episode description in your podcast app for links to the stories and stats we cited today. Thanks to Shane McKeon for his editing

and production assistance. I'll be back with one more episode before the end of the week, which means I will talk to you soon. Did Richard Love Lady ever strike a Taylor T. Godin? Who had more war, Jason Kendall or Russell Martin? What if Shohio Tani's dog was also a good lawyer? What would you do if Mike Trump just showed up in your foyer?

Or is it foyer? Find out on Effectively Wild! Find out on Effectively Wild! Find out on Effectively Wild! Today. Today. Today. Today.