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- [00:01]
A
This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast instead of doomscrolling. Smart move. Another smart move getting help from one of State Farm's 19,000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with the personal price plan. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts, and savings and eligibility vary by state.
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B
Well, welcome, bookcasers. It's good to have you back with us. Katie has finally succeeded in dropping the word book nerds and using bookcasers. That's a big step for you.
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A
Yeah, you'll be artists formerly known as book nerds. No, I mean, I'll still accept. I'll still accept book nerds, but I think bookcasers is fine. And I know you're a lot more comfortable with it. And the debate was, you know, it's
- [00:55]
B
a little more dignified. All right, anyway, this is the Kate and Charlotte back with you. And today we have a doubleheader, which is two books in which it's absolutely apt in this case because one of them is a baseball book. And double header is a baseball term.
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A
And my father is a baseball guy.
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B
I am.
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A
Yes.
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B
And this is very nice. We indulge you with horror books many, many months ago.
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A
We have, we have.
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B
And you're indulging me today with a very good baseball book. But we're starting with what is a great beach read written by a wonderful author, Jenny Jackson, the name of the book being Shampoo Effect.
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A
The Shampoo Effect. And her first book being Pineapple street, which many of you may have read. And the Shampoo Effect is just a great. It's an ensemble novel where you get a bunch of different perspectives. Everybody in sort of the same insulated friend group. They're very east coasters and they're all sort of, I don't know, they get in and out of each other's lives. But they're all in each other's lives pretty consistently from college, I think, before college.
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B
Well, it's. Yeah, they go, they go way back to, I think, almost a grade school. And it's a very tight knit group of friends. And somebody, Caroline Lash, comes from outside and really sorts of ingratiates herself into the group and that has all sorts of.
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A
She starts dating one of them. She starts dating. She's an outsider.
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B
As the maturity of the group increases, there are problems that arise. It is, as I say, a terrific beach read. On the COVID of the book is a woman sitting In a beach chair looking out at the sea. And it just tells you, oh, this is the kind of book I want to curl up with on the beach. If you remember, many years ago, for those of you who are of age, there was a wonderful movie about a similar group of friends called Big Chill. The Big Chill. And this is. I. I think both of us felt this was very similar.
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A
Yes, absolutely. It had the same sort of friendship. They have the sort of what? Same short. Speak with each other. They. The shorthand. They have a group shorthand. They all know sort of, you know, some of have slept with each other. Like, you know. Again, there's a lot going on in this group. But I also want to say that this book is particularly funny.
- [03:02]
B
It is particularly funny. And we had some fun trying to find some of the lines that really show you how amusing it can be.
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A
Well, and we're from the east coast, so we know exactly what this line means. So she says. That night, they grilled chicken and corn on the cob wrapped in tinfoil. Everyone had strong opinions on how corn was best cooked, boiled, steamed, or grilled in the husks. And one of the real perils of New England in the summer, Caroline was learning, was the risk of. Of dying of annoyance over how people talked about corn. Now, I love this line because my father, who is a desperate East Coaster, and I, who was raised an East Coaster, even though I live in Minneapolis now, I have to hear about the way to eat corn, not the way to make corn. But dad has a particular style of eating the corn, so he's New Englander.
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B
Now, I admit. I admit this is idiosyncratic. I admit this is idiosyncratic.
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A
I apologize in advance.
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B
But when you take corn on the cob, you take a sharp knife and you go down the line of each row of kernels. And that way, when you eat it, each kernel bursts into your mouth with greater flavor and you don't get kernels stuck in your teeth. I'm telling you, just try it, folks. Try it. Tell him Charlie sent you.
- [04:12]
A
Lord, Lord. See, I've been hearing this speech forever. And so he is, in fact, a New England, if you can't tell. And so I love that line. It remind me very much of my father and the speech I've been getting at the dinner table. You know, every time mom serves corn on the cob, I'm like, I'm going to get told how to eat it.
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B
It's true. I am. I proselytize about this, cutting each line
- [04:33]
A
of kernels and that's why I think this line is down the middle.
- [04:36]
B
You don't cut them off the cob, you cut, you cut into them down look down the row. And that it just, it bursts with.
- [04:43]
A
I know, and he has to use the word bursts. That's another one. I'm just saying it happens. Anyway, so it. She's very true with this line. So we love Jenny Jackson's the Shampoo Effect. It's funny, it's interesting, it's true to life. You'll see yourself in these characters. And she seems like she's having a good time writing the book. And there's actually some really terrific writing in the book as well.
- [05:01]
B
There is. And you get to know these eight, ten people very well. You like them all. As I say, it's a wonderful beach read. Jenny Jackson, the book is the Shampoo Effect. Jenny Jackson, it's good to have you in the bookcase. The book is the Shampoo Effect. It is a wonderful, wonderful read for the summer. It is about a very tight knit group of friends. Tell our listeners a little bit about that.
- [05:29]
C
So it's the story of several couples, a group of friends who've all grown up in the same small town. They've been friends since they were children. Now, you know, in their early 30s, they have children of their own. And they're stuck in their same habits. Some of them great and fulfilling, some of them not so great, not so fulfilling, some of them holding them back. And when a newcomer, Caroline Lash, arrives in this small seaside town, she falls in love with one member of the gang and kind of splits the whole thing open.
- [06:01]
B
Yeah, she's sort of an invader of the group a little bit unconsciously. I mean, she doesn't mean to cause havoc, but she sort of does. But as I read it, I thought Jenny Jackson really has to understand Caroline is a writer. And Caroline is advised at one point to write about what you know. And I thought Jenny Jackson must know this kind of grouping. Did you have a group of friends like this?
- [06:23]
A
Yeah.
- [06:24]
C
So I grew up in Ipswich, Massachusetts, a town that bears about 99.99% resemblance to the fictional town of Greenhead, Massachusetts in this novel. And I'm still best friends with my, my same best friend from when I was 12. And we do have a gang. We do not fall prey to the same bad habits that all these characters do. But one of the things I've been thinking about as I myself have tipped over into middle age, is how these long term friendships both sustain us and they keep us honest to who we are. But at the same time, you can kind of start to hit some speed bumps. As you age alongside your old friends, you make different decisions. You get married, you get a big job, you move away, you move back home. And when your friends make different decisions, it can cause little bits of friction between you because you think, oh, am I not doing life right? Am I doing something wrong? And so I wanted to write about the inevitable friction that comes when you're trying to grow up alongside other people.
- [07:29]
A
You have six or seven characters here, and I'm interested to find out was that the original hook for you was like, I want to write a book about a group of friends. And what I'd like to know is how you then went about building this infrastructure of this group. Because they have to work well with each other. They have to have a natural chemistry. And their personalities can't be too similar, but they can't be too opposing as well.
- [07:50]
C
So there were two things that I knew that I really wanted to write about. One of them is I really wanted to write about a love triangle with a baby in the middle. And, you know, you find out early on in the book. So I'm not giving too much away when I say that Caroline moves to town, she falls in love with Van, and after they've been together for about two months, Van learns that his old girlfriend Bailey is pregnant with his baby. So I wanted to create a love triangle with two women. I didn't want it to be about competition between women, but I wanted it to be about the different kinds of love that two women can have for the same man. Then the other thing I really wanted to explore with this book is I wanted to take a look at what marriage means in the year 2026. You know, we can get into it later, but I took John Updike's novel Couples as a jumping off point that was about marriage in 1968. I wanted to take a look at marriage today because I have a number of girlfriends who didn't meet the right guy and have had a baby on their own. I have a number of girlfriends who have been divorced. I have friends who are partners but not married and have started a family. And, you know, I have plenty of friends who are gay couples who have either adopted or used surrogates. So what a nuclear family looks like in 2026 is really different than what it looked like a generation ago. And so I wanted to sort of ask, does marriage matter anymore? Is marriage even relevant? And what are the new rules for marriage in an age where half end in divorce. And also, New York magazine writes a different article every week about open marriages. What is marriage now?
- [09:28]
A
Well, also, too, I think you should include in that is obviously to the spectrums of sexuality the kids are exploring. Like, am I this? Am I that? Am I both? Do I feel comfortable in my own body? So now that that is more accepted, debated, and out in the open. That I think also, and I think you write very well about that in this book as well, has also changed the definition of marriage. Yeah.
- [09:49]
C
Thank you. I do think that we are a lot more comfortable talking about our desires. But I also think I've written pretty specifically about millennial sexuality here, because I think that millennials grew up in an area where it was more either or. And it's only in recent years that we've.
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A
It's been both and potential.
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C
Yeah, exactly. And so I wanted to write about millennials trying to wrap their head around this sort of fundamental shift in the way they thought about attraction.
- [10:21]
A
Jenny, I was really struck when we were talking earlier that as well as authors saying they know their characters, sometimes an author will find that there are details in their lives that they can't write. And that seems counterintuitive to me.
- [10:31]
C
I had this funny experience because, you know, in my day job, I'm a book editor at Knopf, and one of my authors is this hilarious, wonderful writer named Katherine Heine. And I was editing one of her books 10 years ago. It's called Standard Deviation. And I said, well, I just want to know where the main characters met each other. You know, we meet them and their husband and wife, but you never give us their origin story. Where did they meet? How did they fall in love? So I asked for her to write that into the next draft, and it came back, and she hadn't written it. And I said, catherine, can. Can you, like, how did they meet? She said, oh, I don't know. I said, but you. You made them up. Make it up.
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B
And.
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C
And she didn't. And she wouldn't. And then when I started writing myself, I realized it's because every time you try, what you're writing is. Feels wrong, it feels stupid. It feels like absolutely incorrect. And so I have come to believe there's just pieces of information that are fundamentally unavailable to the author. And yes, somewhere out there, there could be the exact right way that her two characters met. But she doesn't know it, and I don't know it. It just seems so funny to me,
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B
and I guess the reader can fill in the blanks.
- [11:43]
C
Yeah.
- [11:43]
B
So in this group of eight or ten, do you have to like them all? Do you have to find a redeeming quality to each of them?
- [11:52]
C
As the author, I have to understand their motivations. I think that there are. I do genuinely like them, but I think that a few of them behave really horribly. And what I really need to do is understand why, what. What damaged place they're operating from to make those decisions. I'm always surprised when people don't like my characters. With Pineapple Street, a lot of people came out and they said, oh, I really enjoyed it, even though I hated all the characters. And I was like, what?
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A
You hate it?
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C
Because I think. I think I'm trying to write from a place of total empathy for these characters, but they do some very bad things.
- [12:32]
B
I mentioned that Caroline is told to write from what she knows. Has that ever been a problem for you? As you write about what you know, is there anything that you've ever thought to yourself? You know, I'm modeling this up to so and so, or this is so and so that I knew in this stage of my life. And maybe they won't like this because Caroline really, really does upset the apple cart with what she writes about them.
- [12:55]
C
Yeah, this is something that I've struggled with a huge amount. So I. Before I published Pineapple street, before I published the Shampoo Effect, I wrote a novel, and it was the first thing I ever wrote. And I wrote it during COVID and I loved it so much. I still think. I still think it's a really good book. And I showed it to a few people, and they basically said, if you publish this book, you're going to lose all your friends. You can't do it. And so I had to take a hard look at myself because I had really got. I had deluded myself and thought maybe it would be okay. I was so in love with the work that I made that I thought I had disguised things that I really hadn't. And so I had to kill the book. I had to put it in a drawer. And it was so unbelievably painful, but it gave me a lot of empathy for the way a writer might accidentally wreck their life without meaning to. So, you know, with Pineapple street, there are a few people who jokingly say they won't tell me stories anymore because I put too many, too much of their gossip in the book. And with the Shampoo Effect, I really gave out copies to the people whose lives I took from, and I got their permission to put it in there because I'm at this point where, you know, I'm. I'm not willing to destroy my life for art. Maybe down the road I will, but at this point, like, good, you know, good friends, good family, I'm trying to tread a little more lightly, but I have. I have a lot of sympathy for people who feel like they can't help it. And then I also have had some great conversations with lawyers who have given me some good tips on how to disguise people in fiction. I mean, there's some kind of foolproof ways. If I. In my experience, if you change someone's gender, they don't recognize themselves. If you change someone's race, ethnicity, that does go a long way. If you call someone incredibly good looking, then they generally don't object to anything else you say about them.
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A
Oh, I like it.
- [14:46]
B
I think that's wonderful.
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C
It's gonna be my next writing class.
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A
How to get away. How to get away with writing about your friends and nobody knowing. That's awesome.
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B
This is the first book with Pineapple Street.
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C
Yes, with Pineapple Street.
- [14:58]
B
Yeah. I mean this only in the kindest way. I have no greater respect for any profession than for writers. I just do. My favorite guests, always on Good Morning America, were writers. I think it's a bit of magic that you all perform. Having said that, yes. I want to make this equation to my thoughts about politicians because it takes a certain hubris to think I'm the one who should represent this state or this country, even. I'm the one who can best lead this group of people. For writers, the hubris comes to me and saying, I have something to say that people need to hear. Did you always have that in your mind?
- [15:37]
C
No, but, you know, it's really funny. I watched, oh, some clip, and there was an actress in it, and she was talking about what she does when she is feeling kind of unsure of herself. And she said she basically watches some really awful movies and she watches some actresses just being, like, horrendous. And she thinks, well, I can do better than that. You know, I think, like, I definitely am not. I'm not, you know, going to put down anybody else's writing, but I think in some ways, you kind of. You kind of think, you know, there's a. There are a lot of books out there. I can do this.
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B
Were you surprised in any way by the success of Pineapple street, your first book?
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C
Yes, beyond surprised. I mean, it was something I did for fun and something I did because I wanted to share the experience with readers. But it really. It went Beyond. It went far beyond what I expected. But I will say the thing that was most incredible about it was the way that publishing a book like that connects you with people all through your life. So I did an event in my hometown and this woman came up to me and she said, oh, Jenny, I'm. I remember you from, you know, when you were just a little girl. Who do you remember From. From Winthrop elementary School? And I said, Well, I remember Ms. Tamaki. And she said, that's why I'm here. And I looked at her face. She'd introduced herself as Ann Marie, who. Who knows their first grade teacher's first name. And there she was, my first grade teacher celebrating this book, you know, and so that has been. It's.
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B
It's like.
- [17:16]
C
It's like a wedding on steroids. You get to connect with all these people from your life, and it's been unreal. You know, I still. I still have my day job as a fiction editor. And I don't plan to leave, first of all, because it's my first love. But I'm also very aware that we're living in a pretty golden time for fiction right now. I mean, if you look at the numbers on week over week on the New York Times bestseller list, fiction is so far outselling nonfiction right now, especially since 2020. People have been looking for escapism, people have been looking for storytelling. It gives me huge hope that, you know, that book sales are up over where they were in 2019. I mean, how amazing is that? But I am not ready to, you know, stake my retirement account on the fact that that will always be this way. The tastes of the public are ever changing. And. And I am very aware that, like, I'm thrilled that people want to read this kind of fiction right now. And I am desperately hoping that people will continue to read fiction in different forms. I don't know that it'll always be the kind that I write.
- [18:27]
B
Jenny Jackson, it's a treat to dock to you.
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A
Thank you so much.
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B
The book is Shampoo Effect. As I say, a wonderful read for the summer. The COVID has a woman in a beach chair with a wonderful looking sea in front of her. And I think that's a perfect setting in which to read this book. Thanks for being with us.
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A
Thank you so much.
- [18:48]
B
Our thanks to Jenny Jackson. One other thing I want to add. When we were talking to her, you asked her something that I thought was sort of strange. You said, you want to say hi to somebody, and she had a wonderful answer. Here it is.
- [19:00]
A
Anyone out there you want to say hi to?
- [19:02]
C
Oh, yeah. I want to say hi to my teachers. I want to say hi to my high school writing teacher, Charlotte Gordon.
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B
Was she behind all this?
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A
Yes, exactly. Is she responsible for the shampoo effect? More or less.
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C
Charlotte Gordon made me see that creative writing was like the witchiest, most badass, magical thing a woman could do.
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A
Love it.
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B
And did she give you confidence you could do it?
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C
Yeah. She really made me feel like I had something. How she would linger on my stories. She would have me rewrite my stories. She would tell me I should submit them for high school prizes. She treated me like someone she believed in.
- [19:46]
A
I love this rapid fire question. I think it's just really interesting because, you know, when I first originally wrote the question, I thought people were gonna be like my Aunt Verna. And then I thought, well, Aunt Verna, I'll tune in and we'll have at least a listener that week. It's been a reflective answer from you and a reflective answer from her. So I think that's gonna be a part of our rapid fire line.
- [20:03]
B
Well, her answer really bespeaks the importance of teachers, and you can never overemphasize that. And every one of us, I think, has a teacher in their lives that have meant something the same way that teacher did for Jenny Jackson. Anyway, we're going to take a break. When we come back, the baseball book. The name of the book is One Day in September. The author is Scott Reich, and we'll talk to him after this.
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C
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- [20:51]
B
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- [21:00]
D
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- [21:02]
B
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- [21:09]
D
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- [21:14]
B
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A
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C
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C
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D
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- [21:53]
B
So our baseball book, our second half of the doubleheader this week. This is a book that I found really interesting and educational because it's. I thought I knew a lot about baseball.
- [22:04]
A
He does.
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B
By the way, this is a game that was played in 1917 in Fenway Park. It was a fundraiser, essentially, for a sports writer who. Who had died. And it seemed counterintuitive to me that a sports writer would get all the great stars in baseball to come together in the middle of a season to put aside their pennant race for a while and to play a game to benefit this sportswriter's family. This sportswriter, his name is Tim Mernane. This sportswriter was really critical to the development of baseball and to write about it in terms of it being so important to the ethos of this country. I think he was one of the first people to really picture it as the national pastime, and it still is to my mind. But in this. In this All Star Game, which was, as I say, to benefit Tim Renane's family because he had just died, all the great stars showed up. Babe Ruth and Tris speaker and Shoeless Joe Jackson. Shoeless Joe Jackson, Walter Christy Matheson, Walter Johnson. And it was the precursor to the All Star Game. And we've just gone through a week where this year's All Star Game was played, but it doesn't go back to 1933, when the first All Star Game was played. But it was essentially an All Star game back in 1917, and Scott Reich discovered it. I'd never heard of it. I'd never heard of Tim Renane, but it's a really, really interesting tale. So here it is, our conversation with Scott Reich. Scott Reich, it's good to have you in the bookcase. I'm curious as to. I'd never heard of this day that you're writing about, and I'd never heard about the sports writer that you have as a central character to this book. How did it come about?
- [23:50]
D
I was researching an unrelated book in presidential history, and I stumbled across an article about this game. And I was like, I never heard of this. What is this? And I had never heard of Tim Renane, who we'll talk about a little bit, of course. But I said to myself, Ty Cobb was there. Babe Ruth was there. Shoeless Joe, Walter Johnson, Connie Mack, the manager, Buck Weaver, Ray Chabin. How did I never hear about this guy if all these guys were willing to leave their regularly scheduled games during a pennant race on their own dime for no money to show up for him? And I said, I gotta research this. And a story was there.
- [24:23]
A
So did you largely research Tim Bernane through Tim Bernane's writings? Like, what were the resources available when you were researching?
- [24:30]
D
A combination? I. First thing I did was I immersed myself in his writing. He was a terrific writer. He was for 30 years the sports editor of the Boston Globe, focusing on baseball. Also an author of several books that had many editions, literally called how to Play Baseball to help evangelize the game. So I got a good sense of his voice because I had so much rich material to work from through these digitized archives. Tim Renane was basically the godfather of the early baseball world. He was an original player in the National League in 1876 and moved around a few teams, became a scout, an umpire, a league commissioner, and ultimately the writer that we described. So he was there from the beginning, became this bridge from the place of birth, the origin story, all the way till his death. And so he knew all the players, he knew all the managers, he knew all the owners. And he somehow had this access. Everybody was believed. He was a trusted advisor. And he evoked in people a sense that baseball was more than a sport. It was a piece of Americana. When Marnane died, it was February 1917. He died unexpectedly of a heart attack. He had young children from a second marriage, and he had no money. So baseball decided, this guy has given so much to all of us. We need to do something in return.
- [25:43]
A
How did this game evolve from what it was back then, this great game for Tim Bernane, to the. To the two leagues in competition, the All Star Game that we know today.
- [25:53]
D
What happened when you traveled forward in time is there was the 1919 Black Sox scandal, of course, and that put this major cloud over the game. And the idea of an All Star Game didn't appear again for a number of years until 1933. And it didn't happen because they wanted to have an All Star Game. What happened was the Chicago World's Fair, excuse me, Chicago was hosting the World's Fair. And the Chicago Tribune wanted to have some big entertainment event. And so essentially they said, what if we have a one off All Star Game? And the bridge between that game in 1917 is pretty direct because you had some of the same participants, even Babe Ruth himself played in that game and hit a home run in 1933. And if you Drive it forward further. You see that the tradition established at the Marane game is actually very visible in the modern game. Because they didn't only have an all star game, they had a skills competition beforehand. Just the way we have a home run derby today. They had a home run derby that Babe Ruth participated in. They had a longest throw contest, most accurate throw, a race around the bases. And they also combined it with entertainment. It wasn't just baseball, if you can believe this. Will Rogers, the great entertainer and humorist, rode a horse on the field of Fenway park with a huge rope lassoing the players before the game to the, you know, great cheers of the crowd. Lassoing police officers. There was Fanny Bryce from the seat
- [27:08]
A
Folly still folks, because while the. While the players owe something to Tim Bernane, Fanny Brice does not. So where. How did that happen that all these celebs ended up.
- [27:18]
B
Or Will Rogers or John L. Sullivan, the great heavyweight champ who was what, a first base coach for one of the teams, right?
- [27:25]
D
That's right. He was the Boston strong boy. Came in a little bit late to a big round of applause and coached first base, challenging all the runners to a little playful fight as they, as they got there. It's a great question. I think it speaks to the fact that his legacy, although is not even that old at the time it was several months, was already larger than life. He was somebody who represented the sport and he was, he was the conscience of it. He fought for its integrity. He was opposed to gambling. He focused on establishing rules that made the game more fair. He ensured that the owners didn't tilt outcomes toward the big city teams because it would be better commercially for the league. So I think he meant something to people.
- [28:02]
B
You mentioned the contest before the game. Who did hit the ball the furthest?
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D
I'd like to say let me not spoil the book and read, but since it's you, Charlie, I feel like I'm compelled to answer. It's Babe Ruth won and it was a fungo home run derby contest, meaning he didn't have the benefit of the velocity of a pitch coming at him to. In other words, it was all self generated power because he threw it up to himself, making it all the more impressive. So his Ruth was the winner. And in fact one reporter said he had never seen a ball hit so high or so far.
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A
I got to know, even though I read the book, but I thought I want our audience who won.
- [28:35]
D
There's going to be all the ones that I've tried to reveal at the end of the book here, but I'll give it to you, Kate. It's. It came down right to the wire. There were a couple of close plays at the plate, some diving catches, and it was. It was a really hard fought, serious contest which made it special. And in the bottom of the eighth inning, the Red Sox, who of course were home and had the bottom of the inning, they came up and scored two runs and they held on in the ninth, and the fans ran on the field. It was a tremendous outpouring of levity, excitement, and I think remembrance also. And, you know, it was one of these moments where the players lingered. They knew they were part of something special. And I think even the city of Boston was emotionally so invested and ultimately exhausted by this experience that the very next day for the Red Sox regularly scheduled game, you know how many people showed up? 356, the whole ballpark. And it's still one of the, I think, top five lowest attended games in Red Sox history, because everybody had come out and, you know, spent the day feeling so emotionally part of this.
- [29:35]
B
I want to finish, Scott, with talking about the state of baseball in 1917. You made reference to the fact that in 1919 there was the Black Sox scandal. Players on the White Sox admitted to throwing games and they came down hard on those guys and they were banned from baseball. But I hadn't realized until I read your book that there was considerable corruption in baseball leading up to that. And I gather Mernane was proselytizing about how that should not be part of baseball. But I hadn't realized that it was sort of a matter of course leading up to 1919 when the White Sox scandal occurred. Tell me about that.
- [30:13]
D
Not only that, Charlie, it actually continued after the Black Sox scandal, and I'll get to that in a moment. But gambling had been a problem from the earliest days in the sport. In fact, in this very year of the Mernane game in 1917 that summer, it was a known fact that in the outfield there was a section of bookies that would be at Fenway park who placed bets during the game. And the police officer security would look the other way. And there was a game where the Red Sox were losing to the White Sox. And after four innings a rain started to come down. And with the Red Sox losing and the hometown money being on the Red Sox, the bookies actually ran onto the field to disrupt the game for two hours, trying to get it canceled before it was a complete game. The umpires ultimately said, get off the field or the Red Sox are Forfeiting. Anyway, I say this because this was rampant. It was everywhere. It was a major problem. The White Sox were by no means the only team that was doing this. It happened to occur on the grandest scale in the World Series. And at that time, recognizing the need for order, Kennesaw Mountain, you know, Landis, who became the lifetime commissioner, came in with this big punishment in my book. You'll see that it didn't stop there. In fact, Carl Mays, who is one of the Red Sox pitchers who appears in this book, he was there from her name day, has these big accusations in the 20s, alleging that Ty Cobb and Tris Faker, two of the game's biggest stars of all time, had thrown games. And look, the stories from this era are just so spectacular. In the same 1917 season that I spent so much time researching, Babe Ruth actually got suspended himself for 10 games in the middle of the season because on the first batter of a game, he walked a batter. The umpire just was simply calling balls and strikes.
- [31:49]
A
Ruth.
- [31:49]
D
Ruth ran to home plate and said to the umpire, he says, I'm gonna punch you in the face if you call another ball. He called another ball, and he ran right back to home plate. He punched him out. Babe Ruth punched the umpire out in 1917.
- [32:02]
B
You know, Scott, reading your book, I had a hard time believing it that then I went and looked it up, and sure enough, in 1917, Ruth did clack an umpire. Part of the wild and woolly baseball world in 1917. The entire story of that game, actually, in which he did that is fascinating all by itself. But, yes, what you related in the book is true. I was amazed by it. Anyway, Scott Reich, thank you very much for joining us in the bookcase. Appreciate it. The book is One Day in September, Baseball Brotherhood and the Birth of the All Star Game. Thanks for being with us.
- [32:34]
A
Yes, thank you so much.
- [32:35]
D
Honored to be with you both. Thank you.
- [32:41]
A
So it's mid July and we're halfway through summer. I'm amazed. We haven't done a baseball book up until now because, you know, it may be the national pastime, but there have been times where I've looked at my father and thought it is his only pastime. I'm not sure, you know, it's just he loves that sport so much. So, like, we have to do at least one baseball book. I feel like a year.
- [32:59]
B
You make it sound like I live a really barren life. No, but, like, I. I don't just watch baseball. I was with my daughter on occasion.
- [33:06]
A
You used the word barren. I didn't. I didn't use the word barren. And I think that's worth pointing out. And I also think I come home and you're watching a baseball game and you're doing, I don't know, sometimes you're balancing your checkbook, really, really exciting stuff like that. And I'll say, like, who are you watching? And you look up and you go, oh, this I don't know. And so, I mean, I know that you just find beauty in the sport. So it's always nice to do a baseball bucket.
- [33:27]
B
It is a beautiful sport. It is ecologically pure. It is. You walk into a baseball stadium, you see that expansive field, the grass. It's just gorgeous. Anyway, I love baseball. This is an interesting story about a game in September 1917, when the All Stars came together to do a benefit for a sports writer. Something that I think would never happen today.
- [33:48]
A
But anyway, no, but that's, you know, go with my dad to a game. He'll talk to you about how best to eat corn. You don't want to miss it. Anyway, we'll, we'll remind you about the great folks that make this podcast possible. And then a coda from the great Jenny Jackson.
- [34:01]
B
We're getting a little punchy. As you can tell, the Bookcase with Kate and Charlie is a joint production of Good Morning America and ABC Audio. It is edited by Tom Butler of TKO Productions and our executive producer is Simone Swink. We want to make special mention of Amanda McMaster, Sabrina Kohlberg, and Ariel Chester of ABC Good Morning America and Josh Cohan of ABC Audio. You can follow us and rate and review this podcast wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like to find any of the books mentioned on this podcast, you can find them listed in the episode Description.
- [34:36]
C
This is a piece of advice that I came by as a book editor, which is that if you want to sell 100,000 copies of a book, give the people what they want. If you want to sell a million, give them the book they never knew they needed.
- [34:55]
A
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