Nate DiMeo
Appearances
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
Absolutely. John McGraw, superstitious man, says, okay, let's see what you can do. So Charlie Faust is there like in his Sunday suit. He walks out to the mound. John McGraw gets behind the plate, puts on his glove. You know, he says, okay, it's one finger for the fastball, two fingers for the curve. If you got something else, that'll be finger number three.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
And Charlie Faust gets out there and he gets into his wine app. And then his arm starts flailing around. You're doing the Bugs Bunny thing? Yes, not even. Like Bugs had way more grace than that. It sounds like it's just this sort of chaotic mess, you know. And he fires that ball and it very slowly glides to the plate. You know, it is like pretty straight. It is roughly accurate.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
And it is incredibly slow. He puts down the number two. It is the same pitch. It is straight. It is slow. It is just imminently crushable. People are gathering around. The other players are watching this, you know, and they are certainly laughing at this guy they think is simple or whatever. They let him bat. He swings 20 times. He hits something into the field. Everybody's kind of in on the joke.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
So they're like letting him run around the bases. They're fumbling. They're pretending they can't tag him. He slides into home and he gets up and he says, like, when am I starting?
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
They're walking that fine line between laughing at and laughing with.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
And they invite Charles Victor Faust to hang out on the bench with them that night. They give him a uniform. They intentionally give him a too small uniform. It is comically small. They are playing a joke on this man.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
Like they are being cruel to this man sitting on the bench at a major league baseball stadium whose whole dream has been to do this, whose focus has been after someone has told him with a presumably straight face that you, sir, you, young man, are going to pitch the New York Giants to the World Series.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
Louis. And they've taken him out to dinner. They've bought him some beers. They've, like, bought him a burger. They've said, like, hey, we've had a fun time with this Rube or whatever other more cruel thing they've been saying about him. And they say, like, yeah, have a nice life, man. Thanks for these victories. You really helped us out. And so the Giants decide to leave St.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
They thought they were in spitting distance of being able to play for the pennant. Everything has kind of fallen apart in this thing.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
who previously had crossed 300 miles or so to get from Kansas to St. Louis, he has now crossed half of the United States, has seen Manhattan for the first time, has showed up at their stadium, and is like, am I going to pitch tonight? And they say, yeah, yeah, yeah, who knows what'll happen, but hey, we need some luck. The penny has suddenly rolled back in front of me. Let's pick it up again.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
They win 36 times when he is sitting on the bench. They lose twice in the rest of the regular season. Every night, Charlie Faust is saying to John McGraw and saying to all the guys, saying to the equipment manager, saying to the peanut guy, to everyone, like, tonight's the night. I'm going to get in the game. I'm going to get in the game.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
And he's driving people crazy, but they don't mind because they're also winning. He eventually does get in a game, which is when he becomes the least qualified person to ever play in a Major League Baseball game.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
It's September. They already booked their ticket to the World Series. They can lose any of these games. He comes in in the ninth. He pitches. The other team is, like, in on the bit. You know, they're swinging and missing. Some guy really tries to take him for a ride, but he just kind of gets under it, and the ball goes deep to right field, and someone catches it.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
Yes. Two innings pitched. Everyone in the papers is like, they're covering Charlie Faust all the time. For a long time, it's this great bit. They have changed his middle name to Victory Faust. The Giants go on to lose the World Series that year.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
And the joke is that it is because the mojo in the Philadelphia Athletics dugout, because they have their own cruel mascot, which is there is a little person in their dugout who has a hunchback. Louis Van Zelst. Louis Van Zelst. And they have been rubbing the hump in his back for luck as though it is the Buddha's belly at a Chinese restaurant for their whole season. And apparently that mojo
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
brings them to victory. Just baseball, man. Baseball. And the next year comes around and Charlie's like, all right, let's do it again. Let's roll it back. And like, hey, you know, I'm really sorry. I must have let you guys down because I like the prophecy. So clearly this is our year. I mean, the truth is he's also a person who is struggling being a person. He's a little bit too insistent.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
He gets a little bit too agitated. Yeah, it's not a joke to him. It was fun for them for a while and now it's not. And like, how do they adjust when it's fun? And I'm sure some of the guys were total dicks. I'm sure some of the guys weren't because that's just the way people are. And they tell him to take off, you know, and they say, we'll catch up with you. And they never do.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
And in a lot of places, like, this is where the story ends, right? You can either do, like, some sort of weird movie version, which, thank God, they would not make today, but they might have made in, like, 1968, where Charlie Faust, you know, is hoisted on someone's shoulders after sliding into home. Right. You know, hey, Charlie, it's been a good season. Yeah, you make it narratively convenient.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
Yes. So they can feel like actually this was nice all along. You know, but the truth of the matter is like, that's not the way we tell stories anymore. Charlie Faust, he goes back to live with a brother who lives in Seattle, who like tries to take care of him as best as he can. But at some point, Charlie is found wandering in Portland, you know, having walked all that way.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
And he's looking for the New York Giants. He's trying to connect with them in Portland where they will never be. He's remanded to an institution where he dies in poverty, like quite soon thereafter, this sad death.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
He is supposed to, for record keeping, write down, what sort of work did you do? And he writes baseball player. Which is entirely true. And however he came to it, the truth of the matter is this guy played baseball. In fact, he is a guy. He's a guy. That one can remember. Yes. And, you know, we've created this little memory palace here. And now you two can remember some guys.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
When I think about trying to write the best memory palace story or trying to figure out like what's the mode that I want to be in, it really comes back into what are my favorite ways to have heard a story. And it is some version of like your best friend at the bar where they have just read some incredible book or they have come back from a trip to Venice.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
Something has just happened to them and they have come to you and they have thought about what you, Pablo, you, Nate, kind of need to, what's really going to get you going. And they have like blown your mind.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
It's this kind of like intimate thing where someone has thought it all through and they have a sense where like, well, if I tell you this first, you're going to be thinking this and then I'm going to flip it over. And so there's craft stuff. But ultimately what underlines that and underlies it is meaning. That the past is just like the present. It is just as complicated.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
The big picture understanding is that it is everything all at once, that it is as complicated as today feels, that the people in the past are just as human as we are. And it's surprising how hard that idea is, you know, for even me to hold who thinks about that all the time. I am not an expert in history, but I think about how we live in time all the time.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
It's very convincing. And thinking about the present as this like historically constructed thing in the way, you know, it's hard to just like hang out in the Walgreens and hear a song on the radio and not think to yourself, boy, in 1997, they were really thinking, like the ways that they were sanding off the rough edges of grunge in this one, you know, or whatever. It's like, it's constant.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
It's a constant presence.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
It's impossible to know for sure, but ornithologists tell us there were five billion passenger pigeons in North America at the beginning of the 1800s. That is one out of every five birds. And when they would fly south in the fall and north again in the spring, the birds would literally darken the sky. The flocks would stretch out a mile wide and 300 miles long.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
They would take hours, often all day, to fly overhead. You'd wake up in the morning to the sound of approaching birds, and while you ate breakfast, tended your fields all day, brought your livestock in at night or whatever, the flock would still be overhead when you went to bed. The sound must have been incredible.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
The droppings, the s*** from a couple of million birds would rain down, defoliating whole swaths of forest, making fields fallow. When all those birds would set down in the woods as a layover, it would take years for trees to recover. One nesting site occupied 850 square miles of Wisconsin. There were as many as 136 million birds there at a time. But all of this made them incredibly easy to hunt.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
It is said that if you shot a rifle into the air as they flew overhead, one shot could take down 30 birds. They were flying so close that they collide like some sort of horrible highway pilot, and they plummet. As the American human population spread west, the forest started to disappear. And as industrialization and immigration swelled the eastern cities, people needed meat.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
Industrial hunters stepped in. They laid fires and stands of trees to smoke the birds out and kill them. They'd take a single pigeon and sew its eyes up for some reason. Then they'd tie it to a stool so its panic flapping would cause curious flocks to land. Then they'd be trapped and killed. Sometimes they'd soak birdseed in alcohol to get them drunk so they'd be easier to kill.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
In Petoskey, Michigan in 1878, 50,000 birds were killed every day for five months. They were packed into boxcars and shipped to New York, or Boston, or Providence, or Buffalo, or Newark, or Baltimore. That same year, a different Midwestern supplier shipped another three million passenger pigeons, and the birds started to disappear. The females only laid one egg a year.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
which is a terrible evolutionary strategy. By 1900, the flocks were gone. By 1909, the American Ornithological Society was offering $1,500 to anyone who found a pigeon in the wild. The last known passenger pigeon died in the Cincinnati Zoological Park in 1914. She was stuffed and mounted in the Birds of America exhibit at the Smithsonian. Some years back, she was put into storage.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
I fear what you're about to say. Tell me what you're going to say.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
But more than omnipresent, it literally darkened the sky. Sometimes with these stories, like the point on some level is to be like, eh, people are just like us, right? You go back and you're like, you find yourself connected. But there's also such value in just being like, Yes, but the past has changed so quickly. It is so different.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
Like from 5 billion down to, you know, the one stuffed in the Smithsonian. Right. That there was like a single bird just like sitting there is stunning. It really is. And every once in a while, you are at a museum or you are like, you know, scrolling through TikTok or whatever, and something comes in and knocks you out. And this is one of those things that knocked me out.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
And for a long time, the memory palace was things that knocked me out 12 years ago that I could not shake. And that I would roll out occasionally, like at that bar, you know? And like, you know, it's a thing that will blow your mind. And I've come to just sort of trust that... If I noticed it, there was some reason. I'm inherently interested in why we remember the things we do.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
And sometimes it's because it was traumatic. Your reptilian brain has like put up some warning sign and made you remember it. The sky can be blackened for numerous such reasons. Yes, exactly right. You know, but the other thing about it is like, like kind of like the inverse of trauma is like epiphany.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
you know, enjoy, which, you know, that there are these things that happen that are novel and wonderful. Like the thing when you're suddenly like, oh, wait, shoot, this is the way the world works. Or even more importantly, this is the world, the way the world can work. Like there are times that like this sort of wonder like is around you and oh my God, sometimes it goes away.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
Like there's something useful about just sort of like realizing how radically things can change and how like at one point, These birds darken the sky and they are no more. Then what is it that is around me all the time that I'm taking for granted that I might engage with more deeply?
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
Yeah, I sometimes think about it as like, I love going to movies in the middle of the day. And you walk out and you forget that it's daytime. And to have been just moved by something really wonderful and having your day changed by art or by... you know, a beautifully told story. What I want to try to do is I want to move you and give you that experience. Sometimes I like the kicker.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
I think about it as like a tiny little note that I passed you so that you can open and be like, oh, that's what that thing is about.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
Sure. I mean, it does come with the territory. Part of it is like, you know, if I'm telling some story about this remarkable athlete who had this incredible triumph, right? On some level, I'm just like, it's never that satisfying because the truth of the matter is what is often so interesting to me is like, well, what else do you do?
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
There's a story from the podcast about this woman who swam the English Channel and she became the second woman to do it. And for a long time, I was like, well, that's not a story. But ultimately, it becomes a story about keeping going, that it's actually okay to be the second to do it, that it is in the doing that there's this pride.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
She then, like, went around the world, like, swimming, like, any channel that needed crossing.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
Like any place where people are like, boy, it seems far over there. She'd be like, I'm going to be the first person to swim. These lesser channels.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
But there's something really beautiful to me about the keeping going. And there's something really beautiful to me in the right arm breathe, left arm breathe of these repeated movements that does sort of resonate. But ultimately, a thing that ties these things all together is that, yeah, everybody dies. And I find it very useful to remember that. This is the time that this person had.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
And, you know, here I am in 2024, and this is the life that I get to live. Like every couple of weeks, I sit down and I put on, like I start to imagine and start to conjure these spaces and think about these other people's lives. And it helps ground me in that way.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
for as ephemeral as it is, and for the fact that we have just dipped cotton candy in the water, and it has disappeared and dissipated, and the water is just slightly pink, and that's the only thing that we can hold on to. It's those things. It's that I will carry that with me, that that is now in, you know, my sort of personal, like, memory palace.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
All of the stuff that we are doing, besides the fact, you know, we will all die, you know, things will crumble to death. It is only the Shakespeare's and the and the McCartneys and the Lennons that will, you know, persevere and for who knows how long. Yeah, I was going to say, I don't know how much longer they got at this point. It's exactly right.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
And this book that I have written, like, truly may not sell very many things, but at the same time, you know, like the person that finds it and the person that flips through it, where that gets, you know, knocked on their ass by one story, That little thing will live on.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
Very excited to be here. I really am.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
And it comes down to this thing that is just fundamental to my understanding, not just of the past, but the way that I just sort of move through the world, is that the past is inherently fictional. Like no matter the fact that we know that this stuff happened, we can dig up the bones, we can read the letters, we can read the diary entries. The way that we can access that is an act of imagination.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
If you're on the subway and you're reading a book about Gettysburg and part of you is on the sixth train and part of you, you know, is in the bloody junction or whatever the names of the places are at Gettysburg. I don't think that's one, but it sounds like one. You know, wherever you are in Gettysburg. Somewhere where trench foot wasn't happening.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
Somewhere, exactly, where people had trench mouth, trench foot, all the trench stuff. Like, it's the same thing if you're sitting there and you're reading about, like, Middle Earth. Like, you are transported to this imaginary space in which the past lives.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
And that is true of Gettysburg, and that is true of Normandy Beach, but it is also true of, like, the story that your buddy tells you at the bar, of the thing that happened to him. It happened to him. It is already living in his memory. But when he's recounting it, it creates this kind of like fictional space, you know, where you're picturing your buddy hitting on this girl.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
I haven't explained exactly what she looks like, but you can kind of picture her. You can, you know, you can conjure this thing. And I am fascinated by the way memory works. But what I really love is that conjuring act.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
Yeah, I mean, and I'm sure that has cost me money. I guarantee. I have bad news. It's cost you a lot of money. I guarantee that that's true. And believe me, this is a conversation that I have, you know, like ongoing in any number of venues. And that is the truth. Like at the beginning of an episode, there's often a cryptic title.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
And then there is no like, hey, we're about to talk about the Korean War. We just start talking about the Korean War. Part of it also comes down to like, I got into this whole thing in part like through music. You know, like when I was in my 20s, I played in bands that people don't remember and loved that experience. But what I really loved was the idea that one day the song will be on the radio.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
that a song that I write might come in and change someone's day out of the blue. That they're in one mood and then the song comes in and they are changed. And I started to notice that that's the way that radio works. And I started to fall in love with public radio in part because a story from the news could sneak into your day the same way.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
Here you are, you know, wrapped up in the whir and sputter of just like, of you're trying to find a parking spot. You're trying to remember what you're supposed to do that afternoon. You're replaying the fight you had with your girlfriend the night before, whatever it turns out to be. And then suddenly, some sort of beautifully crafted thing comes into your day and snaps you out of it.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
This is The Memory Palace. I'm Nate DiMeo. The sound of the chants, the creaking door, the lumbering footsteps. They'd recorded all that before Bobby had shown up in the studio, right on Sunset Boulevard, a stone's throw from Hollywood High.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
That location alone still had some magic in it for Bobby Pickett, only six years since he'd graduated high school himself, on the wrong side of the tracks in Boston. Part of, you know, not telling people what the story is about is because I want to take them on a ride, but I also don't want them to prepare.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
not long after his ill-fated stint in post-war Korea, all kitchen duty and bordellos and blown curfews and court-martials, and just months since he'd come out to California to make it, to take a chance on his henchman-to-the-teen-bully-in-a-beach-party-movie good looks and his fourth-best singer in a five-man boy band voice. but he was starting to find his footing. Make friends, make connections.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
Meet that guy at the bar who knows the girl who works on the desk of some agent, who knows this producer, who knows this woman who's one of the mistresses to the aging actor who used to play the buttoned-up dad on that sitcom and is trying to pull together his next project.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
Like the best like writing advice I ever got from a former host of the public radio show Marketplace when we were writing the little introductions to the thing. He said every introduction that you hear in public radio, almost everyone tells you the whole damn story. And what you need to do is you need to raise a question.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
And I have realized that every single line ought to be either raising or answering a question because that journey, it turns every story into a mystery, no matter how straightforward.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
And I do think that people have found in its weird, like hypersincerity and kind of purity, they have like connected to the project on this sort of deeper level because they feel like they're not being kowtowed to or manipulated.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
One starts to realize, I mean, like you must contend with this all the time as you have a new venture, as you are trying to make sure it gets in front of everyone and gets in front of different audiences. Like all the while knowing certainly that, oh, this show could have a bigger audience than it does. There is freedom and release in the notion of like, well, let's let the algorithm do this.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
I truly think he is probably the least qualified baseball player to ever suit up and participate in a Major League Baseball game. Right after this ad.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
Let me like allow it to tell me. But at the same time, it's like, what's the version of the algorithm of the past? It's sort of like you look back and you see these poles of the stories that you know, right? That... If you're talking about World War II, you can rattle off the handful of facts you might know. And you can picture Marines storming Normandy Beach.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
Yeah, I think that's entirely true. I think that... One of the things that is key to me when I sort of look out in the world and try to find these different stories, because it's super easy to find things that you might potentially write about, you know, like in one's algorithm, it will just feed you like fun factoids.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
And you can, you know, maybe picture, you know, FDR speaking at some conference or whatever. And you can picture these different moments. Yeah, I got Douglas MacArthur.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
So whatever, you know, matters to you, Filipino American, you know, might be different than what matters to me and what matters to the audience, et cetera.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
But like you look back at these polls and you look back at the story we're told and I'm constantly sort of aware and kind of trying to unearth and ultimately like trying to like imagine and trying to find the facts that allow for better, more accurate imagining and more like sincere and more sort of ultimately like more true guessing and gap filling.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
Yeah, just a big... I'm always taken by the, like, I'm puzzling something out face. It's amazing. I'm glad to participate in this.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
And all day long, you can see endless debate about whether Karl-Anthony Towns' interior defense, what that might mean to the- They're shooting 90% on him in the paint.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
In a way, because it is anti-algorithmic. You know what I mean? Like, yes, you can look up any guy, right? You can look up anything. But to just sort of sit there and just let your mind go. Scott Rowland. Yes, exactly. To just say, like, John Candelaria, right? And to just throw out these names. Like, for every, like, Greg Gagne, you know? Eric Gagne.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
Eric Gagne, because they're paired in your head in the same way Kirby Puckett will suddenly enter the picture and you won't know why Kent Herbeck is there all of a sudden. It just like activates this weird, you know, sensation. Like that is part of like the conjuring act that I tried to participate in.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
You can look for that, but don't expect to have any other useful search terms.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
A thing that makes it a memory palace story, instead of just like a sort of interesting thing that you heard once, is that it has to move me in the same way that it has to move you.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
I truly think he is probably the least qualified baseball player to ever suit up and participate in a Major League Baseball game.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
Well, for me, it begins in Germany. You can understand who Charles Victor Faust is by thinking about his father leaving Germany in like 1880-something. traveling across the world, ending up in Kansas. Classic immigrant story. And what is he going to do? He's going to buy some land. He's going to, like, have some strong sons. They're going to take over the farm one day.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
And he has this son who simply can't. Charlie Faust. He is neurodivergent in some way. Like people, you know, at the time, you know, call him an idiot or a moron or... Simple. Or simple or whatever their pejorative or even technical term they're trying to apply that now seems like, you know, chaotic and cruel and imprecise. We don't know what that means to him.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
We don't know whether that was a thing that pained him. We don't know if he could understand his father's disappointment. But what we do know... is that one day he shows up in St. Louis, Missouri in the summer of 1911. He has traveled hundreds of miles from Kansas, which one would assume would be a very challenging thing.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
The New York Giants are in town, and he gets the attention of John McGraw, the pugnacious manager of the New York Giants.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
Yes, exactly. So here comes this man, Charlie Faust. He essentially says like, hey, Mr. McGraw, I have something to tell you. He speaks in a apparently like accent that's part sort of German accent, part kind of like hick from the country. And he says, a month or two ago, I went to the fair in Wichita and I talked to a fortune teller.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
And at this point, McGraw is like, fortune teller, do tell, because he is pugnacious, but he is also apparently like super superstitious. He is a lucky penny, picker-upper. He is a, you know, okay, guys, let's wear the road uniforms even when we're home. Let's break this streak. He's a true baseball man in this regard. He's Wade Boggsian, and he's going to eat chicken the whole time.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
Jason Giambi wearing the gold thong. Jason Giambi wearing the gold thong. So you've done it again. Remembered some guys. And he says, okay, so what do you have to tell me? What did this fortune teller tell you? And the thing about fortune tellers is that they are typically giving you the most vague thing that will resonate specifically.
Pablo Torre Finds Out
It's Time to Remember One of the Worst Athletes Ever
So Charlie Faust tells John McGraw, this fortune teller told me that I am going to pitch the New York Giants to the World Series. John McGraw looks at this guy. He's six foot two, corn-fed. Something's a little off of him for sure, but he has no idea. Like this is 1911. Like the greatest baseball player ever to live might be in the next town undiscovered. Yeah, fan graphs didn't exist yet.