Infinite Inning 155: In Combat With Famous Bigots

Paul Dickson returns to discuss The Rise of the GI Army, an increasingly hard-to-imagine moment when the country overcame resistance and demagoguery to pull together. Plus a tale of two terrible first basemen going to war and a reply to Thom Brennaman. TABLE OF CONTENTS Mahan, Sturm, and the Lost Players of 2040*Thom Brennaman: “Bye Bye Blackbird”*Paul Dickson: A Timely Recollection (An Army in Yankee Stadium)*Charles Lindbergh and the Isolationist Gang (And Their Enemies)*The War After the War Before*“The Veterans of Future Wars”*Bipartisanship in a Time of Crisis*General George Marshall: Hall of Famer*The CCC Saves the World*Discovering Eisenhower and Scouting Patton*Marshall and the Plattsburg Movement*Grenville Clark*The Struggle for a Desegregated American Military (The Double V)*Robeson and Robinson*Did Patton Cheat During War Games?*A Peacetime Draft and Wearing Your Mask*Playing Politics with Safety*We Could Do That But We Can’t Do This*Goodbyes. The Infinite Inning is not only about baseball but a state of mind. Steven Goldman, rotating cohosts Jesse Spector, Cliff Corcoran, and David Roth, and occasional guests discuss the game’s present, past, and future with forays outside the foul lines to the culture at large. Expect stats, anecdotes, digressions, explorations of writing and fandom, and more Casey Stengel quotations than you thought possible. Along the way, they’ll try to solve the puzzle that is the Infinite Inning: How do you find the joy in life when you can’t get anybody out?