how does one get into baseball. can you just start watching a random thing or should you try to start at the beginning of a season or like. hows that work
here was my process
have boyfriend who loves baseball (this is truly not an essential step bc i went a year and a half of our relationship before making any active moves towards getting into baseball but having someone in your life who loves it DOES help)
read The Echoing Green by joshua prager, a book chronicling a sign-stealing (cheating) scandal that led to and marred one of those home runs informally monikered The Shot Heard Round the World bc of its impact on baseball fans during a time when baseball was still really popular in the usa. the book was written by a journalist who is an avid baseball fan, so it's FULL of statistical information, technical terminology, humanity, and deep, elegant, funny, sad, joyful insights into the role of the sport within people's minds and american (and global) culture. it's additionally about the giants and dodgers, bf's team and bf's team's eternal rivals
look up a lot of definitions and explanations while reading that book, start to become enamored with the weirdness of the game
download the mlb app, make an account, and use it to listen to radio broadcasts of giants games, because the app aggregates the radio stations for every team and broadcasts them almost-live for every game, for free
have switch flipped in your brain for you after your first time listening to a complete game on the radio
listen to at least part of every one of your team's games since then except all-stars bc you were on a plane
you don't have to start at the beginning of a season, and a random thing is totally fine! honestly i recommend the live radio steps of my method bc they were hugely accessible and following what's happening with a team in the present day makes things pretty exciting and engaging. (baseball has also been broadcast on the radio for a very long time so it's a cool way to engage with history.) there are also livestreaming piracy sites for sports including one that has had video streams of every baseball game i've wanted to watch rather than listen to .... i can share the url privately if u want. the mlb app/mlb.com also does a Free Game of the Day every day, where the video stream of one game will be free! also there are lots of full games on youtube, and old radio games on archive.org.
i can't in good faith recommend like, reading a long book and going on wikipedia deep dives trying to piece things together and teaching yourself stuff as an entry method for everyone since that's not .... fun, for everyone, but it did a lot towards getting me into the game in a way that exposed me to some of its most interesting elements right from the getgo, so (shrugs). (and it was fun for ME!! hehe) i also sort of had a team picked out for me going in, which helped -- like i totally could've gotten into another but i'd heard about the giants from mar, and about some interesting parts of their character as a team and their history, and for several reasons they on their own were appealing to me so while i listen to a broadcast from other teams now and then i was locked in from the start. which fast tracked me towards caring about specific players, eras, moments. plus, alaska doesn't have a baseball team
re: the season -- the way baseball works is for most of the season every team is playing every other team, more or less, in series of 2-4 games. during this period everything is just hammering out division standings. tournament-stuff starts happening during the postseason (starts october i think?) so that's when jumping in in the middle might get confusing. even then tho u would probably be fine. games happen like, often every day and sometimes twice a day, with occasional rest days
thank u for asking me this this was fun :D feel free to ask me to clarify anything
