SSoP Podcast Episode 71 — Baseball Diamond: Root, Root, Root for the Home Team

This is a transcription of Baseball Diamond: Root, Root, Root for the Home Team

David: Hello. Welcome to Strong Sense of Place.

Melissa: In each episode, we focus on one destination and discuss what makes it different than any other place on Earth.

David: Then we recommend five books we love that took us there on the page.

Melissa: I’m Melissa Joulwan.

David: I’m David Humphreys.

David: We’re going around the world one great read at a time. Thanks for joining us.

[cheerful music]

David: Welcome to Strong Sense of Place. Today we get curious about the baseball diamond. Today on Two Truths and a Lie, we’ll talk about a base-stealing queen, a trade that sounds more like a bar bet than a sports trade, and the most eccentric man in the sport’s history. Then we’ll talk about five books we love.

Melissa: I’m recommending an epistolary novel that made me guffaw out loud and had me ugly crying at the end.

David: I’ve got a book that’s a love letter to the guys who don’t get the glory but still might hold the team together. But first, Mel’s going to bring us up to speed with the Baseball 101.

Melissa: I usually start with getting us oriented, but today, I’m asking Dave to step up to the plate. [DAVE] For our friends in countries where ‘swing for the fences’ or ‘cover all your bases’ aren’t common phrases, here’s a brief overview of how baseball is played.

David: Baseball is a game built on a simple idea: one team throws the ball, the other team tries to hit it, and if you hit it, you run like crazy around four bases to score. Each team has nine players on the field, and they take turns batting and fielding. At its heart, it’s a showdown between pitcher and batter. In the major leagues, the pitcher fires the ball in at nearly a hundred miles an hour, and the batter has less than half a second to decide whether to swing. But it’s also a team sport full of strategy and quick reactions — outfielders chase down fly balls, infielders dive to make a stop, managers tinker with their teams and their lineups until they’ve got just the right ingredients to beat the other guy. The pace can be slow, and then suddenly—crack of the bat, a runner sliding home, the whole stadium erupting. It’s patient, it’s explosive, and that mix of difficulty and beauty is what makes baseball such a lasting game – and a great game to write about.

Melissa: Since the 1860s, baseball has been called ‘America’s pastime.’ During times of strife — the Civil War, the Great Depression, the world wars — baseball provided escapism and a sense of normalcy. It’s always been seen as a reflection of American attitudes and values: Baseball requires cooperation and self-sacrifice — and like America, baseball loves a maverick. Baseball is also democratic: Just about anybody can play just about anywhere if they’ve got an open space, a bat, and a ball. As a spectator, even if you don’t know all the rules, you can still understand the elation of a stolen base or a home runNow is probably a good time for me to admit that I don’t love-love baseball. I will happily watch a game, but I’m not out here memorizing stats. I do not have a favorite player. But I enjoy the stories and the romance, and I love-love-love to go to the ballpark.

Melissa: I want to share a quote from Roger Angell. He was an American essayist and a fiction editor for The New Yorker and was known as the Babe Ruth of baseball writers. Also, BTW, he lived to be 101. He had this to say about the game: ‘Within the ball park, time moves differently, marked by no clock except the events of the game. This is the unique, unchangeable feature of baseball… [it]’s time is seamless and invisible, a bubble within which players move at exactly the same pace and rhythms as all their predecessors.’

Melissa: That was definitely my experience when we went to a minor league game this summer. It was a perfect summer evening: a soft 75 degrees with the sun slowly going down. We had the essentials — cold drinks, a big bucket of nice-and-salty popcorn, and during the third inning, a classic hot dog. There was nothing to do but sit there, enjoying the air, and occasionally joining in a cheer now and then.

Melissa: There are 30 major league ballparks across the United States and visiting them as become a Thing. Slate magazine built a tool that generates a road trip to visit all 30 ballparks in 30 days. You plug in the stadium where you want to start, then it plots a 30-day driving loop so you end up where you started. The math allows for four hours at every game, which is usually enough time to eat a hot dog and catch the whole game.

Melissa: The tool only includes the MLB schedule from 2014, but that didn’t stop Dave and I from playing with it for a while and daydreaming about a month on the road.

Melissa: If you want to plot a roadtrip for real, baseball-roadtrip.com is based on the 2025 season. You specify how long you want your trip to be, a start date, and the teams you want to see, then it generates a route. It even lets you specify days off so you can do some sightseeing along the way. I’ll put links to both of those in show notes.

Melissa: Today, I thought it would be fun to take a virtual road trip to three standout stadiums to talk about why you might want to visit and what you can eat there. Because what’s a baseball game without good snacks?

Melissa: First up: A historic park.

Melissa: I was torn between Chicago’s Wrigley Field and Boston’s Fenway Park. They’re the last two parks built in the early 20th-century style called ‘jewel box.’ That referred to smallish urban ballparks designed to put fans close to the action. Imagine a black and white photo of an old-timey ballpark, and you’ll get the idea.

Melissa: I went with Fenway — home of the Boston Red Sox — because it’s the oldest park in Major League Baseball, built in 1912. Plus, its nickname is ‘America’s Most Beloved Ballpark.’

Melissa: There are a few features that make Fenway remarkable.

Melissa: First, it’s home to the Green Monster. That’s the nickname for the stadium’s left-field wall. It’s been painted a dark forest green since 1947 — and it’s 37 feet, 2 inches tall (that’s 11 meters). That makes the highest wall in MLB.

Melissa: Two other things make the Green Monster special: 1) You can sit on top of the wall. The chairs are called Monster seats — and 2) the lower half of the wall is a manual scoreboard that’s still updated by a team of three people. They change the numbers and lights by hand from behind the wall. Apparently, it can get really steamy inside and the interior walls are covered with autographs and messages from players and other famous people who’s been inside.

Melissa: So, that’s in left field.

Melissa: In the right-field bleachers — way up in section 42, row 37 — there’s a single bright red chair — seat 21 — among the sea of green chairs. That lone red one marks the spot where Ted Williams hit the longest home run in Fenway’s history. 502 feet on June 9, 1946. For context, 502 feet is about two city blocks — or five blue whales.

Melissa: If you visit Fenway, you can take a guided tour before the game where you’ll get an inside look at the dugouts, the press box, the lone red seat, and the Green Monster, plus learn about the history of the park and more about players like Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, and a former Red Sox player and coach with a great name: Johnny Pesky!

Melissa: Let’s talk food! In addition to the usual hot dogs and popcorn, you can chow down on Green Monster Fries. They’re crinkle-cut fries turned into nachos with chili, cheese, sour cream, and fried jalapeños on top. If you need a sweet chaser, they’ve got a hot, gooey 3/4-pound cookie made with milk, dark, and white chocolate chunks.

Melissa: My next stadium pick is for best architecture. It’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, Maryland. Home to the Baltimore Orioles, also known as the Birds or simply the Os to the locals.

Melissa: This really lovely park was built in 1992 and kicked off a wave of ballpark design that combined the classic look of the jewel box with modern updates. Camden Yards looks like a ballpark from a 1950s movie or the retro-modern style of the 1990s Batman cartoons. The outfield grass is mowed in a perfect diamond pattern. The right-field wall is formed by a historic red brick building — The B&O Warehouse — which used to be the home of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Then in the distance, beyond center field, is a series of skyscrapers, including the art deco Bank of America building, that looks like a cousin to the Empire State Building. When I zoomed into photos of the park, I fully expected to see men in the stands wearing suits and fedoras. [DAVE]

Melissa: The city of Baltimore’s most famous player is Babe Ruth. He was signed to the Orioles in 1914 when he was 19 years old, but was pretty quickly snapped up by the Red Sox. He pitched for the Sox, but really made a name for himself as an outfielder for the New York Yankees, where he got the nickname ‘The Sultan of Swat.’ We’ll talk about him more later. Baltimore still claims Babe Ruth as their own. His boyhood home at 216 Emory Street is now a museum, and it’s just an 8-minute walk from Camden Yards.

Melissa: Another famous Oriole is Cal Ripken, Jr., also known as Iron Man, because he played 2632 straight games with the Orioles.

Melissa: To put that in perspective: In 1939, Lou Gehrig set the record with 2130 games consecutive games. That’s 12 years without a single day off. When Gehrig retired, everybody thought that record was untouchable. Then 56 years later, Cal Ripken broke that record. At that game on September 6, 1995, the crowd gave Ripken a 22-minute standing ovation. And then Ripken went on to play for three more years without missing a game.

Melissa: Let’s talk food! Camden Yard’s sandwiches pay homage to its Maryland location. First, there’s the Chessie. That’s a foot-long Chesapeake-spiced sausage, topped with crab dip, pickled sweet corn, and fried green tomatoes. A Jewish deli called Attman’s has been slinging sandwiches in Baltimore for more than 100 years. At the Park, you can get a Cloak & Dagger. That’s corned beef on fresh rye with coleslaw and Russian dressing. And if you want to dress up your classic hotdog, you can get it with mac and cheese on top.

Melissa: Our final stop has the prettiest view. It’s Oracle Park, home to the San Francisco Giants.

Melissa: This park sits right on San Francisco Bay. Imagine the triple-decker delight of a sunny, light blue sky, emerald green grass that looks velvety, and the deep, dark blue of the Bay. Most of the seats in the stadium have panoramic views of the water, and past left field, you can clearly see the span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

Melissa: The park is so close to the water that on game days fans sit in boats with fishing nets in the hope of hauling a home run ball from the water. They call those ‘splash hits,’ and since the park opened in 2000, there have been 106 splash hits.

Melissa: The part of the Bay where the splash hits land is nicknamed McCovey Cove, in honor of former Giants player Willie McCovey. Starting in 1959, he was a first baseman and left-handed power hitter. He was 6-foot-4 with long arms that let him extend and reach for throws at first base, so he got the nickname Stretch. He was also known as the ‘scariest hitter in baseball’ because of his knack for line drives — but that wasn’t always a good thing.

Melissa: In 1962, the Giants were playing the Yankees for the championship. It was Game 7, the bottom of the 9th. There were two outs, and the score was Yankees 1, Giants 0. The Giants had a runner on second and third. Any base hit would probably have meant the World Series won the Series. McCovey stepped up to the plate and nailed a line drive — straight into the glove of Yankees’ second baseman Bobby Richardson. Game over. The Yankees won.

Melissa: A few months later, Charles Schultz drew a comic strip with three panels of Charlie Brown sitting silently next to Linus. In the fourth panel, Charlie Brown throws his head back and shouts, ‘Why couldn’t McCovey have hit the ball just three feet higher?’

Melissa: But McCovey is beloved. He played 19 seasons for the Giants and hit at least one homerun in four different decades. He was a 6-time All-Star, the 1969 National League MVP, and was inducted into the Hall of Face in 1986. His statue stands guard outside the stadium.

Melissa: If you visit before a game, you can take a behind-the-scenes tour of the park where they let you walk on the field, sit in the dugout, and watch the players warmup.

Melissa: The food options there include nice nods to San Francisco culinary history. There’s a crab salad sandwich on grilled bread from Bodin bakery. They’ve been making their iconic sourdough in San Francisco since 1849. The park sells 2500 of those sandwiches every game day. There’s also a hot fudge sundae made with legendary Ghirardelli chocolate. Italian chocolatier Domenico Ghirardelli founded the company during the California Gold Rush in 1852.

Melissa: And finally most relevant to my interests, you can get a baseball bat of popcorn throughout the stadium. A writer for Eater San Francisco said, ‘This is an obvious must-purchase. It’s a baseball bat full of popcorn.’ I saw a photo. The thing is the length of a baseball bat, but the other dimensions are like the bulbous club a cartoon character would use to clonk someone over the head. I’m sold.

Melissa: A trip to a major league ballpark can immerse you in history, give you an excuse to cheer and dance in public, offers lots of over-the-top food possibilities, and is a nice celebration of Americana.

Melissa: That’s the Baseball 101.

David: I’m going to say three statements, two of them are true. Mel doesn’t know which one is the lie. - Statement one: The person with the record for most stolen bases in a professional season is a woman. Statement two: In the 1950s, a Pacific Coast League club traded a backup catcher for a custom-painted popcorn machine. And statement three: Rube Waddell — a pitcher at the turn of the 20th century — was the most eccentric man ever to play major league baseball.

David: One at at time: The person with the record for most stolen bases in a professional season is a woman.

David: That’s true — the woman’s name was Sophie Kurys. In 1946 she stole 201 bases in a single season, a record no man has come near.

David: So, picture postwar America: gas rationing is over, the GIs are home, baseball is booming. In Chicago, chewing-gum magnate Philip Wrigley – you might recognize him from Wrigley field – has an idea: America needs a women’s baseball league. A little sporty, a little sexy. The result was the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Later, this league would be immortalized in ‘A League of Their Own,’ the baseball movie with Gena Davis, Tom Hanks, and Madonna. Tryouts are held in a few places.

David: Sophie Kurys is 18 and living in Flint, Michigan when she hears about the new league from some friends of hers. She goes to try out. They like her in Flint. They send her to Chicago. She earns a spot with a brand new team, The Racine Belles. Sophie later said that when she saw her name on a chalkboard under the name ‘Racine,’ she had no idea what that was.

David: But she takes the train up to Racine with a bunch of other young women; they meet the mayor and a rabbi from the Kiwanis Club. Everybody hits it off. And she starts playing baseball.

David: She’d go on to play ten seasons.

David: The league had its quirks. The players wore short skirts, attended charm school, and were given a code of conduct that covered everything from posture to lipstick. But they were also expected to play real baseball.

David: Kurys’ best year is 1946. Now, she wasn’t a slugger — she hit a single home run her entire career — but she could run.

David: That year — 1946 — she gets on base 215 times. And she steals 201 bases. She was caught stealing – twice. If she gets to first, she’s taking second. Probably third.

David: For comparison, Ricky Henderson — the MLB’s stolen base king — swiped 130 in his best season. Last year, the steal leader was Elly De La Cruz, and he took 67. Sophie’s total of 201 makes those guys look cautious. On rough dirt, in skirted uniforms, wearing cleats that would make a modern trainer wince. And in a season of 112 games.

David: Fans loved her. Kids would lean over the dugout rail to see if she’d wink back. Local papers wrote about her with a mix of awe and Midwestern pride.

David: Her opponents dreaded her. Pitchers tried quick-pitching, catchers tried snap throws, infielders faked pickoffs — and she still went, head down, arms pumping, until the umpire’s arm shot sideways to call her safe.

David: The league folded in 1954, the way so many women’s sports leagues have — underfunded, underpromoted, quietly dismissed. But her record? Still there. Still untouchable.

David: Statement two: In the 1950s, a Pacific Coast League club traded a backup catcher for a custom-painted popcorn machine.

David: First, let’s talk about trades in baseball. They’re as much a part of the game as hot dogs and foul balls. Most trades are straightforward: a player or two for another player or two, maybe some cash changing hands. There’s a stretch in the season — roughly from the end of July until after the World Series — when teams can’t trade players on their 40-man rosters. Outside of that, pretty simple.

David: But every so often, owners get… inventive. Baseball’s history is dotted with deals that sound like bar bets.

David: In 1930, catcher Johnny Jones was traded for a turkey, a live turkey. The owner claimed it was because the turkey was having a better year. That ended poorly for everyone. The player retired, the turkey was cooked, and sportswriters ate it in the press box.

David: In the early 1900s, Cy Young — yes, that Cy Young, the pitcher so good they named baseball’s top pitching award after him — was traded for $250 — and a new suit. For context, that was pretty good money at the time. But I love that the owner got a new suit out of it.

David: And then there’s the 1948 deal where the Dodgers sent catcher Cliff Dapper to the Atlanta Crackers in exchange for broadcaster Ernie Harwell — the only time in pro baseball history a player was swapped for an announcer. It was a lopsided trade: the catcher played just eight more pro games, while Harwell went on to call Tigers games for 42 years. He ended up in the Sportscasters Hall of Fame.

David: And then there are a few ‘traded for himself’ guys — one of baseball’s true unicorns. Four players have had the distinction of being traded for themselves — the first a catcher in 1962, the last an infielder in 2005. The deal goes like this: Team A sends the player to Team B for a ‘player to be named later,’ and after some weeks or months, Team B sends back… the same guy.

David: With all that in mind, that statement about the popcorn machine probably sounded believable: In the 1950s, a Pacific Coast League club traded a backup catcher for a custom-painted popcorn machine. The PCL was the top-tier minor league of its day — teams in big cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle, with just as much swagger as the majors. Popcorn machines back then weren’t just concession equipment; they were ballpark showpieces — gleaming metal and glass, turning out salty, buttery handfuls for fans in their Sunday best.

David: But this one’s a lie. Could it have happened? Sure. In baseball’s long, odd history of trades, a popcorn machine would be downright reasonable compared to a live turkey or an announcer.

David: Still… I wouldn’t mind seeing a popcorn machine in the Hall of Fame.

David: Last one! Rube Waddell, a pitcher at the turn of the 20th century, was the most eccentric man ever to play major league baseball.

David: That’s true — at least, it is to me. Calling someone “the most eccentric man to ever play major league baseball” is subjective, of course. And there are a lot of contenders. This is a game that has attracted its share of outliers, oddballs, and originals.

David: Take Moe Berg, for instance. On paper, he was a light-hitting catcher from the 1920s and ’30s. Off paper? He spoke seven languages, read newspapers in Sanskrit, and could lecture on classical philosophy.

David: One teammate summed it up: “He knows seven languages, but he can’t hit in any of them.”

David: After his baseball career, Berg joined the OSS — the CIA’s forerunner — and was sent to Europe during World War II to gather intelligence on the Nazi atomic bomb program. His mission was to size up physicist Werner Heisenberg — yes, the uncertainty principle guy — and, if necessary, kill him. The Smithsonian says he was given a .45 pistol and a cyanide capsule and told to take Heisenberg out if the Germans seemed close to having the bomb. That’s a flavor of eccentric you don’t see every day.

David: Or Mark “The Bird” Fidrych, the Detroit Tigers rookie sensation of 1976. Fidrych talked to the baseball before each pitch, crouched to pat the mound like it was a family pet, and waved to fans mid-inning. He radiated joy, innocence, and a little offbeat magic — He brought a lot of delight to the game.

David: But if we’re talking all-time, no one matches the carnival energy of Rube Waddell. A Hall of Fame lefty in the early 1900s, Waddell was as dominant as he was unpredictable. He led the league in strikeouts six straight years. On July 1, 1902, he became just the second pitcher in major league history to throw an immaculate inning — striking out three batters on nine pitches. Even now, fewer than 120 pitchers have ever done it.

David: In exhibition games, he’d sometimes wave the rest of the defense off the field, leaving just him and the catcher. And he was good enough to get away with it.

David: Off the field, though, he could vanish mid-season to go fishing… or bolt from the diamond in full uniform if a fire truck went by. He had a weakness for puppies, too — fans of the opposing team sometimes brought dogs just to distract him while he pitched.

David: Baseball historian Lee Allen once summed up Waddell’s 1903 season like this: ‘Waddell began the 1903 season sleeping in a firehouse at Camden, New Jersey, and ended it tending bar in a saloon in Wheeling, West Virginia. In between those events, he won 22 games for the Philadelphia Athletics; toured the nation in a melodrama called The Stain of Guilt; courted, married, and became separated from May Wynne Skinner of Lynn, Massachusetts; saved a woman from drowning; accidentally shot a friend through the hand; and was bitten by a lion.’

David: His role in The Stain of Guilt is particularly on-brand. The producers discovered he couldn’t memorize his lines, so they let him make up his lines on the spot. The play was a hit, and audiences roared at the scene where Waddell — with the ease of tossing a bag of laundry — picked up the villain and threw him clear across the stage.

David: Fans loved him. He was perhaps the biggest draw in the first decade of the century. People traveled just to see him pitch, knowing they’d get a show one way or another.

David: Baseball has had plenty of eccentrics, but Rube wasn’t just a player with quirks. He was a one-man spectacle, a traveling sideshow with a golden arm. If there’s a contest for the title of “most eccentric,” I’d say it’s not even close.

Melissa: My first recommendation is ‘Last Days of Summer’ by Steve Kluger.

Melissa: This is one of those novels that makes you want to read bits out loud to someone else — and magically leap into the pages to hang out with the characters.

Melissa: It’s a coming-of-age story set in 1940s Brooklyn. The plot unfolds through letters, newspaper articles, postcards, and baseball scores. It tells the story of an unlikely friendship between a 12-year-old boy named Joey Margolis and Charlie Banks, a third baseman for the New York Giants.

Melissa: Joey, the kid, is a born and bred Brooklynite with a lotta attitude. But you can’t really blame him. His no-good father left him and his mom. That’s not only uprooted his life, he might be in mortal danger. This is how he describes it:

Melissa: ‘After the divorce, my mother moved us from a largely Hasidic community in Williamsburg to an old brownstone at the corner of Bedford Avenue and Montgomery Street, where the mailboxes in the vestibule presaged the special fabric out of which my adolescence was to be woven. Corelli. Verrastro. Fiore… Di Cicco (chico)… Delvecchi. This told me all I needed to know… as the newly appointed resident Jew, I couldn’t be entirely certain what recreational activities the neighborhood was willing to offer, but I had a pretty decent hunch that bleeding was among them. Not that my mom or my Aunt Carrie did much to promote my cause: they openly lit Shabos candles on San Gennaro Day… and helped feed the Italian-American War Widows with a tray of… potato knishes. The day we unpacked, I figured conservatively that I had a week left to live…’

Melissa: Our boy Joey has a lot on his mind. He regularly writes letters to President Roosevelt to share his concerns about the Germans occupying Denmark. He’s worried about the war between Japan and China. And his face has been beaten to a pulp by the Italian toughs on his block.

Melissa: The one bright spot in his life is baseball. By all rights, he should root for the Brooklyn Dodgers, but they’re his rotten Dad’s favorite team. Therefore, Joey HATES the Dodgers. He looks beyond Brooklyn for a hero and finds Charlie Banks. Banks is a hot third baseman who’s a monster slugger and has just signed with the Giants after a bidding war.

Melissa: Charlie is twenty-two, and a Wisconsin native with a smart mouth. He’s almost as well known for landing a punch as he is for his home runs. In his defense, he says he only uses his fists ‘whenever anybody gives me lip or such other good reasons.’

Melissa: Joey writes a letter to Charlie, thinking that if he can befriend the ball player, maybe he can salvage his rep in the neighborhood. In his letter, he makes one big request: He asks Charlie to point to left field at his next at-bat, to say ‘This is for my friend Joey Margolis,’ and to hit a home run.

Melissa: This is an homage to a famous story about Babe Ruth.

David: For people who aren’t familiar… It was October 1, 1932, Game 3 of the World Series at Wrigley Field in Chicago. The Yankees were playing the Cubs, and the score was tied in the fifth inning. Babe Ruth came to the plate, already larger than life, already the game’s biggest star. The Cubs dugout was riding him hard with heckling, and the crowd was on him too. They had been throwing lemons at him earlier in the game. On a two-strike count, Ruth made a gesture — he raised his arm and pointed. Some say he pointed toward the outfield bleachers. Others swear he was just pointing at the pitcher or at the Cubs bench.

David: But then, with everyone watching, Ruth crushed the very next pitch from Charlie Root deep into the center-field bleachers for a home run.

David: The story that stuck — the one passed down like myth — is that Babe Ruth called his shot, pointing to the exact spot where he’d hit the ball and then doing it. Whether or not it really happened that way doesn’t matter so much anymore. What matters is the image: baseball’s most legendary slugger, taunting fate, then delivering in the biggest game on the biggest stage.

Melissa: So, back to Joey. That first letter he writes to Charlie sets off an ongoing pen pal situation that changes both of their lives.

Melissa: I chose this book because I love epistolary novels, and this one is so CUTE! Each written artifact has a distinct voice: Joey and Charlie’s banter made me laugh and the newspaper stories are written in the ‘why I oughtta’ style of the ’40s. I was delighted immediately.

Melissa: Then almost without me noticing, the narrative bits started to work on my other emotions. The boys’ correspondence takes on more depth. They move beyond baseball to life off the field and the changes wrought by the war in Europe.

Melissa: More characters are introduced, like Joey’s best friend — a sweet Japanese kid during a rough time to be Japanese in the US, Charlie’s best pal, and the girl who steals Charlie’s heart. It’s all richer and more complex than it seems at first. You get tricked by the novelty of the format and then BLAM! then a hit to your solar plexus comes out of left field.

Melissa: The author Steve Kluger is a journalist and playwright, in addition to being a novelist. His two heroes growing up were the grand dame of musical theater Ethel Merman [play a clip of Hello Dolly?] and the baseball player Tom Seaver. All of those influences are threaded throughout this story with references to books, musicals, movies, and real baseball history sprinkled throughout.

Melissa: This is a story about families of origin and the families we choose. It’s also a celebration of baseball and what it means to its fans — and it shines a light on the good and the bad of race relations in the US. It’s tender and made me laugh out loud. It’s ‘Last Days of Summer’ by Steve Kluger.

Melissa: I want to add a footnote. When the author said that Tom Seavers was his favorite baseball player, I had to go digging. I’m glad I did because it led me to a really nice story. Tom Seavers was also known as ‘Tom Terrific’ and ‘The Franchise.’ He was a pro pitcher who played 20 seasons in the major leagues — for the New York Mets, Cincinnati Reds, Chicago White Sox, and Boston Red Sox. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. At the time, he had the highest percentage of votes ever recorded. His career started in 1967 and ended in 1986.

Melissa: When he retired in ‘86, he was playing for the Boston Red Sox where he had his 311th and final win. Also on the Red Sox that year was Roger Clemens. Clemens was making his MBL debut. In case you’re not familiar with his name, he’s one of the most dominant pitchers in baseball history and is called ‘The Rocket’ because of his powerful fastball.

Melissa: Clemens said that playing with Seaver in 1986 helped him make the transition from ‘thrower’ to ‘pitcher.’ And when Seaver died, Clemens told Sports Illustrated, ‘I got to stand on the same mound as someone I looked up to.’

David: My first book is ‘The Tao of the Backup Cather: Playing Baseball for the Love of the Game’ by Tim Brown. Almost every baseball team has a backup catcher.

David: He’s not the everyday guy. He’s not the star behind the plate. He’s the one who plays when the starter needs a rest — maybe the day game after a night game, or maybe he plays because a certain pitcher likes throwing to him. Sometimes he spends the whole game in the bullpen, catching warm-up tosses.

David: And make no mistake: catching is brutal. It’s the hardest defensive job in baseball. Squatting for three hours. Taking foul tips off the mask, off the shoulders, off the thighs. Managing the mental side too—memorizing hitting patterns, watching base runners, working the umpire’s strike zone. It’s punishing on the body and exhausting on the brain.

David: And usually? The backup catcher isn’t much of a hitter. If he were, he’d be starting. So why do these guys matter? Because the ones who stick around—the ones who build careers as backup catchers—bring something more.

David: There’s a quote in the book stayed with me. A major league general manager says, “Every other person on the field, on the roster, is there based wholly on talent. The backup catcher is also evaluated on a sixth tool – and that is what kind of teammate they are.”

David: That’s the heart of this book. This book is about the guys who are never going to be the star player, who play fine, but who still bring something to the game.

David: Maybe he’s the guy who keeps the clubhouse loose. Maybe he’s the one who knows how to calm down a nervous rookie on the mound. Maybe he’s observant, picking up on the little tells from the other dugout. Maybe he’s the glue, the teammate who shows up every day with humor and humility, putting the team first.

David: In a sport this is obsessed with numbers, the backup catcher is a reminder that not everything valuable can be measured. This book is about those guys.

David: It centers around one catcher, Erik Kratz. Kratz played nineteen pro seasons with fourteen different organizations. You might be surprised at how fast you can be juggled from one team to the next. Kratz caught everything from minor league hopefuls in AAA to October pitchers on the big stage. And through him, Tim Brown introduces us to the larger fraternity of backup catchers—the men who love a game that doesn’t always love them back.

David: You get the nuts and bolts, what’s it like to call a game, to read hitters, to manage the ego of a 21-year old man who was throwing fine five days ago, but can’t seem to get the ball over the plate today. You hear about how a bullpen runs. But you also get the heart: stories of showing up, swallowing pride, serving the team.

David: And here’s what I loved most: it’s not sentimental. It’s funny, it’s warm, and it feels honest. Backup catchers are frequently good storytellers, and this book is full of their voices.

David: Brown is a great writer for this book. He’s spent decades covering major-league baseball – first with the Los Angeles Times, and then Yahoo Sports. He’s written two other books that I’m curious about. One is about a pitcher, Jim Abbott, who had a successful major league career. In 1993 threw a no-hitter – even though he was born without a right hand. The other book is about another pitcher, Rick Ankiel, who had the yips for four and a half years. He was in the majors, got a mysterious anxiety condition they call ‘the yips.’ He got out, then reinvented himself as a hitter and a center-fielder and managed to get back into the majors.

David: But in this book, Brown really captures the character of the backup catcher. He reframes success from their perspective. He makes a really strong argument that baseball isn’t just about the win-loss stat – that “backup” isn’t a demotion, it’s a calling.

David: If you like sports books that take you inside the clubhouse, if you want to meet the kind of people you’d actually want to share a beer with after the game, I can’t recommend this enough. It’s ‘The Tao of the Backup Cather: Playing Baseball for the Love of the Game’ by Tim Brown.

Melissa: My second recommendation is a baseball murder mystery by Troy Soos (Seuss) called ‘The Cincinnati Red Stalkings.’ This is a page-turning mashup of baseball murder mystery, historical fiction, and a touch of rom-com. It’s part of a series set in the 1920s, starring a baseball player and amateur sleuth named Mickey Rawlings. Mickey is a utility infielder — which means he plays different base positions — and is a journeyman player — so every season, he finds himself on a different major league team, on a different baseball diamond.

Melissa: His career has taken him to Fenway Park to play with the Red Sox, to the old home of the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field, to the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley, and in this one, to Cincinnati, where he plays for the Reds.

Melissa: Mickey makes a dangerous habit of being curious, and he has more chutzpah than common sense. The guy is a bad luck magnet, but his good nature rarely falters. He’s a champion of the downtrodden and damsels in distress. Because he’s not a star player, he has plenty of time to nose around illicit goings-on — and with his lower spot on the roster, he’s a little bit invisible around the ballpark. He’s like a baseball version of Columbo. His ability to be underestimated and discounted is a superpower.

Melissa: I chose this installment for two reasons:

Melissa: One, it’s set in Cincinnati, and Dave grew up there!

Melissa: And two, it delves into the history of the Black Sox Scandal at the 1919 World Series.

Melissa: Before I say more about the book, we need to take a brief historical detour. In real life, the Chicago White Sox were playing the Cincinnati Reds. Eight members of the White Sox were accused of intentionally losing the game in exchange for payoffs from a gambling syndicate. The players were acquitted in court, but were permanently banned from Major League Baseball by the new commissioner: one Kenesaw Mountain Landis. He was the very first Commissioner of Baseball, and he was on a mission to restore confidence in the sport after the Black Sox Scandal. I’ll put a photo of him in show notes. If you were, like, ‘Hey, central casting! Show me a no-nonsense judge that looks like he could be a villain in a black-and-white adaptation of a Charles Dickens novel,’ they would pick this guy.

Melissa: While his standupedness against cheating is a check in the win column, he was also a racist, which is a definite smudge on his record. During the 25 years he was Commissioner, he blocked all attempts to integrate the game. When he died in 1944, the new Commissioner — aptly named Happy Chandler ‚ had a completely different take on the situation. He said:

Melissa: ‘I’ve already done a lot of thinking about this whole racial situation in our country. As a member of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, I got to know a lot about our casualties during the war. Plenty of Negro boys were willing to go out and fight and die for this country. Is it right when they came back to tell them they can’t play the national pastime? … I’m going to have to meet my Maker some day. And if He asks me why I didn’t let this boy play, and I say it’s because he’s black, that might not be a satisfactory answer… It is my job to see that the game is fairly played and that everybody has an equal chance.’

Melissa: By 1947, Major League Baseball was officially integrated, and Jackie Robinson debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15. He won Rookie of the Year and and went on to play in six World Series with the Dodgers. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1962, and just nine days before his death in 1972, he threw out the first pitch in Game 2 of the World Series.

Melissa: Now, back to the story of this book. It’s 1921 — two years after the Black Sox Scandal. Our hero Mickey has just arrived in Cincinnati to play for the Reds. Here’s a thing you need to understand about Mickey: He loves baseball more than anything. Playing it. Reading about it. Meeting other players. Learning the history. He instantly strikes up a friendship with Oliver — who’s maybe an even bigger baseball fan than Mickey. Oliver is putting together an exhibit of memorabilia from the historic 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings. A precurso to the Red Sox, the Stockings were the first all-professional team in baseball history. They traveled from coast to coast, taking on all the best teams, and they never lost a game.

Melissa: The ‘69 Reds were so famous and so adored, a Cincinnati sports journalist wrote a long poem called ‘The Reds of Sixy-Nine’ that ends with these stanzas:

• The game you see them play to-day
• Is tame as it can be;
• You never hear of scores like ours —

• A hundred and nine to three.

• Well, well, my boy, those days are gone;
• No club will ever shine
• Like the one which never knew defeat.
• The Reds of Sixty-nine.

Melissa: So, Mickey and Oliver are waxing poetic about the Reds and some other stuff happens and yada-yada… Uh-oh! Oliver’s dead!

Melissa: Mickey does the only reasonable thing: He starts investigating the murder. Even though assorted tough guys and pillars of the community — with more money than integrity — try to convince him otherwise. First with words, then with bullets.

Melissa: He’s aided in his investigation by his girlfriend Margie, who has plenty of moxie, and a muckraking journalist who gives off Damon Runyon vibes. It’s all got the shimmer of a black-and-white film: a little screwball comedy, a little noir. It’s a lot of fun. It’s ‘The Cincinnati Red Stalkings’ by Troy Soos.

Melissa: Ah, just one more thing: I’ll put the poem ‘The Reds of Sixty-Nine’ in the show notes because it’s pretty sweet.

David: My second book is ‘K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches’ by Tyler Kepner. In baseball scorekeeping, the symbol “K” means a strikeout — with a forward K showing the batter swung and missed, and a backward K showing he was struck out looking. But before we get to the book, we should talk about pitching.

David: The very first step in major league pitching sounds … simple … relatively simple: throw a baseball 60 feet, 6 inches — a little longer than a bowling lane — straight through a batter’s strike zone. So, picturing trying to hit a medium-sized piece of luggage hanging in midair at the other end.

David: Then comes speed. That’s the next test. A talented high school freshman might zip in a pitch at 70 miles an hour. In the majors, even the so-called ‘slow’ offspeed pitches arrive in the low 80s. At the other extreme, there are pitchers – more than a few – who regularly break triple digits. A 100-mph fastball reaches home in less than four-tenths of a second. Blink and it’s over.

David: But. Major-league pitching isn’t just about throwing hard. It’s about control and deception. It’s about out-thinking some of the best hitters in the world.

David: A fastball at 98 miles an hour is impressive – but the real work comes in pairing it with an off-speed pitch that looks identical until the moment it leaves the pitcher’s hand. Or using spin and air currents to make a ball appear to rise, or dive, or dart sideways like it just remembered somewhere else it needed to be.

David: Every pitch in the majors is the product of years – and sometimes decades – of refining mechanics, tinkering with grips, and studying hitters until their tells are etched into memory.

David: When a pitcher’s locked in, he’s not just throwing a ball—he’s managing the batter’s expectations, then breaking them. It’s athleticism, psychology, and sleight of hand. And he’s doing it with thousands watching, the game on the line. When it all comes together, you’re seeing one of the most precise and demanding performances in sports.

David: It is so mentally and physically taxing that most big league starters only work every five days.

David: Which brings us to the book.

David: It’s called ‘K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches’ by Tyler Kepner.

David: This is a book about the major pitches in baseball – the fastball, the cutter, the curveball, and so on. Each get their own chapter. Kepner explains what they are, traces their history, and tells the stories of the players who threw them best, all in an easy, conversational style.

David: Here’s a sample. This is the very opening of the book. I’m going to read you about a page worth.

‘I can pinpoint the single happiest moment of my childhood. On October 8, 1983, when I was eight years old, the Philadelphia Phillies beat the Los Angeles Dodgers to win the National League pennant at Veterans Stadium. Everyone in the stands chanted “Beat L.A.! Beat L.A.!” On our way home, my dad let me honk the horn of his Chevette, like the other revelers on Broad Street. It was the best traffic jam ever.’

‘Steve Carlton won the game, just as he had won the World Series clincher three years earlier, when I was too young to notice. In between he claimed his fourth Cy Young Award, a record at the time, leading the majors in wins and strikeouts and mesmerizing me completely. When I had tickets on his day to pitch, I would scramble to the front row near the first base dugout to watch him get loose, staring up in awe. He would bring his hands together, dip them down by his belt, and then raise them up near his head. He’d drop them lower as he turned, hiking his right knee up around his chest. For a moment, he’d curl the ball in his left hand, down behind his left thigh, before whipping it up and around for the pitch. Power and grace, personified.’

‘I would imitate this windup at home, in the mirror, where I could be left-handed, too. I pitched like Carlton in Little League, right down to his facial twitches. I collected every baseball card that ever featured him, scoring his rookie card for $75 from a cash-strapped friend who had just gotten his driver’s license. Thirty-two has always been my favorite number. I named the family dog Lefty.’

‘I met Carlton in 1989, his first year of retirement, at a charity signing at the Vet. I had just finished my middle school baseball career, and he signed my jersey, right above the 32 on the back. I didn’t tell him that I wanted to be a sportswriter.’

‘For most of his career, Carlton didn’t talk to the media at all. To a young fan, that only added to his mystique. He loosened up later in his career, but not much. When I started this project, I wanted to talk to Carlton more than anyone else. We connected by phone, and this is the first thing he said: ‘So you’re writing a book. Don’t you know people don’t read anymore?’

‘If that was a brushback pitch, I ducked.’

‘Well,’ I replied, ‘my first goal in life was to be you, and that didn’t work out. So I’m going with my strengths.’

‘He laughed and then talked for a while about the slider, the pitch he threw better than anyone else.’

David: Now, this isn’t the first book I’d hand someone who’s new to baseball. If you’re looking for that, I might suggest ‘Baseball for Dummies’ by Joe Morgan and Richard Lally. Joe Morgan is one of my favorite players; I got to know baseball when he was playing for the Cincinnati Reds in the 70s. Another fun pick: ‘The Comic Book Story of Baseball’ by Alexander C. Irvine, Tom Coker, and C.P. Smith. That’s a graphic novel about the history of the sport.

David: K is a little more inside baseball—but it made me happy. What stayed with me was how much of pitching is about teaching, reinvention, and passing knowledge along. Again and again, Kepner tells stories of players helping each other—a quiet question in the clubhouse leads to a game of catch outside, small conversations that change careers. You come away feeling that pitching is a dialogue across generations of ballplayers.

David: I especially loved the chapter on the knuckleball—a pitch meant to leave the pitcher’s hand with no spin. Without spin, the ball dances on the way to the plate, it swerves unpredictably as it catches little pockets of air. The result? Nobody—not the pitcher, not the batter, not even the catcher—has any idea where it’s going to end up. It’s a nightmare for hitters, but it’s no picnic for catchers, either. Sometimes they use an oversize mitt. Kepner interviewed a catcher who worked with a knuckleballer. He talked about catching 10 to 12 balls a game in the chest. He’d routinely walk away bruised. Some knuckleballers have even had a personal catcher, just to handle that one pitch. The knuckleball doesn’t see much use today, in part because it takes ages to perfect it.

David: So, if you love a good baseball book that weaves together historical context, quirky character studies, and a sense of wonder, this is a good one. This book takes you inside baseball in a way that feels both meaningful and fun. That’s ‘K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches’ by Tyler Kepner.

Melissa: My final recommendation is ‘The Art of Fielding’ by Chad Harbach. This book mixes genres: It’s a baseball story, a campus novel, and a rom-com. If I was going to add an adjective to that description, it would be something charming or winsome or endearing with a splash of cute. But not twee. Every character has their own arc, and there are delightfully mismatched romantic pairs that somehow make sense. I enjoyed spending time with the characters AND I couldn’t decide if I wanted to hug them or deliver a slap upside the head when they made a boneheaded decision. And there are a lot of amusingly boneheaded decisions in this book.

Melissa: Here’s the setup:

Melissa: The baseball player at the heart of the story is Henry Skrimshander. He’s a naturally gifted shortstop who also works really, really hard to improve. He’s short, scrawny, very physically unimpressive, until he starts to move. Then he has a grace that seems driven by a preternatural ability to know where a ball is going to go. He hails from a town in South Dakota that is in no way set up to create a baseball star.

Melissa: But at an amateur competition, he catches the eye of a catcher named Mike Schwartz. I want to read you a passage from when Schwartz is about to introduce himself to Henry.

‘… he headed for the far dugout, where the kid was packing up his gear. He’d figure out what to say on the way over. All his life Schwartz had yearned to possess some single transcendent talent, some unique brilliance that the world would consent to call genius. Now that he’d seen that kind of talent up close, he couldn’t let it walk away.’

Melissa: Even though they’re the same age, Schwartz appoints himself Henry’s mentor and finagles Henry’s recruitment to play at his school: the fictional Westish, a small college on the shore of Lake Michigan. Henry has just taken his first step toward the major league draft.

Melissa: Henry and Mike don’t just love baseball, they LIVE baseball. The passages about their relentless training routine and motivational quotes about how to play the game are really good. There’s dugout banter. Someone gets the yips. We get an inside look at being part of a team, and we follow them through one full season. The play-by-play of the games is riveting. When the team reaches the final game of the season, it feels like everyone’s future is riding on it. As I read that chapter, I had to put my Kindle on the table so I could hold my head in both hands, reading as fast as I could to see how it was all going to end. That is some damn good writing to make a baseball game on the page feel clutch.

Melissa: But this is also a campus story that romps through administrative politics, dorm life, and romantic entanglements. There’s Henry’s gay roommate, also a baseball player, who gets caught up in a tricky relationship. There’s the college president, a confirmed bachelor, who accidentally and unexpectedly falls madly in love. His life is complicated further when his estranged daughter returns to campus — after a disastrous marriage — and causes all manner of friction in the boys’ dorm. And then there’s the friendship between Henry and Mike, a brotherhood, really. They’re inseparable and make each other better… until Henry can’t tell the difference between Mike helping him and controlling him — and Mike wonders if by prioritizing Henry, he’s shortchanged himself.

Melissa: This is a great book for people who love references to other literary works in their novels. Sprinkled throughout the book are winks at Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick.’ The college president is a Melville scholar, the baseball team is called the Harpooners — to commemorate a visit Melville made to the school in the 1880s — and Henry’s last name — Skrimshander — is a minor character in ‘Moby Dick.’ Henry also frequently quotes from a fictional book called ‘The Art of Fielding’ by his baseball hero.

Melissa: Here’s an example: ‘#59. To field a ground ball must be considered a generous act and an act of comprehension. One moves not against the ball but with it. Bad fielders stab at the ball like an enemy. This is antagonism. The true fielder lets the path of the ball become his own path, thereby comprehending the ball and dissipating the self, which is the source of all suffering and poor defense.’

Melissa: Like most sports talk, it’s good advice — aspirational even, but also a little hokey.

Melissa: I read this book for five straight hours one Saturday evening, then got up the next morning to read the final 90 minutes like my life depended on it. I loved that the everyday events in the story are as high stakes as the big game. I loved that the characters are nice people to be around. I loved its exploration of ambition and sacrifice and friendship. It’s fun and moving, suspenseful, beautifully written, and it made me care about baseball. It’s ‘The Art of Fielding’ by Chad Harbach.

David: Those are five books we love, set on a Baseball Diamond.

David: Got something we missed? Come tell us on Patreon. Every week, we hang out with listeners after the episode — swapping stories, trading ideas, and keeping the conversation going. It’s just $3 a month, and you’ll help us keep making the show. Join us. We’ll save you a seat. Visit our show notes at strongsenseofplace.com for links and details.

David: We’ll show you some great baseball videos. We’ve got a video called ‘Average Dude vs MLB Pitcher’ that I enjoyed. It’s what it says: an average guy trying to hit a pro pitcher. If you’re still curious about how baseball is played, we’ve got a few videos for that.

David: And if you’re the right kind of person, we’ve got a vided called, ‘The Insane Logistics of Pro Baseball, that will give you some insight about what it’s like to get a team to 162 games a season, all over the US.

David: Where are we going for our next episode?

Melissa: I’ve been waiting to do this destination since the very beginning. We’re ringing for the maid and walking down the dark halls of a venerable manor house.

David: Thanks for listening, and we’ll talk to you soon.

[cheerful music]

Top image courtesy of Brandon Mowinkel/Unsplash.