All About Baseball with Byron Copley

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.

Music: "Field Grass" Sergei Pavkin

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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 without suffering the career-ending arm injuries that pundits warned as its final consequence.

Rest in Peace, Fernando Valenzuela (1960-2024)

Music: "Field Grass" by Sergei Pavkin

email: [email protected]

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.

Music: "Field Grass" Sergei Pavkin

email: [email protected]

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 the "junk drawer" that is my mind, I offer some selected World Series stories, and, as a special bonus, I list all the winners and losers in order at the end of this podcast.

I make a solemn oath that I am not reading from one.

Music: "Field Grass" by Sergei Pavkin

email"[email protected]

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-league teams. Now the arrangement seems stripped down to the contrived and transactional, no matter how much both sides deliver messaging to the contrary, couched in PR word salads.

Music: "Field Grass," by Sergei Pavkin

email: [email protected]

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 deliberate approach to hitting was evident to us from the time we played organized baseball.

Music: "Field Grass" Sergei Pavkin

email: [email protected]

ps. I revised this podcast to correct a mistake that was identified by a loyal listener. In a total lapse of concentration, I incorrectly named "sacrifice" as a way to reach base. I made an edit to correct this "egregious" mistake.

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, Aguirre's story of a literal nuts-and-bolts beginning to an enterprise business is chronicled in the book "The Tall Mexican," written by my father, Robert Copley, who was Hank's friend from 1962 to 1994 and beyond.

Music: "Field Grass" by Sergei Pavkin

email:[email protected]

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: [email protected]

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) to pursue this passion for sharing baseball content with a like-minded audience, I can see why most podcasts never reach this milestone.

In this podcast, I recognize the people who helped me get it up and running, share some background as to how it got started, remind myself mostly why I am doing this in the first place, and I encourage you, the listeners, to do likewise if you are so inclined -- because I want to hear what you have to say.

Music: "Field Grass" Sergei Pavkin

email: [email protected]

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 Average, (wOBA) of .350 or higher.

wOBA is perhaps the most-effective way to measure a player's ability to generate runs. According to Fangraphs: "Weighted On-Base Average combines all the different aspects of hitting into one metric, weighting each of them in proportion to their actual run value."

The list is surprisingly small and contains names that will surprise. From that list, I selected eight position players as my "5,000 to 5,999 Plate Appearance MLB All-Time Team: 1960-2023."

It's a long podcast title, and, for clarification , the cutoff point is 5,999 plate appearances. I say that because I mention "5,000 to 6,000" plate appearances a few times in the podcast. Rather than re-record the entire episode, I include this disclaimer here.

Thank you for listening.

Music: "Field Grass" Sergei Pavkin

email: [email protected]