Fungos & Fastballs: Baseball History & Trivia

Send us Fan Mail One random found ball near Cooperstown turns into an eight-year mission that sends a baseball fan deep into cemeteries, card shows, and the awkward seconds of face time you get with living legends. We sit down with baseball historian and SABR contributor Ralph Carhart to unpack the Hall Ball Project: photographing a single baseball with every National Baseball Hall of Fame member,...

Send us Fan Mail A baseball game that starts at 10 p.m. with no stadium lights sounds impossible, yet Fairbanks pulls it off every year. We kick things off with the Midnight Sun Game, a summer solstice tradition that has been running since 1906, and the Alaska Goldpanners, a legendary college summer team with an alumni list that includes Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and more. If you love baseball t...

Send us Fan Mail A World Series disappears from baseball history, and it has nothing to do with war. We start with the odd, dramatic story of 1904, when the New York Giants refuse to face the Boston Americans, turning the sport’s biggest prize into a feud about leagues, rivals, and pride. It’s a reminder that MLB history isn’t just stats; it’s people making stubborn decisions that end up shaping t...

Send us Fan Mail The warning track sits in every ballpark like background scenery, yet it has a darker origin story than most fans realize. We start by pulling the camera into the outfield dirt and unpacking why Major League Baseball mandated the warning track in 1949 after a run of frightening wall collisions. We talk about what it’s made of on natural grass versus artificial turf, how wide it’s...

Send us Fan Mail The baseball is the only “player” guaranteed to show up for every pitch, and it has a bigger impact on the game than most fans realize. We start with a quick curveball: the switch pitcher, one of the rarest roles in MLB, and the hilarious logic trap that led to the Venditte Rule when a pitcher and a switch hitter kept countering each other. It’s a perfect reminder that baseball’s...

Send us Fan Mail You can measure Wade Boggs with numbers, but you can’t really understand him without the stories. We start by checking the current MLB landscape with our friend Edwin Noland, moving division by division and hitting the surprises, the contenders, and the little controversies that make a long season feel alive. Then we pivot hard into baseball history and trivia with one of the most...

Send us Fan Mail Seventeen ejections in one night should be impossible, yet baseball found a way. We start with the 1984 Braves Padres beanball brawl, where one hit-by-pitch spirals into pitcher retaliation, managers getting ejected, and a benches-clearing pileup that somehow doesn’t even end the game. We walk through how “beaning” worked as baseball’s old language of payback, why umpires kept tos...

Send us Fan Mail Link to the National Assoc of Historic Base Ball Clubs  Baseball changes completely when you strip away gloves, modern habits, and the assumptions we’ve all carried since Little League and it becomes Base Ball (two words!). We sit down with Tom “Big Bat” Fesolowich, a 30-year veteran of vintage 19th century baseball, coordinator at Old Bethpage Village Restoration in New York, and...

Send us Fan Mail A single baseball episode can feel like four different road trips, and that’s exactly the point here. We’re clearing out a backlog of “first pitches” with a grab bag of baseball history, MLB trivia, and the kind of oddball stories you only hear when fans start swapping favorites. Before we dive into the time capsule, our friend Edwin Nolan calls in with a sharp MLB rundown, includ...

Send us Fan Mail A Cubs legend doesn’t have to be loud to be unforgettable, and Ryne Sandberg is the proof. We sit down with longtime friend and die-hard Cubs fan James Maumus to trace how a kid in New Orleans became devoted to Chicago baseball thanks to cable TV, WGN superstation broadcasts, and the simple magic of day games at Wrigley Field. The result is part baseball history, part fan memory,...

Send us Fan Mail Cooperstown tells one kind of baseball story. The Baseball Reliquary tells the one that lives in fan memory, strange artifacts, and the people who shaped the game’s lore even if they never fit a Hall of Fame template. We sit down with Joe Price, Professor Emeritus and co-director of the Institute for Baseball Studies at Whittier College, to explore how an “alternate hall of fame”...

Send us Fan Mail A home run derby sounds like a modern invention until you stumble on a 1960 TV series where Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and other legends went head-to-head for cash at Los Angeles Wrigley Field. We start there because it’s baseball history hiding in plain sight, and it helps explain how the sport’s love affair with the long ball kept evolving long before today’s MLB Ho...

Send us Fan Mail The MLB season moves fast, and so do we: quick division check-ins, the kind you can actually remember, followed by the sort of baseball trivia that instantly upgrades how you talk about the game. We hit the recent headlines and early surprises across both leagues, including why some starts feel real and others look like smoke, and we keep ourselves honest with a speedy pace. If yo...

Send us Fan Mail A runner gets lifted off first base. A ball disappears into the Metrodome plexiglass. A Game 7 stays scoreless so long you can feel every breath in the stadium. The 1991 World Series isn’t just a classic, it’s a blueprint for why people fall in love with October baseball in the first place. We’re talking Minnesota Twins vs Atlanta Braves, seven games, constant tension, and the kin...

Send us Fan Mail You can learn a lot about a team by the player it chooses to follow when things get loud. For my birthday special, I bring on my son Griffin Dynes (calling in from Denver) to talk about the toughest kind of baseball greatness: the quiet, gruff, unglamorous leadership of Yankees catcher and captain Thurman Munson. We start with a quick New York detour through Billy Joel and a trivi...

Send us Fan Mail A rally monkey that only appears under strict rules, a capuchin celebrity from Friends, and fans waving stuffed primates like it’s a sacred rite. That’s where we start, because baseball’s superstitions aren’t just funny, they reveal how the sport builds meaning out of moments. Then we jump to a place where the weirdness isn’t a gimmick at all: the Polo Grounds, one of the most imp...

Send us Fan Mail Jerry’s new Mariner Moose plush turns into a full blown tour through the strangest and most lovable corner of baseball culture: MLB mascots. We dig into why mascots work, why a few teams still refuse to have one, and what separates “cute” from cringy (“why does that thing have a human body”). Along the way, we hit the origins of the word mascot, the design choices that push charac...

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Send us Fan Mail The fastest way to puncture a sports myth is to show the day-to-day life behind it and Jim Bouton did exactly that with Ball Four. We start with a quick detour into Jerry’s battered tennis hand, then get serious about why this 1970 baseball book still sparks arguments: it broke the clubhouse “what you say here stays here” rule and made MLB confront what it wanted fans, kids, and t...

Send us Fan Mail One bad idea can become baseball history, and sometimes it takes the form of a crate full of disco records wired to explode in center field. We go from a quick, colorful detour on the Mendoza Line (baseball’s infamous .200 batting average benchmark) to one of the most chaotic nights ever staged at a ballpark: Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in Chicago. Along the way, we co...

Send us Fan Mail A fastball that “blue bayou” sounds like something you’d hear in a music documentary, not a baseball broadcast, but that’s exactly why we love the game. We kick things off with one of our favorite bits of baseball terminology: Tim McCarver’s “Linda Ronstadt,” his nickname for a pitch so nasty it just whizzes past the hitter. It’s a perfect reminder that baseball history and baseba...

Send us Fan Mail Baseball doesn’t pause for history, even when history is at its loudest. We pick up a question that hovered over America after Pearl Harbor: should Major League Baseball keep playing during World War II, or should the season shut down? From the owners’ worry to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous “Green Light Letter,” we walk through how wartime baseball became part of the home-front r...

Send us Fan Mail What if you could step into the batting cage and face tonight’s starter without burning a single pitch? We open with the Trajekt machine, the AI-powered pitching system transforming batting practice by recreating big-league arms with lifelike release points, spin, and sequencing. From a gunpowder “cannon” in 1897 to arm-style throwers to modern programmable wheels, training tech h...

Send us Fan Mail A rivalry doesn’t become legend overnight; it’s built pitch by pitch until one swing echoes for decades. We’re stepping into October 1978 at Fenway Park with an eyewitness who felt the bleachers shake, as the Yankees and Red Sox fought a one-game tiebreaker that turned role players into symbols and routine plays into folklore. From the bathroom ticket hustle at dawn to a cracked b...

Send us Fan Mail A lefty so electric that catchers stuffed sponges in their mitts. We dive into the speed, the swagger, and the scars of Vita Blue’s remarkable career, tracing how a high school quarterback from Louisiana turned a blazing fastball into stardom, magazine covers, and a central role in the Oakland A’s three-peat dynasty. From a 1970 no-hitter at just 21 to the 1971 MVP and Cy Young sw...