COCKY // DISTRAUGHT

Baseball? Boring????

Obviously baseball has a reputation for being boring, and if that’s what you feel, in some ways that’s hard to overcome. I’m not gonna lie and say baseball can’t be boring, but I think all sports can be boring (and imo low-offense football/hockey games are like. supremely boring.) And I'm gonna try, but really the best thing to do to get it is watch baseball with a friend or someone irl who likes baseball and can tell you what you’re watching. Or at the very least, pay attention to the broadcasters.

Anyway: boredom is part of the appeal. It’s a game with a lot of downtime. Like literally a 2013 study found that the ball is in play for just 17 minutes and 58 seconds. But that’s deceptive because, unlike in sports where the ball is always in play—and, still, nothing really is happening—in baseball, the fight to get the ball in play is most of the fun because the defense has the ball! To enjoy baseball you have to appreciate pitching and understand what a pitcher is doing because it’s basically the whole game. Waiting around for your team to score a run is missing the point and the whole appeal. 

It’s been said before (by me and countless others), but: every at bat is a game inside the game. It’s pure psychological warfare between the pitcher and the batter. There’s a finite set of outcomes of an at-bat (basically: strike out, walk, home run, or a hit or an out on a ball in play) but infinite ways things could happen if you can just get the ball in play, but it's so fucking hard to do. Hitting MLB pitching is somewhat-universally regarded as the hardest thing to do in all pro sports. Batters have 150 milliseconds to try to track the pitch being thrown and decide whether to swing at it, and the best pitchers are so good at tricking them. They throw 3-7 different pitches and you have no idea what's coming because they try to make every pitch look the exact same until after the hitter has to decide. Watching how the pitcher approaches a critical at-bat and how they try to get the next strike is what makes the “downtime” so exciting. And when it works—when the batter chases outside, or swings behind a changeup or at a splitter below the zone, or, best of all, just watches the pitch go by—and your pitcher gets out of a jam, it’s fucking euphoric. Any hit could be the hit that wins the game, even in the first inning, so every at-bat of the game matters. On the flipside, the game can still be won when your team is getting no-hit and is down to its final out in the bottom of the ninth like the Orioles did last year! To me, that isn’t boring; that means every at-bat is worth watching. 

There’s also just so much baseball being played—4,860 games in the MLB regular season alone—that there’s always something happening. A slump, a streak, a record, a comeback. I think baseball is a sport that lends itself best to complete devotion to one team, but watching all around the league means there's always something fun to watch.

Also all the games and all the downtime contributes to the players getting up to some really weird shit!

I wish I could recommend some baseball writers/podcasts but frankly I don't listen or read them much! A person can only consume so much baseball, and I honestly just watch a lot of it. I love the lazy comfort of a long, "boring" and "meaningless" regular season. It's there for me spring, summer, fall, nearly everyday. America's greatest pastime, and all that. I love the familiarity of the rhythm and cadences of a baseball game whether I'm at home, in a bar, at the ballpark. It's a hobby in a way it's hard for a sport to be if you don't play it.

History! Like literal historical narratives!

Baseball is just so old! MLB is the oldest pro sports league in the US & Canada (& we’ve been playing baseball much longer), and there’s so much history and politics tangled up with it!!!!! Recommendations if you want them:

Ken Burns’s Baseball (which as of June 9, 2026 is blessedly on youtube but probably not always). If you take anything from this post, you should watch Baseball!! Like I probably could have just linked the first episode in response to your question.

Lords of the Realm by John Heylar (labor politics)

I don't really want to mention Moneyball but it is a pretty good look at the rise of analytics in baseball and the movie gave us “how can you not be romantic about baseball?” which (without context cause honestly I don't remember the context) is essentially the thesis statement of sports rpf

The other thing that baffles me is even though we’ve been playing baseball so long, things are always happening for the first time ever. Last year Nick Kurtz was the first rookie ever to hit four home runs in a game in a season where two other players also did the same thing. Christopher Sánchez just completed the longest scoreless inning streak for a lefty (45.2 innings but his streak was actually 50.2 innings). On the way, he beat out a guy named Grover Cleveland Alexander (just one of many excellent Baseball Names) for a Phillies franchise record that had held for 115 years.

And! One of my favorite fun facts is that Glenn Burke (the first MLB player to come out as gay) invented the high five with Dusty Baker! Baseball and American culture are so intertwined its influence is invisible if you don't know about it, and it's fun to feel like a part of that.

RPF: This is probably what you're here for! down here!

As for the rpf side, I mean. Specifically when I said "narratively rich," I meant like. It’s a grueling season during the hottest laziest (sexiest) time of year and they’re playing nearly everyday. A team plays 162 games together (not counting spring training or the postseason), and they're on the road for 81 of those for like seven days at a time. Not to be a pervert so openly but do we really think they're not fuckin and suckin on those trips? (I mean at the very least we know many players are cheating on their wives and gfs; why not with each other, ya know?) They spend so much time with each other, how could they not become obsessed with each other? Not become unhealthily co-dependent? 

And it’s such a brutal sport. Physically and mentally exhausting. It’s a sport where, as an individual, you fail more often than you succeed (to quote Ken Burns (I think): “the men who fail seven times out of ten are considered the game's greatest heroes.”) Don't we all love to torture our blorbos? And these guys are playing the torture sport! Like just this season, Fernando Tatis, Jr., after hitting 25 home runs last year, just hit his first home run of the season this year on May 30 during his 208th at-bat of the season. Dude’s in a torture nexus and it’s the sport he loves to play. Baseball players are all such fucking weirdos because they’re willingly playing the torture sport and they have to cope.  

Anyway I simply can’t recommend any fic. I read it but as my original post demonstrated the situation is dire and I'm not even reading the popular pairings. What I can recommend are some excellent m/m baseball romance novels that capture why baseball rpf has so much untapped potential in my opinion

You Should Be So Lucky by Cat Sebastian

The Unwritten Rules series by KD Casey (especially Unwritten Rules and Diamond Ring !!!!!!!!!)

The Prospects by KT Hoffman !!!!!!!!!!!!