The Runners Up Club

Ray Agostinelli
  • 5.0 (1)
  • History
  • Updated Monthly

Short-form episodes about history's "losers", air quotes essential, by Ray Agostinelli. Wild and fun stories about people & products, brands & businesses, ideas & inventions that failed to ascend to the dominant position in their fields - business, science, politics, the arts - sometimes deservedly so, many times not. What Hydrox is to the Oreo, Gabriel Metsu to Vermeer, Eulace Peacock to Jesse Owens, Iliodor to Rasputin; and very many more besides - diminished, obscured, forgotten. Stories that are by turns instructive, humorous, enraging, illuminating, cautionary, and addictive.

  1. Jul 4

    Graham Parker: The Original Angry Young Man

    Passion is no ordinary word when it comes to this famously acerbic and literate rocker, the first - and most soulful - of the triad at the vanguard of the British New Wave.

  2. Feb 28

    Alfred Russel Wallace: The Spiritual Evolutionist

    The naturalist whose contemporaneous insights into “the transmutation of species” may have shared top billing with Darwin had he not gone off - script, refusing to boot god entirely from his theory of evolution.

  3. 12/25/2025

    Howard K. Smith: An Anchorman For Our Time

    The post-war era found most Americans turning to the famously well-trusted "Uncle" Walter Cronkite on CBS for their eyes on the world, while the gloriously opinionated Howard K. Smith, his ratings rival, was Edward R. Murrow's truer heir, and progenitor of today's primetime news anchors.

  4. 10/12/2025

    Greg Norman: Prophecies Fulfilled

    The likable Australian golfer's frequent appearances in the runner-up slot raises questions about the perils of catastrophic thinking and self fulfilling prophecies in sports. But also lessons in flipping the script in life.

  5. 08/31/2025

    Catherine Littlefield Greene: The Heart of the Gin

    A Rhode Island aristocrat who became a widowed plantation owner in the Reconstruction Era South may have been more instrumental to the invention of the cotton gin than Eli Whitney.

  6. 06/15/2025

    Beech-Nut Baby Food: Bad Apples Spoil the Barrel

    A long-standing Mohawk Valley food company forfeited any chance to upend rival Gerber’s at the top of the baby food market in a case of spectacularly wrong-headed and unethical management.

  7. 04/05/2025

    Minerva: The Handcuff Queen

    This pioneering escapologist captivated audiences in her brief but brilliant time under the Vaudeville lights. She aroused Harry Houdini’s ire when she stole his signature trick. Did he retaliate by trying to blind her?

  8. 03/22/2025

    Antoine Bechamp: The First Anti-Vaxxer?

    Louis Pasteur’s bitter rival staked everything on a discredited theory of the role that germs play in the body. If his theories regain a measure of respectability, as many believe they already have, will statues of Antoine Bechamp appear beside those of Pasteur?

See All (18)

Ratings & Reviews

About

Short-form episodes about history's "losers", air quotes essential, by Ray Agostinelli. Wild and fun stories about people & products, brands & businesses, ideas & inventions that failed to ascend to the dominant position in their fields - business, science, politics, the arts - sometimes deservedly so, many times not. What Hydrox is to the Oreo, Gabriel Metsu to Vermeer, Eulace Peacock to Jesse Owens, Iliodor to Rasputin; and very many more besides - diminished, obscured, forgotten. Stories that are by turns instructive, humorous, enraging, illuminating, cautionary, and addictive.

Information

  • Creator
    Ray Agostinelli
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    18
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 Ray Agostinelli
  • Show Website
    The Runners Up Club