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It Seemed Smart is a six-part storytelling experience brought to you by SB Nation and Vox Media Podcast Network that enters the amusing, diabolical, and entertaining world of sports trickery and mayhem. SB Nation's Editor-at-Large Spencer Hall shares the absurd stories of stolen bats, pirated play calls, renegade cross-country road racers, and fantasy football's own insider trading scandal.
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Episode 1
The Great Albert Belle Bat Caper
In 1994, the Cleveland Indians crawled through a ceiling, stole a bat out of an umpire’s dressing room, and set off a chain of events that eventually involved a former FBI agent.
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Episode 2
The Real Cannonball Run
The Cannonball Run, a 28-hour car sprint across the United States, involves a thousand small challenges, and two huge ones: how to not leave any evidence, and how to fool the cops.
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Episode 3
The Shady Rise and Spectacular Fall of Daily Fantasy Sports
The online fantasy boom made a lot of people rich: the fantasy sports companies that raked in millions on barely legal bets, and some of their employees who used insider info to cash in.
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Episode 4
Wakeyleaks (a college football espionage story)
Wake Forest suspected that someone was stealing its playbook. What they didn’t know was that it was an inside job.
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Episode 5
Tour de France is the pinnacle of cheating in sports — Part 1
There is cheating, and then there is the Tour de France — an event so rife with cheating that riders taking rat poison, nitroglycerine, and chloroform was considered normal as far back as 1924. Part 1 looks at the event's first winner, Maurice Garin, who established a tradition of ruthlessness from the race's inception.