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It’s our deepest dive yet into the legendarily one-of-a-kind All-American Girls Professional Baseball League with Marshall University Professor of Women’s Sport History Kat Williams (The All-American Girls After the AAGPBL: How Playing Pro Ball Shaped Their Lives).

Widely acknowledged as the forerunner of women's professional league sports in the United States, the pioneering AAGPBL featured more than 600 female players over the course of its twelve seasons between 1943-54 – spanning 15 mid-sized markets across the American Midwest, and drawing sizable crowds – including nearly a million fans at its peak in 1948.

In its first season, the league played a game that resembled more softball than baseball: the ball was regulation softball size (12 inches) and the pitcher's mound was only 40 feet from home plate – a third closer than that of men’s baseball. Pitchers threw underhand windmill (as in softball) and the distance between bases was 65 feet – a full 25 feet shorter than in the men’s game.

But, over the AAGPBL’s history, the rules gradually evolved to approach those of full-fledged men’s baseball; by the league’s final season in 1954: the ball was regulation baseball size, the mound distance was 60 feet (a mere six inches closer than the men’s game), and the basepaths were 85 feet long (just five feet shy of those of the men).

To prove its competitive seriousness, the league peppered its on-field managerial ranks with male skippers of substantial major league baseball pedigrees – including eventual National Baseball Hall of Famers Max Carey and Jimmy Foxx.

The quality of play was consistently high, convincing even the most purist of traditional baseball fans that “the Girls could play.” By 1947, the AAGBPL was even emulating the majors in identifying and recruiting talent from the fertile playing fields of baseball-mad Cuba – a story Williams helps illustrate with her new profile (Isabel “Lefty” Alvarez: The Improbable Life of a Cuban American Baseball Star) of one of the handful of émigrés who ultimately came to the US to become “All-American.”

This week’s episode is sponsored by the Red Lightning Books imprint of Indiana University Press – who offer our listeners a FREE CHAPTER of pioneering sportswriter Diana K. Shah’s new memoir A Farewell to Arms, Legs and Jockstraps!

The Major Indoor Soccer League’s rocket red ball bounces back our way this week for an Eighties-style rewind into the story of the Los Angeles Lazers – as seen through the eyes of one of its chief front office architects, Ronnie Weinstein.

Claimed from dormancy (as the previous Philadelphia Fever) by LA sports baron Dr. Jerry Buss – owner of the 1980 NBA champion Lakers, NHL Kings, 1981 TeamTennis champion Strings, and the building that housed them, Inglewood’s “Fabulous” Forum – the Lazers began life in the MISL in the fall of 1982 under the direction of Weinstein and Buss’ eldest son Johnny.

True to its name (and emblematic of the league’s over-the-top promotional zeitgeist), the team immediately became known for its cutting-edge pre-game laser light shows, which management felt ideally suited to the lightning-fast pace of indoor soccer – and hoped would help the Lazers stand out from the wealth of entertainment options available in Southern California.

Weinstein, Buss & Co. also tapped heavily into the celebrity-driven energy associated with their “Showtime”-era Laker arena mates, borrowing the Paula Abdul-choreographed Laker Girls to become the “Lazer Girls” for their games – and regularly recruiting Hollywood A-listers like James Caan, Neil Diamond, Cher, Ricky Schroeder, and elder Buss poker mate Gabe Kaplan to the festivities.

But the white-hot Lakers, the rising Kings, a robust concert schedule, and the family-favorite Strings all took scheduling precedence over the Lazers, leaving only a hodgepodge of mostly weekday winter school nights from which to attract soccer-mad families to the Forum.

Of course, there was high-scoring MISL soccer action – but the Lazers were not very good (an 8-40 inaugural record and just one winning [1987-88] season over the team’s run didn’t help) – and the majority of games were not well-attended (the league’s least-drawing franchise in five of its seven seasons).

Despite all the synergies – including Jerry Buss’ strong enthusiasm for the game itself – nothing seemed to work. By 1987 (with son Jim now helming the team alongside Weinstein), Buss saw the Lazers and the league as doomed – unless moves to reduce player salaries and shift play to a more family-friendly summer schedule were embraced.

After fruitless pleading with the MISL Board of Governors, Buss pulled the plug on the team after the 1988-89 season, telling Weinstein if he ever wanted to pursue another indoor soccer endeavor with his more prudent business model, he’d be there to back it.

This week’s episode is sponsored by the Red Lightning Books imprint of Indiana University Press – who offer our listeners a FREE CHAPTER of pioneering sportswriter Diana K. Shah’s new memoir A Farewell to Arms, Legs and Jockstraps!

We take a rare dip into the minors this week with the intriguing story of hockey’s Columbus Chill – the 1990s sensation that took the East Coast Hockey League and the Ohio capital’s sports scene by storm, and helped set the table for Columbus’s ascension into top-tier “major league” status by the dawn of the 2000s.

Historically overshadowed by the scale, prowess and outsized culture of its hometown Ohio State University Buckeyes athletics programs, Columbus’ pro sports landscape in 1991 largely consisted of AAA baseball’s sleepily long-standing Yankees affiliate Clippers – and not much else. Professional hockey, specifically, had been absent from the market for 14 years, after a largely lamentable run of thinly supported International Hockey League franchises (Checkers, Golden Seals, Owls) during the late 60s and 1970s.

But though cheeky marketing campaigns and promotion-laden game-day experiences – targeted at both the growing city’s young professional set and fun-seeking OSU students looking for off-campus entertainment alternatives – the Chill quickly made an impact and suddenly becoming the hottest ticket in town. Sellouts in the ancient 5,600-seat Ohio State Fairgrounds Expo Coliseum (opened in 1918) became the norm, and national media lauded the club as the vanguard of minor league sports.

After a dubious scheduling snafu by Fairgrounds management amidst the Chill’s second season, fans and local community leaders galvanized around a longer-term plan to solidify the newly popular team’s future and independence – leading to the eventual commitment to construct a top-flight downtown (now, Nationwide) arena – and, ultimately, the awarding of an expansion NHL franchise in 1999.

Ex-Chill President David Paitson and former Columbus Dispatch sportswriter Craig Merz (Chill Factor: How a Minor-League Hockey Team Changed a City Forever) recount the story of the team that paved the way for the Columbus Blue Jackets – and beyond.

This week’s episode is sponsored by the Red Lightning Books imprint of Indiana University Press – who offer our listeners a FREE CHAPTER of pioneering sportswriter Diana K. Shah’s new memoir A Farewell to Arms, Legs and Jockstraps!

We journey north of the border this week to get our first at-bats with the 35-year adventure formerly known as the Montreal Expos, with author and de facto team historian Danny Gallagher (Always Remembered: New Revelations and Old Tales About Those Fabulous Expos).

Created in expansionary haste by the National League in 1969, MLB’s first-ever Canadian franchise was named after the city’s futuristic “Expo 67” World’s Fair, and expected to be domiciled in a new domed stadium by 1972 after a temporary stint at a barely-minor-league field in the city’s Jarry Park. Chronically delayed and reshaped by preparations for the 1976 Summer Olympics, that permanent home (a cavernous, drafty and still-unfinished Olympic Stadium) didn’t formally arrive until 1977 – with its promised roof not in place until a full decade later.

The Expos’ locational challenges were only slightly overshadowed by their mediocre play on the field – which, while competitive at times (they had the best cumulative winning percentage in the NL from 1979-83, for example) – netted just one post-season appearance (in a convoluted strike-shortened 1981 season) in the team’s 35-year stay in Montreal. (The strike-abandoned season of 1994, when the team led the NL East by six games with eight weeks to play, literally and figuratively didn’t count.)

Still, the Expos had their share of talent (buttressed by a reliably prolific farm system) – boasting 11 MLB Hall of Famers (including fan favorites Gary Carter, Andre Dawson and Tim Raines) – and a panoply of memorable characters like Rusty Staub, Warren Cromartie, Steve Rogers, and Tim Wallach.

When Major League Baseball voted to contract two clubs in 2001, the Expos were targeted as one of them – beset by dwindling attendances and cellar-dwelling records during the latter half of the 1990s. A ham-handed league takeover that year led to three final lame-duck seasons – including a bizarre relocation of “home games” in 2003-04 to San Juan, Puerto Rico – before moving to Washington to become the Nationals.

While we ruminate on what a potential resumption of the National Hockey League’s delayed 2020 regular season (and playoffs) might look like in the months ahead, we pause to look back at the rich, but altogether confounding history of the world’s premier pro hockey circuit with Down Goes Brown blog scribe and Athletic columnist Sean McIndoe (The Down Goes Brown History of the NHL: The World's Most Beautiful Sport, the World's Most Ridiculous League).

Over its often-illogical 103-year history, the NHL has proven to be – as the dust jacket to McIndoe’s loving, but irreverent book intimates – a league that often can't seem to get out of its own way:

“No matter how long you've been a hockey fan, you know that sinking feeling that maybe – just maybe – some of the people in charge here don't actually know what they're doing. And at some point, you've probably wondered – has it always been this way? The short answer is yes. As for the longer answer, well, that's this book.”

McIndoe helps us cheat-sheet through some of the league’s defining historical inflection points, including:

• The myth of the “Original Six” – the hallowed group of supposedly foundational franchises cemented during WWII-era 1942 – that conveniently ignores 15 teams that preceded them in the league’s first 25 years of existence;
• 1967’s “Great Expansion” – when the NHL doubled its franchise count from six to twelve, including pre-emptive strikes against the Western Hockey League with new teams in Los Angeles (Kings) and Oakland (Seals);
• The 1979 “merger” with the pesky World Hockey Association – which absorbed only four of the challenger’s seven remaining clubs; AND
• Comical expansion/relocation follies in Cleveland, Kansas City, Denver, and Atlanta (twice).

This week’s episode is sponsored by the Red Lightning Books imprint of Indiana University Press – who offer our listeners a FREE CHAPTER of pioneering sportswriter Diana K. Shah’s new memoir A Farewell to Arms, Legs and Jockstraps!