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Fungos & Fastballs: Baseball History & Trivia
Join us on this podcast exploring baseball's history and lore, plus enjoy some fastball trivia all in under 30 minutes. Topics will be all over the place - players, traditions, baseball lingo, stadiums, baseball movies/books. Like you, we just want to talk baseball!
Episodes
36 episodes
E35: 2026 Hall of Fame Inductees & Jerry’s Five Baseball Pet Peeves
Cooperstown is about to get loud, crowded, and emotional and we couldn’t wait until Monday to talk about it. With Baseball Hall of Fame Induction Sunday here, we take a bonus lap through baseball history, starting with a trivia question every f...
E34: Kitchen Sink II: Back-to-Back No Hitters, Ultimate Grand Slams, the Eddie Waitkus Shooting & More
A movie cast quietly buying a minor league baseball team sounds like a punchline, until you hear the name Richmond Flying Mummies and realize baseball is still the best sport for pure, delightful weirdness. We start there, digging into why the ...
E33: Ranking The Best Catchers In MLB History
Rankings bring out the real baseball opinions, especially when the position is catcher, where greatness is part statistics and part survival. We put on the backwards cap, crack open Baseball Reference, and take on an impossible question: who ar...
E32: The Hall Ball: One Man’s Journey to Photograph a Baseball with Every Hall of Famer
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 c...
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E31: Manager Earl Weaver + Book Review, 2026 MLB Update & The Midnight Sun Game
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 ...
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E30: MLB’s Greatest Hitting Streaks & The (First) World Series That Wasn’t
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...
E29: Brooks Robinson, Human Vacuum Cleaner & The Warning Track
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 ...
E28: The Baseball: Leather, Stitches & Switch Pitchers
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...
E27: Wade Boggs: Contact Hitting and Chicken; Plus The Longest Game and 2026 MLB Update
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...
E26: King Kelly, Baseball’s First Rock Star & The 1984 Bean Brawl
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 pile...
E25: Vintage Base Ball Brings The 19th Century Back To Life
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...
Ep 24: Kitchen Sink Episode: LOOGY Explained, The Kissing Bandit, Eephus (film), & '70 East West Classic,
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...
E23: Talkin’ Ryno: Ryne Sandberg - Heart of the Chicago Cubs
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 ...
E22: The Baseball Reliquary: A Fan’s Hall of Fame
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...
E21: Hall of Famer Ken Griffey Jr & 1960 TV's Home Run Derby
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 ...
E20: Bill Mazeroski’s Stellar Defense and Series Winning Homer, Golden Sombrero Explained, & 2026 Season Update
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 ...
E19: 1991 Twins vs Braves World Series. Greatest Ever?
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...
E18: The Legacy of Thurman Munson & Billy Joel Baseball Trivia
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,...
E17: The Polo Grounds Shaped History & Rally Monkey!!
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 spo...
E16: MLB Mascots & The 2026 Season So Far
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 ...
E14: Ball Four Book Review And The Seattle Pilots, The One-Year Team
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 boo...
E13: Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey & Mendoza Line Explained
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 bench...
E12: Origins of The National League, Fantasy Draft WS26 Predictions & Linda Ronstadt Explained
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 “L...
E11: How WWII Reshaped Baseball & A Personal Look at That Cardinals Dynasty
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...
