National Pastime Radio

Among the other things I’ve neglected to post recently was the cornucopia of recent NPR programs featuring baseball, in one form or another.

On All-Star Game Tuesday (July 15) Leonard Lopate interviewed Ken Griffey Sr., author of Big Red: Baseball, Fatherhood, and My Life in the Big Red Machine

You can listen to that segment here:

On the same program, Lopate chatted with Tim Elfrink and Gus Garcia-Roberts, authors of Blood Sport: Alex Rodriguez, Biogenesis, and the Quest to End Baseball’s Steroid Era.

You can hear that one here:

On the “Bluff the Listener” segment of the July 12 edition of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, this one was one of the options for the category “promotions gone wrong, “as offered by panelists Brian Babylon:

It seemed like a nice gesture – handing out free, promotional ponchos to fans at Chicago White Sox games. And those ponchos with hoods would not have been a problem if it hadn’t rained. But the rain started, and the hoods came up – the pointed, white hoods. You can’t blame the fans. They couldn’t have seen what they’d look like. They couldn’t have possibly known what a crowd of people, identically in white robes and pointed hoods, would look like to people at home watching the game on TV…

(LAUGHTER)

BABYLON: Until it was the next day, when photos went viral on the Internet, that White Sox marketing department realized that they had made a terrible mistake. It was free poncho night, not Klan rally night.

(LAUGHTER)

BABYLON: It was so bad that former Clipper owner Donald Sterling immediately put a bid to buy the White Sox.

(LAUGHTER)

BABYLON: This was the worst promotion since the ill-advised, Parkinson’s awareness, baseball bobble heads of 2012.

I thought, this has to be one of the bluffs. Shockingly, I was wrong; that was a real thing.

Awkward.

(That’s even worse than the Colorado Rockies misspelling the name of their All-Star Shortstop on a giveaway promotion.)

In last week’s “Lightning Round” closer, Derek Jeter got props:

PETER SAGAL: Retiring Yankee, Derek Jeter received a three-minute standing ovation at this week’s blank game.

BOBCAT GOLDTHWAIT: All-Star Game?

SAGAL: Yes.

Sagal closes his show with a promo for How To Do Everything, which recently featured this piece on keeping the scoreboard (not scorecard) at Wrigley Field. (Wish there was video for this; something things don’t translate too well to audio.)