0:00 Stan Coveleski, a future Hall of Fame pitcher, built his arm strength by quitting school at twelve to haul timber, and practiced his aim by throwing rocks at birds.0:10 Just yesterday, in our look at July twelfth, we were talking about the chaos and energy of the Disco Demolition riot at Comiskey Park.0:19 Well, today, on July thirteenth, we’re digging into a day that’s just as packed, but with a completely different kind of texture.0:27 It’s a day of quiet transitions, profound discoveries, and stories so wild they feel like they’ve been pulled straight from a tall tale.0:36 And some of those transitions are monumental.0:39 On this day in 2016, the United Kingdom woke up to a new reality.0:44 Following the seismic shock of the Brexit referendum, Prime Minister David Cameron formally resigned.0:50 He walked out of Number 10 Downing Street for the last time, and Theresa May walked in.0:56 It was this quiet, formal, almost unnervingly calm handover of power that set the course for years of political struggle and national redefinition.1:05 A single day that marks a point of no return.1:08 July thirteenth also holds a much more recent, and much more somber, memory.1:13 In 2020, after a five-day search that gripped the public, the body of actress Naya Rivera was recovered from Lake Piru in California.1:22 It was a tragic end to the life of a talented performer, known to millions from the show Glee.1:28 A day of closure, but the kind of closure that brings only sadness.1:33 And amid these specific events, today is also marked on the global calendar as World Refugee Day.1:39 A day for awareness, for solidarity, for remembering the millions of people displaced by conflict and hardship.1:46 It’s a backdrop of ongoing, massive human history that puts the individual stories of any single day into a much, much larger perspective.1:55 Oh, and the birthdays!1:57 It’s an incredible lineup.1:58 You have Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, a certified musical genius who rearranged the sound of pop music.2:05 You have the one and only Lionel Richie, a master of the perfect song.2:10 The great actor John Goodman.2:12 And Audie Murphy...2:13 one of the most decorated American combat soldiers of World War Two, who then came home and became a Hollywood movie star.2:21 You can’t make this stuff up!2:23 Each one of them a landmark in their own right.2:26 But I have to go back.2:27 We have to talk more about Stan Coveleski.2:30 Because his story is one of those that, as a historian, just makes you sit back and smile.2:36 It’s a perfect capsule of a time and a place and a kind of person that barely seems real anymore.2:42 He was born on this day in 1889, the son of Polish immigrants in a Pennsylvania coal town.2:48 And his childhood was not a childhood as we’d recognize it.2:52 He was out of school and working in the mines at age twelve.2:56 Not in the mines, technically, but doing the brutal work of hauling timber for the miners.3:02 This is where the legend begins.3:04 To pass the time, and to just...3:06 you know...3:07 be a kid, he started throwing rocks.3:09 He threw them at birds, at squirrels, at whatever moved.3:13 He was building this incredible arm strength without even realizing it.3:17 When he got home from a long day of labor, he kept practicing.3:22 His family was poor, they couldn't afford a baseball.3:25 So he set up tin cans on a fence and threw rocks at them.3:29 Over and over and over.3:30 He later claimed, and I absolutely believe him, that he got so good he could hit them BLINDFOLDED.3:37 Can you even imagine?3:38 The focus, the muscle memory, the sheer determination of it.3:42 And here’s the turn.3:43 Here’s the moment that changes everything.3:46 It’s not a scout, not a league, not some formal tryout.3:50 It was a local school teacher who saw him one day, just whipping these rocks at tin cans with impossible accuracy.3:57 And the teacher walks up to him and asks him to pitch for the school team.4:02 That’s it.4:03 That’s the spark.4:04 A moment of pure chance that ignites a Hall of Fame career.4:08 From there, he starts playing semi-pro ball and gets noticed.4:11 He makes it to the major leagues in 1916 with Cleveland.4:15 And he’s not just some curiosity.4:17 He is immediately one of the most dominant pitchers in the game.4:21 And his greatest weapon?4:23 The spitball.4:24 Now, the spitball is this mythical pitch.4:27 It was exactly what it sounds like.4:29 A pitcher would apply saliva, or tobacco juice, or petroleum jelly, or...4:34 well, whatever, to the ball.4:35 And it made the ball do insane, unpredictable things.4:39 It would drop, it would dart, it was nearly impossible to hit cleanly.4:44 It was also, frankly, dangerous.4:46 Batters had no idea where it was going.4:48 After a batter was tragically killed by a pitch in 1920, the league BANNED the spitball.4:54 But here’s the catch.4:55 They couldn’t just take away the primary tool of some of the league’s best pitchers overnight.5:01 So they made a special exception.5:04 Seventeen pitchers, Stan Coveleski among them, were grandfathered in.5:08 They were officially allowed to keep throwing the spitball for the rest of their careers.5:14 They were the last of a dying breed, legal practitioners of a forbidden art.5:19 And Stan used it to become a legend.5:21 In that same year, 1920, he led Cleveland to the World Series and was just untouchable.5:27 He pitched three complete games, won all three, and had a microscopic earned run average of zero-point-six-seven.5:34 For four straight seasons, from 1918 to 1921, he won twenty-two or more games.5:39 He was a workhorse, an artist, and a relic all at the same time.5:44 He was finally, and rightly, inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1969, a testament to a career that started with nothing more than a strong arm and a pocketful of rocks.5:55 So when we look back at a day like July thirteenth, what do we actually see?6:00 We see the formal, televised history of a nation’s path changing in an instant, with one prime minister leaving and another arriving.6:09 That’s the history we read in textbooks.6:11 We see the very modern history of a celebrity tragedy, played out in real time across our screens.6:18 That’s the history that shapes our cultural memory.6:21 We see the ongoing, ever-present history of global movements and humanitarian crises, a story that has no single beginning or end.6:30 But then you have Stan Coveleski.6:32 His story reminds us that history is also made in the dirt.6:36 It’s made by kids who should be in school but are instead hauling timber.6:40 It’s made in moments of boredom and backyard practice.6:44 It’s made by a teacher paying attention.6:47 It’s the story of a man who mastered a pitch that was so strange and effective the sport itself had to ban it, but not for him.6:55 That’s the beauty of looking back day by day.6:58 You get the whole picture.7:00 The political, the personal, the tragic, and the purely, wonderfully unbelievable.7:05 History isn't just one thing.7:07 It's everything, all at once, happening on a single summer day.7:11 The story of our world is written in headlines, but its soul is found in the details.
