Selects: How the Negro Leagues Worked

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Speaker 6 Hey everybody, it's me, Josh, and for this week's select and in honor of Black History Month, I've chosen our 2016 episode on the Negro Leagues.

Speaker 14 It's a story that follows an arc a lot like another episode we did on the Harlem Globetrotters, where we have a group of people who were discriminated against.

Speaker 6 So they went off and formed their own league, their own thing, showed their greatness, and then were eventually co-opted, which left some of the people who'd helped build what they had out in the cold.

Speaker 6 And it's also a story, though, of great feats of athleticism and social heroics as well. And even if you're not into baseball, I guarantee you'll like this episode.
So enjoy.

Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 14 Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W.
Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry.

Speaker 14 And who's the stuff you should know?

Speaker 18 Sportsy Edition.

Speaker 14 Sportsy?

Speaker 14 I think really we should err on just the side of history.

Speaker 18 Well, I even put a note in here. If you don't like sports, listen to this one anyway.
Yeah. Because this is about much more than baseball.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 18 This is about

Speaker 18 history and about

Speaker 14 overcoming adversity.

Speaker 18 Yeah, like it's a very interesting story because, and we'll get into this, but I think people

Speaker 18 tend to think of the Negro leagues, and that's what this is about, the baseball Negro leagues, which is what they were called.

Speaker 18 We don't use that word anymore.

Speaker 14 No.

Speaker 18 But you call this that because that's what it was. Right.

Speaker 18 You tend to think of it in a certain way, which is only, yeah, well, baseball was segregated and they couldn't play in the white leagues, and that's awful, which it is and was.

Speaker 18 But there's another side to it, too.

Speaker 14 Yeah, yeah, that's a good point.

Speaker 18 Where these men and these business owners were empowered.

Speaker 14 And the players.

Speaker 18 Yeah, and it's, yeah, that's just a tease.

Speaker 18 I just wanted to whet their appetite

Speaker 14 for people who hate sports.

Speaker 14 My appetite, I'm sitting here like, keep going. Yeah.

Speaker 14 So I think we should start with a little bit of history, right? So just a brief primer of American history.

Speaker 18 Okay.

Speaker 14 We'll start with slavery. It's a good place to start.
The transatlantic slave trade

Speaker 14 built this country. Yep.
And frankly, I'm just going to come out and say it. I think some of the major issues that the the United States faces today

Speaker 14 come

Speaker 14 from a

Speaker 14 lack of accountability for slavery.

Speaker 14 Really

Speaker 14 is contributing to a lot of the inequality and a lot of the strife that we still face today and have faced over the decades. Yeah.
So you've got slavery, and then you had the end of slavery.

Speaker 14 You had the Emancipation Proclamation, which a lot of people say, oh, well, that was great. Abraham Lincoln spoke some magic words and freed the slaves and everything was great.

Speaker 18 Yeah, it was just perfectly equal after that, right?

Speaker 14 No. No.
So it took the Union to win the Civil War

Speaker 14 to

Speaker 14 begin to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation in the South and in Texas. Apparently, Texas were among the last holdouts.

Speaker 14 And there was slavery going on in Texas like years after the Civil War was over. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. They were just like,

Speaker 14 just not going to pay attention to that. Sure.
So the Civil War was fought.

Speaker 14 Part of the Union victory of the Civil War was coming into the South and saying, like, all you Confederates, you guys are out of power.

Speaker 14 And as a matter of fact, this power vacuum is perfectly willing to be filled by freed blacks.

Speaker 14 So go ahead, run for office,

Speaker 14 become judges, like become part of the Reconstruction power.

Speaker 14 And that lasted for a very, very short time.

Speaker 14 The white southern former power base who were leading the Confederacy, and even ones who weren't necessarily part of the actual Confederate government or even the Confederate army, but just the people like in your town who used to own the sawmill or whatever.

Speaker 14 That guy came back in power within a couple of years.

Speaker 14 And the white southerners who'd been supplanted, when they came back into power, they remembered the black people who had tried to take their positions.

Speaker 14 And so it got ugly.

Speaker 14 And so rather than having actual legal slavery, it came in other different, horrible, pernicious forms, which came to be called post-Reconstruction the Jim Crow South.

Speaker 18 Yeah, and boy, we need to do one. I've had it on my list for a while on Jim Crow, period.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 18 How about this? First of all, where'd you get this other good, really good article?

Speaker 14 It was on the Major League Baseball website. Was it? Yeah.

Speaker 18 In the prehistory section of that one. And this is just to show you the tone of things.
In 1857, there was a Supreme Court Chief Justice,

Speaker 18 Roger Tanney, who it's funny that the way this writer put it, he said he's campaigning hard for a spot in the American Scum Hall of Fame.

Speaker 14 Like that. It's pretty funny.

Speaker 18 In his official writing, this is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, said,

Speaker 18 Negroes were so far inferior to whites that they had no rights which a white man was bound to respect. This is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Yeah.

Speaker 18 I think I need to say that like four more times before it sinks in that was two or three this is what was going on despite the emancipation proclamation despite the 14th amendment well that was actually before it that was before that was during the slave the time of slavery yeah yeah yeah

Speaker 14 just to excuse that guy but after

Speaker 18 after that despite the amendments to the constitution despite all of that it's it took

Speaker 18 the till the 1960s to even begin the slightest bit of real progress. Yeah.

Speaker 14 That's true.

Speaker 18 Not Not quite true, because the history is littered with people who've made advancements.

Speaker 18 And I don't want to knock that.

Speaker 14 But in a systemic manner,

Speaker 14 you're right. It wasn't until the 60s.

Speaker 18 But part of the problem, too, was, and this is a valid point,

Speaker 18 other courts had said, like those is Justice Henry Billings Brown, said legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences.

Speaker 18 Basically what he's saying is like, we can create laws, but you're not going to change the public's mind by creating laws. And you can't, like, abolish prejudice.

Speaker 14 Right. And so, if white people think that black people are inferior to them, who are we, the government, to say otherwise?

Speaker 18 Yeah, or to try, maybe, and legislate our way out of it, even.

Speaker 14 Right. So, in I think 1896, there was a court case called Plessy v.
Ferguson. Yeah.
And in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court upheld and legitimized and actually made

Speaker 14 real the segregation that had already been going on

Speaker 14 ever since Reconstruction or ever since the end of Reconstruction, the beginning of Jim Crow laws.

Speaker 14 So

Speaker 14 the United States was officially segregated in 1896, but baseball had actually segregated years before that, but not

Speaker 14 as far back as people think. And a lot of people think that baseball had always been segregated up until 1946.
Yeah, I think Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier.

Speaker 18 I think 99% of people think that Jackie Robinson was the first black American to play baseball.

Speaker 14 Including me until yesterday when we started researching this. Oh, did you know this already?

Speaker 18 Yeah, I mean, I'm a big baseball fan and a bit of a student of its history, so I knew.

Speaker 14 Okay. So tell them, Chuck.
Well,

Speaker 18 who the guys were specifically?

Speaker 14 Well, yeah. So in 1867, I think, two years after the Civil War, there was already baseball.
Remember Abner Doubleday created baseball in what, 1839?

Speaker 18 Oh, in like 1300.

Speaker 14 And that's, but that's a legitimate story, right? That's not,

Speaker 14 like, he really did, he was the inventor of baseball, and it did happen in Cooperstown, New York, and all that, right?

Speaker 18 Yeah. Okay.
I don't know, but was he in Cooperstown?

Speaker 14 I believe so. Okay.
Well, that makes sense. So within

Speaker 14 just a couple of decades, there was the National Association of Baseball Players. They were the league, right?

Speaker 18 Yeah, I mean, not within a couple of decades, a couple of years. Oh, really? Yeah, like literally two years after the end of the Civil War, there was

Speaker 18 an African-American team called,

Speaker 18 I actually don't know what their name was, but they were out of Philadelphia, and they said, we want to join your league, which was the National Association of Baseball Players at the time.

Speaker 18 And they were rejected as a team, of course, at the time.

Speaker 18 But that didn't mean that there were not players individually.

Speaker 14 Right.

Speaker 14 That's a huge caveat.

Speaker 18 Yeah, it was a a little bit later in 1886, finally, and not for too long, we had two brothers,

Speaker 14 Moses Fleetwood Walker and Welday Walker.

Speaker 18 And Moses. Who do they play for?

Speaker 18 The Toledo Blue Stocks.

Speaker 14 That's right, baby. My hometown integrated baseball team in the 1880s.

Speaker 18 You were totally right.

Speaker 18 Moses was...

Speaker 18 He was older. He played 42 games for the team.
Welday only came along and played in six games. Moses hit 263 that season.

Speaker 18 And they were the son of a physician,

Speaker 18 like the first black physician in Toledo. Nice.
And

Speaker 18 went to college, played baseball at Oberlin, then Michigan.

Speaker 18 So

Speaker 18 I know the Wolverines. I didn't know Oberlin even had sports.

Speaker 14 Well, this is the 19th century. I think they phased him out.

Speaker 18 Phased him out in favor of

Speaker 18 acoustic guitars and debate.

Speaker 18 I know a lot of people that went to Oberlin, weirdly.

Speaker 14 Really?

Speaker 18 Well, my good friend Robert Shahadi from Boston that you met that came to our show. Okay.

Speaker 18 Lucy Wainwright went to Oberlin. Didn't know that.
David Rees

Speaker 18 went to Oberlin. Okay.
And I feel like a couple of other people. Yeah.
It's got a nice reputation. Yeah.

Speaker 14 Great name, too. Oberlin? Oberlin.

Speaker 18 It sounds Ivy League.

Speaker 14 Yeah. Oberlin.
The sound of quality.

Speaker 14 Oberlin.

Speaker 18 Sounds Ivy League-ish.

Speaker 18 That's on their t-shirts.

Speaker 18 Although, we do need to give a shout out, there was one guy in 1879, William Edward White, who substituted and played one game. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 18 He was officially, and this is a little murky history-wise, because we don't know much about him or how it happened, but supposedly he played one game as a professional baseball player as a black man.

Speaker 14 Is that right? Yeah. And this was when?

Speaker 18 1879.

Speaker 14 Okay, so the Walker brothers are playing for Toledo in 1886, right? Correct.

Speaker 14 And actually, this article on How Stuff Works gets it wrong says that they just played for the team for one year before the team went under.

Speaker 14 That's not the case, as a matter of fact.

Speaker 14 Moses Walker, they may have only played together on the team for that one year. But Moses Walker had played for years before them.

Speaker 14 And actually, Moses Walker and there were several other players at the time.

Speaker 14 In 1886 and 1887, there were at least four black players in the minors, but the Walker brothers were playing for Toledo, which was a major league team, right? Correct.

Speaker 14 But the presence of Moses Walker actually brought to the fore this kind of simmering resentment

Speaker 14 and kind of the big elephant in the room.

Speaker 14 There's a black guy on your team. Right.
What are you guys doing? And so Toledo actually went to go play the White Sox in Chicago.

Speaker 14 And the White Sox had this, like, their great player of that season, I think, in 1884. Who was it? Cap Anson.

Speaker 18 Great nicknames back then.

Speaker 14 So Cap Anson said, he said some horrible things and ultimately was like, I'm not playing if that man's on the field. Yeah.

Speaker 14 And Moses Walker was actually injured and still was like, oh, well, I'm definitely going on the field today anyway.

Speaker 14 So he dressed out and I'm not sure if he actually played in the game, but he was like part of the team. And Cap Anson

Speaker 14 was not indulged. Toledo was like, we're not taking our guy out.
He's one of our players. So Cap Anson can go suck an egg.
And Cap Anson went and sucked an egg. He was really mad.
But

Speaker 14 the issue that day, that dispute at Kamiski Field,

Speaker 14 brought to the fore

Speaker 14 the concept of integration and ultimately segregation among major league baseball teams.

Speaker 14 And it actually increased the pressure among owners and managers to get rid of the black players, not just in the majors, but in the minors. Yeah.

Speaker 18 There was another player, too. I read another story about,

Speaker 18 and we'll get to Roy Campanella. He was a,

Speaker 18 he was better than Jackie Robinson at the time,

Speaker 18 a catcher who was just amazing, Hall of Famer. And he had a, there was a white pitcher that was like, you know, he was a great catcher, but I didn't want to play with him.

Speaker 18 So I would, when I pitched to him, I would just ignore his signs and threw whatever I want. Like to his own detriment and to the team's detriment.

Speaker 18 He just wouldn't take the signs.

Speaker 14 What a putz. I know.

Speaker 18 Career sabotage, essentially. Yeah.
I don't think he lasted long either. And Campanella's in the Hall of Fame, so he can.

Speaker 14 Right. The other guy, who knows?

Speaker 18 I want to give these names all out, though. The four black men and the miners in 1866, besides Moses Walker, we had Bud Fowler, Frank Grant, and George Stovey.

Speaker 18 And as far as I'm concerned, all these dudes are American heroes.

Speaker 14 So,

Speaker 18 all of a sudden,

Speaker 18 they succumbed to pressure in 1890 after hate mail and death threats to

Speaker 18 coaches and managers and umpires and, you know, basically everybody, the players themselves. And they said, you know what, we're going to shut it down.

Speaker 18 Officially, in 1890, we can no longer have any black men in our league. So here's the thing.

Speaker 14 They never officially did that. They had the minor league ban black players

Speaker 14 way into the major leagues. It was through the minors.

Speaker 18 Well, and it was never on the rule books either.

Speaker 18 It was an unofficial non-gentleman's agreement. Right.
Because actually, when it was broken, it wasn't like a rule was broken.

Speaker 14 Right, right.

Speaker 18 It was just an unwritten rule.

Speaker 14 Right, exactly, which paved the way for Branch Ricky to break that unbroken rule without actually breaking a rule. Yes.
Yeah.

Speaker 14 Good point, Chuck. You want to take a break?

Speaker 14 Yeah, let's do it. Burning stuffed with Joshua.

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Speaker 14 All right, man.

Speaker 14 So, 1890, it's now

Speaker 14 there are no black players

Speaker 14 in major league baseball or minor league baseball in America, right? That's right.

Speaker 14 That actually paved the way for one of the great unsung chapters in baseball history, which was the creation of the Negro Leagues.

Speaker 18 Yeah, and a true show of American spirit and determination and

Speaker 18 just love of the game.

Speaker 18 These men got together, they formed their own teams, and they did what was called barnstorming.

Speaker 14 Yeah, which is pretty awesome.

Speaker 18 And they would load up in cars on a bus, and they would go from town to town and take their show on the road and they would get a game up wherever they could and wherever people would pay a couple of pennies to come watch a baseball game.

Speaker 18 They were playing white players and these barnstorming games or black players or Latino players.

Speaker 14 Yeah, because that's a definite overlooked segment of the early baseball history or Latino players. Oh, totally.
And one of the cool things about the Negro leagues is they were integrated.

Speaker 14 They had Latino teams, like the Cuban Kings out of New York, I believe.

Speaker 18 Yep, and one white guy. All right, so barnstorming's going on.
Like I said, they would roll into town. They would play whatever teams they could play.
And it started to gain some momentum.

Speaker 18 Like, people started to follow these players. Yeah.
And they actually got fans. And there was a former player named Andrew Rube Foster who owned one of those teams.
And he said, you know what?

Speaker 18 I think we need our own league.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 18 If they won't let us in their league, let's start our own. Because

Speaker 18 besides the fact that people want it, there's money to be made here.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 14 And as a matter of fact, so this barnstorming thing, I want to talk a little more about that, right? Yeah.

Speaker 14 One of the reasons barnstorming came about was to make ends meet, but it was also because these teams had to figure out a way to put on games as cheaply as possible. Yeah.

Speaker 14 All of the stadiums at the time were owned by whites, and the whites apparently were not very friendly to the idea of

Speaker 14 black teams playing in their fields. So if it were just like black teams one another, the white owners of the fields would just charge an exorbitant amount.

Speaker 14 So these guys were going basically anywhere they could find a place that would stand still long enough for them to play a baseball game on. That's what they would play.

Speaker 14 And they play like three games a day. Oh, yeah.
Every day.

Speaker 14 And they all traveled together and like hung out with one another and spent a lot of time together. So like

Speaker 14 the Negro leagues came out of this

Speaker 14 kind of camaraderie of barnstorming together, which is pretty awesome. Yeah, it's very cool.
So, yeah, this guy, Rube Foster, he owned the

Speaker 14 Chicago American Giants. And confusingly, there was also another Negro team called the Chicago Giants.

Speaker 18 And the St. Louis Giants.
Yeah.

Speaker 14 Yeah, but he could be like the Negro. The St.
Louis versus Chicago.

Speaker 14 But if it was Chicago versus Chicago, well, which one? The Giants. Well, which one?

Speaker 18 The American Giants.

Speaker 14 Okay, now I understand.

Speaker 18 Not just the Giants.

Speaker 14 But Rube Foster was like this

Speaker 14 booster of boundless enthusiasm this guy literally put together the first real negro league yeah and when he was basically removed from it the whole the whole thing fell apart that's how how much of a driver this guy was yeah he's in the hall of fame too yeah he was a catcher i think uh

Speaker 18 oh i don't even think he was in as a player but he was

Speaker 18 yeah i think just for his achievement i gotcha um although it may have been both i don't know but uh in 1920 he said all right here's what we'll do let Let me get these seven team owners of the Midwestern League that are doing these barnstorming

Speaker 18 traveling shows, basically. Let's get together in Kansas City, seven all-black teams.

Speaker 18 In addition to those two Chicago Giants, we have the Cuban Stars, the Dayton Marcos.

Speaker 18 the Indianapolis ABCs, and the very famous Kansas City Monarchs and St. Louis Giants.

Speaker 18 All, and this is the really great thing about this story. All of these teams, except for the monarchs, were black-owned teams.

Speaker 14 Right.

Speaker 14 So not only do you have black players' careers developing, you have black enterprise developing in a time when there were very few avenues of opportunity for black people to advance in business. Yeah.

Speaker 14 And in a sense where they own the business. This is a really good way to do it.

Speaker 18 Yeah. And not only that, like,

Speaker 18 the Major League Baseball site points out, like, this was

Speaker 18 like it should be embraced in some ways because this at a time was

Speaker 18 one of the only ways that minorities could fully, like, excel to their fullest potential. Right.

Speaker 14 And, yeah, and that was a point of that article that I thought was pretty cool is that

Speaker 14 one of the things they lamented about the segregation of baseball during this time

Speaker 14 is that we'll never know how Babe Ruth would have stood up against Satchel Page pitching to him because they never got to play each other.

Speaker 14 So the truly great players are truly great during this time within their own skin color. Yeah.

Speaker 14 You know, you can't say they were the greatest in baseball because there were two legitimate parallel leagues going on at the time.

Speaker 14 And yeah, they played each other sometimes, but if you wanted to sit down and put stats against stats, you'd be very hard-pressed to do that. Right.

Speaker 18 Sure.

Speaker 18 Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Christy Matheson, like,

Speaker 18 we know they were good. Like, we're not knocking their talent, but who knows what it would have been like in a truly integrated league.

Speaker 14 Yeah, and actually, it's funny you bring up Ty Cobb because I was like, oh yeah, Ty Cobb was a huge racist. I wonder what he thought about the Negro leagues.

Speaker 14 And I looked it up and I found an article from a guy who argues that Ty Cobb was not the

Speaker 14 horrible racist that he's made out to be these days.

Speaker 18 Written by Jimmy Cobb.

Speaker 14 He found, well, he actually did cite his son, and I think his son's name might be Jim. Really? Yeah.
Oh, wow.

Speaker 14 But the guy found an article from maybe the 50s or something 1952 where Ty Cobb is quoted at length

Speaker 14 coming out in favor of integration into

Speaker 14 baseball yeah saying like of course these guys should play as long as you know they conduct themselves like professional baseball players like why would they not be able to play I'm totally in favor of it interesting I was like did Ty Cobb say this I think that bears more research yeah you know

Speaker 18 because he was supposedly very racist, yeah.

Speaker 14 That's what not what this guy says, all right. Well, I'm gonna look into that, that's not what his son says.

Speaker 18 Uh, I'm not doubting you, of course. I just want to show you, no, I'm with you, I understand.
Uh, so we talked about the integration of the Negro leagues, which was awesome.

Speaker 18 Uh, pretty soon, other leagues formed, not just teams. Yeah, uh, there was one right here in the south, the Negro Southern League, with teams from right here in Atlanta.

Speaker 14 Dude, do you know the Atlanta team played directly across the street? Ponste Leon Park, Yeah, where there's now a Staples and a Home Depot and a Pets Mark. And a Whole Foods.
Yeah.

Speaker 18 How, like, funny is that? Yeah.

Speaker 14 If you walk into Whole Foods and listen, you can hear the ghost of a bat cracking on a ball.

Speaker 18 Yeah, I don't think this was the first team in Atlanta that played in the Negro Southern League because they folded that same year.

Speaker 18 But the Atlanta Black Crackers, we also had the Atlanta Crackers, which was the white team.

Speaker 18 We had the Atlanta Black Crackers, and it sounds funny that we say Ponce de Leon,

Speaker 18 not Ponce de Leon, but that's how we say it here. It's the street that fronts our office building.

Speaker 14 Ponce de Leon himself would have punched you in the stomach if he heard you say his name like that, though.

Speaker 18 But that's the street in Atlanta that fronts our office.

Speaker 18 And if you go and look on the internet, you can see these awesome pictures of this cool little baseball stadium right there, hundreds of feet from where we sit. Yeah.
Really neat. Yeah.

Speaker 18 And now you have Whole Foods.

Speaker 14 Nice. You just have to listen closely.

Speaker 18 You go go pay $7 for artisan mayonnaise. Yeah.

Speaker 14 If you're lucky. $7.

Speaker 14 Oh, that's just for the.

Speaker 14 Just for one smear?

Speaker 18 Yeah, just one smear.

Speaker 14 Did you hear Whole Foods got caught

Speaker 14 with uncalibrated scales for their hot bar stuff?

Speaker 18 Like, it's not already expensive enough. Right.

Speaker 14 Yeah, that's crazy.

Speaker 14 I expect a lot more from them. Yeah.

Speaker 18 You know, never get anything with bones at one of those.

Speaker 14 Oh, never. Or liquid?

Speaker 18 What a waste. Yeah.
You throw half of that chicken leg away.

Speaker 14 Yeah. You paid for it.
Sure.

Speaker 18 Or just, you know, grind that chicken bone up and eat it and get your money's worth.

Speaker 14 Yeah, like peel it off with your teeth, spit the meat into

Speaker 14 your little basket and throw the bone back into the hot bar. Yeah.

Speaker 18 Oh, I didn't think about that.

Speaker 14 Sure. That's a great idea.

Speaker 14 And you can say, I'm no chump.

Speaker 18 Yeah. I'm just go around screaming out and not paying for that bone.

Speaker 14 All right, so where are we?

Speaker 18 The Negro Southern League folded. The Eastern Colored League opened in 1923.
And then finally, in 1928, the American Negro League formed, and

Speaker 18 that was when things, like they, they called eventually the American Negro League and the American, I'm sorry, the National Negro League, the majors of the Negro Leagues. Right.

Speaker 18 Like, that was where the creme de la creme played.

Speaker 14 And, um,

Speaker 14 everything's going pretty smoothly, except two things happen, right? Um, there was even like a Negro League World Series. It was a best of nine.

Speaker 14 The Kansas City March. Oh, was it really? Yeah, the Kansas City Monarchs narrowly beat the Hilldale team.
They're from Darby, Pennsylvania, which I guess is near Philadelphia

Speaker 14 in the first one in 1924. So there's like, there's a, there's, these leagues have established themselves.
By 1924, they have their own World Series going, right? Yeah.

Speaker 14 But just within a few years, there are a couple of hits to the league that ultimately led to the Negro majors disbanding um one is that uh rube foster suffered uh gas poisoning in a hotel room yeah in a hotel room in indianapolis he was found unconscious yeah and there's some theory that um like everyone believed in ghosts and spirits and mediums in the 19th century because they were all being poisoned by the natural gas that was like leaking into their kitchens and homes all the time right well this guy had like an acute poisoning yeah and was found unconscious.

Speaker 14 And after that, when he regained consciousness and was nursed back to health, he lost his mind. And he just kept getting worse and worse.
And by 1925, I think this happened in 1924,

Speaker 14 1925, he was institutionalized. And by 1930, he died of a heart attack at age 51.

Speaker 14 And again, his guidance was so integral in this first incarnation of the Negro Leagues that, you know, when he

Speaker 14 was institutionalized, obviously they weren't like, well, what does the league do next? Yeah. He was in an institution, and the league started to falter and fall apart.

Speaker 14 And eventually that, coupled with the Depression, the onset of the Depression,

Speaker 14 really kind of led to the unraveling of the first Negro League.

Speaker 18 Yeah, and this the Major League Baseball site,

Speaker 18 you know, these were,

Speaker 18 they profited on certain days of the week. Sundays were big days because they were played double headers.
But the fact is,

Speaker 18 black Americans didn't have a lot of expendable money to throw at going to baseball games. Sure.
Even though they're pretty cheap, that was commiserate with what people made at the time.

Speaker 14 Unless you were one of the Walker brothers whose dad was a physician.

Speaker 18 Yeah, they probably had a little money. Sure.

Speaker 14 They were playing, so I'm sure their parents got him for free. Probably so.
So it's all just a moot point.

Speaker 18 I wonder if they did get free family tickets back then.

Speaker 14 I would hope so. That's got to be as old as tickets, right? Probably.

Speaker 14 We've got to do an episode on tickets.

Speaker 18 Guest lists.

Speaker 18 So they were making a little money on Sundays. They weren't hugely profitable overall, even though they were known as somewhat successful.

Speaker 14 No, a lot of these guys were still barnstorming on their off days.

Speaker 18 Yeah, and these are the players, you know, trying to make ends meet. Like the owners themselves were struggling here and there.

Speaker 18 White people came to see games sometimes, especially when they were exhibition games against white teams. Right.
Because they loved to go out there and

Speaker 18 see something they had never seen before yeah which uh many times was the black team mopping the floor with the white team yeah um although it seemed pretty evenly matched like from what i gathered it wasn't like lopsided one way or the other yeah like they were good competitive games yeah there are plenty of um white players who are better than the black players and there are plenty of black players who are better than uh white players yeah yeah i would say evenly matched is a good way to put it so if you had an integrated league you would get the best of both right which is eventually what we got plus also in some of these cities chuck these there

Speaker 14 not just baseball was segregated, but just within the city, you had a white team and you had a black team. Right.

Speaker 14 And that's evidenced in the names of some of the black teams, like the Black Crackers or the Black Yankees. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 14 There were the Yankees, and then there were the Crackers, right?

Speaker 14 So if you were a white player or a white person, you're probably a fan of the white team and you weren't going and watching the black teams play. Right.

Speaker 18 So they list out four things here on the site. They say the two leagues,

Speaker 18 the American and National Uh Negro Leagues were northern and uh basically city dwelling teams. Right.
Couple that with um there weren't a lot of black people living in northern cities at the time.

Speaker 18 Uh the south was, you know, was way more uh well, I wanna say integrated, but it wasn't integrated.

Speaker 14 Uh way more black people living in the south at the time. Yeah, which is I wonder why the southern Negro League didn't take off like a rocket then.

Speaker 18 Yeah, I mean, probably for the other reasons, like you couldn't afford to go to the games and all that stuff.

Speaker 14 Yeah, that's a good point.

Speaker 18 Black people that were in the North didn't have a whole lot of money. And so basically, all that adds up to not a lot of audience buying tickets.

Speaker 18 And the only way to keep a league afloat is to sell tickets and to sell concessions. Right.
Same as it is today.

Speaker 18 So all those things, couple with Rube Foster.

Speaker 14 And the Depression.

Speaker 18 Their greatest champion and probably sharpest mind,

Speaker 18 sadly, succumbing to mental illness.

Speaker 14 And then the Depression, and that was the end of the beginning of the negro leagues right yeah that was the end of the first one yes and there were more to come and we'll talk about it right after this

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Speaker 18 All right, so

Speaker 18 it didn't take long.

Speaker 18 The old saying, you can't keep a good man down. People wanted to play baseball.
They were good at it. They thought there was more money to be made in leagues.
And so

Speaker 18 what happens is these numbers guys get involved.

Speaker 18 And a numbers man is

Speaker 18 the numbers game was basically like like an illegal, unsanctioned street lottery. Right.
So numbers guys had a lot of money. And some of them said, you know what?

Speaker 18 Let's put money into starting baseball teams and leagues. Yeah.

Speaker 18 And one guy in particular in Pittsburgh, Gus Greenlee. Great name.
He was a bar owner in Pittsburgh. He bought the Pittsburgh Crawfords in 1931.

Speaker 18 He said, well, I've got a team, but I don't have a league. So two years later, he formed the second Negro National League.

Speaker 18 And other numbers guys bought in, and all of a sudden they had another league going. Yeah.

Speaker 14 And this basically kicked off what's known as the golden age of the Negro Leagues. Yeah.

Speaker 14 Starting about 1931, 32, 33, when these other teams came about. And Greenlee's team himself, was it his? No, I'm sorry.
It would have been right across the river, the Homestead Grays.

Speaker 18 Yeah, they eventually migrated back to Pittsburgh.

Speaker 14 Did they? Over to Pittsburgh, yeah. So they were the same team that went from one town to another, or they weren't rivals?

Speaker 18 No, I think there was still the other Pittsburgh team, but from what I understand, the Homestead Grays eventually

Speaker 18 became part of Pittsburgh. Okay, or maybe there was another team, I'm not sure, but I do know they eventually went to Pittsburgh.

Speaker 14 Because you know, Homestead, we've been there, we did a show there, yeah, yeah, okay.

Speaker 18 Um, and I was like, Are we going to the right place?

Speaker 14 And the car was taking me. So, Homestead used to have not just a team, they used to have the best Negro Negro League team possibly ever.
Oh, yeah, wait, easy.

Speaker 14 For nine consecutive years, they won the Pennant.

Speaker 18 Right? Yeah, nine years in a row. Josh Gibson, cool, Papa Bell, and Buck Leonard, some of their stars.

Speaker 14 Yeah, just some of them. In 1935, they had no less than five future Hall of Famers on the team.
Five. That's amazing.
Point to a team that has five future Hall of Famers on it now, or ever did.

Speaker 18 Well, some of the Yankees teams did over the years, but like, I don't think anything right now.

Speaker 14 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 18 Now, even the best team right now doesn't have five future Hall of Famers.

Speaker 14 Certainly not the Braves.

Speaker 18 No, we don't have one.

Speaker 14 I don't know. I could see Freddie Freeman hitting the Hall of Fame one day.

Speaker 14 Oh, really?

Speaker 14 I haven't been watching the last couple seasons.

Speaker 18 No, I mean, he's our best player, but

Speaker 18 the best player on the worst team in baseball.

Speaker 14 Not very good. Casey at the bat.

Speaker 18 All right, so we did mention that there were exhibition games going on, and things really picked up with the exhibition games now because they were a little well-funded, and this is when

Speaker 18 white players would come and see the teams playing. I mean, it was basically more popular than ever in both communities.

Speaker 14 Yes, and we said that they had the

Speaker 14 Negro League World Series going on, right? Yeah.

Speaker 14 There was actually another game that came out of this. I think it was,

Speaker 14 it might have been Gus Greenlee.

Speaker 14 who came up with this. It was the East versus West All-Stars game.
Yeah. And that became bigger than the World Series ever was in the Negro League.
Yeah, it was huge. Yeah.

Speaker 14 So that became kind of like the de facto big game of the year rather than the World Series for them.

Speaker 14 And they played it every year, I think, in Kamiski Field. Oh, really? Yeah, in Chicago.
Because, you know, East, Meast, West in Chicago. That's right.
That's what it says on the t-shirts, at least.

Speaker 18 So players are starting to make some, some, like the top players are starting to make some pretty good money at the time.

Speaker 18 You can't go any further without talking about Satchel Page, Leroy Satchel Page. Dude.
He was a pitcher.

Speaker 18 Very

Speaker 18 interesting dude.

Speaker 14 Maybe the greatest pitcher of all time in the sport of baseball. Maybe.

Speaker 18 He was eccentric. He was an entertainer.
Yeah.

Speaker 14 He was like the Usain Bolt of his day.

Speaker 16 People loved him. Oh, okay.

Speaker 14 Except he didn't like to run.

Speaker 14 That would make it a little different.

Speaker 18 He even said he didn't like to run. Yeah.

Speaker 14 What was his quote? He said that

Speaker 14 training for me is rising gently from the bench.

Speaker 18 Back onto the bench. Right.

Speaker 18 So he had, have you ever seen video or I guess, you know, film of him pitching?

Speaker 14 Yeah, with those old-timey baggy baseball pants and all that.

Speaker 18 Yeah, that was the style. But he had a weird wind-up.
He had this sort of double windmill that he would do with his pitching arm. And then

Speaker 18 when he was younger, he had a great fastball and he had he was noted for his control, like Greg Maddox-like in his pinpoint control.

Speaker 18 Yeah, like supposedly could just put a baseball within a half inch of where he wanted it to be, which is a big, big deal for a pitcher. Sure.

Speaker 18 As he lost his fastball over the years, he learned basically every pitch under the sun. Like, he pitched until he was 59 years old.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 14 He first signed in the majors, white majors, at 42.

Speaker 18 Yeah,

Speaker 14 42-year-old rookie.

Speaker 14 He's the oldest rookie ever in Major League Baseball. And I think the oldest pitcher ever as well.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 18 He was even older than Gaylord Perry.

Speaker 14 How old was he?

Speaker 18 He was in his 40s. Oh, was he? Like Nolan Ryan, Gaylord Perry.

Speaker 14 A few pitchers. Nolan Ryan made it to 50?

Speaker 18 No, not 50, but.

Speaker 14 He came close.

Speaker 18 Like, pitchers notably have been a little little older.

Speaker 14 Which is crazy because, like.

Speaker 18 Their arms, yeah. Yeah.
But they're not, you know, they're not, like, uh, running around and batting, like, other players.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 14 But you're right. Like Freddie Freeman.

Speaker 18 Like,

Speaker 18 the stress on the arm is amazing.

Speaker 14 So one thing

Speaker 14 that

Speaker 14 was problematic or is problematic when you're going back and looking at the Negro leagues is that a lot of teams were allowed to, depending on the league, were allowed to set their own schedules.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 14 Stats weren't kept quite as

Speaker 14 well as they were in the white leagues.

Speaker 18 Yeah, we don't know Satchel Page's real lifetime stats.

Speaker 14 No, but

Speaker 14 there are some estimates and they are high. Oh, yeah.
So one that I saw was that Satchel Page had, I think it was in this article on MLB.com, which eventually will say the author's name, right? Yeah.

Speaker 14 They said that he had 300 career shutouts.

Speaker 14 300 career shutouts. And this guy says, in italics, not wins.
Yeah. Shutouts, right?

Speaker 18 Yeah, if you don't know baseball, shutout means you have pitched a game where no one scored a run.

Speaker 14 Right.

Speaker 18 And back then, there were probably complete game shutouts, meaning he never came out and was relieved by another pitcher. Right.

Speaker 14 He would have pitched like all nine innings.

Speaker 18 Back in the day, they used to do that way more than they do now. Okay.

Speaker 14 So he had 300 career shutouts. 1,500 wins is the estimate that's on MLB.com.

Speaker 18 Yeah, to put that into perspective for non-baseball fans, again, if you have 300 wins, wins, not shutouts, wins, then you're a Hall of Famer. Yeah.

Speaker 18 And in fact, they don't think there will ever be another 300-game winner again because of they are more pitchers in the rotation. Now they usually have five guys instead of four.

Speaker 18 They don't pitch as deep into games. They rest them a lot more.
So it's just, We may not ever see that happen again just because of the way it's built.

Speaker 14 To also put it in perspective, Cy Young is

Speaker 14 regarded as one of the best pitchers ever in Major League Baseball.

Speaker 18 They named the top award after him.

Speaker 14 Exactly. He had 76 shutouts, which is amazing.
He had the most wins ever still in Major League Baseball at 5'11.

Speaker 14 So Satchel Page had conceivably three times more wins than

Speaker 14 the highest win count ever in Major League Baseball.

Speaker 18 And that's counting his entire career, I assume.

Speaker 14 Which, again, was very, very long. Sure.
It was a very long career, but that just makes it all the more amazing, especially as he gets older.

Speaker 18 Yeah, like

Speaker 18 let's say that people

Speaker 18 don't count the Negro leagues as being in the top league at the time. Like, cut it in half, and he's still way ahead of everybody else.
Yeah. If you subtract 50% of everything he did.

Speaker 14 And the fact that he sat in a rocking chair in the dugout and had like a huge personality, it's just awesome.

Speaker 18 Yeah, so he learned all sorts of pitches.

Speaker 18 By the end of his career, he was pitching knuckleballs, and he was famous for the hesitation pitch, which he invented, which was when he got to the white major leagues, they were like, that's illegal.

Speaker 18 You can't do that. It's called a balk.

Speaker 18 And he was like, all right, well.

Speaker 14 He's like, no, it's called a hesitation pitch. Don't you know? It was very sneaky.

Speaker 18 You know, it's like you act like you're pitching, then you stop.

Speaker 18 And because his theory, he was like, you know, I got guys up there that are starting to swing because I'm so fast. Like, when they see me winding up, they're starting to swing.

Speaker 18 So if I just put a little slight pause there, then they're swinging and then the ball comes. So it was a very, very tricky little pitch.

Speaker 18 And he was making between 30 and 40 grand a year in the Negro. And this is also with

Speaker 18 appearances and stuff like that. But in the Negro leagues, which is about

Speaker 18 half a million dollars today. Yeah.

Speaker 18 Amazing amount of money.

Speaker 14 At the time, you know. And those appearances,

Speaker 14 if you were a team owner that had Satchel Page on your team, you might let him go make some scratch and probably take a cut yourself by lending him to another team whose attendance was struggling.

Speaker 14 And all you had to do was advertise for a week that Satchel Page was going to be pitching one day and you would sell out.

Speaker 14 So he would help. other Negro League teams that were

Speaker 18 struggling. Yeah, it could be a draw.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 18 And here's one little cool thing about our own Atlanta Braves. In

Speaker 18 1968, Satchel Page was lacking one more season to get his Major League Baseball pension and was out of the league and retired. And the Atlanta Braves signed him as a player coach.

Speaker 14 Like Terry Pendleton. Yeah.

Speaker 18 He was never a player coach, was he?

Speaker 14 No, but he was a player and then a coach. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 18 Pete Rose was a player coach. Was he, really? Like, he managed the Reds and played for them.
I didn't know that. And bet on them.
Yeah.

Speaker 18 But they signed him to a one-year deal so he could get his Major League Baseball pension.

Speaker 14 That is awesome. Awesome.
Which is really cool. Classic.

Speaker 18 What year was that? 1968.

Speaker 14 That's really cool. Yeah.

Speaker 18 Go Braves. So if you see a picture, when I saw a picture of him in the Braves uniform, I was like, wait a minute.
He never played for the Braves. And he really didn't.

Speaker 18 It was sort of, you know, just a little sneaky way to get him in there. That's cool.

Speaker 14 Which is great.

Speaker 18 All right. So.

Speaker 18 Satchel Page is killing it. Other players are killing it.

Speaker 18 It would not be long before somebody

Speaker 18 in the white leagues, somebody said, the talent is too good.

Speaker 18 Somebody has to be the first to make this move and break the color barrier.

Speaker 14 Yeah, right. You know, that was the thing.
Like this, the, the Negro leagues were ultimately, as we'll find out, victims of their own success.

Speaker 14 The, the players that they supported and brought into the game were

Speaker 14 of obvious major league caliber. Oh, yeah.
In any major league. They were the best in the world they were just playing on segregated teams and so finally a

Speaker 14 group of people but especially it usually comes in the form of one guy named um branch ricky yeah

Speaker 14 did tom hanks play him no harrison ford

Speaker 14 no

Speaker 18 Maybe. Well, I didn't see the most recent Jackie Robinson movie.

Speaker 18 Was it Harrison Ford?

Speaker 14 Maybe.

Speaker 18 I've seen him portrayed in other movies.

Speaker 14 I can't tell if it it was him or not because the actor didn't have a diamond-studded earring in, but Harrison Ford could have taken it out for the role.

Speaker 14 This guy named Branch Rickey, was he an executive or a manager for the Dodgers?

Speaker 18 He was an executive for the Dodgers.

Speaker 14 And he said, and this was when they were in Brooklyn, right? Yeah. He said,

Speaker 14 this is ridiculous.

Speaker 14 We need to break this color barrier. There's plenty of great players out there that I want to sign.
I'm going to break this unspoken rule.

Speaker 14 And he looked around to find a player who was not only good, but who he felt could withstand this horrendous

Speaker 14 reception that whoever the first black player would be would definitely receive and who did receive. And he found it in the person of Jackie Robinson.

Speaker 18 Yeah, that's a huge point.

Speaker 18 Because like I said, Roy Campanella was probably a better player at the time than Jackie Robinson. But if you see the Jackie Robinson story,

Speaker 18 I didn't see the recent one, like I said, but I just know a lot about his story. He was the right guy.
He had the temperament. He had the leadership.

Speaker 14 Roy Campanella would take your head off. Well, yeah, he did.

Speaker 18 He was a tough guy.

Speaker 18 But Jackie Robinson was the man in every way. And we should also shout out to the road being paved by people like Joe Lewis and Jesse Owens before Jackie Robinson.
Yeah.

Speaker 18 As far as just white America accepting mainstream black athletes into their lives.

Speaker 14 Yeah, and I don't know if it was on this or on, there's a site called NegroleagueBaseball.com that has a really good article called Negro League Baseball 101 or something like that.

Speaker 14 It's just the basics. There's a definite story to the whole thing, right? Yeah.
But they point out that

Speaker 14 probably more than anything that helped break the color barrier was

Speaker 14 blacks serving in World War II. Oh, yeah.
Serving alongside white soldiers and stories coming back from the fronts of like, hey, these these guys are killing Germans just as fast as any white guy.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 14 And

Speaker 14 at the time, America was like, well, we love that about people.

Speaker 14 So when they returned,

Speaker 14 the black soldiers came home to a different America that they helped change by fighting in World War II. That's pretty cool.

Speaker 14 And I mean, the timing of this apparently is not coincidental that Jackie Robinson was signed in 1946, a year after World War II went. For sure.

Speaker 18 So Branch Rickey was

Speaker 18 a very puritanical guy. He would often lecture players on sex and drinking and stuff.
And

Speaker 18 he wasn't just some

Speaker 18 benevolent champion of the black man.

Speaker 14 Yeah, that's a good point, man, because a lot of times stories like this end up being about the guy who took the chance and paved the way for the black player to do. But he did.
He did.

Speaker 14 Like he was an idealist.

Speaker 14 It's just too easy sometimes sometimes for the emphasis to go onto that. Where it's like, well, the black player, like, came, he was one of the greatest baseball players of all time.

Speaker 18 Exactly. Let's put it this way.
If Branch Rickey hadn't wanted to sell tickets by fielding a good team, he would have never signed Jackie Robinson. He was a businessman.

Speaker 18 The Dodgers sucked at the time.

Speaker 14 Did they?

Speaker 18 But he was an idealist. I mean, he was very much like, no, like, this is wrong, and they should be allowed to play.
Yeah.

Speaker 14 So, okay. So he was a complex human being like all other human beings.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He can't just be shoehorned into an easy caricature.
No. That's great.

Speaker 14 So Branch Rickey, complicated human being. He selected Jackie Robinson and it was a great selection.

Speaker 18 Yeah, Jackie Robinson played one year in the minors, which was ridiculous. They should have just, like, he spent his entire life playing in the minors.

Speaker 18 They should have just promoted him right away. But I think they just wanted to ease that transition.
He won the batting title in the minors, his only year there.

Speaker 18 And then won Rookie of the Year in his very first year with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Speaker 18 And that was April 15th, 1947, was when

Speaker 18 he made his debut, which was very, very historic day.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 18 An amazing day. Major League Baseball has really

Speaker 18 honored Jackie Robinson to the fullest now. Yeah, they should.

Speaker 14 Great. But Jackie Robinson...

Speaker 14 Definitely threw open the floodgates. Within four months of Jackie Robinson being signed,

Speaker 14 or no, I guess actually being called up to the majors. Yeah.
Two other guys were signed, both in July.

Speaker 14 And I think that year there were a number of other black players suddenly playing for white Major League Baseball, which is suddenly not

Speaker 14 just Major League Baseball, not white Major League Baseball. That's right.
Yeah.

Speaker 18 Larry Doby, Cleveland Indians. Willard Brown, the St.
Louis Browns. Henry Hank Thompson, the St.
Louis Browns.

Speaker 18 Dan Bankhead, Leroy Satchel Page made it finally, and of course Roy Campanella, among others. These were the first African Americans in Major League Baseball.

Speaker 18 And by 1952, just a few years later, there were 150 black players. And by 1954, all but four major league teams had black players.

Speaker 18 There were a few holdouts.

Speaker 14 Yeah, the Boston Red Sox notably were the last. They waited until 1959, 13 years after Jackie Robinson's debut season

Speaker 14 in the minors.

Speaker 18 So with the signing of Jackie Robinson and all the players to follow, like you hinted at earlier,

Speaker 18 and like this article plainly says,

Speaker 18 it was a very bittersweet end.

Speaker 18 In one way, it was great. The color barrier was smashed.
The league was being integrated and they were getting their due.

Speaker 18 Although it was a struggle. But in another way, it was also sad that this league that had so much gumption and such a great, like,

Speaker 18 we'll do it ourselves then attitude

Speaker 18 and empower these men to play and these people to own these teams and start their own leagues. So it was definitely like a weird time in history.
It is.

Speaker 18 Like, I think nowadays there's much more of a reverence and a bit of mourning for the disappearance of that league.

Speaker 18 But, you know, in another way, like I said, it was smashing the color barrier was way more

Speaker 18 better.

Speaker 18 I just went into Hulk speak.

Speaker 14 So,

Speaker 14 yeah, it would have been a much more satisfying end to the whole thing if the Negro leagues had poached the best players in the white major league baseball.

Speaker 18 Oh, actually, you know what? The best possible thing could have been was if

Speaker 18 the white major leagues absorbed those teams and owners and ownership as part of one big league. Nice.
But they're like, no, we're just going to take your players.

Speaker 14 Yeah. Give them to us.
Yeah.

Speaker 14 so um

Speaker 18 that is negro league baseball the history of it yep officially disbanded in uh 1948

Speaker 18 and uh this article says into the 1950s there were still a few teams playing here and there and in the early 1960s even there was like one final team or i guess one final pair of teams i guess they had to play somebody

Speaker 18 still playing right or they could scrimmage themselves yeah it says the negro American League was the last to throw in the towel in the early 60s. Yeah.
So, yeah, more than one team.

Speaker 14 And this article makes a point today, or at least in 2012, Major League Baseball was 40% non-white, which I was like, what?

Speaker 14 I would have guessed it was the opposite of that.

Speaker 18 That

Speaker 14 I would not have guessed 60% of Major League Baseball players are white.

Speaker 18 Yeah, and you know, there's a big push. I think like one of the least represented demographics now in pro baseball are African Americans.
Really?

Speaker 18 Yeah, partially because of the rise of Latino players

Speaker 18 and then partially because

Speaker 18 there's not a big a push to play baseball these days as kids in America. And so

Speaker 18 there's a lot of concerted efforts to try and get baseball going again in black communities,

Speaker 18 which is awesome.

Speaker 19 Sure. You know? Yeah.

Speaker 14 I know I was pushed. My dad was like, get out there and get hit in the head with the ball.

Speaker 18 See, I wouldn't allow it. I had had to play church softball.

Speaker 18 So lame.

Speaker 14 So then the color barrier is broken. And now the last vestige of any sort of color issue is the Native American slurs that are rampant in

Speaker 14 all sports as far as teams go. Yeah, Atlanta Braves.
Once we get past that,

Speaker 14 maybe it'll be finally totally legitimate.

Speaker 14 If you want to know more about the Negro leagues, you can type those words words in the search bar at howstuffworks.com.

Speaker 14 You can also go check out this amazing article called Negro Leagues, a Kaleidoscopic Review. It's on MLB.com.
And check out NegroLeagueBaseball.com.

Speaker 14 They have all sorts of great profiles on the players and all that stuff.

Speaker 18 Oh, we never said the nicknames.

Speaker 14 Oh, yeah. Should we rattle off a few of those? Sure.

Speaker 18 All right, boy, these are some good nicknames. How about Jelly Gardner or Spoony Palm?

Speaker 14 Turkey Stearns.

Speaker 18 Turkey Stearns.

Speaker 14 He's a Hall of of Famer.

Speaker 18 Copper Knee Thompson or Steel Arm Davis.

Speaker 14 I think you mentioned Cool Papa Bell.

Speaker 14 Yeah, Cool Papa Bell. That is the greatest name ever.

Speaker 18 Possum Poles, Ace Adams, King Tut.

Speaker 14 Smokey Joe Williams.

Speaker 18 Bullet Joe Rogan.

Speaker 14 Yeah, Joe Rogan. Did you know that?

Speaker 18 Rats Henderson? Boy, Turkey Stearns. That might be the best.
That might be my new hotel pseudonym.

Speaker 14 Cool Papa Joe.

Speaker 18 Yeah, but no one would buy that at a hotel registry.

Speaker 14 Oh yeah. If you go up and say.
Turkey Stearns, they definitely go for it.

Speaker 18 Those are great nicknames.

Speaker 14 Alright.

Speaker 14 Oh yeah, okay. So

Speaker 14 now that we said Turkey Stearns, it's time for listener mail.

Speaker 18 This one I'm going to call Short and Sweet.

Speaker 18 What do you call it when you

Speaker 18 remember something with a pneumatic device?

Speaker 14 No. Mnemonic.

Speaker 14 Pneumatic is when you remember it while you're pumping air up and down.

Speaker 18 Was it pneumatic? You remember it while you're wandering around?

Speaker 18 Mnemonic, of course.

Speaker 14 Nice.

Speaker 18 I feel like a dummy.

Speaker 18 Howdy, Josh and Chuck. A friend recommended your show to me recently, and I love it.

Speaker 18 You satisfy all my nerdy entertainment requirements while I'm at work.

Speaker 18 You seem to have a bit of trouble recalling the order of

Speaker 18 taxonomic

Speaker 14 categories.

Speaker 18 Boy, I'm going to have trouble in this next show.

Speaker 18 During Woolly Mammoths, not woolly mammoths, as our typo originally said.

Speaker 14 Yeah, it was my fault. That's right.
You just forgot to know. Wally.

Speaker 18 Here's an easy memory trick we learned in high school biology. Kings play chess on fine green silk.

Speaker 18 Kingdom phylum class order family genus species. I love that stuff because I will never forget it now.

Speaker 14 That's not a mnemonic device, is it? It's pneumatic.

Speaker 18 I have no idea why this is still in my head over 10 years later. Well, that's exactly why.

Speaker 14 Sure. Katie.

Speaker 18 So I hope that helps. And that is Katie from West Texas.

Speaker 14 Thanks a lot, Katie, from West Texas. We appreciate that.

Speaker 14 Kings play chess on green silk.

Speaker 18 Fine green silk.

Speaker 14 I'll never remember the fine part. Yeah.

Speaker 14 If you want to get in touch with us, you can send us an email, the stuff podcast at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyushouldknow.com.

Speaker 1 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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