Tipping Pitches is a podcast built on three things:
- Baseball is essential.
- Baseball should take itself less seriously.
- Down with private ownership in baseball.
We’re the podcast that is going to uncover Joe West’s spoken word country music album, draft a team of guys likely to produce Hall of Fame worthy GIFs, and spend a whole episode seriously envisioning what it would look like for fans to actually own their team.
You can subscribe to Tipping Pitches on Apple, Spotify, RadioPublic, Google, or Stitcher. You can also like us on Facebook. If you email us at tippingpitchespod@gmail.com, we promise we’ll answer.
Some of Our Favorite Episodes
Comedian and host of ‘Three Swings’ Rhea Butcher joined the show to discuss baseball as a cultural artifact, the shared and forgotten histories of our sport, and (of course) the Dodgers finally winning the World Series.
At Tipping Pitches, the name of the game is public ownership. In this episode, we explore what it would look like for fans or municipalities to own their baseball teams. Is there precedent in baseball or other sports worldwide?
We, like many folks, took baseball’s hiatus as a chance to go back and watch some of baseball’s most classic games — ones we hadn’t seen, or ones we wanted to sharpen our memory on because they were just so iconic. In this episode, Nationals pitcher Sean Doolittle steps in as a guest host with us and choose 1999 ALDS Game 5 between Cleveland and Boston.
Inspired by an article by Zach Kram at The Ringer, we take a deep dive into the history of “Backyard Baseball,” the kids-video-game-turned-cult-classic that we grew up with. We bring on Nick Mirkovich, one of the game’s co-creators, to talk about the game’s inception and its evolution through the years.
We bring on writer and prolific tweeter Eireann Dolan to talk about activism in baseball, a painfully slow offseason, baseball reality shows, and how she met her husband Sean Doolittle (spoiler: it was Twitter). She also has some great ideas for how we should monetize.
About the Hosts
Bobby Wagner
Bobby grew up a Mets fan in Philadelphia, PA (which should explain a lot if you listen to the podcast). He produces, edits, and hosts the podcast and graduated from NYU Journalism and American Studies in 2018. You can see and hear his work at The Ringer, where he produces a myriad of podcasts on everything from baseball to film. But, if you really want to know him, you should give him an iced red eye and spend 15 minutes at a dog park with him.
Alex Bazeley
Alex also graduated from NYU in 2018, where he majored in journalism and metropolitan studies. He’s a lifelong A’s fan majoring in despair and hopeless optimism. He is the host, producer, and creative director for the podcast. In his professional time he studies and writes about housing policy and urban issues; in his unprofessional time he plays in a band that makes loud music, and yells about how underpaid minor leaguers are. He still sees Barry Zito’s curveball in his dreams and Bobby Crosby’s at bats in his nightmares, and if he starts going on about how this is actually the year the A’s start to turn it around, just let him have this one, okay?
See the rest of the episodes and blog here.
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