Baseball YouTube phenom Marika Lyszczyk remembers Whalley Chiefs roots

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There are young B.C. baseball players following Marika Lyszczyk on social media who undoubtedly found themselves part of her content this  weekend.

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Lyszczyk made a series of posts from the B.C. Girls Baseball championships at Whalley ballpark on Saturday, highlighting game action.

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The 24-year-old from Tsawwassen was back in town, taking a break from her job with Momentum, a baseball content creation company in Scottsdale, Ariz., that has over 850,000 subscribers on YouTube. Lyszczyk herself has over 99,000 followers on Instagram and over 146,000 followers on TikTok.

She had been a baseball trailblazer long before she started piling up views on social media, though.

Lyszczyk was the first female to play in the B.C. Premier Baseball League when she suited up for the Whalley Chiefs in 2018. She became the first woman to play catcher in an NCAA game in 2020 when she took a spot behind the plate for the Rivier Raiders, a Div. III team from Nashua, New Hampshire. She transferred to the Div. II Sonoma State Seawolves and focused on pitching for the Rohnert Park, Calif., program in 2023.

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She took yet another step this summer, making her debut in men’s pro ball when she gave up one run over two innings in relief on June 24 for the Dublin Leprechauns, an independent league team based in Dublin, Calif.

Baseball B.C. CEO David Laing praises Lyszczyk for remaining keen on helping out the next generation of players through it all. The visit to Whalley ballpark, it seems, was very much on brand for her.

“Marika has been great for us. She always has time for the youngest of our athletes and never misses a chance to share her story and her beginnings,” Laing explained “It’s a great testimony to her passion and her never-ending want to give back to the game.”

Baseball B.C. director of operations Scott MacKenzie added: “Marika’s amazing feats in baseball are proof of what’s possible, and her success will undoubtedly inspire a new generation of young girls to pursue their dreams with confidence.”

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Lyszczyk made one other appearance this season with Dublin on July 15 and struggled, giving up three earned runs over two innings.

She wasn’t able to play more for Dublin due to her Momentum commitments. She isn’t sure what next season might bring for her in that regard.

Dublin’s a member of the Pecos League, a loop founded in 2010 that had 16 teams scattered across nine U.S. states and playing 54-game seasons this summer. It’s an entry level into pro ball. There’s been a handful of players in league history move into big-league farm systems, including current Vancouver Canadians pitching coach Eric Yardley, who went on to take the mound in the majors.

“It’s always been a dream of mine to play professional baseball. And it’s super cool that simultaneously I can do two things that I absolutely love, because when I was younger I dreamed of being a YouTuber,” Lyszczyk said. “I never thought I’d be a baseball YouTuber. I dreamed more of it being lifestyles.

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“I’d love to play baseball as a long as I can. The hardest part is that I can’t just up and leave. But Dublin has been amazing, allowing me to have this super flexible schedule. The guys on the team have, too. They’ve been so awesome. If there’s a team that allow me to be able to keep doing what I’m doing I would absolutely love to play again.”

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Her social media channels now offer up a path for others.

“It’s fun to be able to show girls that they can continue to play baseball and maybe one day play college baseball or even pro baseball,” she said. “It’s fun to be able to show them that there’s room for them in the baseball world. People often make girls switch over to softball because they think that’s where there’s the only opportunities. Hopefully we’re showing people that they continue to follow their baseball dreams and there’s a path for them.”

Lyszczyk has been with Momentum for nearly two years. She had been doing content on her own before that, and wound up working for Major League Baseball in that capacity for a time.

Momentum’s content team is headed up by former big-league pitcher Trevor Bauer, 34. It also features Eric Sim, 36, who grew up in Abbotsford, played in the PBL with the Abbotsford Cardinals and went on to be a catcher for five seasons in the San Francisco Giants system.

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She met Sim through their social media pursuits, and says he helped convince her to take this path.

She also says that training with the players of that ilk has “definitely pushed me to be able to get to where I need to be now.”

“Trevor is truly amazing at being a pitching coach,” she added. “He can look at you and go ‘this is wrong,’ and ‘this is wrong,’ before you even let go the ball.”

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As for Momentum, Lyszczyk hopes that it does “bigger, better, more.”

“I want to see us continue to crush baseball content and maybe even branch out and do more sports and incorporate baseball into other things,” she said. “I want to just continuously try to make like the best content for our fans and for new baseball fans.

“I’ve always loved doing content. That’s something I leaned into before this, just because of all that stuff that was happening at school with NIL (Name Image Likeness sponsorship deals open to NCAA athletes). I didn’t know then that it would go any further than that.

“It’s still so crazy when people ask me what I do for living and I tell them that I’m a YouTuber. I mean, that never gets old for me. It’s just so crazy.”

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Bauer has been pitching in Japan and Mexico the past two seasons. He was placed on administrative leave by Major League Baseball in July 2021 after allegations of sexual assault were made against him by a San Diego woman. No criminal charges were ever filed. Bauer was suspended by MLB for 194 games (reduced from the initial 324 games) and he hasn’t landed a contract with another big-league club since being reinstated.

@Seveves

SEwen@postmedia.com

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