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With Major League Baseball finally back in full swing, we dial the Wayback Machine all the way back to the year 1890, when the professional version of America's Pastime was still nascent, its business model was largely unproven, and the players of the day seethed at their team owners' increasingly restrictive operating practices – to the point of dramatic and open revolt that ultimately set the contentious tone of owner-player relations for baseball and all of US pro sports for generations to follow.

Global cultural studies professor Bob Ross (The Great Baseball Revolt: The Rise and Fall of the 1890 Players League) joins host Tim Hanlon to discuss the short-lived professional baseball league controlled and owned in part by players themselves – a response to the dominant National League's salary cap and "reserve rule," which bound players to one team for life. Led by curveball-pioneering and first-ever sports labor union-founding (and eventual baseball Hall of Famer) John Montgomery Ward, the Players' League was a star-studded circuit that included most of the National League's best players, who bolted not only to gain more control of their wages, but also to share ownership of the teams.

Lasting only one season and spanning eight major markets (Boston, Brooklyn, Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh), the league impacted both the professional sports and the labor politics of athletes and non-athletes alike. Though it marketed itself as a working-class entity, the players were badly underfunded; ironically, they had to turn to wealthy capitalists for much of their startup capital outlays – including, in many cases, new ballparks – which, along with baseball's best talent, helped the Players' League initially outdraw the National League at the turnstiles. But when the National League retaliated in the press by overinflating its attendance and profits, the backers of the upstart league pulled out at season's end, and the unionized players' bold experiment folded.

But a clear message had been sent – and the business of baseball and American professional sports would never be the same.

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Our first-ever (and long-overdue) exploration of the sport of professional lacrosse begins with a conversation with one of the godfathers of the modern indoor game, Russ Cline – founder (along with partner and fellow Kansas City sports promoter Chris Fritz) of 1987's seminal four-team Eagle Pro Box Lacrosse League (soon renamed the Major Indoor Lacrosse League) – and the progenitor of today's vibrant National Lacrosse League that spans 11 cities across the US and Canada.

Cline walks obsessive inquisitor Tim Hanlon through: the duo's rationale behind choosing lacrosse as the focus of their entrepreneurial efforts; the slow-growth approaches to expansion beyond the lacrosse-rich Northeast and national television coverage; the business model battle between single-entity and individually-owned franchises; and the delicate balance between maintaining the integrity of the sport's rich history and marketing a hard-hitting, high-scoring, action-packed entertainment product.

Plus: playing surfaces borne of carpet remnants and Coca-Cola; robbing Philadelphia to pay Baltimore; becoming ESPN2's first-ever scheduled pro league; and turning down a very tempting birthday gift!

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Baseball historian Bob Luke (The Most Famous Woman in Baseball: Effa Manley and the Negro Leagues) joins host Tim Hanlon to delve into the intriguing story of the first (and still only) woman to be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame – and the second Negro National League's Newark Eagles franchise she successfully co-owned (with husband Abe) and general managed from 1936-48.

A student of the sport since early childhood with a keen sense of promotion, marketing and player welfare, Manley blended a strong baseball operations IQ with a savvy aptitude for local politics and African-American community issues to become a dominant front office force in the Negro Leagues, and a persistent champion of player integration that ultimately transformed the white-male-dominated National and American "major" leagues in the late 1940s.

Manley's Eagles teams consistently performed well on the field and at the gate, and her deft management style culminated in a Negro World Series championship for the Eagles in 1946, and fueled the careers of no less than six eventual baseball Hall of Famers (Larry Doby, Ray Dandridge, Leon Day, Monte Irvin, Biz Mackey, and Willie Wells), as well as dozens of other players who soon found their way into the majors after the demise of the team and the Negro Leagues in the early 1950s.

Manley, herself, gained Hall of Fame induction in 2006 – albeit posthumously – alongside a number of her fellow Negro League pioneers.

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In this week's episode, we skate back to the National Hockey League's 1967 "Great Expansion," when the league ambitiously doubled in size from its "Original Six" to incorporate a half-dozen new franchises – including the seemingly most obvious and overdue market of all: the hockey-mad state of Minnesota and its cultural epicenter, Minneapolis-St.Paul.

With a skilled management team led by amateur hockey pioneer Walter Bush, the Minnesota North Stars fielded a team-minded and quickly respectable squad of NHL journeymen, castoffs and amateurs that immediately won the hearts of the hometown Met Center faithful.

By the mid-1970s, however, the North Stars had fallen on hard times, with perennially poor records and few playoff berths – until 1978, when, in an unprecedented arrangement, Cleveland Barons (née California Golden Seals) franchise owner-brothers Gordon and George Gund acquired the team and merged them. Bolstered by an immediate influx of quality Barons like goaltender Gilles Meloche and forwards Al MacAdam and Mike Fidler – plus savvy acquisitions and draft picks like eventual Calder Cup-winning forward Bobby Smith, 1980 US Olympian (and Minnesota native) Neal Broten, and future Hall of Famer Dino Ciccarelli – the North Stars reeled off five straight winning seasons and reached the Stanley Cup Finals in 1980-81.

Author Adam Raider (Frozen in Time: A Minnesota North Stars History) joins the show to recount the club's rise to championship contention, and subsequent relapse in the later 1980s/early 1990s – that ultimately saw: the Gunds trade for rights to a San Jose expansion franchise; Calgary Flames owner Norman Green opportunistically swap his interests for the North Stars; and, despite the addition of Mike Modano and a 1991 Stanley Cup Finals run, Green achieve villainy status ("Norm Sucks!") by moving the team to Dallas in 1993.

If you are a fan of today's NHL Minnesota Wild, Dallas Stars or even San Jose Sharks, the story of the North Stars is an important part of your hockey education!

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We conclude our conversation with WFL researcher Mark Speck (WIFFLE: The Wild, Zany and Sometimes Hilariously True Story of the World Football League; World Football League Encyclopedia; . . .And a Dollar Short: The Empty Promises, Broken Dreams, and Somewhat-Less-Than-Comic Misadventures of the 1974 Florida Blazers), as we find the league limping its way through an inaugural 1974 campaign that featured two mid-season franchise relocations (Houston to Shreveport, and New York to Charlotte), two outright team collapses (Detroit and Jacksonville), dwindling attendance and TV ratings, the ousting of league founder/commissioner Gary Davidson – and a championship "World Bowl" between two cash-strapped finalists (Birmingham and Florida) that was only allowed to take place after the IRS agreed to accept the game's gate receipts as payment for an overdue tax bill.

A return for an improbable second season in 1975 was made possible only by dissolving the league entirely and legally reconstituting into a second incarnation (inexplicably with the same name), under the stricture of resort developer/Hawaiians owner Chris Hemmeter's eponymous operating plan that called for franchise deposit fees, limited budgets and player revenue-sharing based on business success. But with no renewed national TV contract (TVS declined the option after Joe Namath spurned the Chicago Winds' lucrative offer to jump), a now-highly suspicious fan base, and far less press coverage than the previous year's spectacle, the "new" World Football League fared even worse – folding entirely and for good on October 22, 1975 – after just 13 weeks of play.

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Perhaps no defunct league in modern-day professional sports history endured a more ignominious storyline and spectacular demise than that of the World Football League – a uniquely disastrous attempt to establish a summer-into-autumn rival to the National Football League during the mid-1970's.

Brimming with confidence from his co-founding exploits with two previous (and at the time, still very-much-alive) challenger pro circuits – the American Basketball Association in 1967, and the World Hockey Association in 1971 – WFL founder/commissioner Gary Davidson saw the 1974-era National Football League as the next logical target for his quintessentially anti-establishment sports management ambitions. While the ABA and WHA both eventually yielded successful mergers of their most viable franchises into their established rivals, the World Football League quickly proved to be quite different – and, ultimately, Davidson's professional and personal Waterloo.

The WFL initially succeeded in persuading dozens of NFL stars to jump leagues for its hastily-arranged summer 1974 launch, largely because the NFL had no free agency, and the promise of a legitimate alternative offered newfound leverage for players seeking to improve their market values. Many who did jump, however, signed "futures" contracts that would only take effect after the expiration of their NFL deals – a proposition that became increasingly dubious as under-capitalized WFL franchises seemingly began shutting down almost as soon as they debuted. And that was just the start of what quickly became a litany of insurmountable calamities (including scandalous admissions of widespread game attendance inflation) that befell and ultimately subsumed both Davidson, and then the league itself – not once, but twice in just two years.

We begin our exploration of this most head-scratching of professional leagues with the dean of WFL researchers Mark Speck (WIFFLE: The Wild, Zany and Sometimes Hilariously True Story of the World Football League; World Football League Encyclopedia; . . .And a Dollar Short: The Empty Promises, Broken Dreams, and Somewhat-Less-Than-Comic Misadventures of the 1974 Florida Blazers), in a gift of an episode that just keeps on giving!

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While the Detroit Tigers hold the record as the oldest continuous one-name, one-city franchise in the American League (debuting as one of the league's "Classic Eight" charter clubs in 1901), they were not the first team to play major league baseball in the Motor City. That distinction actually goes to the Detroit Wolverines of the late 19th-century National League, which took to the field for the first time against the visiting Buffalo Bisons on May 2, 1881 in front of a curious crowd of 1,286 at Recreation Park – land now occupied by today's Detroit Medical Center in the city's Midtown.

Playing in what was then one of the best professional ballparks in America – and during a pre-automotive era when Detroit was known more sumptuously as the "Paris of the West" – the Wolverines traipsed through eight seasons of big league ball, including its final three under the brash and ambitious ownership of pharmaceutical baron Frederick Stearns that produced 1887 National League and "World Championship" titles, boasted a gaggle of the sport's best players (including four eventual Hall of Famers), and rankled competing owners with unprecedentedly aggressive approaches to raiding talent and splitting gate receipts.

The Wolverines were also a product of their time: an era when baseball's formative transition to professionalism was still rough and uncharted, players were rowdy and roguish, and owners were eager to profit by whatever means necessary – including collusively restricting player movement, a mechanism that would continue to haunt the sport well into the next millennium.

Author/journalist Brian "Chip" Martin (The Detroit Wolverines: The Rise and Wreck of a National League Champion) regales host Tim Hanlon with the curious tale of Detroit's first and oft-forgotten major league baseball franchise. Plus: the immortal "Pretzels" Getzein!

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By many accounts, the North American Soccer League was a one-of-a-kind phenomenon in the history of the world game – and, during its 1970s heyday (although it began shakily in 1968 and ended in shambles after the 1984 season) – a league years ahead of its time. More than just Pelé and the star-studded, bigger-than-life New York Cosmos, the NASL lured international soccer's biggest names like Johan Cruyff, Eusebio, George Best, and Franz Beckenbauer to play the "beautiful game" the way it was meant to be played—uninhibited, and with fan-pleasing innovations like sudden-death overtime, a 35-yard-line offsides demarcation, tie-breaking shootouts, and a points system that incentivized scoring regardless of result.

For international players, the NASL provided a bright and shiny alternative (or at least, summertime off-season respite) to the drearily conservative and cynically defensive state of the European game of the day. Plush modern stadiums, professional cheerleaders, pre-game tailgating, clever promotional marketing – and increasingly attractive, though eventually unsustainable salaries – made US pro soccer an irresistible proposition. Until, of course, it inevitably crashed back down to Earth like a once high-flying rock star's private jet – bankrupting not only the league's investors, but also the sport's future in America in the process.

Author Ian Plenderleith (Rock 'n' Roll Soccer: The Short Life and Fast Times of the North American Soccer League) joins host Tim Hanlon to discuss all the color and chaos of the world's first truly international league.

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Four-time American Basketball Association All-Star Bob Netolicky and former Indianapolis Star sportswriter Robin Miller join host Tim Hanlon to share some of their most memorable (and heretofore untold) first-person accounts of playing and traveling with the thrice-ABA-champion Indiana Pacers – and promote their upcoming book We Changed the Game, penned in partnership with original team co-founder/owner Dick Tinkham.

Despite three championships, five finals appearances and the strongest fan base in the league, the Pacers – and by extension, the ABA itself – barely survived a number of remarkably close calls and dire financial situations during their collective nine-year pre-NBA-merger existence that nearly sank both the franchise and the league more than once.

Yet, in the end, the team and the city improbably (and inspirationally) rallied together to keep the team (and the league) afloat – to ultimately become one of the four surviving franchises in the landmark merger with the National Basketball Association in 1976, as well as a source of deep, lasting and transformational civic pride for the city of Indianapolis that lasts to this day.

In this revealing, eyebrow-raising conversation, Miller and "Neto" set the record straight on numerous Pacer and ABA mythologies, and wax nostalgically authoritative on what really happened during the first nine years of the team's pre-NBA existence.

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The history of professional soccer in the United States is richer and far more complex than today's generation of Major League Soccer fans might realize. Multiple ethnically-infused pro leagues existed as far back as the early 1900s – but when the American Soccer Association collapsed in Depression-Era 1933, it wasn't until the mid-1960s when the next serious attempt to bring full-fledged, top-flight Division One professional soccer to US shores was pursued in earnest.

In 1966, suddenly and incredibly, no fewer than three separate groups of well-heeled American sports businessmen coalesced around the same idea, each attempting to draft off of attention-generating events like entrepreneur Bill Cox's International Soccer League tournaments and NBC's surprisingly high-rated, near-live national TV broadcast of the World Cup Final from England.

According to research librarian (and unwitting soccer historian) Dennis Seese (The Rebirth of Professional Soccer in America: The Strange Days of the United Soccer Association), it was a tumultuous revival that ultimately yielded two hastily-assembled competing leagues the following year – the FIFA-sanctioned United Soccer Association (featuring whole-cloth international clubs pseudonymously representing 12 American cities), and the "outlaw" National Professional Soccer League (boasting a national CBS television contract and a one-month-earlier start for its ten teams) – that rushed to beat each other to the American public with their pro versions of the "world's game."

What resulted was near-disaster: sparse crowds, dubious refereeing, anemic ratings, and a shotgun post-season merger to form a successor North American Soccer League in 1968 – which, despite its inherited broadcast TV coverage and official international governing body approval, sputtered mightily itself. By the end of the merged NASL's first season, only five teams remained – and the future of American professional soccer was very much in doubt.

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