Almost Cooperstown

Send us Fan Mail Like a shooting star, sometimes players have one incredible season that they desperately try to replicate.  For those that are unable to 'do it again', they are deemed 'one-season' wonders. From Rookie-of-the year to being out of MLB in 3 years actually has happened and it's not always due to injury!  We remember some names that many have forgotten, and ot...

Send us Fan Mail We were actually kind of shocked to find out that there have only been 32 knuckleball pitchers in MLB history.  Hoyt Wilhelm has the only no-hitter for a knuckleballer blanking the Yankees in 1958.  The Yankees won the WS that season. There are some notable and memorable names of the 32 but also many that most fans have never heard of.   Why aren't there more knuckleball pitc...

Send us Fan Mail There have been close to 40 complete games pitched in MLB this season so far.  The modern era all-time single season record for a pitchers is 41 complete games in 1904. Since then the number has been reduced such that Shane Bieber led MLB with 3 complete games in the last full season 2019.  This year 3 players already have 3 complete games.  Over the years complete games have dwin...

Send us Fan Mail What Shohei Ohtani is doing this season is amazing. Just making it to the Major Leagues is incredibly difficult.  How about changing positions from  being a position every day player to a pitcher?  Or a pitcher needing to become a position player in order to stay in the big leagues?  Players like the Cardinal’s Rick Ankiel come to mind but there are plenty of other MLB players who...

Send us Fan Mail This year there were a slew of big deals for excellent players at the July 30 trading deadline.  it may have even been the most good players traded ever at the deadline.  We talk about the most significant trading deadline deals over the past 60 years since there were not that many before 1969 when divisional play began and there were more than two league champions.  A couple of c...

Send us Fan Mail Interleague play has been a part of MLB since 1997.  This season there will be 20 interleague games for each team.  We think that's too many and that winning a playoff spot should not be so dependent on performance against the OTHER league.  With expansion on the horizon there will almost assuredly no longer be a need to have an interleague game played nearly every day.  Ther...

Send us Fan Mail The role of baseball player-manager was fairly commonplace in the early years of #MLB,  Some great players like HOFers Nap Lajoie, Lou Boudreau, Bill Dickey, Frankie Frisch, and Honus Wagner to name a few.  We talk about why there are no longer player-managers in baseball and who of today's players might be a good player-manager.  Then we talk about the Olympic Games not just...

Send us Fan Mail As of the 2021 season there have been 413 sets of brothers who've played in a MLB game. We found some of the careers of one of the brothers were very short.  Most of the time one of the brothers significantly outperforms the other brother.   But not all the time thanks to brother combos like the Waners, Deans, DiMaggios, Torres and Alomars.   We talked about Hank and Dick All...

Send us Fan Mail The first MLB All-Star Game was in 1933.  Yet it is little-known amongst even big baseball fans that because Black players were not allowed in MLB, the Negro Leagues had their own All-Star Games also beginning in 1933.   And these games were both popular and well-attended. We take a look at how the All-Star game in MLB has changed over the years and with Gary Livacari's help...

Send us Fan Mail The bullpen has not always been the most respected place for #MLB pitchers.  The save did not even become an official statistic until 1969.  Two HOF players far and away represent the best of the best when it comes to having success both starting and relieving. There are  other but not many examples of former starting pitchers who became stellar relief pitchers - even HOFers!  As...

Send us Fan Mail In MLB today scheduled doubleheaders are almost extinct.  Rainouts and Covid-19 protocols have caused there to be a few more DH's than in a normal year.  7-inning DH's are, well just weird but might be here to stay.  We're ok with that for the most part but not if there are two separate admissions at full price!  Two for the price of one does not work well for team...

Send us Fan Mail Official scoring in baseball is very different than it is for all the other professional sports. Part of it is due its own history.  It was not all that long ago that baseball reporters  doubled as official scorers.  The box score 'invented' by Henry Chadwick in 1859 is still in use today!  But official scoring has been the bastion for males almost universally except for...

Send us Fan Mail Aren't we already tired of hearing about the doctoring & defacing of baseballs?  @MLB has decided to do something about it mid-season.  It's always been illegal to use sticky stuff or anything on the baseball. Now the rule is going to be enforced. We just had to talk about it!  Thanks for listening and if you have a suggestion for an episode please drop us a line via...

Send us Fan Mail Most fans would argue that their favorite team had a period of time in which they were a very good team, maybe won a WS, but fell short of winning more than once.  Yet there are also teams that over-performed expectations to win it all more than once over a relatively short period of time.   Are the 2016-2021 Dodgers overrated?  They are the current WS champions and might have act...

Send us Fan Mail What makes a player a good baserunner? Speed helps for sure but there have been many adept, even good baserunners who have lacked foot speed.  Picking up the ball, knowing the field, taking longer leads and reading the move home of the pitcher are all important if not underused skills.  The shift to power and home runs over the past 30+ years has robbed the game of exciting plays...

Send us Fan Mail Partly because baseball has been around the longest, there have been more MLB players who played other professional sports than pro athletes from other sports playing MLB baseball.  Baseball players were not paid much in the early part of the 20th century and being paid for two sports beat out having a regular job!   We talk about what we call the big 4 - all NFL/MLB players as we...

Send us Fan Mail Do you know the 10 oldest ballparks currently in use in MLB?  Sure you'd expect Fenway & Wrigley but some of the other names might surprise even the most knowledgable fans. How about groundskeeping and the differences between baseball parks?  Baseball is really the only major sport in which the playing field differs depending on the park in which you're playing.  Wha...

Send us Fan Mail Ichiro Suzuki has the all-time #MLB record for hits in one season with 262.  He broke George Sisler's 84 year-old record of 257 in 2004.  Since then there have been a number of 200-hit seasons recorded by players but the number is decreasing.  And we talk about why that is the case.  Thanks for listening and if you have a suggestion for an episode please drop us a line via em...

Send us Fan Mail Good teams always seem to have a guy or two who's a versatile utility player.   This helps keep the roster efficient since a good utility player can cover a variety of field positions.  We discuss that being a versatile player is a good thing but overall a utility player is most often not quite god enough to have an every day place in the lineup.  Have there ever been any uti...

Send us Fan Mail Bench-clearings still happen fairly often in #MLB.  Actual bench-clearing brawls are less common due to the players being suspended, losing pay, and generally hurting the team. But in the heat of the moment a batter can snap when a high hard one goes right at his head or upper body. Fortunately baseball brawls don't end up having players injured such that they can't play...

Send us Fan Mail Do you recognize the photo of the AL Rookie-of-the-Year from 2004? Jackie Robinson won the very first Rookie-of-the-Year (for both leagues) in 1947.  Since then one team has dominated ROY selections.  Can you guess which team it is?  We talk about the Hall-of-Fame Rookies of the Year as well as a few winners whose ROY winning statistics are less than impressive.  Thanks for listen...

Send us Fan Mail Before our podcast started, we like so many others, sat around and talked about baseball.  What recently got us going was the idea that Ty Cobb's .366 career batting average back before and after the 'Dead-ball' era was fattened up by facing tired pitchers in innings 7/8/9.  Pitchers today rarely throw complete games  and today hitters have to face a bevy of hard th...

Send us Fan Mail Thanks to Mark Rickard for the show concept!   With some sense of certainty this will be the last year in MLB in which there will not be a DH in the National League.   This will be negotiated as part of the upcoming Collective Bargaining Agreement between the Player's Association and MLB in what promises to be an acrimonious negotiation.  No pitcher has finished the season wi...

Send us Fan Mail It's a new season already and the start of a 2nd season from Almost Cooperstown!  Only 10 months after the delayed start of the 2020 MLB season, here comes the 2021 season.  A planned 162-game season that is sure to test the pitching staffs across both leagues. 7 inning double-headers are back as are some of the new rules introduced in 2020. We talk about the rule changes fro...

Send us Fan Mail Pitchers don't often get hit by line drives and get it to the skull even less frequently.  But it does happen, as much as 2 - 3 times per season.  We note a number of well known current MLB pitchers that have been the victim of a shot to the head.  Currently there are no MLB pitchers wearing protective headgear on the mound.  There are a number of reasons for that and we disc...