FULL EPISODE: ROBIN VENTURA VS. NOLAN RYAN. (Patreon)

NOTE: If you've already seen the first part of this episode that was posted last month, feel free to skip to about the 44:00 mark to pick up where you left off.

Hey everybody, it's Jon again! Here, as promised, is the full 82-minute ninth episode of THE HISTORY OF CHARGING THE MOUND. Our plan is to bring this to YouTube at some point in October, but as always, y'all get the first look.

An aside: throughout this episode, as well as the entire series, I use the word "beanball" to describe any pitch that's thrown at a batter. According to the dictionary definition, I've been using this word incorrectly, as the term refers specifically to a pitch thrown at a batter's head. I realized this early in the series, then decided to just go ahead and keep using the term incorrectly for a couple reasons. First, baseball writers have used the term like I have since at least the '70s, if not before, and I think the word's definition has eroded sufficiently. Second, I never realized how badly we needed a word for "pitch meant to hit or possibly hit a batter" until I began this series. There are a few other great terms at our disposal, like "brushback" and "low-bridge," but those are specific terms that can't really be applied to every ball that hits a batter. Meanwhile, the textbook term, "hit by pitch," is a noun that reads like a verb, and the plural, "hit by pitches," is even more of a clunker. It's grim out there, and I was never gonna make it through more than 50,000 words of script without hijacking the word "beanball" for my own purposes.

Anyway, I hope you like this one. I'll be back in September and October to finish out this series with a special two-part episode on Andrés Galarraga, one of my favorite dudes of all time. As always, thank you so much for being a part of this thing. If you've just signed up and would like to catch up on the entire series totally ad-free, you can do so right here.