This blog is inspired by conversations I had with a friend of mine, who died a year ago as I begin to write. Tom wasn’t into baseball, but he was interested in how someone who lived in Scotland and had spent their entire life playing, watching and writing about football (me) had become obsessed with a sport that is not that easy to follow from this side of the Atlantic.
So I’d talk to him about how baseball connects with what I’ve always wanted from sport: stories, characters, romance, history, communities. And these are the stories I’ll be telling here. There won’t be a barrage of statistics, and I’ll try to explain the particular language of baseball as we go. If there’s something that’s getting in your way, use the comments section to ask a question, or start a conversation, and hopefully we’ll learn the game together.
Before the 2025 season starts in the last week of March, I’ll be writing about some of the big storylines, and drawing a roadmap for the baseball season. Then, when the epic, seven-month saga begins, I’ll be your guide through it – and we’ll even get to watch some games together.
ABOUT ME
I’m Neil White. For the first half of my professional life, I was a sportswriter for national newspapers in Scotland, writing about football, boxing, golf and anything else they asked me to write about (but mostly football). For the past 15 years I’ve been running, with my main hombre Martin Greig, a sports content company called BackPage.
The baseball bug had lain dormant in my system since I repeatedly rented the VHS tape of the movie Major League from Grampian Domestics, a household appliance rental shop in my hometown of Stonehaven, which converted one wall from housing vacuum cleaners to video tapes in the mid-1980s. The old lady running the shop seemed to have no understanding of the BBFC ratings system and a 13-year-old could rent without question the latest Schwarzenegger actioner, brutal slasher pic or nudity-guaranteed comedy, so hiring a 15-rated baseball movie was child’s play (which is also the name of one of the inappropriate horror movies she handed over no-questions-asked).
The virus flared up again at the end of the 90s, when Channel 5 in the UK started broadcasting live Major League Baseball around midnight on weekdays. I was in my mid-20s and this fit perfectly with my lifestyle at the time.
My situation became terminal at the end of the 2010s, after we worked on Ben Reiter’s book Astroball, about the Houston Astros’ rocket-ship ride from worst to first in MLB. It was written before that same team were discovered to have carried out one of the most notorious cheating schemes in American sports history. More on that later, I can almost guarantee.
THIS GOES OUT TO TOM HEYWOOD
This whole thing is dedicated to the memory of my friend Tom Heywood, who died almost exactly a year ago, as I write these first posts.
Tom was a special kind of guy. A super-connector. Expert at finding special little gardens in which his many, many friendships could flourish. That could be a shared love of a particular band – like The Charlatans or The Beta Band – or a football team (he was Bristol City) or a comedian, or a television show, and on and on.
When I told him that I had become obsessed with baseball, he decided he’d get into it, too, so we could watch games together (via WhatsApp – Tom and I lived about four hours apart). Tom’s team was Seattle – his brother lives there still and he had visited the city often. They never got it together in time for poor Tom, but Mariners, if you’re looking for a rallying cry for 2025, his name is Tom Heywood.
I missed Tom’s messages coming through during games last year. Every time something amazing or funny or dramatic happened, my silent phone was a reminder that he’s not here anymore. That’s part of the reason I decided to do this Substack. I hope you get to read it, Tom.
Emails are great, but the Substack app is where we hang out
By subscribing to Baseball for Beginners, everything I make will zoom right into your email inbox. That’s great and it’s how I use Substack most of the time. However, if you download the app, you can access the ‘chat’ function, which allows subscribers of Baseball for Beginners to connect with each other. That’s going to be especially important once the season starts at the end of March, so we can all watch MLB games together. I know! Another app! But, come on. It’ll be fun.
