Baseball, the great American pastime that has not only brought joy and happiness to many Americans for years now but also has a rich history, even at some point changing American culture.

The issue for baseball is it seems is that only people who really played baseball or have been fans really follow it. What I’m really trying to say is that baseball is an incredibly hard sport to get into.

Not because of rules or scoring like how a someone might not understand what an icing in Hockey is, or a defensive pass interference is in football (Although I don’t even think NFL refs know the answer to this one) but baseball is hard to understand because of stats and versatility the players have.

Sure, people probably understand the basics of what a strike or ball is, what a home run is, or maybe a double play for some. However, when it comes to things like slugging percentages, differences between ace pitchers, starting pitchers, relief pitchers, and closers, OPS (On-Base Plus Slugging) percentages, batting averages, and pitchers ERA (Earned Run Average), it probably looks like a foreign language.

At least this all looked like a foreign language to me and if I’m being honest, I’m still not even fluent in this baseball language but that’s what brings me to the point of this article. At the beginning of this 2025 baseball season, I have decided that I’m going to become a baseball guy.

This basically means that I want to just become a big fan of the game and team very similarly to my diehard love for the Buffalo Bills and football. My hope is to write articles about my experiences trying to get into baseball so that it could maybe help others who have dealt with the same issues as I have when attempting to become a fan of the sport.

So where to begin? For today I think we should just focus on the obvious question, who are you going root for?
This question was not very hard for me to answer, I just picked the Toronto Blue Jays. My reason being their minor league team the Bisons are based out of Buffalo, and I went to their games when I was a kid. But if you want to root for another team, I won’t hold it against you, the important part is that you just have a team above all else.

Having a team to watch in baseball is important because of how hard it is to watch Major League Baseball on the National level, due to its massive 162 game regular season. The sheer quantity and frequency of games you miss within a couple days of watching can cause you to be completely behind which leaves most people discouraged and no longer interested.

That’s why picking a team is so important, by watching one team you don’t have to know everything that’s going on in the league just your own team. All teams play each other as well so while you might not always have the most up to date news, you definitely won’t be out of the loop.

Players in baseball are also constantly moving around whether it be pitchers coming in and out of the rotation, players getting sent down or brought up from their minor league teams, or even players being moved from position to position or batting order.

But I think this is a good place to start in the beginning of this 2025 MLB season and while I realize there was not a ton of information in this article, I think that just picking a team and watching a few games will be good and if you are enjoying come back for more weekly articles to learn about baseball and taking our first steps together in becoming a baseball guy (or gal).