With the season already over, this is a pretty weird time to get into baseball, man, but I am here for it. The urge to start watching a bunch of guys in pajamas try and fail to hit a ball with a stick three times out of ten creeps up on you—often as you get a little older and a little wiser. Maybe you’re starting from nothing and you’re completely lost, or maybe you watched Moneyball one time and you’re looking for a gentle nudge in the right direction, slugger. Everybody needs a baseball dad. He is me.

(Pixabay / stanbalik)

I’m not a new baseball fan anymore, but I was. And I’ll argue that the cold, sleepy winter months are a good time to take a run at it. Not the perfect time, mind you, but with perfect being the enemy of good and whatnot, we can make it work. I believe in you.

Sportswriters call the off-season the “hot stove league,” where whispered trade rumours flit in from dark corners and a team full of possibilities and unending potential emerges from the wintry haze and begins to take shape in our minds. The term refers to the days of old, where townspeople gathered at the general store or post office to huddle around the warmth of a lovingly blackened, pot-bellied stove, talking and dreaming of baseball which came as sure—and as welcome—as springtime.

Some fans may tell you to start by watching games. Just be warned that this can backfire in spectacular fashion and set you back some, pushing you farther away from the game than when you first started. Baseball without context is dangerous and subversive. Common complaints are that it’s boring, or confusing. Or that it’s called the World Series when it’s only the United States and Canada.

I have invited friends over to watch postseason (playoff) baseball who ended up staring at their phones. I have gone to Blue Jays/Mariners games in Seattle and had a friend fall asleep in three out of four but that doesn’t count—he’s fallen asleep at a rave.

Baseball lives and dies in the details. It exists within the stat-lines of the guy coming to set on the mound, and the guy stepping into the batter’s box. It exists in a clump of infield dirt rubbed deliberately between two palms for grip—he foregoes batting gloves and he’s had a little luck this way. There’s an entire story that exists in the 45 feet between the two, and it’s even better, even more tense if they’ve faced each other before. Will the story be one of domination, or retribution? For lovers of drama, baseball lives and dies on when and why a guy chooses not to swing the bat.

Baseball is not the first sport I got into, however. It was Formula 1 back in 2014. That came purely from realizing that racing had more depth than I had originally thought. It had rules (racing lines), and it had rivalries and serious beef between teams and drivers.

If you enjoy these things, all sports are amazing. But baseball is my favourite and still has such an allure. It’s harder to pin down but it speaks to the part of my brain that is all about vibes. Not just big arena energy, adrenalin pumping vibes like how it is with football and hockey, but guys standing around, cheeks packed with chew, leaning on the knobs of their bats vibes. Guys hanging out in foxholes vibes.

To get into baseball I think you need to buy into the whole vibe and romance of it before anything else. For that reason I’ll go the opposite route and say save the documentaries and baseball manager sims (superfans, really “inside baseball” people tend to blanket recommend these) until after you start following the game and feel good enough about a team and fanbase to buy their hat.

Tiny things that made me get into baseball:

• Everybody Wants Some!! This Richard Linklater flick is not about baseball, but it’s about guys on an ‘80s college baseball team living in a house together, rolling around the neighbourhood, hanging out and getting into hijinks. And when they do practice baseball, it’s cool as hell.
• When I used to watch Billions, there was a scene of a hedge fund trader who showed one of the characters an investment he’d made, and it was a baseball prospect taking hacks at a pitching machine in a training facility—the plan being to develop him into a superstar so that he could see some return on his investment. I never thought about sports farm systems like that before.
• Random writers like Kerouac and DeLillo who were reportedly crazy about baseball, and if they wrote about it, they made it seem like the coolest, most exciting sport in the world. All vibes. Kerouac kept a notebook full of stats and records from his own dice-based baseball game and he simulated entire seasons of fantasy ball.
• Pitch, and Eastbound and Down. Two shows, very different, but spoke to how cool mechanically pitching is. They’re gunslingers on the mound. Pitch also got me interested in front office action, making trades and signing players, as that’s a huge source of excitement off the field.
• Then Moneyball. Fascinating, simply put. Watching it didn’t get me into baseball in 2011, but it has become a holiday rewatch for me in the last few years. For me, Moneyball is putting together everything I learned and continue to learn as I get a better handle on baseball terms and stats. It’s about seeing the game in a very gamey way, which video gamers will appreciate. Especially if you play tactical, strategy games like X-COM or CRPGs (looking at you, Baldur’s Gate 3). It’s about speccing up your team, developing strengths and patching up any holes. This isn’t strictly a baseball thing but baseball gets a heck of a lot easier to understand put in these terms: player stats are basically RPG stats.

If you feel ready to put a game on and start watching, early on, baseball might be hard to sit through. Stick with it. It’ll start to make sense. A barely-there squibber for the good guys that sneaks underneath a defender’s glove will make you pump your fist in the air. Online communities, while full of vitriol and hot air, can do wonders to keep your excitement at a high and you might even learn something. Pick a team and subreddit or Discord server with a lot of fans and high participation in game discussion threads.

And once you find yourself watching games regularly and enjoying that the fact there’s baseball nearly every day, then check out Ken Burns Baseball (PBS) and The History of the Seattle Mariners (Youtube). Then check out Effectively Wild and Out of the Park Baseball. They throw a lot of information at you and it’s easy to start having second thoughts. The Ken Burns documentary is 20 parts, each one an hour and a half. I needed to be a card-carrying fan to sit through all of it, but it really is wonderful. You can check out Joe Posnanski and his podcast with Mike Schur (of Parks and Rec fame) which I find delightful, but they are crazy about all things sports and if you don’t know too much history it can sometimes wash over you. Seriously, start small.

Baseball is beautiful. Good luck.

Over the next two weeks I will be continuing this series as we head into the winter with recommendations for baseball media in order to fascinate, entice, and delight newcomers and long-time fans alike.