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Erik Malinowski takes a baseball commercial that used to air late nights on ESPN in the ’90s and ’00s, and uses it to trace the effect of technology on sports.
“He was the first guy I ever knew who used video as a training device in baseball,” says Shawn Pender, a former minor-league player who would appear in several of Emanski’s instructional videos. “There just wasn’t anyone else who was doing what he did.”
It’s also something of a detective story, since its subject Tom Emanski has virtually fallen off the face of the earth:
Fred McGriff is surely correct that nearly two decades of video sales — first through TV and radio and now solely through the internet — made Emanski a very wealthy man, but this perception has led to some rather outlandish internet rumors.
According to one, the Internal Revenue Service investigated Emanski in 2003 for unpaid taxes and, in doing so, somehow disclosed his estimated net worth at around $75 million. There’s no public record of such an investigation ever having taken place or been disclosed, and an IRS spokesman for the Florida office would say only that the agency is “not permitted to discuss a particular or specific taxpayer’s tax matter or their taxes based on federal disclosure regulations and federal law.”
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