All About Baseball with Byron Copley

As a counterpoint to an earlier podcast, “The 5,000-5,999 Plate Appearance MLB All-Time Team: 1960-2023,” I flipped that idea on its head and researched MLB players, using Fangraphs and Baseball Reference, with more than 3,500 plate appearances and who consistently “underachieved” at the plate and in the field yet still managed to remain in the…

The top of the 5th inning of World Series Game 5 reinforced the capricious and chaotic nature of baseball, compounded by chance and circumstance, amplified by critics who, according to Theodore Roosevelt, are “cold and timid.” This podcast takes a dispassionate look at this inning and offers a hopefully empathic view of it. Music: “Field…

I was ruminating over a conversation that I had with a client more than 15 years ago in which I discovered that he was the grandson-in-law to a Hall-of-Fame ballplayer who was one of the oldest players alive at the time. This prompted me to look into who were the oldest-living players in the present…

With the passing of Fernando Valenzuela, who pitched the majority of his career with the Los Angeles Dodgers, I was prompted to produce a podcast about his most effective pitch: the screwball. He is one of the very few pitchers in MLB who relied on the screwball to get hitters out, and he and other…

On August 2nd, the Detroit Tigers were 52-59, 16 games behind the Cleveland Guardians with little to no chance of making the playoffs. On September 30, the Tigers were 86-76 and had qualified for the playoffs. How did they do it? I offer a rather basic explanation that involves chance as much as it does…

This is about as “seat of the pants” as I have ever been, as I express my “nerdity” about the game of baseball in the form of waxing spontaneously over the winners and losers of World Series from 1903 to 2023 — I have memorized them. During this “podcast without a safety net” I reveal…