All About Baseball with Byron Copley

Having completed a distinguished 11-year career in 2021 as a catcher for the San Francisco Giants, Buster Posey, an immensely popular Bay Area figure, purchased an undisclosed percentage of the team and joined the Giants’ board of directors in 2022. Then, in a move that surprised many, Posey, at his own request, was appointed President of Baseball Operations in September, 2024. His tenure as Presi...

Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred is proposing changes to the MLB Amateur Draft. In my opinion, these changes will adversely affect the quality of play and deny thousands of aspiring young men the opportunity to develop into a Major League ballplayers. Manfred wants to cut the draft from 20 rounds to 12 rounds, eliminating approximately 250 players from the existing draft pool and cancelling their...

I am off this week. As the one-year anniversary of our son Stuart’s death approaches and passes, I thought it appropriate to replay the episode that I recorded in July, 2025, a few days after his funeral. After a brief preamble that I recorded in advance, you’ll hear that episode. Thank you for your prayers and support, and please continue praying for the peaceful repose of Stuart&#821...

I am honored to welcome Pulitzer Prize finalist, journalist, author, and accomplished historian Edward Achorn to All About Baseball. Edward’s two books about baseball in the 19th Century, Fifty Nine in ’84 and The Summer of Beer and Whiskey , place the reader “at the shoulder” (Ed’s words) of Old Hoss Radbourn and Chris Von Der Ahe respectively. And as Radbourn carrie...

Recently, a game between the Orioles and Blue Jays sparked controversy over a Blue Jays’ runner who veered well out of the baseline to avoid being tagged. The policy of MLB, which prohibits the league to “publicly address the umpires’ decisions,” only serves to amplify mistrust and minimize the credibility of MLB umpires and the league itself. This episode offers an explanation t...

On May 28, the San Francisco Giants relieved Hector Borg of his responsibilities as third-base coach. I think that this decision was as hastily made as the one to hire him in the 2025 off season to handle the most difficult job on the field. In fact, I believe that the Giants should have retained Borg as third-base coach and mentored him into improvement, rather than demoting him to his familiar r...

In this episode, I ruminate over the lost art of pitching that was prevalent in MLB as recently as 2010 or so. Now, since the “Velocity Virus” has infected the minds of baseball executives, scouts, coaches, and players at all levels, multiplied by the “schools” and “academies” that promote this fallacy, it seems that the nuance and complexity of baseball has giv...

Since May 4 to May 20, 2026, the Tigers are 2-13. Is this simply a slump? I think not. The episode of All About Baseball delves into the sad statistics that indicate a bigger problem: the Tigers have too many role-playing players playing main roles, especially offensively, and they are not going to miraculously transform into reliable and ready hitters — or defenders. bcpodcastbaseball@gmail...

Periodically, I recommend good books about baseball. The Summer of Beer and Whiskey, by Edward Achorn, is a great book about baseball. This is my unbridled endorsement of a book that, in great detail, captures the ethos of professional baseball in the 1880s as a time of flux, fanaticism, and fury. bcpodcastbaseball@gmail.com Music: “Field Grass,” by Sergei Pavkin

My first PSA episode of All About Baseball. It’s brief by design, but, if you take the action that I suggest, you could directly impact the lives of the people that Kirk Gibson has himself in the long-term. Do me a favor and listen to the end. Thank you. bcpodcastbaseball@gmail.com Music: “Field Grass,” by Sergei Pavkin Link to Kirk Gibson Foundation for Parkinson’s

In this episode of All About Baseball, I introduce you to Cormac Terry, who pitched for Catholic University, in Washington, D.C.,from 2020 to 2024. His story ranges from the challenges of playing in the “Covid Era,” to how he reinvented himself as a pitcher after an arm injury, to the virtues and lessons he learned because he played baseball at Catholic University. bcpodcastbaseball@gm...

It is a privilege to have Jeff Frye make a guest appearance on All About Baseball. Our 45-minute discussion covers a wide variety of topics. I am ever grateful to Jeff for agreeing to relate his story of the advent and the conclusion of his nine-year MLB career as well as his opinions on the present state of the game, which he considers to be lacking in the fundamentals that he mastered and that h...

In this episode of all All About Baseball, I interview Coach Samuel Skinner, Varsity baseball coach at South Mecklenburg High School in Charlotte, North Carolina. He offers a unique and universal account of his experience as a coach, mentor, and student of the game. I think anyone who loves the game of baseball will appreciate Coach Skinner’s observations and opinions on a variety of basebal...

On April 8, 1974, Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record on national television. Because today, April 8, 2026, is the 52nd anniversary of that event, I thought that I would replay one of the earliest episodes of All About Baseball that recounts my personal experience of that moment when Aaron’s bat made contact with the ball. It was one of extreme disappointment, which t...

Major League Baseball, unlike the other professional sports in the United States, has been exempt from the Sherman Anti-Trust Act since 1922, meaning that no competitive professional baseball league can be established to directly compete with MLB for its players, fans, or markets. Still, that hasn’t prevented a few United States legislators from threatening to introduce legislation that woul...

That’s the question that this episode of All About Baseball answers. A listener requested an episode on nicknames, and I tried to place a larger context around the topic and opine that nicknames no longer, “augment a given name and provide a richer and more explicit denotation.” But that’s only part of this story. Listen in to hear the rest of it. https://sabr.org/journal/a...

In this episode, I, unfortunately, rant somewhat on yet another tinkering of the rules of baseball, using technology to yet again supplant the human factor, which, once ensconced in the game, is “progressively” taking a back seat to machines. “Hey, IT says so!” Controversy resolved, right? As we ignore the larger controversy of handing the judgement and management of the ga...

Baseball has numerous interesting and quirky rules. Perhaps none more so than the “Fourth Out Situation,” where an extra out can be made and applied to replace the third out made in an inning. This episode offers a hypothetical example that is a literal game-changer, and it also recounts two specific incidents in Major League baseball that demonstrate the importance of the rule as well...

Subtitled Baseball and the Rise of a New City , the book The New York Game is about the interdependent rise of professional baseball in New York with the grand and grandiose progress that New York accomplished from 1901 to 1945. This is the first episode of that podcast that I wrote in advance so that my words were measured and what I intended to say. I recommend this book, but not for the reasons...

This episode takes the lessons from a book that I read — and still read — called Quantum Golf, by Kjell (pronounced Shell) Enhager, which offers a radical yet reasonable way to approach the game of golf and asks the question: “can those same lessons be applied on the baseball field to help players enhance the game?” I think they can, and I explain why. I also identify sever...

This episode asks and answers this question to my satisfaction. At first, I was skeptical if the signing was a good idea. However, as I ruminated in real time, without much preparation, but with an open mind and a predisposition to express gladness that Verlander is a Tiger again, I discovered in the process that I can change my own mind by just talking it through with the “record” but...

This episode examines in a fair amount of detail the reasons why I think that there was no World Series in 1904. The personalities who could have worked out an equitable solution — Byron Bancroft “Ban” Johnson, president of the fledgling American League, John T. Brush, owner of the National League’s New York Giants, and John McGraw, manager of the Giants — were simply...

Mickey Lolich, who passed away on February 4, 2026, at the age of 85, was a humble, self-effacing, patient, loyal man and teammate. His 13 years as a Detroit Tiger consisted of dramatic highs and lows, but Lolich was a man who always saw the bigger picture. His dedication and durability — and substantial talent that often went unappreciated — served to place him among the all-time grea...

Artificial Intelligence has infiltrated every aspect of our lives, and Major League Baseball has embraced it with boundless enthusiasm. The claims: AI will increase competitiveness, excitement, safety, and fairness. It will extend careers and enhance the quality of play. This podcast offers some opinions on the “wisdom” of surrendering human judgement to computers, possible unforeseen...

Ok. This podcast is a bit of an outlier. First off, I recorded it in my car as an experiment, so you will notice a difference in the audio. It’s more compressed than the podcasts I record in my office/studio. You might need to boost the volume a little bit. But it’s definitely audible. I liked the content, so I published this one. (With some prudent editing, I made it make sense.) I wa...