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Philadelphia Phillies 1941 (Photo by Sporting News via Getty Images/Sporting News via Getty Images via Getty Images) | Sporting News via Getty Images
I don’t know if you’ve been down to Clearwater lately, but the programs smell weird. It’s like a pulpy garbage smell that is very distinct, and it’s continued since at least 2022 when I smelled it the first time. It must have something to do with the printing process, which is a guess I am making with absolutely no evidence or further knowledge. Somebody could be dipping each individual program in Florida puddle water for all I know, but I’m giving the Phillies the benefit of the doubt for some reason.
But I can promise you this: If you are looking for reading material this spring that doesn’t smell weird, I’ve got just the book for you: “Summer of the Cheap Wieners: What the 1941 Phillies were doing while Joe DiMaggio was making history.”
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Who are you?
Ha ha, what is this, an email from my publisher? But seriously folks, I’m a last-gen Phillies writer (maybe two gens ago now) who wrote here on The Good Phight in the 2010s, ran the site briefly into the ground, and left. I also worked on the Philadelphia Inquirer/Daily News sports desk before everybody got laid off, and I’ve been writing at Baseball Prospectus pretty much ever since. Here are some TGP articles of mine of which I am particularly fond:
One Last Mess at McFadden’s
More than a Minute with Murph
Step into the Relief Room
It All Begins in Billtown
The Good Phight and its talented, illustrious staff have permitted me to come back to my old stomping grounds to talk about my book, like one of those cool kids from your hometown who regularly comes back to visit their old high school while everyone whispers to each other.
What are you doing here? It’s opening day, we’re busy.
Yeah, sorry. I have a book and I’m bad at promoting it. My wife keeps reminding me that offering to buy people beers if they take a free copy from me in the airport isn’t actually getting us any closer to a screened-in porch. Especially when so many wonderful people have been so willing to buy it.
After swearing I was going to write a Phillies book it was a mere 10-12 years later that I stuck to my word. “Summer of the Cheap Wieners” is on bookstore shelves and the internet now!
Why did you write about such a bad team?
Like many first-time authors, I have several other and better book ideas that remain unwritten and/or unpublished. For anyone familiar with my past work, writing about a team that lost 111 games isn’t really surprising. For me it’s like going through a collection of soiled boxes in a dilapidated attic. Think of the gross and horrible secrets we can find by looking for them in places no one else even wants to look!
In fact, one of the collectors with whom I spoke about potentially using photographs seemed genuinely disgusted that the 1941 Phillies were even on my mind. To be honest, I don’t know how they got there exactly either, but it was probably while I was researching an episode of The Dirty Inning (A podcast about the dumbest, funniest, and most obscure innings in Phillies history) for the Hittin’ Season Patreon and, as usual, got easily distracted. Once the gimmick of chronicling them alongside DiMaggio’s much more well-known 1941 achievements came to me—as well as the title—I felt like this was an idea with legs.
Generally, my instinct to tell a story no one else is telling—which can be hard to do in sports, given the severe oversaturation of some topics—often leads me to teams that lost, sucked, or died. This sport is ridiculous, and can get even more so the further back in history you go. But even more than that, there’s a part of me that feels that since Joe DiMaggio will never not be famous, guys like Nick Etten, Doc Prothro, and “Dangerous Dan” Litwhiler deserve to be remembered too. They weren’t nothing.
Somebody once asked why Trevor Strunk and I do a podcast about the “worst” innings in Phillies history and not the best. The answer is because most of the “best” stories you already know, and there is still joy to be found in losing, as long as you’ve had a few decades to get over it.
Is the book boring?
Not on purpose! Another motivation for it was that as a kid, my mom would bring home old baseball books for me from fairs and sales and such. As I tore through the stories of baseball in the thirties and forties, I noticed that the Phillies didn’t really get a lot of love. History squeezes out the details the longer ago it gets, and we’re left with only the most recognizable milestones. I’m sure you are probably aware that the Phillies didn’t do much in that time to get noted on the historical record—but only if you think good things are only what makes up history. It makes sense, but I wanted to read about the Phillies whether they’d been doing things “worthy” of being read about or not. This book is my childlike effort to correct that.
But to actually answer your question and not tell an unrelated story for no reason: No! I really don’t think so. Some of it, maybe, to a non-baseball fan will be, you know. About baseball. But the idea was also to connect the worlds of baseball history—an at times stodgy, self-serious place—and the average reader. While I used countless articles and books by skilled researchers and historians to write it, I did not want “Summer of the Cheap Wieners” itself to be a reference material, but rather a source of entertainment and humor built on other people’s hard work.
What will your next book be about?
Given my constant relevance, skilled topic-selecting, and finger-on-the-pulse writing, I will of course be trying to get something published about Gene Mauch.
All right, thanks. You can go.
Yep, got it. Thanks for reading. I spent the winter imagining all the ways the Phillies could sag this year, but with training camp going so smoothly (You can read my micro-diary from the last few days down in Clearwater tomorrow on Baseball Prospectus!) I can’t help but pick them to win the World Series. And I’m looking forward to the All-Star Game, the Field of Dreams game, Justin Crawford, the return of Zack Wheeler, Bryce Harper finally going on a tear, and a good old fashioned carnival of terrors when Bo Bichette comes to town, even though I’m not even mad anymore.
We didn’t ask.
Right, sorry. Thanks.
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