Dugout of History Casual Diehard

Casual Diehard 59
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Chrystal and Colleen bring you the tale of Moe Berg, and plenty of source material to dive into after hearing them tell it...
Books:
“The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg” - Nicholas Dawidoff
“The Bastards Brigade” - Sam Kean
Articles:
Who Was Moe Berg? A Spy, a Big-League Catcher, and an Enigma (NYT)
Moe Berg: Catcher and Spy (ESPN)
Moe Berg, Class of 1923: Baseball Player, World War II Spy (Princeton University)
The Baseball Player Turned Spy Who Went Undercover To Assassinate The Nazis' Top Nuclear Scientist (Smithsonian)
Moe Berg's Life In Baseball (Baseball Hall of Fame)

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This could have been all yours, Milwaukee. Or Tampa Bay. Perhaps it still could be yours, Nashville. Or perhaps the White Sox belong in Chicago and will be there forever, no matter how bad their owners are, what kind of weirdos want to buy them and move them, or what damage they do to their own stadium in the name of hating disco music. You think 2024 is bad for the Pale Hose? Let's take a trip back to the 1970s with Chrystal and Colleen.
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It’s never a good thing when Pete Rose is back in the news, and he has been lately because of the alleged theft of $4.5 million from Shohei Ohtani to cover gambling debts. That story has yet to fully unfold. Rose’s has, to the point where the Washington Post ran not one, but two big stories looking back at it… 10 years ago. This year is the 35th anniversary of the death of then-commissioner Bart Giamatti, who banned Rose, even though so much of what happened feels so recent. Nope, it was 1989. It’s just that Rose, who agreed to his own lifetime ban, has never once shut up about it, and he probably never will.
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In episode 2 of Dugout of History, Chrystal and Colleen dig into the Pittsburgh drug trials, the scandal that many people know because the Pirate Parrot mascot was implicated as a coke dealer, but that had far-reaching impacts across major league baseball, including shaping the sport’s drug policy into the Steroid Era.
For me (producer Jesse, writing the show notes), it’s a very interesting episode because I was a little kid at the time. I remembered Rod Scurry as a Yankee, for instance, and remember him dying young – though I definitely didn’t put it together as an 11-year-old that his death was drug-related. Lonnie Smith wound up having a very interesting second act with Atlanta, leading the National League in on-base percentage in 1989 and hitting three homers in the 1991 World Series before blundering on the basepaths in Game 7. Keith Hernandez, obviously, was and is Keith Hernandez.
So, I knew some of the details for this one, remembered others, and learned plenty for the first time. The story of the Pittsburgh drug trials also echoes through the way baseball has dealt with subsequent scandals, including in the sport’s powers that be making the same mistakes. Thank goodness that’s all history, though, and vice-related scandals involving superstars are… ah, dang it.

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Colleen and Chrystal start the show by going deep into history for the story of Merkle's Boner, a dramatic turn of events in 1908 that to most folks now is just a funny name for an incident more than a century ago. There's so much more to it than just the boner.
From Wikipedia:
Merkle's Boner refers to the notorious base-running mistake committed by rookie Fred Merkle of the New York Giants in a game against the Chicago Cubs on September 23, 1908. Merkle's failure to advance to second base on what should have been a game-winning hit led instead to a force play at second and a tied game. The Cubs later won the makeup game, which proved decisive as they beat the Giants by one game to win the National League (NL) pennant for 1908. It has been described as "the most controversial game in baseball history"

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