All About Baseball with Byron Copley

This rather rash statement, to some, is axiomatic to me, and I think that the numbers back up my claim. Yet, Whitaker, who played 19 seasons for the Detroit Tigers and saved some of his best seasons for last, was only on the Hall of Fame ballot once, where he received only 2.9% of all ballots cast. I make the case that the Baseball Writers Association of America snubbed Whitaker, for reasons that...

There are inherent and lasting advantages for youth baseball players to use wood bats, which have been supplanted by the proliferation of metal and composite bats. This podcast enumerates those advantages, and advocates the value of the experience of stepping to the plate with a bat made of wood — an experience that every youth player should have. Credit to King Sports for helping to define...

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 Major Leagues for 10+ years...

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 Grass” Sergei Pavkin email: bcpodcas...

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 day and I discovered one mind-blowing fact that will hopefully amaze you, the listener, as well. Mu...

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 prominent pitchers of his era, as well as pitchers from the nascent times of MLB, used the screwball...

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 skill, that isolates a single baseball metric: BABIP — Batting Average of Balls in Play....

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 a “license plate” game I play to keep the data base fresh in...

I expect that the title of this podcast reveals my opinion of MLB’s current approach to partnering with corporations to raise revenue, awareness, and ROI. In my opinion, in-game advertising, that appears virtually everywhere in the course of a television broadcast, is a distraction to the play on the field. And, in the past, there was an organic connection between company sponsors and major-...

Having read the book Moneyball, by Michael Lewis, I recognized that the approach that the Oakland A’s front office took to hitting in 2002 was virtually identical to the approach that we applied in Little League in 1967. Yet, it was rejected and ridiculed by the “common wisdom” of MLB at the time. Why it did so remains a mystery, especially considering that a patient and delibera...

After a 16-year Major League career, Hank Aguirre established a company called Mexican Industries in 1979, with the intent of employing fellow Mexicans and other minorities who lived in an area of Detroit called “Mexicantown.” After several lean years, the company blossomed in to a $150,000,000 business by the time Hank died in 1994. Entrepreneur, community leader, and benefactor, Agui...

Even at the highest levels of the game, in the most critical situations, obstruction and interference create confusion and controversy among the best and brightest baseball minds. Here, I offer three examples of this, as well as one that I judged in much more obscure circumstances. Music: “Field Grass” by Sergei Pavkin email: bcpodcastbaseball@gmail.com

You may have noticed that none of the other episodes in this podcast were numbered. This Episode #21 has a number because it represents a significant milestone: Only 1% of all podcasts ever get to Episode 21. So, now, All About Baseball us among the top 1% of all podcasts in the world in regards to the number of posted episodes. It seems like a low bar, but having put in the time effort (and money...

An idea occurred to me to research former players who compiled year in and year out impressive offense while remaining in relative anonymity, so to speak, and who, by most accounts, are largely forgotten today, with a few exceptions. So I filtered, with the help of Fangraphs, those players who played from 1960 to 2023 with between 5,000 and 5,999 plate appearances and a career Weighted On Base Ave...

A listener posed a question to me: “Is there a correlation between competitive baseball and competitive match play golf?” It inspired me to propose alternate method of scoring baseball games that could apply especially well to youth baseball. In the light of the radical rule changes that Major League Baseball has instituted in the last several years in the interest of accelerating the...

A childhood neighbor relates an experience of fielding a ground ball off the bat of Ron LeFlore, whose rise from the Jackson State Prison in Jackson, MI, to major-league all-star is well-known and -chronicled. This story, until now, was known by only a handful of witnesses and those who heard it first-hand, as I did. Music: “Field Grass” Sergei Pavkov email: bcpodcastbaseball@gmail.com

The importance of base running is undervalued. This podcast seeks to illustrate the value of base running and the consequences of making mistakes on the base paths, which, in virtually every instance, are avoidable when the key ingredients of aggression, awareness, focus, and hustle are applied. Music: “Field Grass” by Sergei Pavkin email: bcpodcastbaseball@gmail.com

Baseball is unique in that the smallest margins of error can determine which team wins or loses games or even World Series championships. In this podcast, I dissect two memorable and minute events that affected the outcome of the 1962 and the 1968 World Series. Get ready to examine them through the lens of a microscope — millimeter by millimeter. Music: “Field Grass” Sergei Pavki...

This podcast examines in detail the events and circumstances of bottom of the sixth inning of the 2001 Little League World Series Championship Game between Apopka, Florida and Tokyo, Japan. I watched this game live, and I relate, here and now, my observations at the time as a way to offer an alternative approach to the strategies and tactics applied by both coaches, that possibly may have changed...

I was an assistant coach on a travel team in Southeast Michigan from 1999 to 2003, and one of our main priorities was to protect the arms of our young pitchers — with large measures of communication, conditioning, and common sense. This podcast goes into some detail about our approach to preventing even sore arms, and there’s nothing complex about it. We considered as one of our most i...

In this podcast, I make an appeal for those who sit in the first row of a ballpark to let the ball come to them. There have been several famous and countless not-so-famous incidents of spectator interference that have possibly affected the outcomes of entire post seasons. I mention both and also make some recommendations that may or may not be acceptable to you listeners — I look forward to...

A text with a friend who is a fan of the San Francisco Giants inspired this podcast that talks about John McGraw’s style of baseball, which has gone the way of the maskless football helmet, the demotion to Triple A of the National League’s 2023 save leader, 27-year-old Camlio Doval, and a comparison of Doval’s 2023 season to the 1973 season of reliever John Hiller, the life-long...

This listener-requested topic spawned a podcast that burrows into several different rabbit holes, from how to grip the bat correctly to a discussion on the revenue-generating power of the batting-glove industry, to a Monet painting that was on display in The Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock, Arkansas. This journey into the logic — and illogic — of the grip that the batting-g...

In the brief three-month summer window of June-July-August, from 1964 to 1967, we packed in countless hours of playing baseball on the neighborhood vacant lot just down the street. The value — and the values — we took away from that all-too-brief experience still resonate with me, and I hope with the kids who came from all around to play the only game we really loved, because baseball...

In my effort to cover content that is All About Baseball, this is a personal account of a tragedy that occurred in a tournament game that involved my high-school team in 1974. Briefly, someone died and I saw it happen right in front of me. I would like to say that this surreal moment transformed me into a better person, but the suddenness and severity of the event was too much for a 17-year-old ki...