Baseball Creepy History: The Chicago Cubs Eddie Waitkus Tragedy & NON-Creep Hunter Pence (SF Giants)
What a Creep
Margo Donohue
4.6 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 3 May 2024
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Season 24, Episode 10
The True Crime Story Behind “The Natural”
The Eddie Waitkus shooting is a notable event in baseball history. It occurred in 1949 when the popular first baseman (and WW2 hero) for the Philadelphia Phillies was shot by an obsessed fan named Ruth Steinhagen. The incident was a shocking reminder of the dangers of celebrity obsession. Also, it inspired Bernard Malamud's novel The Natural, which was later adapted into a popular film starring Robert Redford (who played a 19-year-old when he was 47 at the time!)
Trigger Warnings: Gun violence, stalking, alcoholism, and mental health treatments
Sources for this episode:
- NPR: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/03/18/174623312/stalker-who-inspired-the-natural-dies-lived-real-life-in-obscurity
- Baseball’s The Natural: The Story of Eddie Waitkus by John Theodore
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Waitkus
- ·The Chicago History Museum: https://www.chicagohistory.org/shooting-of-eddie-waitkus/
- History and Relics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9n1HdPmg9oU
- Chicago PBS: https://www.pbs.org/video/chicago-tonight-march-15-2013-2006-eddie-waitkus-documentary/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to What a Creep. The show with Margotaniu and Sonia Mansfield talking about |
| 0:06.0 | creeps from the past to the present. |
| 0:08.8 | This is your quick guide to the biggest Creeps, jerks, ass, and losers, the best of the worst. |
| 0:15.0 | From two nice ladies who want the world to be a creep this is Margot Donahue and my cohort and |
| 0:30.6 | creep as always is the amazing Sonia Mansfield. |
| 0:33.2 | Hey Sonia. |
| 0:34.5 | Hello my friend! |
| 0:35.7 | Hello my friend, we have a baseball themed episode today. |
| 0:39.4 | Yay! |
| 0:40.4 | Sonia is a huge baseball fan. We are doing this because on my other show |
| 0:45.0 | book versus movie we covered The Natural and a spoiler we hated it and we you hated |
| 0:51.6 | the book and the movie? |
| 0:53.0 | The book is actually pretty good. |
| 0:55.0 | It's very different, but the movie is, |
| 0:58.0 | they have Robert Redford playing a 19 year old. |
| 1:02.0 | He was 47. Like a 19 year old. He was 47, like a night year old with liver spots on him. I just couldn't even. |
| 1:07.0 | Anyway. |
| 1:08.0 | We are the podcast that talks about creeps from the past to the present. We have an old-timey |
| 1:14.7 | baseball creepy tail for you today, but we're always looking for suggestions |
| 1:19.0 | from y'all, so places to do it on social media. We have a basic basic Facebook page but that's a place where people |
| 1:24.4 | go to complain about our language this is your warning we will use salty language |
| 1:28.6 | in this program so earmuffs for the kids or you know something else. |
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