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Baseball historian Steve Treder ("Forty Years a Giant: The Life of Horace Stoneham") steps up to the plate this week to delve into the oft-overlooked contributions of influential San Francisco (née New York) Giants owner Horace Stoneham - who quietly stewarded the storied National League franchise through four turbulent decades of baseball history (1936-76).

Inheriting the club at the tender age of 32 from his father after his death in 1936, Stoneham actually began his tenure with the Manhattan-based Giants (and its sprawling multi-sport Polo Grounds venue) twelve years earlier as an apprentice - working his way up from lowly ticketing assistant to (legendary field manager) John McGraw confidante by the early 1930s.

Despite winning only four NL pennants (including the famous 1951 "Shot Heard 'Round the World") and just one World Series title (1954) while in New York, Stoneham more significantly impacted the team's legacy and the game's future off the field. In the mid-1940s when the Pacific Coast League was angling to gain Major League status, few except Stoneham and Brooklyn Dodgers GM Branch Rickey took it seriously; twelve years later, the Giants and Dodgers became the first teams to boldly relocate westward. Stoneham was also an early pioneer in racial integration: he signed Negro League stars Monte Irvin and Hank Thompson in 1949 (enabling the Giants to become the second-ever MLB club to break the color barrier); and he hired the majors' first-ever Spanish-speaking scout to help find and develop Latin American players.

The Roarin' Twenties was a time of Prohibition, jazz, gangland murder - and, for baseball, an age of superstitious magic - when even future Hall of Fame players believed that rubbing the hump of a hunchback would guarantee a hit at the plate.

Irreparably disfigured by a childhood playground seesaw accident, South Philadelphia teenager Hughie McLoon never grew taller than 49 inches; but in an era when baseball club mascots were chosen with as much care as starting pitchers(!), McLoon prevailed upon legendary Philadelphia Athletics owner Connie Mack to hire him as the team's lucky charm in 1916.

Reeling from an unfamiliar last-place finish in 1915 (after winning four American League pennants and three World Series titles between 1910-14), Mack's A's needed all the help they could get - including a replacement for their previous humpbacked batboy/mascot/star Louis Van Zelst, who had died prior to the season's start. Although McLoon couldn't help the A's escape the AL basement during his three seasons, he still became a local celebrity much like his "more successful" predecessor; he loved the crowds at Shibe Park, and they loved him back. McLoon became the toast of the town, parlaying his fame with the A's into a bevy of law-bending ventures, including boxing manager/promoter, speakeasy owner, and booze runner - all while serving as a secret agent for Philly's police chief. Gunned down in a gang-style confrontation outside his tavern one summer night in 1928, McLoon's death rocked the city - and throngs of well-wishers came out for his wake.

Veteran political journalist Allen Abel ("The Short Life of Hughie McLoon: A True Story of Baseball, Magic and Murder") joins us to recount this very curious story of 1910s baseball, its odd superstitions and one of its most unique characters.

There's one question Cam Perron ("Comeback Season: My Unlikely Story of Friendship with the Greatest Living Negro League Baseball Players") has heard over and over again: "How does a white kid from a suburb of Boston become friends with all of these former Negro League baseball ­players?"

An ardent Red Sox fan, Perron grew up during the '00s loving history, and from an early age, had a knack for collecting. But when he was twelve and bought a set of Topps baseball cards featuring several players from something called "the Negro Leagues," his curiosity was piqued.

In 2007, while still in middle school, Perron started writing letters to former Negro League players, asking for their autographs and a few words about their careers. What he got back was much more than he expected. The former players responded with detailed stories about their glory days on the field, as well as disconcerting descriptions of the racism they faced - including run-ins with the KKK. They explained how they were repeatedly kept out of the major leagues and confined to the lower-paying and lesser-publicized Negro Leagues - even after Jackie Robinson had supposedly broken the color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. By the time Perron started high school, letters had turned into phone calls, and he was spending hours a day talking with dozens of seemingly forgotten ex-players. Many of them professed ignorance as to the existence or whereabouts of any records of their play, and sadness at how they'd lost touch with their former teammates. In 2010, with the help of a small group of fellow researchers, a then-15-year-old Perron helped organize the first annual Negro League Players Reunion in Birmingham, Alabama, where he finally got to meet his new friends - all of them 50-to-70 years his senior - in person. Their bond was natural and instant. In between subsequent reunions, Perron has become deeply involved in an ever-expanding mission to help ex-players get rightly-owed pension monies from Major League Baseball, while simultaneously working to get the Negro Southern League Museum in Birmingham opened in 2015.

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Founded as the "Eastern Pennsylvania Basketball League" for its first season in post-war 1946 - and later (1970-78) known as the Eastern Basketball Association before eventually morphing into the NBA's semi-official minor-league Continental Basketball Association - the Eastern Professional Basketball League was the probably greatest pro hoops circuit you've never heard of.

The EPBL was a fast-paced and physical affair, often played in tiny, smoke-filled gyms across the northeast and featuring standout players who found themselves "boxed out" of the NBA for a variety of reasons - unspoken quotas on Black players (like Hal "King" Lear, Julius McCoy, & Wally Choice), collegiate point-shaving scandals (e.g., Sherman White, Jack Molinas, Bill Spivey), or simply the harsh math of a 1950s/60s NBA that counted less than 100 roster slots total across its 8-10 franchises.

Syl Sobel and Jay Rosenstein ("Boxed Out of the NBA: Remembering the Eastern Professional Basketball League") join the show to delve into the fascinating story of a league that, for over 30 years, was the next-best professional league in the world after the NBA.

And featured a bevy of eventual basketball luminaries - like Syracuse University coach Jim Boeheim, former Temple University coach John Chaney, former Detroit Pistons player & coach Ray Scott, former NBA coach & TV analyst Hubie Brown, and former NBA player & coach Bob Weiss - who went on to make their marks upon the modern game. If you remember teams like the Scranton Milers, Wilkes-Barre Barons, Sunbury Mercuries or Allentown Jets - this is the episode for you!

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Author Dan Taylor ("Lights, Camera, Fastball: How the Hollywood Stars Changed Baseball") joins the pod for an in-depth look at one of baseball's most uniquely inventive teams - known for its star-studded celebrity ownership structure (including the likes of Bing Crosby, Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, George Burns, and Cecil B. DeMille) - and warm embrace of movie industry publicity during the 1940s/50s heyday of Hollywood's "Golden Age."

Long before Brooklyn's relocated Dodgers colonized Los Angeles with "major league" status in 1958, the Hollywood Stars (along with its fierce cross-town rival LA Angels) pioneered a host of innovations with a promotional flair that was the envy of its "near-major" Pacific Coast League competitors.

Led by Robert Cobb, owner of the legendary Brown Derby restaurant chain (and Cobb salad namesake), the Stars routinely challenged baseball conventions with a litany of paradigm-changing initiatives such as: uniforms with short pants, in-stadium cheerleaders and movie star beauty queens, between-innings infield-dragging (to boost concession sales), high-end ballpark food, and professional baseball's first regularly broadcast televised home games. Support the show by getting two free months of NordVPN - plus a FREE GIFT - when you use promo code GOODSEATS at checkout!

International Tennis Hall of Fame Museum director Doug Stark (The SPHAs: The Life and Times of Basketball's Greatest Jewish Team) joins this week's 'cast for an authoritative exploration of one of his first loves - pro basketball's pioneering Philadelphia SPHAs. Originally organized in 1918 as a local amateur team by South Philadelphia High School grads Eddie Gottlieb, Harry Passon and Hughie Black - and acronymically named for their early uniform sponsors, the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association - the SPHAs rose from a regional amateur league power in the 1920s to become an early avatar for professional basketball dominance in the 1930s & 40s. With home games played in the ballroom of Philly's Broadwood Hotel (replete with customary singles dances afterwards), the SPHAs became a sensation in the local Jewish social scene, and soon graduated (under the guidance of Gottlieb) to winning titles in various early pro hoops leagues like the Eastern League and Abe Saperstein's American Basketball League - while beating legendary teams like Boston's Original Celtics and New York's Renaissance Five along the way. In the ABL alone, the SPHAs captured seven titles in their 13 years of play between 1933-45, and were runners-up twice. In 1946, the NBA-forerunning Basketball Association of America debuted, and the ABL ceased to be a major league. With Gottlieb establishing the Philadelphia Warriors as his BAA franchise, the SPHAs continued with the minor league ABL and as a touring opponent of the Saperstein's barnstorming Harlem Globetrotters. Gottlieb sold the team in 1950 to former SPHAs star Red Klotz, who changed the name to the Washington Generals. Support the show by trying one month of BlueChew for FREE (just pay $5 shipping) with promo code GOODSEATS at checkout!

We fire up the GPS for a trek back to the City of Brotherly Love this week for a fond - but decidedly one-of-a-kind - remembrance of Philadelphia's oddly beloved "octorad"-styled outdoor sports mecca known as Veterans Stadium. Memoirist, Philly native and actual (Vietnam War) vet Tom Garvey ("The Secret Apartment") joins us to delve into his incredible story of living in a self-fashioned apartment underneath the seats of the old Vet's left-field Section 354 (above the visiting team's baseball bullpen) in the early 1980s: From the opening chapter of "The Secret Apartment": "Let's begin an implausible story with a seemingly simple yet complex question: If you were single, never married with no children or dependents, would you, if you had the opportunity, have lived 'on the down low' in a secret apartment in Veterans Stadium? "In this proposal, we have an off-the-wall South Philly version of 'Phantom of the Opera,' but the larger notion this question begs could easily challenge the inner demons of sports fans anywhere. If you had an opportunity to live in a major sports stadium of a team you grew up loving, what would you have done? "In my case: I could, so I did."

Arizona State calculus professor Scott Surgent ("The Complete World Hockey Association, 11th Edition"; "The World Hockey Association Fact Book") joins this week to discuss his personal passion project of documenting everything statistical from the fascinatingly ephemeral World Hockey Association - despite never having witness a single game during its brief seven-year run (1972-79). Like many young sports fans of the 70s living outside of actual WHA markets (for as long as they lasted), Surgent's first introduction to and ongoing understanding of the upstart WHA was by way of laboring through the tiny catch-all "scoreboard" agate of local newspaper sports sections - where league standings, player transactions and a random box score or two would qualify as "coverage." Surgent would squint hard to literally and figuratively read between the lines as to what the WHA was all about - supplemented by an occasional wire service article, usually about a team (or the league itself) in financial trouble. Imagination and hearsay filled in the rest - until the league's "merger" with the NHL in 1979, when everything WHA-related seemingly vanished with it, as if nothing had ever transpired. By the early '90s, Surgent was perplexed as to the continued absence of anything historical - let alone definitive - from the league's statistical existence. So he struck out on his own to literally set the record straight - resulting in the first edition of "Complete" in 1995. 25 years and ten editions later, Surgent's reference opus - all 526 glorious pages of it - is now the go-to resource for anyone seeking authoritative certitude about anything WHA. Support the show by getting two free months of NordVPN - plus a FREE GIFT - when you use the promo code GOODSEATS at checkout!

After a severely challenging, COVID-hampered 2020, it wasn't altogether surprising to hear NBA Commissioner Adam Silver openly muse with reporters at year's end about the potential for adding a new franchise or two to help shore up the league's finances. "I'd say it's caused us to maybe dust off some of the analyses on the economic and competitive impacts of expansion," Silver said back in December. "We've been putting a little bit more time into it than we were pre-pandemic." While not necessarily a fait accompli, it is still a remarkable turn of strategic thinking that immediately sent local tongues wagging in multiple North American cities from Las Vegas to Louisville to even Mexico City and Montreal. But few would argue that the aggrieved city of Seattle - losers of the much-beloved SuperSonics in the summer of 2008 to a carpet-bagging ownership group from Oklahoma City - should be the first in line for a new club when the NBA is officially ready. Author Jon Finkel ("Hoops Heist: Seattle, the Sonics and How a Stolen Team's Legacy Gave Rise to the NBA's Secret Empire") helps us bolster the case for big-time basketball's return to the Emerald City - through the eyes of both Sonics' legends like Lenny Wilkens, Spencer Haywood, Gary Payton, Shawn Kemp & Ray Allen, as well as via home-grown players like Isaiah Thomas, Brandon Roy, Doug Christie, Jason Terry, Nate Robinson & Jamal Crawford - who all came of age in the Sonics' shadow and now define the modern-day NBA. Support the show by getting two free months of NordVPN - plus a FREE GIFT - when you use promo code GOODSEATS at checkout!