A new story from Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast
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And I guess there are some names that are a little more colorful or uncommon here as we scroll down. I mean, again, it's like Willie Jones, Bobby bond's Hank Perry, Mike Johnson, Walter Schmidt gets Walter Johnson and Mike Schmidt, William Martinez gets Willie Mays and pager Martinez. I guess nothing can really compare to eat your O Cano. Eddie Robinson, the late Eddie Robinson two time multi time podcast guest. He's up there because he gets Eddie Collins and Frank Robinson. But yeah, just for sheer jumping off the page at you. I mean, you can easily tap ichiro Cano in combined war, but I don't know that you can top it in terms of just name recognition. Yeah, I think that the gap in war is being made up for by a difficult to measure, but obviously valuable coolness factor we're just not capturing. It's a flaw in our war, you know? Or maybe not a flaw, but certainly a blind spot. Yeah. All right, well, I will link to the full spreadsheet from Ryan if you would care to peruse it. And now we will wrap up with the past blast. So this is a past west from 1984 and from David Lewis and architectural historian and baseball researcher based in Boston, 1984, baseball history belongs in schools. This reminds me of a recent banter topic of ours in a 1984 column newsday writer Steve Jacobson marveled at Jackie Robinson's place in American history, choosing the trailblazing ballplayer as the one person in history he would have dinner with if given the opportunity. In doing so, however, Jacobson went further, stressing the importance of Robinson's story and suggesting that it become part of the history curriculum in American schools. The column which serves in part as a review for Jules titles books, baseball's great experiment argues, every high school history text should acknowledge it, Robinson's history, but the academic community is not quick to acknowledge the role of sports in shaping society. Continuing on Jacobson quoted taiju as saying baseball is not the stuff upon which successful careers in history are normally made. After recounting the stories of bud Fowler, Larry doby and the Red Sox reluctance to integrate Jacobson wrote these stories could be recounted to ballplayers in each generation as if it were happening to them. He concluded the story of the great experiment. Robinson should be in every high school history book two, so this is not the book banning kind of concerns that we were talking about with a Jackie Robinson related book. This was apparently just maybe looking down on sports figures as a valued historic figures. 1984 predates our births, I can't recall whether my high school history textbook to be specific covered Jackie Robinson, I would think so, but I couldn't really tell you when and where and how I learned about Jackie Robinson first and whether that was something I learned in history class or by that point I would have been a big baseball fan anyway and would have been aware of him. So I wouldn't really remember learning it in school, probably, but I would guess that most likely by the time we were in high school, it was much more common for that kind of thing to be covered in a textbook. Yeah, I would think so. I don't remember either. I'm trying to think, I mean, I definitely knew of Jackie and like his place in baseball history by the time I was in high school, I took a class in college like a sociology of sport class and obviously he occupied a good amount of time in that class. But yeah, I feel like by the time we had reached high school, well, it should have been obvious in 84 also, but the tradition of athletes using their platforms to sort of protest and muster support for civil rights causes was like very well established, both before and after Jackie. So what a dismissive view to think that not worthy of inclusion in history. It's a big part of a big part of not just sports history, but history. In general, so glad we are past that no one ever says that stuff should stick to sports anymore. We've evolved should definitely be in the book. Jackie Robinson ranks 1041st on the max war namesakes list because he gets credit for Jackie Jensen and Frank Robinson, which takes him up to about 137 more than he choked. How about that? They probably didn't mention that in the history books. Bigger accomplishments. Yeah, I would imagine so. All right, that will do it for today. Thanks as always for listening and thanks to Liz panella for today's effectively wild theme song. Liz is a longtime listener and Patreon supporter, member of the great bands, earth girls, and rotten mind. And again, thanks to Cory for today's stop blast song cover, which reminded me of pretty odd era panic at the disco, the sound I enjoy. You can keep your effectively wowed intro theme songs coming for now to podcast at fangraphs dot com and again we're looking for roughly a minute in length, maybe half of that consisting of lyrics. One brief follow-up to something we talked about on episode 1982. We got into the coming RSN shake up and the broadcast upheaval that's happening. I don't know whether we specified this, but MLB is affected by that perhaps more than other sports leagues. In fact, there was a recent piece in sportico, headlined why MLB feels RSN pinch more than other leagues because of course the diamond sports bally sports branded networks carry 16 NBA teams, 14 MLB teams, 12 NHL teams, and others, but the impact on baseball has gotten a lot of the attention based largely on timing and revenue generation. This piece by Kurt Baden hausen says basketball and hockey represent two thirds of the affected teams, but the NHL and NBA wrap up their seasons over the next four weeks and those teams have already received the lion's share of their rights fees, baseball's opening days until March 30th, which means clubs are just getting their first checks or not. The bigger factor is how teams in each of the leagues generate revenue MLB's 30 teams generated a record $10.9 billion in revenue last season from ticket sponsorships TV, concessions and other sources, including an estimated 2.25 billion from their local TV deals.