Host Bill Donohue welcomes Hall-of-Fame sportswriter Bill Madden, who offers insights into his newly released memoir that chronicles his illustrious career covering Major League Baseball, particularly the New York Yankees. Later, writer Ronald T. Waldo discusses his latest work, Deadball Mayhem, which delves into the tumultuous events and scandals of baseball's dead ball era. The dialogue touches upon the legendary pitcher Rube Waddell, whose eccentricities and on-field antics serve as a fascinating focal point for the discussion. Bill explores the intersection of personal narratives and historical context, shedding light on the evolving landscape of baseball and its myriad characters. This episode promises to enrich listeners' understanding of baseball history through the perspectives of two esteemed authors.

Takeaways:

• In this episode, we delve into the illustrious career of Hall-of-Fame sportswriter Bill Madden, whose memoir reflects on his extensive experiences and insights into the world of baseball.
• The podcast features a discussion with Ronald T. Waldo about his book, "Deadball Mayhem," which explores the scandals and dramatic events of baseball's Dead Ball era, a fascinating yet tumultuous time in the sport's history.
• We engage in a detailed exploration of the peculiar and eccentric personality of Rube Waddell, a pivotal figure of the Dead Ball era, whose antics often blurred the lines between genius and madness.
• The conversation also touches upon various historical scandals within baseball, including the infamous Black Sox scandal and its lasting impact on the integrity of the game.
• Madden shares compelling anecdotes about his interactions with legendary figures such as George Steinbrenner, illustrating the dynamics between sportswriters and the personalities they cover.
• The episode emphasizes the resilience of baseball as a sport, despite its numerous scandals throughout history, showcasing its ability to endure and evolve over time.

The views expressed in the following program do not necessarily represent those of the staff, management or owners of wgbb.

Live from the WGBB studios in Merrick, New York, this is Sports Talk New York.

Good evening and hello again, everybody.

Welcome welcome to SPORTS Talk New York here on WGB in Merrick, Long Island, N.Y.

bill Donahue here, taking you through the first hour.

Our engineer Brian Graves is on the other side of the glass with us.

As always, I am very happy you could join us tonight.

We have got some great authors discussing their latest, greatest efforts tonight.

Up first, we welcome back to the show the great Baseball hall of Fame writer Bill Madden.

He has penned his memoirs of his illustrious career and we will take a look at that in the second half.

We'll welcome in author Ronald T.

Waldo.

He's written a book about baseball's dead ball era as it had been come to be known.

We will even bring back to life the great hall of Famer, one of my favorites, Rube Waddell.

So sit back, relax.

Let us paint the picture for you tonight.

Enjoy the show.

As always.

Before we begin again, Rube Waddell.

I just want to say, folks, if a guy does not keep pace with his companions, he may hear a different drummer.

And Rube certainly marched to the beat of his own drummer.

And apologies to Henry David Thoreau for paraphrasing him there.

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Well, our first guest, for more than 30 years, he's covered the Yankees in Major League Baseball for the New York Daily News.

Hence, he gets to sign autographs with the distinct HOF10 inscription.

His latest book from our good friends at Triumph in Chicago, it's titled Yankees Typewriter Scandals and Cooperstown A Baseball Memoir.

Welcome back to Sports Talk New York.

Tonight Bill Madden.

Bill, good evening.

Good evening.

It's good to be with you.

Except you're short sightingly.

It's not 30 years, it's 50 years.

Oh man, I'm sorry, Bill.

Yeah, that's okay.

You look much younger, I'll tell you that.

Well, I'm willing to take 30 years off my age, however.

Yeah, wouldn't we all?

Yeah, I know.

Yeah, I hear you.

Well, you grew up in Jersey, Bill.

Who are your sports heroes and your favorite teams as a kid?

Well, I grew up in a family of Yankee fans in Bergen County, New Jersey, so.

But I felt it was too easy to be a Yankee fan.

Okay.

So I needed to find some, I needed to find a team more challenging.

And when I was a kid, I was.

My favorite player as a kid was Nelly Fox who was a short little guy who was a self made player.

He didn't have a whole lot of natural ability, but he put everything into the game and he wound up going to the hall of Fame and he was the All Star second basement of the White Sox for over 10 years.

And so because of Nelly Fox, I became a White Sox fan.

Ah, I get it.

Okay.

Nelson Fox, folks.

I had a Nelson Fox bat when I was a kid.

The big bottle handle bat.

Right.

I have one too.

No handle, just, just straight down, sort of like.

Who uses one of those?

I can't think of an example now, but you'd know the handle if you've seen it folks.

And that's the, the bat that Nellie Fox, as Bill says, a self made ball player, second baseman for the Chicago White Sox.

Now funny Bill, on tonight's show, both of our books that we're talking about mention scandals in baseball and later on we'll be talking about the scandals of the dead ball era.

Give us an example of some of the scandals in your book.

And then it was the scandal with the, the Pittsburgh drug scandals in the 70s and of course the steroid scandal.

And I talk about all of them in my book in regard to how I say that baseball, if it's not the greatest game of all time, and it's certainly been the most resilient game of all time to have survived all of that.

And these were major scandals.

I mean the steroid scandal in my opinion was the worst of all because that's the one that affected the records, right?

Definitely.

That is for sure, all major scandals.

And baseball as you say, resilient the one that marked the time, as James Earl Jones says in Field of Dreams, is baseball.

Now, also you mentioned, Bill, Yankees, who you covered typewriter scandals in Cooperstown.

Invariably, Bill, I think when you're discussing your book with my audience, with any audience, you're going to meet a younger person who does not know what a typewriter is.

Right.

Well, as Triumph is promoting this book as an inside history of baseball by the guy who was right in the middle of it, that would be me.

And the typewriter's part of it is, when I was a kid, I was weaned by my father on newspapers and baseball.

And we back in those days, New York had seven major newspapers.

@ the time, we had the New York Herald Tribune delivered to our house in the mornings, and there was the Daily News, there was a Daily Mirror, and then the afternoon papers were the Post, the Herald tribute, I mean, the World Telegram and Son and the Journal American.

So I voraciously read all of those newspapers, mainly for baseball.

And then I wound up being in the newspaper business myself.

And it's also, in addition to being, as they say, an inside history of baseball over the last 50 years, it's also kind of a history of the newspaper business and.

And what it was like to be a baseball writer working for a newspaper at the height of the newspaper's popularity back in the 80s.

Somebody once asked me why I had a good relationship with George Steinbrenner.

I tell a story in the book about how early on in my career covering the Yankees for the Daily News, Steinbrenner, I was having a conversation with him one day on the phone, and he said, in case you're wondering why I return your phone calls, it's because I feel like you've been very honest and you're balanced, unlike a lot of the other writers in New York.

And that's why I return your phone calls.

And I said to myself as I hung up with him, I said, george is no fool.

He doesn't return my phone calls because he thinks I'm balanced.

He returns my phone calls because the Daily News at that time had a circulation of 2 million readers, the largest circulation of any newspaper in the country.

So George returned my phone calls because he knew he was going to get where he was going to get the most bank for his buck.

The most ink, definitely from the Daily News.

We're speaking with Bill Madden tonight on Sports Talk.

New York got a new book out, his memoir, and we're discussing that with him now.

Bill, are you still a member of the Baseball Writers association of America.

Oh, yeah, I'm still running for the News.

I have a column a week for the News every Sunday.

And I still have a Hall of Fame vote.

Well, as a Spink Award winner, I have a lifetime vote as long as I want to vote.

Yeah.

I wanted to ask you.

You were part of the Historical Overview Committee who helped select candidates for.

For the ballots presented to the Veterans Committee.

Who are some of the players that you've championed their cause and helped get in the hallowed portals of the hall of Fame?

Well, I'm trying to remember now because most of the players, obviously, all the players that we had to consider for those ballots were players that the baseball writers themselves had rejected in 15 years on our ballot.

So there were probably players that I didn't vote for as a baseball runner.

But you can't.

As a member of that committee, you can't put that hat on.

You gotta.

You gotta evaluate these players in a whole new, you know, starting all over again.

Right.

And I'm trying to think of some of.

Well, you know, we also dealt with managers and umpires as well.

Right.

One of the managers we put in was Whitey Herzog.

We put on the ballot, and Whitey wound up getting elected to the hall of Fame the same year that I won the Spink Award.

So he was.

I was part of his class.

And I remember something that.

Well, Ozzie Smith was on that committee that was on that committee, Veterans Committee that voted Whitey in.

And he was a huge.

Obviously, he played for Whitey, and he was a huge proponent of it.

And Ozzy later found out that Whitey was his biggest supporter in that room and said glowing things about him.

And he.

To his dying day, he said, whitey Herzog is the reason I'm in the hall of Fame, because.

And I've always told people, as far as that Veterans Committee vote goes, I mean, we would put you on the ballot, but I would tell people, you got to have a champion in that room if you want to be elected, you got to have a champion in that room, as was proven a few years ago when Harold Baines got elected and he had Jerry Reinsdorf and Tony La Russa, the owner who got him to the White Sox, and the manager who managed it for the White Sox.

And they were both on that committee and they were able to sway everybody else on that committee.

A lot of people.

A lot of people are skeptical as to whether Harold Baines is a true hall of Famer or not.

So but anyway, that's kind of like the background on all that.

Another guy, Bill, that comes to mind is Mazerosky.

With Joe Brown on the committee, champion Bill Mazeroski.

I feel bad for Bill Mazeroski because he really gets taken apart by a lot of people questioning his worthiness for the hall of Fame.

But there's an example of what Bill Madden's talking about, folks.

You need somebody who's your boy basically on the committee to get in.

Now, before you worked for the Daily News, Bill, you worked for United Press International, and people, the older folks who remember those machines ticking off the stories, coming across the wire constantly.

Now, the, the first contact you had with the Major, Ralph Hauck, when you were covering the Yankees, tell us about that encounter.

Bill?

I was, I was a rookie writer at the time.

Well, I I've been with UPI for three years, but it was the first time they sent me up to Yankee Stadium to come the Yankees, a Yankee game.

Halk was the manager, and there was a big scrum of riders in the dugout before the game, and Halk was regaling them with stories and whatever, and he looked at me at one point and spit a big wad of tobacco juice all over my new sneakers.

Nice.

And I was, needless to say, I was not happy with that.

But I didn't say anything.

And later on, Phil Pepe, who was the Yankees beat writer for the Daily News, called me aside and he said, don't be offended by Ralph.

That's his way of saying he's accepting you to the club.

I looked at Phil and I said, well, that's a hell of a way to.

I said, I guess whatever.

I said, if that's his way, that's his way.

But I was never too fond of Ralph Hawken from that day on until I did my book, Pride of October.

And I went around the country and interviewed 18 former Yankees for this book.

I wanted to tell the history of the Yankees in the eyes of the players who made that history instead of just writing a narrative.

And Halck was one of my subjects when I went down and visited him in Florida.

And even to this day, to that day, some 35 years later, I was still intimidated by him when I went into his house and interviewed him.

But it turned out he was a pussycat.

I titled the chapter on him the Major in Winter, because, you know, he was a decorated major In World War II, the boats and everything.

But, you know, I was straightforward with him because he was notorious for beating up on writers.

He had a couple of things with a couple of major things with writers in which he got physical with him.

And I asked him point blank about them and he kind of said, well, you know, I probably shouldn't have done that.

But he, you know, he answered the questions forthrightly.

And then at one point he said that he felt like maybe he didn't get his just due with the hall of Fame because he's still to this day the only manager in history to win world championships in his first two years as a manager, when he took over the Yankees in 61 and 62.

And I almost felt sorry for him.

Well, I did feel sorry for him because he did have a good point, you know, but his problem was after he won those two championships, he went upstairs and made Yogi the manager and everything.

Yogi got all the way to the World Series and then they fired him anyway.

And then Ralph came, they brought in Johnny Keane, who had managed the Cardinals to beat Yogi in the World Series.

And that was at the same time the Yankee dynasty was totally in shambles.

Mickey got old, Maris got old, Atwood got old.

And it got so bad, after two years of Johnny Keane, that help came back downstairs.

But by that time, the Yankees were a shell of the team that he had managed, the championships.

And he never got back to the World Series again.

No, he never did.

Bill Madden's talking Yankees and baseball with us tonight on the program.

I want to talk to you, Bill, about the meeting you had with Tom Seaver at Seaver Vineyards out in the Napa Valley.

You wrote a book about that, and folks should check out that book by Bill Madden about Tom Seaver and talk a little bit about Tom for us, Bill.

Yeah, well, there's a lot of Seaver in this book because we were friends.

We became friends by rather strange circumstances.

You may remember when the Mets left Tom Seaver unprotected in what they called the free agent compensation draft.

And I was at my office the morning of the day before that draft came, came down, and I got a call from a friend of mine, a fellow White Sox fan, who said to me, are you.

Are you going to be covering the draft tomorrow?

And I said, no, I have no reason to cover.

The Yankees didn't lose any players and neither did the Mets, so I don't think it's going to be a New York story.

And he said to Me, I wouldn't be so sure, Bill.

I think it's going to be not only a New York story, but a huge New York story.

And I said, why?

And he said, because I happen to know that the Mets have left Seaver unprotected in the draft.

I said, really?

How do you know that?

And he said, well, I was talking to a guy I know in the commissioner's office who I work for, and he has the list of players.

And he called me this morning and he said, you won't believe this.

Seaver's been left unprotected.

So I got this story exclusively.

And in those days, this is long before Twitter and the Internet and everything else.

And when you work for a newspaper, you got a story like that.

We had to hold it for the later editions for fear of, you know, because you couldn't just put it out there.

And, you know, you may think you had an exclusive, but you couldn't be sure.

But at the same time, there was nowhere to go with it until the final editions came off the presses.

So, anyway, I have the story, but I felt like, first of all, I called Frank Cashin of the Mets, the general manager, and I asked him about it and he said, well, Billy, I'm not going to lie to you.

We did leave him unprotected, but we felt like he's a 40 year old pitcher who's going to take him.

And I said, well, Frank, I hate to tell you this, but I have good information that the White Sox are going to take them.

So he said to me, well, you have to write what you have to write.

So I had the story confirmed, but at the same time, I felt I owed it to Seaver not to blindside him with something like this.

Now, Steve, I covered the Yankees during this time, and I didn't have too much interaction with Seaver during the seasons, but he knew me, obviously, from the Daily News.

And so I called him at home in Greenwich and he picked up the phone and I told him what I had.

I told him the whole story.

And he was.

First of all, he was shell shocked.

And then he was just, you know, he was not happy, put it that way.

Yeah, I can imagine.

And so.

But I sat on the story all day for fear.

I mean, I.

I mean, who even could have called somebody?

Cashing could have called somebody, but nobody did.

And the next day we had an exclusive on the back page.

But anyway, I don't think.

I think Seaver never forgot that courtesy I gave him because from that day on, we talked Often on the phone and in after a couple of years in Chicago, he called me one day at home and he said, look, I need your help.

I want to get out of Chicago and get back to New York.

I'm wasting my time out here with White Sox.

They're going nowhere.

And I'd like to finish my career in New York.

I need you to do me a favor.

And I said, what's that?

He said, could you call Steinbrenner and tell him that I want to come back to New York and I'd love to play for the Yankees?

They had one of the greatest pitching staffs in history, you know, with Gooden and Darling and Sid Fernandez and Ojida.

So I said, okay, I'll see what I can do.

So I called Steinbrenner.

I told him this.

And for the first time, I mean, this was a layup for Steinbrenner.

I mean, he, you know, anything to upstage the Mets.

George was all in.

And yet for some strange reason, he was only lukewarm about this idea.

And then I was working with Ken Harrelson, Hawk Harrelson, who was the White Sox gm.

I was going back and forth with him because he was the guy that was going to have to make the trade.

And Harrelson's telling me, I can't get George to move on this.

And I said, doesn't he understand what this is?

And Harold said, all right, call him back again.

So I called George back again.

I said, george, I don't understand.

I mean, this is a no brainer for you.

This is Tom Seaver.

He's going to go to the hall of Fame.

And as you get him, the New York Yankees will be on his hall of Fame plaque.

And George said, well, they want me to give up this top prospect amount.

I just don't know if I want to do that.

And the bottom line was he never made the deal.

But after that, Seaver and I, we remained really good friends and we were both.

I was a big wine connoisseur.

And of course, Seaver, after his career, went into the wine business out in Calistoga, California, he built his own vineyard out there and he made award winning Cabernet Sauvignon.

And I went out and visited him a couple times there because to talk wine, to talk baseball, and I, I talk about this in the book.

By now we are in the age of analytics and what they have done to starting pitching, basically emasculated starting pitching.

And Seaver was heartbroken.

He was truly heartbroken over what had happened to pitching because of Analytics.

And we were sitting in his.

In his vineyard, the far end of his vineyard there, under the shade of some trees out there, and talking baseball and talking wine.

And all of a sudden, he launches into this tirade about starting pitches and what analytics has done for him.

He says, they won't let these kids out of the corral.

They're ruining these kids.

And these kids, it's not their fault.

It's the manager's fault, and it's the owner's fault, and it's the GM's fault for doing what they're doing.

So these kids.

It's not these kids fault.

And he went on and on about this.

And so I thought about dedicating that one chapter to Steve, because there's a whole chapter on analytics in the book about my feelings about it, which I pretty much made plain here in this interview.

But great story, though, Bill.

Yeah.

And he was.

We were.

He was a good friend.

We talked often.

And then, of course, he got the elements of Lyme disease.

He had gotten Lyme disease early on and I guess was.

I don't know, after his career was over.

Well, it's actually maybe during his career, he had a garden in the back of his house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and I guess he got a deer bite or something.

Anyway, he got Lyme disease.

It was a severe case of it, and he got it treated, and he was okay.

But what they.

They didn't tell him was that the Lyme disease could come back, and if it does, you need to get it treated immediately.

Well, years later, it came back, and he didn't get it treated in time, and it started to go to his brain, and he was, you know, at the end of his life, he had severe.

I don't want to call it dementia, because it wasn't like that.

It was.

But he just had trouble remembering things, and he had trouble communicating, and, you know, and this was one of the most.

Just fun people and just intelligent.

Smartest.

Smart.

Probably the smartest player I ever knew.

He used to do the New York Times crossword puzzles at his locker in pencil.

Yeah.

Very articulate young man.

Definitely.

Yeah.

And it was so sad when I saw what happened to him at the end.

And, of course, he passed away.

And when I wrote the book on him, I had done a documentary on him, actually, before I wrote the book.

A friend of mine who was the editor in chief of the Daily News, his name was Martin Dunn.

And he was in the.

He went into documentary productions and things like that.

And he asked me if I could arrange with Seaver to do a documentary on there.

He said, I'll call him.

I'll see.

At this time, he was already starting to lose it.

I don't want to say mentally, but he was losing it as far as his, you know, memories and everything else was concerned.

And I called him and he agreed to do it.

And we went out there.

We went out there a couple of times and filmed this documentary out at the Vineyard, which I was obviously very grateful that he did it, but because of that, because we did the documentary, then Martin would ask me, he says, why haven't you done a book on Steven?

I said, look, I don't think I.

I said, we're.

We're too good of friends.

And I don't.

I did a book on him.

It would have to be an autobiography, his story.

And I don't think he's capable of doing that now.

And he wasn't.

So I never did a book on him.

But then he passed away, and Martin came back to me again.

He says, billy, you have to do this book on Seaver, because if you don't do it, someone else is going to do it.

And you're the only guy that can really do this book.

You get it, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I did the book, and it was.

I was very happy with it.

But, you know, if I could have promoted it in New York and gotten on TV and stuff like I'm doing with you tonight.

So many things.

So many things, Bill.

I wanted to get to Dick Young, Pete Rose, the Home Run chase, which you mentioned in your book, was great covering it, but later you had to expose these guys for what they are.

I want to talk about Roland Heman, the great scout, and scouts should be in the hall of Fame.

I think in the short time we have left, Bill, one good story.

Rocking on the back porch of the Otis saga.

Give us one good story from those times for you.

Well, probably the best one.

This is in the book, too.

There was a day that Ted Williams had made one of his rare appearances at Cooperstown, and we were all sitting on the back porch there, and it was.

And all of a sudden, the peace and quiet of the back porch is interrupted by this shouting.

And it was Ted Williams and Tommy Lasorda getting into this heated argument over who was dumber, pitchers or hitters.

And Ted Williams had this guy with him, his name was Buzz, who was the guy that ran his museum up there in northern Florida.

And Buzz was with him and.

And Ted had given him an encyclopedia of baseball to bring with him just in case he got in an argument with somebody about baseball.

And so they're going back and forth and Losor would say something and Williams would say something, and then Williams would yell, buzz, bring the book.

Bring the book.

And Buzz would scurry over.

The book was laying on a table there.

He would scurry over, grab the book and bring it to him.

And it was a.

This went on for about a half an hour.

And I only wish there was somebody there to videotape this because it was a priceless thing.

I tried to get it as accurate as possible describing this whole scene with Williamson, but it was one of the more memorable days I had at Cooper Sale.

Amazing.

For folks who may not know, the Odessauga Hotel is where the hall of Famers stay on hall of Fame Weekend.

And they sit in rocking chairs on the back porch looking over the great Otsego Lake and regaling those around them, like Bill Madden, with tales of our great pastime.

Well, Bill, it's been an honor and a pleasure having you with us tonight.

I thank you for taking time out of your Sunday night to spend some of it with us here on Long Island.

The book again, folks.

It's from Triumph Sports, Our Buddies in Chicago, A Baseball Memoir, Yankees, Typewriters, Scandals, and Cooperstown.

The great Bill Madden, ladies and gentlemen.

Thanks, Bill.

Okay, thank you.

Have a good night.

That's Bill Madden, ladies and gentlemen.

Up next on Sports Talk New York, we'll speak to another author, Ronald T.

Waldo, about his new book about the legendary dead ball era.

More immortal personalities coming up, folks.

Stick around.

You are listening to Sports Talk New York.

You're listening to Sports Talk New York on Long Island's wgb.

And now back to the show.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, we are back.

We're back with Sports Talk New York here on WGBB AM FM radio.

Live from beautiful Downtown Merrick, Long Island.

The silver snail of the Long Island Railroad running right by our window here.

Right, Brian.

You can see the expression on the people's faces going by.

Pretty disgusted, actually.

They are, but I can't blame them.

I hope everything is well with you guys.

I thank you for stopping by and hanging with us tonight for a while.

For those of you who watched the Met game today, it was a very Metzian outcome, as I call it.

Metzian.

Winning 71 in the eighth inning, losing 8 7.

Yes, yes, Brian, that was it.

And just a real gut punch, what they've been doing to me for 60 years.

But that's a story for another night.

Our next guest, he is a baseball historian and he's an author.

And his latest book is titled Dead Ball Scoundrels, Scandalous Behavior and Tragic Events.

I welcome to Sports Talk New York tonight, Ronald T.

Waldo.

Ron, good evening.

Hey, Bill.

Thank you very much for inviting me on your show.

It's great to be here and happy to talk about some baseball from back at the turn of the 20th century.

Here we go.

I was just talking to Bill Madden on the air, Ron, and it's funny, his book is titled A Baseball Memoir.

Yankees Typewriters, Scandals and Cooperstown.

So tonight, I guess the main theme is scandals.

So we'll go with that.

That is interesting.

Yes, it is.

Yeah.

And I didn't even plan on that.

See, Brian, you see how things work out.

Amazing.

Now, your sports heroes as a youth, Ron, who can we count in that category?

When I grew up in the 70s, when the pirates were always competing for Eastern Division National League pennants, Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell, Doc Ellis, because he was such a character back then.

They were just great teams, fun to watch.

It was actually a great time to be a young lad in the Steel City here, Pittsburgh, watching a Pirate team that contended every year.

Yeah.

And I always loved the uniforms when they switched from the sleeveless to the gold and black and the pillbox hats and the whole.

The first thing I did when I stopped at PNC park was to go in and get a pillbox hat for myself.

And I got one of those.

So I was able to complete my pirate collection.

But always great, those pirate teams, the lumber company folks.

Google that and you'll see what a great ball club the Pittsburgh Pirates had.

Now, I know you have a great body of work prior to this book, Ron, tell the folks some of the titles and short synopsis of each.

Well, the first book I wrote, it's actually been 15 years now.

2010 it was about hall of Fame outfielder manager Fred Clark of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

And then I did a few season books on that club.

And then after doing a lot of books on the Pirates, I tried to diversify a little more after that, doing books where I covered various players from different eras.

But my last read through somebody press have basically dedicated to the dead ball era, which I find to be a fascinating era just because it kind of was the era that drove baseball at first as we kind of grew to know it through the ensuing decades.

It might be self explanatory, Ron, but.

And explain to some folks who may not know what dead ball means.

Well, the basic, if you get right down to the nuts and bolts of it, the baseball that was used during those years wasn't filled with a nice cork center that gave it a little bit of jump when you hit it off the bat.

It was basically a dead ball.

And those baseballs early on stayed in play for a while or when they went out of play.

People were usually employed at the ballpark, usually young boys to go retrieve them, like if it went out into beyond the wall or over, you know, on a foul ball, because they continuously reuse them.

And it was very difficult to actually, if you're a batter, sometimes pick it up because of the imperfections and obviously the sore nature of the baseball.

Of course in that era too, you had the different tactics because the power game wasn't as prevalent because a lot of ballparks had spacious outfield distances.

So it was more small ball, hit and run, steal bases and you know, station to station running, which Ty Cobb eventually of course perfected when he joined the Detroit Tigers in the middle of the first decade of the 20th century.

You can see folks by the home run totals of ball clubs.

You had a guy like Frank Home Run Baker, I think he led the league with nine home runs one year.

And that's because of the ball, the ball.

You can google it.

The Dead ball, and you'll see exactly what it's made of.

They probably have one torn open, so you can take a look at it.

Now, you talk about scoundrels in the book.

Ron, give us an example of a scoundrel.

It seemed like they had a lot of them back in those days.

One has to do with Rube Waddell, the quirky, eccentric, odd, stalwart, southpaw pitcher of Connie Mack's Philadelphia athletics.

Well, I think Rube appointed himself head of the committee to retrieve all straw hats, because by that point of the year, if you were a male wearing a straw hat, that was considered, I guess, bad fashion sense.

So.

And I guess he wanted to get Cochleaf because he hadn't retrieved his.

And supposedly during that exchange, Cokely threw his suitcase at Rube, hit him in the shoulder.

Now, that is the story.

So he did not pitch in the World Series that year against the Giants.

And of course, in that World Series, Christy Mathewson was unbelievable.

He tossed three shutouts and the Giants easily handled the Athletics.

And at the time, even OMEC had Eddie Plank.

Chief Bender Waddell was considered a staff face because he was a foul baller and, you know, he had high strikeout totals each year he pitched for the Athletics, as well as being a pretty dominant pitcher when he, you know, when the mood struck him if he wasn't distracted by other things.

Yes, let's talk a little bit about that.

We're going to spend a little time on Rube Waddell, folks.

As a matter of fact, there's a girl I went to high school with, her name is Sharon Waddell, and she told me that she is related to Rube Dist somehow, which I think is great, but I guess it's not something that you want to tell a lot of folks about.

Why was he considered easily distracted?

What was this guy's special needs?

What's up with Rube Waddell?

There are some historians that feel he had a learning disorder.

It's a tough pipe ripple to walk.

I've read quotes from him and I guess to quote a phrase from when I was younger, there were times where if you read some of his quotes, he sort of waxed philosophic, especially when he did.

Sometimes he acted in plays.

I know one of the plays he participated in was called the Stain of Guilt.

In interviews of him over that, he sounded like he was actually a Barrymore type actor with how astute he was in describing the things he did.

A lot of people kind of give the misconception on his penchant for abandoning a ball game when fire trucks went by.

It kind of made it like he was a young boy at heart who chased fire engines, when in reality he actually was very dedicated to helping firefighters battle blazes and was very heroic on instances where he actually risked his life to save, like, property or people or, you know, sometimes it would be a farmhouse, like livestock.

And he took it seriously.

So it wasn't like he was just, hey, I hear the clang of fire engines.

I'm like the little boy that loved it so much.

He heard me and he felt, hey, I have to like, rush to help, you know, aid in this effort.

Like, of course.

Spanking.

Yeah.

Was that.

Yeah, he shouldn't have been running away from being in the middle of the game.

He was pitching, but that was rude.

Yeah, we've had a calling sometimes.

I mean, he just, you know, if it was, hey, I'm going to do this, or I prefer to 10 bar somewhere.

And rather than show up at the ballpark pitch that whatever struck his fancy at the time.

Like I said in the beginning, Ron, in the intro to the show, he more or less, as Henry David Thoreau would say, marched to a beat of his own drummer.

Oh, definitely, Definitely.

And he's always intrigued me.

He's in so many of my different books because he actually is from the Pittsburgh area.

That's where his roots are.

So that was.

Kind of made a powerhouse team in that those first few years of the 20th century.

But yeah, Rube.

Fred Clark Manager of the Pirates.

Yes.

He had no patience for Rube, whereas Connie Mack actually did exhibit great patience with his antics.

And while he's drinking, unfortunately, he did have a drinking habit at times as well.

All these guys did, though, back then.

Yes, a good portion.

I mean, you look at Lewis Hack Wilson, he died penniless.

Ford Frick had to pay for his coffin.

And he basically was a derelict at the time of his death.

Yeah, unfortunate.

Definitely unfortunate.

And then of course, Dead Ball mayhem.

Mike Donlon, who played for various teams before he hooked up with the giants and John McGraw, a lot of his issues came about because, yeah, he had an issue with drinking at times where he would be involved in incidents and stuff like that.

Another hall of Famer who's a favorite of mine that you mention in the book.

We have Ronald Waldo with us tonight discussing his latest book, Dead Ball Mayhem, Scoundrel, scandalous behavior and tragic events taking place back in that Dead Bull era.

Big Ed Delahanty.

Yes.

Give us a little insight on Big Ed.

Well, his tale was a little tragic.

Great phenomenal hitter, had a lot of great years with the Philadelphia Phillies.

I'm going to get more money to play in our own form league that only lasted one year.

So Delahanty, like every other National League player, the maximum salary was $2,400.

And Delahanty and George Davis, who was with the White Sox and the Giants, they both actually in 03 signed with both teams.

But then when the peace agreement was reached, a committee decided on disputed players.

And while they awarded Delahanty back to Washington Senators, whereas he would have preferred to play for the Giants because he would have made more money with them.

And that just kind of started the snowball effect of him drinking too heavily that year and the circumstances that led to him ending up on a train to try to get to New York to talk to McGraw one last time in July and he gets kicked off the train and he ends up as he's walking across the International Peace Bridge towards Buffalo after being dropped off in a place called Bridgeburg, Ontario.

Falls off the bridge into Niagara river and drowns.

And they find his body days later below Niagara Falls.

Kind of a tragic tale that, you know, unfortunate tale.

There are a few in the book, right?

One of the tragic events that Ron Waldo mentions in Dead Ball Mayhem.

The untimely death of Big Ed Delahanty, a great hitter back in the dead ball era.

And there are even some suicides of ballplayers.

Ron.

Yes.

Yeah, the chapter right before the Delahanty chapter.

Pitcher named Win Mercer.

And when I researched this individual and wrote about him, he actually, out of all the things I've covered, fascinated me the most.

Here was Wynn Mercer.

Charismatic, handsome, charming, did all the right things.

First person as a pitcher who kept a book on the hitters in the league.

The eras were high that year or that decade because the hitting was unbelievable then, but just a phenomenal individual.

Ladies swarmed at a ballpark on Ladies Day because they find him so charming and charismatic.

He stayed with Washington and then Washington was one of the contracted teams, moved on to a few other teams.

But he had the one vice, the one thing that kind of brought him down.

He loved the gamble and especially betting at the racetracks at.

On the ponies.

It was a team of all stars from both the National American Leagues.

We committed suicide in San Francisco.

There was speculation if the family thought someone murdered him over stuff related to his gambling, that he may have been in debt.

Police thought that he might have absconded with funds that the traveling team had, you know, earned on their trip to pay off debts.

But the players said that wasn't true.

But I just find this individual absolutely fascinating just because of.

Yeah, he stuck.

Stuck out in that error, I guess, compared to that rough and fumble type of ball player.

So many.

Yeah, so many of them back then, Ron, like you bring out in the book.

And then along comes a gentleman who really changes the game and revolutionizes it in so many ways.

Tyrus Raymond Cobb, the Georgia Peach.

That's true.

Yes, very temperamental individual at times.

A lot of things seem to revolve around him.

Some of his own doing, some not of his own doing.

Now, Ty's theory, which a lot of players from the dead ball era adhere to, was that the baseline belonged to the baserunner.

And if a builder got in the way of that, he did so at his own peril.

And that was kind of the mantra.

But he did take a lot of grief for that.

And then a couple weeks later, he accidentally spiked Baker's teammate, shortstop Jack Barry.

But with Barry everybody knew it was actually.

Whereas Barry actually told Ty Cobb not to worry about it because you know he didn't do it on purpose.

But that one bothered him because he said that was the worst he had injured anybody up to that point.

It actually bothered him for a few days after that when they moved on to the next city to play.

Do you bring out in the book, I didn't see it myself, anything about the fights that Ty Cobb got into?

Supposedly legend has it he got into a fight with a man with no hands.

Yes, that is the key part of that chapter on him.

It's near the end and it kind of morphs into the next chapter which leads into the Carl Mays chapter.

The pitch for the Red Sox and Yankees.

Yes, Claude Lucker when the Tigers were playing New York.

Yeah, he ran.

He basically four game series, they, he singled him out as the person doing most of the abusing.

They put the fans into one section over by third, I guess the third base dugout abused him throughout the whole four game series.

And by the last game on a Wednesday afternoon, he just couldn't take it anymore, so he rushed up to the stands.

Now, one baseball writer from that era, right now, the name escapes me, claimed that they knew each other from the Georgia days as competing athletes in different sports.

And they kind of had a feud then too.

So.

But yeah, you're right about no hands because he was a pressman for newspapers and he lost, I think most of one hand and part of the other in a accident with a press.

What an ugly story that is, man.

But the thing that was the big thing that came out of that Was Dan Johnson.

American League president suspended him without due process.

He basically suspended him indefinitely without really hearing, having a hearing and hearing anybody like Ty side of the story.

So his teammates actually went out on strike for one game.

And manager Hughie Jennings had to get a bunch of semi pro players and collegians to play against the Athletics.

And the Athletics end up winning that game 24 to 2.

Now one interesting thing is one of the people that played, I think third base for that team.

Does the name Billy Maharg ring a bell to you?

Yeah.

Yep, yep.

Yeah.

Wow.

Small world, right, Ron?

It's just.

It's just weird how that happens sometimes.

Yeah.

How did you do your research for the book?

Did you go to Cooperstown?

How did you find most of your material?

Well, I'm a member of the Society for American Baseball Research.

So they have a great amount of resources through their thing online and that's where most of it.

I did it that way.

You know, stuff, you know, it's just diligent checking, double checking on things.

I mean, some of these individuals.

I know there's been obviously biographies on Cobb, but the one kind of is inaccurate.

The one from Stump, I believe it is.

Yeah, that one's kind of always like kind of some falsehoods in that one.

But yeah, there was a biography on when Mercer.

Someone did, I believe one on Delahunty as well.

A lot of stuff like the Pirates chapters with the Fred Clark Frank Bowerman fight.

You know, it was stuff that I first did on earth when I did like the Clark book years ago.

I just, you know, expanded and did more digging on that.

The Stump book that Ron refers to is Al Stump was a writer and it's brought out in the movie Cobb starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Wall as Al Stump.

And a lot of falsehoods and inaccuracies in that particular film.

But people took that as reason to hate Ty Cobb and to brand him a racist and just a horrible man.

And a lot of the revisionist history says that that's incorrect.

What in the few minutes we have left, Ron, any upcoming projects on Dead Ball?

Right now I'm in the process of finishing up my latest project.

As someone that's lived in Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania all my life, it's kind of tend to be titled Western PA of Western Pennsylvania Dead Ballers Home Cooking.

I've found people that just are from around this area and ended up with the research.

I actually have enough for coup volume.

So I'm probably going to do a volume two as well.

But he had the nickname Serpentongue because he was one of the best bench jockeys in the National League.

And he just abused members of this White Sox and especially Eddie Collins.

Eddie Collins.

Lesser degree Buck Weaver in Happy Phelps, too.

Eddie Collins.

Yeah, Big target.

Well, Ron Waldo, it's been a pleasure.

Thanks for taking the time out of your Sunday night to spend it with us here on Sports Stock New York.

The book again, folks.

Yeah, go ahead.

I appreciate you inviting me.

No worries.

I really enjoy talking about stuff.

It's been a pleasure.

As I said, dead ball mayhem, scoundrels, scandalous behavior and tragic events.

Amazon, Barnes and Noble.

Ron Waldo, thanks again.

Thank you very much, Bill.

You have a fantastic week.

You, too.

That's Ron Waldo, ladies and gentlemen.

That'll do it for me tonight on Sports Talk New York.

I'd like to thank my guest, Bill Madden, and Ronald T.

Waldo, my engineer, Brian Graves, and of course, you guys for joining us.

I'll see you next Sunday, May 4, for more sports Talk.

Till then, be safe, be well.

Bill Donahue, wishing you a good evening, folks.

The views expressed in the previous program did not necessarily represent those of the staff, management or owners of WGB.