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We spotlight the new Amazon Prime Video series "A League of Their Own" - an inventively reimagined telling of the story of the World War II-era All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (and originally made famous in the 1992 Penny Marshall-directed motion picture of the same name) - with writer and executive producer Desta Tedros Reff.

Decidedly more "dramedy" in tone than the comedic approach of the namesake film (or even its short-lived, lesser-remembered CBS-TV primetime sitcom spinoff the following year), the new League still builds its rich storyline around the AAGPBL's four-time champion Rockford (IL) Peaches - while notably incorporating race and gender identity themes not previously addressed (or even acknowledged) in the original.

Tedros Reff takes us inside the myriad of challenges behind the making of the series, including: the persistent curveballs thrown by COVID-era production scheduling; the purposeful approach to historical accuracy (yes, various scenes were shot in Rockford); and the obvious, but important risks of reframing the lighthearted plot of a modern-day film classic into an authentic narrative befitting the true legacy of the league's pioneering women players.

Life has come full circle for TV news reporter-turned-Triple-A baseball play-by-play broadcaster Mike Capps ("Grinders: Baseball's Intrepid Infantry") - now the longtime radio voice of the Pacific Coast League's Round Rock Express.

As a kid in early-1960s North Texas, Capps grew up immersed in the exploits of Dallas-Fort Worth's minor league Rangers, Cats and Spurs - intrigued by rotating rosters of determined pay-your-dues hopefuls bouncing up and down between baseball's majors and minors - players his grandfather called the "engine" of the sport.

After an intense award-winning professional career covering hard news for local Metroplex TV stations and early 1990s Gulf War-era CNN, Capps found solace and renewed purpose in those early childhood memories of the "grinders" of the game he fell in love with - reinventing himself in their mold into a second post-journalism work life as an (also) award-winning baseball play-by-play man for minor-league clubs in outposts like Tyler, TX (the former Texas-Louisiana League WildCatters), Sioux Falls, SD (Canaries), Atlantic City, NJ (the former Atlantic League Surf), and Nashville (Sounds).

By 2000, Capps' pressbox grinding paid off with an offer by Nolan Ryan to help inaugurate suburban Austin's expansion Express as its radio voice and director of broadcasting - a run that's lasted some 3000+ games (and counting).

It wasn't easy being a soccer fan in the United States in the 1980s.

While the 24-team North American American Soccer League ushered in the decade with an air of stability and momentum (the league even sold a pennant proclaiming the game the "Sport of the 80's"), it wasn't long before big-time American pro soccer was dangerously on the ropes (the NASL shrank to just nine franchises by 1984) – and then seemingly gone for good when the league officially sank into oblivion in early 1985.

For a nascent generation of US fans newly hooked on the world's "beautiful game," it felt like an abandonment – and an air of disillusionment beset the American soccer scene in the immediate years that followed.

Slowly and awkwardly, Americans slowly got wise – miraculously qualifying for the 1990 World Cup in Italy, hosting the event four years later, and re-birthing the pro game with Major League Soccer in 1996 – and ultimately evolved it into one of the most popular sports in the country.

Sportswriter/author Hal Phillips ("Generation Zero: Founding Fathers, Hidden Histories & the Making of Soccer in America") joins the podcast this week to help trace the timeline of events that led to this epic transformation in American sports, by spotlighting the national team players and fans - raised on the game and tempered by hardship - who made it happen.

PLUS: Your chance to win a free copy!

Pro hockey history enthusiast/author Steve Currier (Episode 37; "The California Golden Seals: A Tale of White Skates, Red Ink, and One of the NHL's Most Outlandish Teams") returns to the show after a five-year absence - this time to accompany us deep down the rabbit hole of one of the National Hockey League's most overlooked adventures of the 1970s. In his new book "When the NHL Invaded Japan: The Washington Capitals, the Kansas City Scouts and the Coca-Cola Bottlers' Cup", Currier recounts the story behind the NHL's long-forgotten, but historically relevant 1976 promotional exhibition series (colloquially known as the "NHL Japan Series") between the league's two most lamentable teams that year - the sophomore-twin Washington Capitals (11W-59L-10T) and Kansas City Scouts (12-56-12) - and their curious mission to introduce professional hockey to the Land of the Rising Sun.

Chicago sports fans of a certain age may remember the name Charlie Evranian atop the masthead of the executive suite (behind inimitable owner Lee Stern, of course) of the 1981 outdoor version of the North American Soccer League's Chicago Sting - when that club delivered the first major pro championship to the Windy City since 1963's NFL Bears. (Not to mention the team's first two barn-burning indoor NASL seasons at the former "Madhouse on Madison".) But Evranian's time leading the Sting of the early 1980s was merely a brief mile-marker along a fascinatingly peripatetic 20+ year journey across a litany of (mostly forgotten) teams and leagues in both the majors and minors of professional sports management - laden with unbelievable twists and turns that only a podcast of a certain genre could love. Evranian takes us on a wild ride alongside the likes of legendary front office figures like Bill Veeck, Ted Turner, Pat Williams, and Earl Foreman - for memorable stops including:

• leading baseball's Class A Greenwood (SC) Braves to two league championships;
• co-founding AHL hockey's minor league Richmond Robins;
• reinventing the mid-70s' Chicago White Sox; AND
• cleaning up an endless array of messes as the Major Indoor Soccer League's deputy commissioner.

Fresno Grizzlies baseball TV play-by-play broadcaster (and Episode 208 guest) Dan Taylor ("Lights, Camera, Fastball: How the Hollywood Stars Changed Baseball") returns to the podcast - this time with the story of one of the most unheralded players in pro football history. In his new book "Walking Alone: The Untold Journey of Football Pioneer Kenny Washington," Taylor writes the first solo biography devoted to collegiate star and original Los Angeles Rams standout running back Kenny Washington (1918-71) - perhaps the best known of the pro game's "Forgotten Four" (the others: Woody Strode, Bill Willis, and Marion Motley) - collectively recognized as the first Black athletes to permanently break pro football's color barrier in 1946. Of the group, it was Washington - a one-time UCLA teammate of Jackie Robinson in both baseball and football - who officially re-integrated the NFL by signing with the just-relocated-from-Cleveland Rams (he convinced the club to later sign Strode). While Willis and Motley were doing similarly with the challenger All-America Football Conference (and later NFL-absorbed) Cleveland Browns - ultimately earning them selections to the Pro Football Hall of Fame - Washington has yet to join them in such recognition, despite being the first of any of them to achieve the feat. Of course, there is MUCH more to the story - including Washington's prolific minor league football exploits, frequent small-part film roles, and local LA celebrity status. By the end of this episode, you too will be convinced that Washington deserves a place in the Canton's hallowed Hall.

We're back from vacation with a 50th anniversary rewind of 1972's iconic "Summit Series" between "Team Canada" (featuring the NHL's best from north of the border) and the then-Soviet Union - with veteran sports journalist/hockey analyst Scott Morrison ("1972: The Series That Changed Hockey Forever"). It's a deep dive into the curious, yet now-iconic battle between the hockey's two top superpowers at the time - played against the backdrop of global 1970s-era Cold War tensions - that morphed from a relatively unassuming cultural exchange-oriented pre-season "exhibition" into the defining hallmark of each country's rich hockey heritage. All culminating with Toronto Maple Leaf forward Paul Henderson's dramatic and decisive late-third-period "goal heard around the world" ​(​on September 28, 1972) to clinch the eighth and final game of an epic month-long hockey series that, to this day, remains Canada's most enduring professional sports triumph.

[We celebrate eminent North-of-the-border sportswriter Ed Willes' selection to the Canadian Football Hall of Fame's media wing last week - with a June 2018 archive re-release of one our most popular episodes!]

As Johnny Manziel's pro football comeback journey wraps up a promising pre-season with the Canadian Football League's Hamilton Tiger-Cats, we take a moment this week to reminisce on the approaching 25th anniversary of the CFL's bold, but ultimately ill-fated attempt to bring its exciting brand of pigskin south of the border in 1993.

When the NFL put the brakes on its two-year World League of American Football experiment in the summer of 1992 (which included a franchise in Montreal, dubbed the "Machine"), an economically wobbly CFL sensed an opportunity to fill the gap in US markets newly comfortable with the notion of pro football, as well as a potential growth path for the tradition-rich Canadian game to expand outside the Provinces. In fact, two WLAF owners, Fred Anderson (Sacramento Surge) and Larry Benson (San Antonio Riders) "crossed over" to the Canadian League and were awarded newly rechristened franchises for 1993 – Anderson's Sacramento Gold Miners and Benson's San Antonio Texans.

While the Gold Miners were the only ones to make it into the following season's expanded CFL schedule (Benson literally – and ominously – left the league at the altar by bowing out the day of the league's press conference announcing the expansion), the door was open to a wild three-season adventure that brought the wide-open Canadian game to far-flung American outposts in Baltimore, Las Vegas, Shreveport, Memphis, Birmingham, and, ironically (via eventual relocation from Sacramento), San Antonio.

Longtime Vancouver Province sportswriter Ed Willes (End Zones and Border Wars: The Era of American Expansion in the CFL) joins the podcast to discuss the league's short-lived American expansion effort, which then-commissioner Larry Smith had hoped to eventually encompass ten US teams in a fully expanded 20-team league.

Among the misadventures, Willes recounts: the 1995 champion Baltimore Stallions (who operated as the nickname-less "CFLers" the previous season in a trademark dispute with the NFL over the "Colts" moniker); the woefully attended Las Vegas Posse (who practiced on the Strip in the Riviera Hotel's parking lot and were forced to play their last "home" game in Edmonton); the Memphis Mad Dogs' unique approach to fitting the longer/wider CFL field into the Liberty Bowl; why football-mad Birmingham couldn't draw flies for Barracuda games once college and high school seasons started; and the "Great Tucker Caper" – featuring the infamous brothers Glieberman and their attempt to steal away the Shreveport Pirates to the greener pastures of Norfolk, VA.

[A June 2017 archive re-release favorite with one of the true insiders behind the initial success of the legendary original 1970s/80s Major Indoor Soccer League!]

This week, Tim Hanlon buckles up for a wild ride through the tumultuous early years of the original Major Indoor Soccer League with sports PR veteran Michael Menchel, in our longest and most anecdote-filled episode yet!

Menchel takes us on a head-spinning audio journey across some of the most memorable (and forgettable) franchises in professional indoor soccer history – including stops in Long Island, NY (the Arrows trade for Pete Rose!); New Jersey (scoring champ Fred Grgurev's unique approach to car maintenance!); Houston (the "Summit Soccer" borrows its name from the arena it plays in and its players from the NASL's Hurricane!); Baltimore (the marketing genius of Tim Leiweke!); and Hartford (what the hell is a "Hellion"?).

Plus, Menchel: hits the road with Frank Deford; spends a year outdoors among the Caribou(s?) of Colorado; has a bad day in Rochester, NY; and "settles down" in St. Louis wondering when and where the NFL football Cardinals will move next.

It's a special "retcon" episode this week, as we dig into both the original and revisionist histories of the NBA's Charlotte Hornets - with the first incarnation's most recognizable player, and the second iteration's most logical keeper-of-the-flame: Tyrone "Muggsy" Bogues. Over a 14-year pro NBA career, Bogues ("Muggsy: My Life From a kid in the Projects to the Godfather of Small Ball") was best known for his ten standout seasons of on-court wizardry with the 1988 expansion version of the Hornets - which lit up the league in attendance (highest in the NBA for seven seasons, including an unprecedented string of 364 consecutive sellouts in the 22,500-seat Charlotte Coliseum [aka "The Hive"]); dynamic up-tempo style (featuring a bevy of budding stars like Alonzo Mourning, Larry Johnson, Glen Rice, and Dell Curry, as well as future Naismith Basketball Hall of Famers Robert Parish and Vlade Divac); and unique, ahead-of-their-time Alexander Julian-designed purple and teal uniforms. Bogues regales us with some of his most memorable moments from the OG Hornets - as well as other career highlights like: a rookie-of-the-year summer season with the 1987 USBL Rhode Island Gulls; two seasons of head coaching the WNBA Charlotte Sting; and stealing some scenes in the iconic 1996 film "Space Jam". And, of course, we debate the vagaries of the original Hornets team history in relation to the "revived" Charlotte franchise narrative - despite the club's move to New Orleans (now today's Pelicans) in 2002, and the subsequent expansion Bobcats' retroactive bending of the time-space continuum.