The Devastation of The Pine Tar Home Run

Season 1. Episode 2: The Devastation of The Pine Tar Home Run. And here’s the question we want to answer for history: Just how traumatic was that game? For George Brett? For the players? For all of us?

In 1980 George Brett missed three innings of a World Series Game to get treated for hemorrhoids. Three years later, he would blow a gasket for getting called out for using a bat with an excessive amount of pine tar. Roughly a quarter century later, Brett would confess, in a legendary Youtube clip, that he twice a year, he would defecate in his own pants. It seems impossible that these three things are unrelated.

Moreover, what is the relationship with Brett's unsuppressed anger and that of Hulk Hogan's? Of John McEnroe's? Of Mike Tyson's? Or Ron Artest's? Did George Brett inspire those rageful outbursts? Did he cause them? What about the four Royals that were arrested for cocaine possession following the 1983 season? Was that Brett's fault? And what about our own childhood traumas of the 1980s? The divorces. The angry gym teachers? Can we draw a through-line back to Brett?

We kick off by revisiting a fairly meaningless baseball afternoon in the summer of 1983 and the at bat of one of the greatest hitters of all time and the very best player in Kansas City Royals' history. From there, everything goes haywire. A game winning home run gets protested and then called an out by virtue of an obscure rules violation. And, from there, George Brett blew a gasket that symbolized America's repressed rage. We trace that event to the WWF, to other professional sports, to politics and to our home towns. Twenty plus years later, Brett is caught on mic retelling a story about how he soiled himself at The Bellagio. We try to find the truth of the through line between all of these events that might seem unrelated, but cannot possibly be.