"Rube" Waddell

"Rube" Waddell

Author: Citation Needed Media October 1, 2025 Duration: 33:01

George Edward "Rube" Waddell (October 13, 1876 – April 1, 1914) was an American pitcher in Major League Baseball (MLB). A left-hander, he played for 13 years, with the Louisville Colonels, Pittsburgh Pirates, and Chicago Orphans in the National League, as well as the Philadelphia Athletics and St. Louis Browns in the American League. Born in Bradford, Pennsylvania, and raised in Prospect, Pennsylvania, Waddell was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1946.

Waddell is best remembered for his highly eccentric behavior, and for being a remarkably dominant strikeout pitcher in an era when batters were expert at making contact. He had an excellent fastball, a sharp-breaking curveball, a screwball, and superb control; his strikeout-to-walk ratio was almost 3-to-1, and he led the major leagues in strikeouts for six consecutive years.


Ever wondered how confidently incorrect a person can become after a ten-minute internet deep dive? Citation Needed is a comedic exploration of that exact phenomenon. Each episode, the hosts from Citation Needed Media pick a topic-which could be anything from the history of a bizarre invention to the biography of a semi-forgotten public figure-and their sole source material is a single Wikipedia article. They then proceed to discuss, dissect, and wildly extrapolate from that one page, adopting the unearned authority of online experts. The result is a hilarious and often insightful collision between earnest curiosity and total improvisation, revealing just how fragile our shared understanding of culture and society can be. You’ll hear genuine attempts to parse dense, dry information immediately derailed by personal tangents, absurd hypotheticals, and the inevitable realization that the wiki text itself might be deeply flawed. It’s a podcast that celebrates the joy of learning something new while simultaneously mocking the platform where most of us go to do it. The conversations are loose, funny, and surprisingly informative, not because the hosts are actual experts, but because they’re so willing to follow a strange fact down a rabbit hole and see what they find. Tune in for a unique blend of casual research and comedic commentary that holds a mirror to our own online habits.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Citation Needed
Podcast Episodes
Olestra / Olean [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 33:56
Olestra (also known by its brand name Olean) is a fat substitute food additive that adds no metabolizable calories to products. It has been used in the preparation of otherwise high-fat foods, thereby lowering or elimina…
Pluto [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 40:24
Pluto (minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object to directly orbit the Sun. It…
Defenestration [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 36:28
Defenestration (from Neo-Latin de fenestrā[1]) is the act of throwing someone or something out of a window.[2] The term was coined around the time of an incident in Prague Castle in the year 1618 which became the spark t…
Moving Day [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 40:54
Moving Day was a tradition in New York City dating back to colonial times and lasting until after World War II. On February 1, sometimes known as "Rent Day", landlords would give notice to their tenants what the new rent…
Mark Twain [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 36:28
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, and essayist. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced",[1…
The Juniper Tree [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 36:42
"The Juniper Tree" (also "The Almond Tree"; Low German: Von dem Machandelboom) is a German fairy tale published in Low German by the Brothers Grimm in Grimm's Fairy Tales in 1812 (KHM 47).[1] The story contains themes of…
Optograms and Wife Salves [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 34:59
Optography is the process of viewing or retrieving an optogram, an image on the retina of the eye. A belief that the eye "recorded" the last image seen before death was widespread in the late 19th and early 20th centurie…
Charge of the Light Brigade [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 34:33
The Charge of the Light Brigade was a military action undertaken by British light cavalry against Russian forces during the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War, resulting in many casualties to the cavalry. On 25 Octob…