Best of BP 2025: Fandom, Pitching, and Solitude

English is not my native language. Some of you might know this already, but I’m Spanish and have lived in my native country for my entire life, and have been to the U.S. exactly three times in my entire life. As my poor editors are well aware of, I exist on a different plane than the baseball world I frequently inhabit.

You probably know, if you’ve read my work, that I enjoy watching, talking, and writing about pitching. What you may not know is that baseball was never my favorite sport growing up. I’m 26 years old, but I didn’t grow up watching the great players of the 2000’s or even the early 2010’s. I have no fond memories of Albert Pujols, or Mike Trout, or the peak of Clayton Kershaw, or the Strasburg, Tim Lincecum, or Bryce Harper phenomenon. The first full season of baseball I can remember following was 2018, when I was nearing my third decade of life. I have no preconceived notions about this wonderful sport—not any I can’t logically diagnose, anyway. Baseball has not always been a huge of my life like it is today

I love writing pieces about player analysis. I get tons of satisfaction out of explaining complex pitching concepts in a simple way. I even dream of one day working full-time within baseball, the one corner of the world I’ve found genuinely rewarding up to this point. This piece, however, is not about those details or concepts. Instead, it’s about one of the main reasons behind my fascination with baseball, and how seeing yourself in a sport can tie you to it forever, even separated by an ocean’s width.

***

The first steps on the road that would eventually lead me to this very piece were not traveled in the land of baseball. That’s because baseball is not a relevant sport in Spain, where soccer is king. Every single kid who has grown up in Spain has played fútbol extensively, whether they liked it, loved it or hated it. Its presence is felt in every corner, every park, every school yard. It’s a gregarious sport that is very simple and intuitive to play and also requires little to no resources outside of the ball itself. We used to mark the imaginary goal posts with our bags full of books, or use two trees in close proximity, only to then argue incessantly about what qualified as a shot that was too high to count whenever some cheeky soul would inevitably aim way above the goalie’s head and celebrate like he’d just scored the go-ahead, Champions League-winning goal.

So I played it. But I never loved soccer as a kid, and still don’t to this day. I couldn’t have told you why then. As an adult, however, I can look back and think about the team and club culture that is so tightly woven into the fabric of the sport, and conclude that perhaps something about it repelled me. Instead, I preferred to watch and play basketball, which is probably Spain’s second most popular sport. The NBA and its videogames were my first proper introduction to the English language back when I was barely six years old. If it wasn’t for them, I don’t think I would be writing this piece and doing every bit of pitching analysis I’ve done over the last five years. There were others—Formula 1, most notably—but basketball was my first sports love. I still recall waking up every morning before school and dashing towards the family PC in order to watch highlights from the previous night’s games.

I played basketball for the entirety of my childhood and into my teenage years, all the way up until I was around 16 years old. I wasn’t some prodigy on the court. There were always kids who were taller, faster, stronger, and more audacious than me. I seem to remember that I passed the ball pretty well—not that I got a ton of mileage out of that skill. More than anything, I liked to shoot the basketball and wasn’t bad at it at all. Like any kid, my favorite shots to take were the ones I saw from pros twice my age, exactly the ones I couldn’t make consistently; difficult and off-balance pull-up attempts from long range, three-pointers off the dribble, gentle floaters from just inside the free throw line. I loved basketball. I used to dream about being a pro one day.

But I also hated basketball. I always felt so much more at ease shooting alone than playing with others. I distinctly remember the feelings of apprehension I would get whenever we would play another team in our local league, and how discouraged I was whenever those feeble imitations I worked tirelessly on didn’t pan out for me the same way they did for bigger, older, stronger and more skilled players. Every sport is cruel and elitist by design—they’re athletic competitions, after all—but basketball is unique in this regard because one of the sport’s main barriers of entry is related to your height, something you just don’t have any control over. At a certain point, I simply wasn’t tall enough to make up for any shortcomings. I’m of perfectly average height today, but that’s for normal life. For the maybe foolish hopes I once had, it wasn’t enough, and that was that. It was over.

***

Pitching is a solitary activity. I think even someone who isn’t very well acquainted with the sport could say that. What perhaps some of those newer fans could miss is how much of that solitude is a product of the game’s design. The pitcher holds the baseball and begins every play with his delivery, for starters, but there’s more to it than that.

Let’s start with the physical position the pitcher occupies, the mound, which is distinct in a few interesting ways. Its placement in the middle of the infield diamond already betrays some of the quirks it upholds, but there’s also the curious detail that we make sure the mound is made out of dirt, in stark contrast to the grass that surrounds it. It’s an island, a lone star we can’t help but focus on. The cherry on top is that the pitching mound is quite literally elevated over the rest of the field; the hurler resides in a different stratosphere from the rest of the players on the field. Pitchers also tend to walk to and off the mound, whereas everyone else knows to jog on and off the field. And the camera will always find them, both when they enter the game and during the remarkably unique ceremony that is being taken out of it. That long and lonely walk back to the dugout is quite possibly the best example of the isolation that pitching implies.

This is not a dynamic often seen in other popular team sports. Sure, the quarterback might be the most important position on the football field, but he’s also surrounded by teammates, five or more of which quite literally exist primarily to protect him. He also doesn’t hold the ball at the beginning of the play; the center, his co-pilot, does. Basketball players work in unison, even though only one of them can possess the ball. Rugby players are obviously cogs in one large machine. So are volleyball players. You can probably name other sports where this holds true. That is not the case in baseball.

The closest thing to the pitcher that we can find is the figure of the goaltender, whether in hockey, soccer, handball, or elsewhere. Even then, however, the goalie is a last line of defense and often not involved in the action. Goalies rarely hold the ball and frequently don’t even show up on camera when their team has possession. It’s a solitary job as well, but without a lot of the glory that the baseball pitcher is afforded. In what is ultimately one of the purest team sports around, one where an individual’s contributions to a winning team over 162 grueling games are minimal compared to others and determining who gets to swing the bat in the most important moments is nearly impossible, the pitcher stands out. He has a monopoly over the baseball, begins play, stands isolated from the rest of the field, and has the luxury of walking where everyone else must run to. He wins; he loses. He is the main character. And those are the ones we frequently find the easiest root for.

***

My basketball fandom didn’t survive high school. But it was also during high school, when I was about 12, that I began to get into what I would call American Football, after finding some related news about it by chance in some NBA magazine I used to read. It’s hard to explain how much of a shock football was for me, a teenage Spanish kid who’d never seen anything like it. Not even rugby compared; I could see the players’ faces there, so they looked like real people. Football, with its helmets with facemasks, seemingly superhuman shoulderpads and equally inhuman violence, was a different story. These players were superheroes—how else could they march onto the field and tolerate the brutality they were about to endure? And again, the players I was most drawn to were the wide receivers, the ones who had the job I was least equipped to perform. The ones who broke away from the huddle and stood noticeably apart from their teammates before knifing in between the coverage, all by themselves, like a fearless knight charging into battle all by his lonesome.

As a teenager, then, long after basketball had stopped catching my eye and even another childhood interest like Formula 1 had ceased to seem interesting, football was the only sport I cared about. Years later, this actually turned out to be the catalyst for my interest in baseball, despite the two sports being as diametrically opposed as they are. One of the many downsides of exclusively following the NFL—especially if you’re a New York Giants fan like me—the season is over by early January, and the waiting period between winter and fall is an excruciating slog. (There’s only so much I can care about the Draft when I can’t really watch college sports.) As such, I wanted 

Baseball was perfect. The season fits perfectly within football’s offseason, american sports were something I was already familiar with, and it was new and exciting. The main challenge was that, unfortunately, I didn’t know which team to root for, because I didn’t know any teams. Not wanting to be one of those people who immediately begin to root for the most popular teams, I found a solution I considered elegant and simplistic: I would simply pick my team like a toddler, based on how cool I thought their jerseys were. The best-looking uniforms would win out and earn my undying loyalty; an irreversible choice, as it turns out. It’s one of the many objectively irrational things that make sports so captivating.

Oh, about my pick? My favorite color is purple. I think you can guess how that turned out.

My first full season of baseball was 2018, when the Rockies were coming off a postseason berth and had tons of exciting talent on the team. I couldn’t have picked a better first impression. The emergence of Trevor Story, the continued excellence of Charlie Blackmon and Nolan Arenado, and more. Most important of all, however, the pitching was breathtaking; Kyle Freeland had his magical season; Germán Márquez battled back from early-season struggles to dominate and cement himself as my favorite pitcher; the bullpen turned it around and was terrific down the stretch. They were dead in the water and seemingly out of the postseason hunt late in the season, only to rip off a 19-9 September stretch. Even the heartbreak of losing Game 163 against the mighty Dodgers was remedied by a cathartic Wild Card win at Wrigley Field. The NLDS loss that followed was brutal, but also enticing. You could see the potential conquest in the distance.

I was irreversibly hooked from there. The game, with its slow pace and gut-wrenching volatility, had sunk its teeth into my heart. There was no turning back. If these last six years of following the Rockies haven’t been enough to deter me from loving baseball more with every passing season, nothing will.

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Being a baseball fan from so far away is an interesting experience. It can also be quite lonely. There’s half a baseball field in the city where I live, but it’s only partially functional and not very busy, often used as a park by a public that might not even realize what that weird dirt protuberance in the middle of a diamond-shaped quadrant is supposed to be. The general lack of interest is an obstacle for sharing a passion—not a single person in my life is what I would call a baseball fan, and even the well-meaning interest they sometimes show isn’t enough to satisfy a baseball fan’s endless appetite for discussion. But there’s more to it than that.

Time is another barrier. The earliest start times are often at 7 PM in Spanish time, which is actually quite decent given our infamously late schedules, but a lot of ballgames see their first pitch thrown well into the night. It’s even worse as a fan of a team so far from the East Coast; Rockies games usually begin at 2 AM. Since even I can’t stay up that late, I’m usually relegated to either condensed games the following morning, or a swift, barely attentive watch if I find the time before having to get on with my day. This nocturnal time slot only further adds to the solitude. I’ve developed my own schedules that don’t match those of nearly anyone else around me. There are times where I feel as though I’m on an island, precisely as a pitcher is, when I do what I like the most. It’s never enough to deter me, but it is enough for me to acknowledge it. This reality never leaves my head.

Space is yet another obstacle. It’s easy to feel isolated when you live thousands of kilometers away from the one thing you truly enjoy. I can count the number of times I’ve had the privilege of walking into a major league ballpark and experiencing their magic with the fingers of one hand; twice at Fenway Park, twice at Coors Field. I cherish every single one of those instances with near mythical reverence. Even if I go out of my way and head to one of those London Series games, it won’t be the same, and the prospect of hopping on a train and then a plane just for the sake of a ballgame is not an easy pill to swallow, neither practically nor financially. I could find comparable replicas of professional basketball in Spain; I can get the thrill of the huge crowds by buying a ticket to any first division soccer game. The slow, relaxed, and uniquely steady vibe of a baseball game, though, is not something I can find here, no matter how hard I look. And believe me, I have tried.

***

I’ve known for a long time that pitching is the baseball discipline I identify the most with. When I liked basketball, I was so much more comfortable shooting all by myself rather than doing team drills or playing three-on-three. When I found american football, I instantly drifted towards the isolated wide receiver and ran my route patterns in the park, catching imaginary passes and taking it to the house. Even outside of sports, I’ve long leaned towards that solitude. I used to read books by the hundreds as a kid; whenever I finished one I liked, I read it over and over again instead of moving on to the next one. When I was getting into football, I printed out the Wikipedia page and studied it obsessively, showering it with a level of attention that none of my school books received.

It’s probably not an incident that there’s something about the solitary nature of pitching that appeals to me. Perhaps, in some roundabout way, I see my own experiences as a fan reflected in the story of every hurler. Their isolation speaks to me, even though it partially furthers mine. Maybe some of that lies in a search for comfort. Maybe it’s a fondness for self-sabotage instead. Whatever the case, I’ve dug into the details and the data of this unique position in the world of team sports, an idol propped up to be taken down and removed in almost shameful fashion whenever the manager takes that slow walk up the dugout stairs, more than I could’ve ever thought it possible.

Just look at where I’ve landed as a fan; I root for the Colorado Rockies, one of the most hopeless and dysfunctional organizations in pro sports. And not only am I a Rockies fan, dragged into their orbit by something as trivial as my lack of knowledge and the color of their uniforms, I’m also a fan of pitching above all else. Picture that: a supporter of the most pitching-tortured team in baseball history, who also happens to enjoy good pitching a lot more than good hitting. It would be easy to see it as a cruel joke after all the winding roads my sports fandom has led me down.

I don’t, though. I’m not bitter about my baseball fandom, even though it certainly could be more rewarding if the Colorado Rockies decided to pick a realistic direction and stick to it for once. I wouldn’t change a thing about my trajectory. Despite the isolation, a common symptom of the modern world, the game of baseball is gratifying to me by virtue of its very nature. It curtails the loneliness and provides me with an endlessly intriguing and ever-evolving world to bask in and enjoy. And no matter how much it changes on the surface, the spirit of the pitcher, the lonely cowboy desperately firing his best bullets as he fights to remain in control, in the middle of it all and yet so alone at the same time, will never go away.

As long as that loneliness exists, baseball will exist. And as long as baseball exists, well, why wouldn’t I?