TRUMP HURT AGAIN IN POLLS; JUSTICE & MRS ALITO SELF-DISTRUCT - 6.11.24

This is the sixth successive week in which Biden's net favorability rating has bettered Trump's, a trend that began as legal proceedings in New York ramped up. The latest data shows Trump's worst net favorability rating since last January. That is the point Biden's net favorability is minus nine. Trump's is now minus twelve. He is further underwater in the land of the Bland. The one digit disapproval guy is king.

The day before the Morning Consult poll was the CBS you gov poll, and Trump was ahead fifty to forty nine, but Biden is ahead in battleground states fifty to forty nine. To their eternal discredit, Ugov and CBS gives you none of the raw data in the battleground states, nor anything on a state by state basis, only saying we oversampled in them in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, in Wisconsin. That's like looking outside your window and saying

there's some weather out there. CBS also completely and more importantly misses the point when it asks which issues are major factors in your vote, and it gets eighty one percent saying yes, the economy is a major factor in my vote. Seventy five percent say yes, inflation is, seventy four percent say the state of democracy is fifty six percent say yes, the US Mexico border is a major factor in my vote. And then CBS concludes only twenty eight percent said the Trump conviction would be a major

factor in their vote. Seventeen percent said it would be a minor factor, right twenty eight percent, So fifty six percent say the border, immigration, deportation, the Trump racism card. Fifty six percent say that is a major factor in their vote, something Trump has been selling NonStop for nine years, but half that many say his conviction, which is still

just twelve days old, is also a major factor. In twelve days, Trump's conviction in the hush money election interference trial has become half as important as immigration and the border. And that is being dismissed in the write up as being a minor factor. It is in fact, astonishingly large, astonishingly fast, and that's not even considering the minor voters. Twenty eight percent say it's a major factor, seventeen percent say it's a minor factor. Nearly half of voters say

his convictions are a factor in their vote. CBS also noted in passing that the conviction seem to be improving Biden's position with Democrats. Of course it is. It is animating them. That's the other point. We see the same thing in a different you gov poll for Yahoo News, which has Biden up forty six to forty four. And by the way, that's his first lead in that poll

since October. And again, more importantly, let me quote the write up, Trump's conviction in the hush money case may have even made aid some otherwise skeptical Democrats and independence more inclined to believe that Trump is guilty of other crimes.

The number of Americans who now think Trump quote conspired to overturn the results of a presidential election, for instance, has grown from forty five percent to fifty percent since January, which includes a seventy nine percent to eighty eight percent uptick among Democrats plus a forty five percent to fifty

percent uptick among independents. And belief that Trump is guilty of taking highly classified documents from the White House and obstructing efforts to retrieve them has increased from forty eight percent to fifty two percent over the same period, with

similar gains among Democrats and independents. Hallelujah. The point is being made for us that Yahoo poll also shows voters want to know how those trials will turn out before the election, and although this will not happen, if Trump were to be convicted of another serious crime before the election, Biden's lead would widen to forty six to forty And that, of course, is why his concierge, Judge Eileen Cannon, and the Political Supreme Court have worked so hard to prevent

any other verdicts before the election. And Yahoo also asked, and this is more important, and I give them all the credit in the world. Which is more important to you? Joe Biden's age or Donald Trump's conviction, the result the Trump conviction is more important to forty three percent, the Biden age is more important to thirty eight percent. And

nobody knows how to read the polls. And so with the most encouraging polling numbers for Biden and more importantly against Trump, showing an awareness of Trump's criminality, the most encouraging polling numbers this year, and hard and fast polling evidence that the convictions are hurting Trump well for polling meaning the mud is slightly clearer than the usual mud. What is the Biden campaign doing with these the most

encouraging polling numbers this year? Off camera, the President is telling people at fundraisers that Trump is a convicted felon and that having a convicted felon seeking the presidency is disturbing, And on camera, in an interview with ABC News, he wouldn't say it. What do you think the American people should make of this? How important do you think this conviction should be in this race for president? That's for the public to decide.

public to decide, Help them decide. Tell them the truth, because mister president, when you hesitate like that, all the other Democrats think they are supposed to hesitate. Paul freaking Begala goes on CNN and says, quote, the Democrats have

to make this about your life, not Donald Trump's. I mean it's always you know, I was politically raised by Bill Clinton, and he would always say, you know, elections are about the voters lives, not ours, and Democrats need to take this to that message of we're here for you. I'm not very interested in mister Trump's personal problems. I'm interested in the lives and families of the American people. Bullshit, bullshit.

Paul Bagala Trump's personal problems, like his you know, dictatorship problem, and his if I lose this election, I'll die in prison problem, and his I'm a convicted felon problem, These are all also about the voter's lives. Trump is willing to end all of the voter's lives just to save

his own. You want to debate how much economics, how much immigration, and how much dictatorship in the mix here, fine, but don't tell me you're not interested, mister in mister Trump's personal problems, or I will have to mention that your last consulting job was on Hillary Clinton's two thousand campaign,

and we know how that turned out. And you and the others are still thinking twenty twenty four is just nineteen ninety six with a little added pizazz, a little free song of you know, America is going out of

business sale. The suicidal madness of the Paul begalas even the Biden reluctance to just harshly focus on Trump's convictions, is also at its core and inability to realize that not only can you base a campaign on more than one theme, more than one slogan, more than one pitch, but that in these days of epically low attention spans. You have to Nobody is saying the whole anti Trump

campaign should be about his crimes. You need to have as many ads about his attempts to overthrow democracy, but you also need just as many and just as bold ads about meat and potatoes issues. I wouldn't be so upset about this if the Biden advertising We're a little stronger. Trump keeps promising to defund all schools that have vaccine mandates. Well, this should be an advertising no brainer. I cooked this up. It took me about forty five seconds. Convicted fellow, Donald

Trump wants to keep your children from getting vaccines. All vaccines, he says. I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandates. No vaccines, says Donald Trump. No measles vaccine, no tetanus vaccine, no polio vaccine. Just sixty years ago, six thousand American children died from polio because there was no vaccine. Convicted fellon, Donald Trump wants to keep your children from getting the polio vaccine. Donald Trump wants to kill your children. Okay, how hard was that?

Just slap? I'm Joe Biden, and I approved this message on the end, and you have a campaign ad, and and you have the lead story in the news cycle that day, simple, memorable and by the way true. What are you thing's gonna happen if Trump is reelected and there are no vaccines? Once again, I wrote that in forty five seconds. Imagine what a pro could do. Don't tell me it's too tough. We need that Willy Horton

commercial attitude, only with facts and reality. Or if you don't want to do the Trump wants to kill your kids ad, how about a quick pocketbook style commercial convicted felon. Donald Trump wants to deport millions of people. Maybe you like this idea, maybe you hate it, but either way, he's going to make you pay for it. Who does the tough jobs in this country? Who harvests the crops, who cooks at the restaurants, who delivers things to your home?

What happens when Trump has deported all the people who do all the tough jobs. Companies will have to spend twice as much to get people to do those jobs. Guess who will pay for that? You will guess what happens then? Inflation? Donald Trump wants more inflation. I mean, you can make one of these for every topic you could think of, from the price of gas to the impact of Trump's stance on climate change on the cost of orange juice. In fact, you could make ten new

ones a day. I could make ten new ones a day. This isn't as hard as the Paul Begalas of this World wants you to think. And you can go really topical. I mean, I mean really topical. I ask you only for this one one visualization for me. Visualize lots of shots of the Appeal to Heaven flag and the upside down American flags, and lots of shots of guys in robes. Convicted felon Donald Trump loves Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito,

you know, the flag guy. And sam Alito has told an investigative reporter that he agrees with her that America's future is a choice. Tolerant moderates like you must lose, lose everything so that sam Alito and convicted felon Donald Trump and other religious fanatics can win.

because this isn't Iran. If that clip of Alito there surprised you read the Rolling Stone piece about my friend, the investigative journalist Lauren Windsor and Sam Alito, and once again we survive thanks to the stupidity of the people who would kill us. This is the second time Lauren has gotten sam Alito to disqualify himself on tape. She did it last year too. She just massages the egos of these self indulgent psychos long enough and the next thing you know, they're going all Illuminati on her.

is their guy. And we have now certainly entered into what we can safely called the post resignation era of American political history, in which nobody will go voluntarily, no matter the shame, no matter the crime, no matter the corruption, no matter the number of times they don't recognize that it's Lauren Windsor batting her eyes at them. Trump had

his first meeting with his probation officer yesterday Inhale. For a second, think about the reality that a presidential candidate having a with his probation officer ya zoom has happened, and it was not only not covered live on all news networks in the world, especially considering they really had nothing else to talk about, but I didn't even lead

this podcast with it. A meeting with a probation officer who's going to report to the judge with recommendations or at least assessments that will affect whether or not the judge sends him to the Big House at the sentencing on July eleventh. By the way, Trump just learned what I found out like fifteen years ago. Why you do not rely on Jonathan Turley as a legal expert or as anything else. Jonathan Turley went on Fox and says Judge Mayor Shawn kn't send Trump to prison because Trump

is an elderly first time offender. He called him elderly, elderly convicted fellon Donald Trump. And look, I'm holding up these papers by Jonathan Turley. I don't know that Trump will be quoting any more. Turley articles elderly first time offender Donald Trump. Ah, yeah, maybe put it in a B section, Mac, but yeah, a lead nowh Hello, we got the hotter Biden. Jerry went home without giving us

a verdict. Oh the pat Sayjack retirement. At the risk of devoting the entire podcast to naval gazing and philosophy, it can never be over emphasized. Part of Trump's success is this firehouse fire hose effect. There's so much going on that something that happened Sunday is already forgotten, like

uh well, like Trump glitching again. In fact, he he escalated from ordinary glitching to the record scratch glitch, where you immediately repeat what you just said and neither times can you finish the word oh man.

would end up in a major fistfight with the president. Okay, And you know what I would have said, It was okay. In that one instance, they made up a story. They just out of thin air, just like a lot of the fake stories are made up by these people because they're among the most dishonest people in the country, the fake news. They're dishonest people, but Frank, Frank, let.

on it. Also, even though the once great Washington Post is a wounded being lying there on the Veldt, which, if you know Washingt is take the metro, go to the National's Park station. It's out near there. Even though that's true, I am obligated to take a shot at the Washington Post because at this point it looks increasingly like Jeff Bezos adopted the phrase democracy dies in darkness as nothing more than a clever marketing slogan. And he don't give a damn about democracy dying in darkness, and

he never did. The new Washington Post marketing slogan may very well be well. Democracy's dead already, so at least fascism makes me richer. The Post has profiled Russ's vote, the ironically named Trump cultist who is behind Project twenty twenty five and theocratizing America and maybe you know, having the army shoot anti Trump civilians. Russ's vote could wind up as Trump's hmmler or gerring, or more likely his Albert spear. He's nuts, He's amoral, he is completely unburdened

by conscience. He waives the flag of religion and then tries to put it through your thorax. If he wasn't bald, Trump might have considered vote for vice president. I mean vote Trump, vote perfect slogan. The Post headline in its profile about this man who is a danger to everything America has ever stood for quote Trump loyalist pushes post constitutional vision for second term post constitutional. In other words, we've cut to the chase, here have we, Washington Post,

And we have already let Trump terminate the constitution. So we're post constitutional and we're already moving into shaping the dictatorship. And instead of a headline like this man wants to end your freedom and make you a slave, the Post goes with Trump loyalist pushes post constitutional vision for a second term, which makes me think of an article somewhere about your body decomposing after your death and the headline

Trump loyalist pushes postlife weight loss plan. Why has American journalism descended to the next of Dante's circles of hell so quickly? You know about the British sleeves journalist the Washington Post brought in Trump loyalist pushes post American vision for America. But do you know about the British editor in chief of the Wall Street Journal the one who must have greenlighted that hit piece last week on the President's age, the one that only quoted Republicans and deliberately

edited out all comments from Democrats. Daniel Lippman of Politico has a story about her. Her name is Emma Tucker, and the story sounds like it was written by mel Brooks that he cut it out of the producers. Mister Lippmann writes that at the Wall Street Journal party before the twenty twenty three White House Correspondent's Dinner, Ms Tucker, in conversation with a journal staffer and an unidentified second person, said, and I'm quoting Politico here, that she hadn't realized that

there were two Houses of Congress. Oh my god, she hadn't realized that there were two houses of Congress. Emma Tucker's response to this was, quote, this is garbage. Well, that's one description of it. I'd prefer to go with mel Brooks and the producers, like I mentioned the scene where he has the dilettant. Broadway producer Roger Debris played by Christopher Hewitt, read the script and say I never knew that the third Reich meant Germany. I mean, it's

just drenched with historical goodies like that. Wait, there's a North Dakota also of interest here. You think all that's bad? Which member of Congress? And by the way, there are two houses of Congress. Now have you heard, thanks Obama? Which member of Congress has indicated at a Trump rally that they believe that electric cars run on gas? I mean, you'd have to be pretty stupid to think that, So you have only like two hundred and seventy five choices. But I have faith in you. I think you can

figure out who said this. That's next. This is an all new edition of Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith Olberman still ahead of us on this all new edition of Countdown. I am breaking format. One of those things has happened in sports that makes my hair catch fire, then turn white, then fall out, then grow back, then turn black, then turn white again. And I want to comment on it at length, and you may or may not be interested in that, so I'm going to put

it last. So no things I promised not to tell today. Instead, I will give you my response to a survey of active baseball players by the website The Athletic, in which the active players absolutely trashed the old timers, and by old timers, they meet anybody who played before twenty ten. And apart from proving that nobody thinks as highly of today's baseball players as to today's baseball players, somebody grabbed

what is for me personally the third rail. Somebody said, in talking about batters versus pitchers, you think Babe Ruth ever saw a slider because they were too arrogant to google it first, and find out that the slider was in use in baseball when Babe Ruth was nine years old. And that invokes the story of the active pitcher who a few years ago claimed he would strike out Babe Ruth every time he faced him. And by the way, his earned run average at this moment is five point

seventy nine. Coming up. But first, as ever, there are still more new idiots to talk about who are not in baseball. The daily roundup of the mis grants, morons and dunning Krueger effects specimens who constitute today's non baseball worst persons in the world. And yes, if they ball cares, and I know it doesn't. Baseball's losing me the bronze worse.

Governor Kathy Hokel, alleged Democrat of New York. Hokel has abruptly and it sure looks like she's done it illegally frozen the introduction of congestion pricing in New York City at the end of the month. This is where they charge you for going downtown. It's worked in cities around the world. It's increased traffic flow, increase the use of mass transit, decreased pollution, and she stopped it just her after it passed. She's being sued, she may be primaried.

There may be a push forming to remove her. Happily, for her opponents, Kathy Hokel is just not bright. She claimed yesterday that no, she's not attending a fundraiser for her today in New York City. The fundraiser, which donors are being asked to fork over five to ten thousand dollars a piece, is being days after she came down in favor of cars and traffic and pollution and sucked a billion dollars worth of funding out of mass transit

in New York City. This fundraiser for her is being held at the Center for Automotive Education and Training in Queens and it's being staged by Well this is a coincidence, the Greater New York Automobile Association, a group of car fanciers, people who like to make models.

be confused. She might be thinking of hybrids. And I suppose if you walked her through it very carefully and slowly, over the course of several weeks or months, Green would finally realize that the point of electric vehicles, why they call them electric vehicles, is that they don't run on gasoline, and they certainly would not drive up demand for or the of gasoline. But after like three minutes of trying to process reality the eyes of Marjorie Taylor are you

sure you haven't had multiple concussions? Green just glaze over and she gets that hit in the face with a snowshovel. Look. I mean this one is up there with the time she demanded a national divorce because in her new country, let's call it Moronica, you could force students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day. The Pledge of Allegiance in a divorced country, the Pledge of allegiance that includes the line one nation indivisible. I guess division would be

illegal in her new country. She doesn't know what indivisible means. The debate over what makes Marge so stupid is endless and pointless. Just last week, she explained something on Twitter by using a phrase that she must have heard a not stupid person say once therein lies ojie. She thinks it's there and law she spelled it thch e R space new word e n l i E s. She thinks there's a word and lies like that guy used to run China Joe and lies. Oh my god, they're

and lies for all intensive purposes Marjorie. Previously, Midge has warned us that Bill Gates intends to force us to eat artificial meat grown in a quote peach tree dish. It's two years now since her video in which she insisted that Joe Biden would soon be unleashing his secret police against America. You know, the gospacho. Maybe it's brain damage. Maybe it's an IQ matching Tom Brady's uniform number or Babe Ruth's uniform number. Maybe it's opioids. Maybe it's steroids.

Maybe it's hemorrhoids. Maybe it's inbreeding. But I am going to play this part of this clip again and then offer you a really low odds explanation that truly would tie it all neatly together.

Marjorie Taylor Green. I mean a little on the facial coloring, but with the amount of makeup marg wares, it's pretty close. Same bulging bones under the eyebrows, the high cheek bones, the prominent nose. Only the hair color is really different, and we know how it got different. So here's my theory. When they found shannas dar's Z Neanderthal woman from seventy five thousand years ago, they did not find her alone.

There were two of them, and one was dead shannazar Z, and the other one was just frozen in suspended animation. And they brought her back to life and they named her Shanadar MTG, and the Republicans promptly ran her for Congress. And here we are with a leading GOP elected representative insisting that electric cars run on gasoline. But our winner

the worst of worsts Politico Playbook. Politico Playbook is well known as the home of typos and log rolling for the editor's girlfriend and editors who are only there because they've been fired by everybody else, and printing interminable lists of anonymous political reporters who mistakenly think they are celebrities because they were attending parties they don't know are slightly less important than the meetings of the Kowanas Club in

Rapid City. But even for them, even for a political playbook, this is a dilly. It's about North Dakota Governor Doug the mono Brow Bergham. And how as I have suggested here for months, Bergham is actually the clubhouse leader to be Trump's running mate, because when Trump picked Mike Pence, he thinks he was right and Mike Pence just failed. He needs a better Mike Pence. And that's got Doug Bergham written all over it. Anyway, here's the typo about

Bergham and Trump quote. As for looks, which are clearly important to the former president, Trump has also told people that Bergham looks the part and has gushed over his thick head of head.

you think Babe Ruth ever saw a slider question mark? Annually, the now New York Times owned website The Athletic does a survey of Major League Baseball players in which they make the mistake of asking today's baseball players opinions and questions and insights about the game today and about the game in the past. And one thing has been certain for the last well I've been a baseball fan since nineteen sixty seven, so since nineteen sixty seven, is that

today's baseball players know almost nothing about the past. And I mean the twenty twenty four baseball players know nothing about nineteen ninety four, as the nineteen ninety four players knew nothing about nineteen seventy four, and as I presume the nineteen twenty four players knew nothing about eighteen eight. They just think they live in a vacuum every generation. I had a conversation not long ago with a baseball

play by play man, and I asked him. Actually, I posited to him that it seemed to me that there were only two or three guys, maybe four, on every team that could actually play baseball, That the rest of them were hitters or pitchers who really didn't know what they were supposed to do strategically at a given moment, whether they should swing on a certain count or not, what base they should throw to, where they should go to in a rundown play, that they didn't know the

essence of baseball as it used to be taught. And he went, there's not that many. It's probably one or two. In any event, The Athletic asked baseball players many different topics and asked them one thing in particular, what about

the criticisms of today's game by recent former Major leaguers. Hell, you should read this article just to see how highly today's players think of themselves and how nobody appreciates them, and how they don't get the credit for playing in the most difficult game that has ever been called baseball, That nobody ever looks out for what they need, that

they don't get what they deserve. Despite the seven hundred million dollar contract that show hey Otani got and the freedom to play basically anywhere they want to from one year to the next end coaching staffs that are now who twenty twenty five guys per team trying to help you, and all the video in the world and computers and all the rest of that. But it all boils down to that one quote I started with, essentially the comments from about seventy five players or so who were willing

to criticize baseball as it used to be. And they're not talking about nineteen sixty seven. They're talking about twenty ten baseball players. These seventy five or so all had the basic same argument. No player from the past could exist in today's game, or almost no player from the past.

And this is one thing that has changed appreciably. Players in the past used to think of themselves as the culmination of a series of evolutions, that the game had gotten greater, and therefore they had gotten greater, and their physicality had gotten greater, et cetera, et cetera. It's not like that. Reading this article, it's all about how today's baseball players would if they put together an all star team against yesterday's great players, they'd come to bat once

and they would never ever end the game. Because today's baseball players would never make it out because they're perfect. This is what they have been taught. And we can talk about what this means in terms of society and entitlement and reading your own newspaper clippings and all the rest of that, but I'll spare that. I'm just saying that the article will make you in raged. And unfortunately it's not just baseball, every sport except probably the National

Hockey League. The players pretty much think that the guys before them were idiots who just happened to stumble around and set all these records and win all these championships. But there was one quote in there about how difficult it is to face pitching today, and the quote was, do you think Babe Ruth ever saw a slider? And

the answer is, you goddamn righty saw slider. The slider was put into use by the great Philadelphia Athletics Hall of Fame pitcher Charles Bender, native American from Minnesota, who debuted I believe in the year nineteen hundred and three. It was later perfected in the twenties by another pitcher named George Blaholder. But the slider that pitch with that motion was well known in Major League baseball long before Babe Ruth came to the major leagues in nineteen fourteen.

And any time that you hear somebody invoked Babe Ruth and dismiss him, well, he only played against white pitching. Well, he also only played against like one hundred different pitchers. Nominally, he was facing one of the two hundred best baseball pitchers of all time. And yes, maybe that number was limited, and half of what should have been the two hundred best baseball pitchers of his time were segregated out of

the game. So let's say he should have faced one of the top four hundred pitchers every day when he played in Major League baseball. Well, today, that's like a thousand pitchers are active. At any one point. Any hitter goes to the plate facing one of the thousand, let's be conservative, just the healthy ones, maybe the best six hundred active pitchers in the game, as opposed to the four hundred or the two hundred or the one hundred that Babe Ruth faced. But I'm getting very very far

into the weeds and the woods here. This is much simpler than I'm making it out to be. Every time somebody invokes Babe Ruth, as happened yesterday in the Athletic back to December of twenty eighteen, when Adam Ottavino, who is a relief pitcher who has experienced moderate success in the major leagues for many years and is now with the team that is the home of moderate success, the New York Mets. Adam Ottavino told a podcast that if he faced Babe Ruth, he would strike him out. Every time.

Babe Ruth would not make contact against him, he would strike him out every time. This, I think, still to this day, summarizes the attitude of the modern player about

the past in baseball, and it's also moronic. Adam Otavino is a smart guy, well respected among his teammates, pleasant with the media, and could not be more wrong about this because he has not considered anything other than what he knows of baseball, and he has projected himself back into its history and said, look how much bigger and stronger I am. Therefore, I would strike him out every

time I throw pitches he's never seen before. I cannot stop, and since December of twenty eighteen, I have not stopped thinking about this hypothetical theoretical transcendent somewhere in outer space without time, matchup between Adam Adavino and Babe Ruth or whoever it was the anonymous player who was quoted in The Athletic Yesterday saying, do you think Babe Ruth ever saw a slider? Yeah? Probably once every game. Obviously the

matchup could never happen. Babe Ruth died in nineteen forty eight. He retired from baseball in nineteen thirty five. He was born in eighteen ninety four, meaning if he came back somehow from the dead and played today, he'd be one hundred and thirty years old. I don't think he could get around on Adam Ottavito's slider. I don't think he could get around on my slider. But let's make this

increasingly fair. The point of what Adam Adavino said was, I suppose at Otdavino's prime and at Babe Ruth's prime, out of Vino thinks he would strike him out every time. So in theory, you'd have to have this matchup somewhere. You couldn't just pluck these two guys out of their existences and put them in a timeless white space in which the best Adam out of Vino, with all of his advantages, would face the best Babe Ruth with only the advantages of his lifetime. Of course, that would happen

the way he thinks it would. He would strike him out every time, at least the first few times until Ruth tried to adjust to him. But it wouldn't happen that way. Even in the wildest theory of time travel in space, you got to travel to some time. So where do you play it? Is it a home or a road game? For Adam out of Vino? Is it

nineteen twenty seven? Is it Babe Ruth's prime? Babe Ruth as he was a little portly but surprisingly nimble, big belly, big shoulders, unbelievably fast, hands as fast as Henry Aaron according to those who saw them, both as fast as any player today, and tiny little legs, unexpected speed and grace, and more importantly, in nineteen twenty seven, Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs, and no other team in the American

League hit more than fifty six home runs. No other complete team came close to his individual performance in home runs for the equivalent impact, how many more home runs he hit than everybody else last year? There would have had to have been in twenty twenty three, a major league baseball player who hit himself two hundred and fifty five home runs. That's how better than everybody else, Babe Ruth was in nineteen twenty seven. But also, what about

the ballparks you're playing in nineteen twenty seven? Where did he hit these? Down the left field line at Yankee Stadium, and Ruth was a left hand hitter, was two hundred and eighty one feet down the right field line. It was two hundred and ninety five feet, tiny distances even then on the other hand, in center field it was four hundred and ninety feet to the bleachers in center field.

Any major league hitter who came into a ballpark in which centerfield was four hundred and ninety feet away, they would leave. They would go on strike. Center fields now are not four hundred and ninety feet but closer to four hundred and nine feet, And we're not even going to talk about the power alleys and everything else. The ballparks of nineteen twenty seven were gigantic, except if you

pulled the ball right to the foul pole. Because Yankee Stadium two hundred and ninety five feet right down the line there for Babe Ruth's home runs, then jutted out to about three twenty almost immediately, and then gradually out to four hundred and ninety feet in right center field and center field. The other thing about hitting in nineteen twenty seven, you did not get a new, fresh, clean,

easy to see baseball every pitch. Sometimes a game could be played with less than twenty baseballs in And yes it's true, as autom Altavino pointed out, Babe Ruth did not see any of today's exotic pitchers and their exotic

movements and the pitches that they threw. No, he just saw spit balls, shine balls, emery balls, balls that had gouges taken out of them by ballplayers, rings, balls that had been in use for several innings and were lopsided, balls that were not stitched properly to begin with and came apart when you hit them. The other thing that I always think about that modern players don't think about is Babe Ruth saw each pitcher live, and that was it.

Today's batters can study every pitch the opposing pitcher, every opposing pitcher has ever thrown, ever thrown as recently as the nineteen eighties and nineties. Tony Gwinn, my late friend of the San Diego Padres, used to go looked at funny by his teammates because he was studying videotape of the pictures. What good does that do? How does that help you guess what? They didn't have videotape of all

the other pictures in nineteen twenty seven. They didn't have still pictures of most of the pictures in action in nineteen twenty seven. You couldn't tell what another picture threw. You had a reputation, You had your own memory. Maybe like many players did, you wrote down what you saw as it happened, so you'd have a fresh memory the next time you saw the guy in Saint Louis in August, when it was ninety five degrees and you were playing at one thirty in the afternoon. Baby Ruth had no gym.

Bab Ruth did not work out. Nobody really had understood the relationship between staying in shape and hitting home runs, or hitting or pitching or anything else. On the other hand, if you're playing this game in nineteen twenty seven, it would seem that almost all the advantages the gigantic ballparks, no video, no gym. That would favor Adam out of Vino, And I'm sure it would for the first couple of

it bats. But here's something else. If you transported any major league ball player of twenty twenty four back to the year nineteen twenty seven, he would feel like Robinson Crusoe, washed up on the desert island. He has no assistance of any kind. A major league baseball team consisted of twenty three, twenty four or twenty five players, the manager, and, if you were lucky, two coaches, both of whom were there basically to go drinking with the manager after the game.

I researched this when I was a kid. The first book I ever published, in nineteen seventy four, when I was fifteen years old, was about the major league coaches. It was a list of major league coaches, and it was the greatest shock of my life to that point. In nineteen twenty seven, there were sixteen teams, and the sixteen teams had twenty eight coaches among them. Five of these guys were either former pitchers or catchers. There were five pitching coaches. So Adam Ottavino, if you go back

to Facebook bab in nineteen twenty seven. You are on your own. You don't have video of him either. Also, there are no night games. Now to some pitchers, night games and day games make no difference whatsoever. But the point is there are no night games. And most importantly for somebody like Ottavino, who was a very good pitcher, there are no good relief pitchers. Maybe there's one or two.

Furpo Marberry of the Washington Senators would come in and work in relief almost exclusively, but there really weren't relief pitchers. If you were a good pitcher, you had to start, and you had to start every fourth day. So Adam Ottavino is not pitching an inning or two in which he would face Babe Ruth once or twice, maybe over the course of one game, and might face him again a few weeks later, so that when he faced him seven times in one season, yes, maybe he would strike

him out seven times. There was a picture named hub Prewitt who managed to strike out Babe Ruth repeatedly and got almost nobody else out. That was his whole reputation, the man who got Ruth out. But Ottavino would not have the luxury of only facing Ruth seven times, he'd have to face him four times in a game, because not only would they make him into a starting pitcher, but the likelihood of him being relieved at any point

during the game is almost zero. You go out there and throw your two hundred pitches at him, and then we'll see you in four days again. And by the way, you'll see the Yankees again in no more than a month's time, because there are only seven other teams in the league, and you play each other in a balanced schedule, none of this interleague crap. So that's nineteen twenty seven. What if you brought Babe Ruth. Do you think Babe

Ruth ever saw a slider? Yeah, he probably saw. He saw a slider and all those spitball pitches and the other things. And by the way, he wasn't wearing a batting helmet for any of this, nor any armor on his arms, nor any protection of any kind. So let's bring it to twenty twenty four, and Adam Ottavino is as he is, and Babe Ruth is the stranger arriving

in a new world. Well, the first thing that Babe Ruth finds out is sho hey Otani signed a contract last winter for seven hundred million dollars for ten years. And even when the calculations are shown to Babe Ruth as to what that means in nineteen twenty seven dollars, Babe Ruth is going to say, Holy spit, and he's going to go right to the gym and start working out in the hopes of playing until he's forty five years old, rather than retiring forcibly at the age of

about forty. That's the first thing he's going to see. He might actually begin to take care of himself. And if he doesn't think of that himself, he has six hitting coaches and twelve assistant hitting coaches and all the videotape he could ever want to look at at Adam out of you know, And if he can't really perceive what videotape is, there's of course a videotape coach to show it to him. And then he goes to the

ballpark and says, where's the rest of it? Tiny ballparks, centerfield to Yankee Stadium is not four hundred and ninety feet. Center field in some ballparks is pushing three ninety nine, not quite four hundred feet. Babe Ruth averaged at the peak ten year stretch of his career ten triples a year in smaller ballparks, just slightly smaller ballparks. By nineteen twenty seven standards, he would have hit seventy home runs

in nineteen twenty seven, not sixty. Now, suddenly center field, to which players regularly hit home runs, is available to him. The only home runs hit to center field before about nineteen fifty were inside the park home runs. Babe Ruth could now take an adam out of eno pitch, a slider or something else and put it over the freaking center field fence in any ballpark in the major leagues.

Remember what I mentioned earlier that the equivalent of what Ruth did compared to the rest of the league in nineteen twenty seven would require somebody to hit two hundred and fifty five home runs this year. He might do it also in terms of longevity. In addition to all of the athletic facilities available to him to get in shape and stay in shape, there are trainers, multiple trainers. There are workout rooms. There are doctors. There are team doctors.

They didn't have team doctors in nineteen twenty seven. They

didn't have padded fences in nineteen twenty seven. They didn't have the designated hitter in nineteen twenty seven, where Ruth, if he was tired or hungover or had spent the last three days without sleeping because he was chasing girls, could be the designated hitter and not have to worry about playing the outfield or though if he played the outfield he had those fences had padding on them today and they did not in nineteen twenty seven, So if

he ran into the outfield fences he did on many occasions, there are pictures of him laid out cold on the ground with all his teammates standing around waiting for him to come to That would never happen. And as I mentioned before, again, what are you facing today as the average hitter going to the plate in the average Major League game against random pitcher number five hundred and thirty two.

Because baseball is nearly twice as big as it was in nineteen twenty seven, there are automatically going to be twice as many pitchers, plus their longevity and their ability to get through a season is half of what it was at best compared to nineteen twenty seven. There are literally at any point in the game, six hundred or so active pitchers rotating around from team to team sometimes

and from the majors to the minor leagues. So you are facing any one of six hundred different pitchers, whereas Babe Ruth went through his career facing really just the American League pitchers, maybe just one of the best one hundred pitchers in the world, and now one of the best six hundred pitchers in the world. The average pitcher he's going to face today is not as good as the average pitcher he would have faced in nineteen twenty seven.

So here's the gist of it. I think, having watched this game and the other games all this time, and having remembering flashing back to a conversation I had on ESPN two in October nineteen ninety three with my co host Susie Calber about Wayne Gretzky and Gordie Howe, and she looking at me and going, well, of course, Wayne Gretzky's better. He's of today. All of today's athletes are better than they were in nineteen fifty three, and now Wayne Gretzky is dismissed because he's not as big as

the ones who play in twenty twenty four. Every generation does this, Well, they're much better today. I don't know that that's true. You'd really have to have Babe Ruth face Adam Outavino to see whether or not Adam Oudavino would strike him out or Babe Ruth would hit a home run seven hundred and eighty five feet off Adam Outavino. That is the point of playing the game. That is the one thing that does not change, and the idea

that today's players dismiss their predecessors. It occurs to me in the Baseball documentary by Ken Burns, there is a player quoted about how they don't play it as good as they used to in his day. His quotes are from about eighteen seventy, and he's talking about baseball in

eighteen fifty five. The gist of this is that, as in any generation, some sort of theoretical, magical conflict between Adam Adavino and Babe Ruth on a field somewhere in the sky would depend on who was better prepared, who had better access to training, better access to information, better access to nutrition, better access to coaching, better access to

video of the opponent. Those are ninety five percent of the improvements from one generation to the next and whatever is next in baseball or any other sport, when in twenty years from now people look back and go, well, yeah, but he was hitting off people like Adam Otnovino, and you know, Pete Alonzo was considered a great player. Show Hey, Otani was the only two way player. Remember those dead

days in baseball in twenty twenty four. That's the one guarantee going forward, somebody else, sitting in some other podcast will have these exact same complaints about Adam Ottavino the seventh or whoever the player was who was quoted in the Athletic as saying, do you think Babe Ruth ever saw a slider? And someday somebody will say the equivalent of this in some future search engine world. Did you

think about googling that before you asked that question? And another thing about the goddamned eighteen ninety World Series and how that and I got it next time, I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Countdown musical directors Brian Ray and John Phillip Schaneil arranged, produced and performed most of our music. Mister Ray was on the guitars, bass and drums. Mister Shanelle handled orchestration

and keyboards. Was produced by Tko Brothers. Other music, including some of the Beethoven compositions, arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. The sports music is the Old Woman theme from ESPN two, written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc. Our satirical and pithy musical comments and the organ accompany meant for the commercials in the A Block by Nancy Fauss, the best baseball stadium organist ever,

and I work on a song for Jonathan Turley. Our announcer was my friend Larry David, and everything else was pretty much my fault. So that's countdown for this. The one hundred and forty eighth day until the twenty twenty four presidential election, the two hundred and fifty third day since convicted felon Don Trump's first attempted coup against the

democratically elected government of the United States. Use the July eleventh sentencing hearing for an elderly first time offender, Use the mental health system, use presidential immunity if it happens to stop him from doing it again. While we still can. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Bulletins is the news warrants till then. I'm Keith Ulruman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is

a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.