The 2026 Major League Baseball season begins in about 48 hours and, for reasons still unbeknownst to me, the San Francisco Giants have drawn the opening assignment. A brand new season, full of brand new baseball, kicks off on Wednesday at Oracle Park, with the Giants hosting the New York Yankees, while the rest of the baseball world tunes in, eagerly awaiting their turn on Thursday (when the Giants get the alway-annoying Day 2 off day).
You know what to do. This isn’t your first rodeo, unless it is,
in which case, hello and welcome, we hope you enjoy your first date with baseball.
But in case you’ve forgotten — last Opening Day was a year ago, according to my calendar — well, here’s a refresher. Here’s 10 things you need to do before yet another season of baseball begins.
1. Stock up on beer and snacks
The older I get, the more I find myself gravitating to baseball over other sports. I only recently realized one of the main reasons: what sport has such a strong relationship with food?
You can’t go to the ballpark and not get a large, cold, overpriced beer, unless you don’t like beer, in which case you can’t go to the ballpark and not get a large, cold, overpriced margarita, unless you don’t drink, in which case you can’t go to the ballpark and not get a large, cold, overpriced lemonade. Or a water, I guess.
Cracker Jack? Baseball food. Garlic fries? Baseball food. Hot dogs? Baseball food. Dippin’ Dots, peanuts, frozen lemonade, cotton candy, gloopy nachos, and sunflower seeds? Baseball foods.
Most of us don’t make it to the ballpark often, for which our tailbones are appreciative. But over the years, I’ve decided that the couch experience of baseball-watching is greatly amplified by ensuring that baseball foods are exactly that: baseball foods, not ballpark foods.
And if you don’t eat baseball foods on Opening Day, when will you?
So my fridge is full of beer and hot dogs, and my pantry’s got enough sunflower seeds to ensure that my sodium levels stay delightfully in the red. Please join me.
2. Read Alex Pavlovic’s book
There’s still time to get and read Alex Pavlovic’s book, at least if you live in the Bay Area. Most bookstores within 50 miles of the ballpark should carry The Franchise: San Francisco Giants: A Curated History of the Orange and Black, and it’s a quick read. You can go get it tonight, read it tomorrow, and be ready to go on Wednesday.
Don’t let the double-colon insisted by the publisher trick you into thinking Pavs wrote anything other than a stellar book. I’ll be honest: I’m normally not a fan of this popular style of sports book, where writers are tasked with distilling a team into 20-something medium-length chapters. But Pavlovic wrote the best one I’ve read yet. While most of the books in this ilk are overly-formulaic, and read like someone curated 25 of the author’s articles from over the years, that’s emphatically not the case with this one. Pavs put in the work with countless interviews, and the result is that the book is filled with information that isn’t available elsewhere, and stories that haven’t been told.
If you haven’t read it yet, read it. You’ll have a good time, you’ll remember some great times, and you’ll learn a whole lot.
3. Check your subscriptions
Yes, it’s true: the streaming era has fully reached baseball, with countless “exclusive” options branching from the sport like snakes from Medusa’s head. Opening Day, as you’ve surely heard, is on Netflix, making it easier than ever to watch Love is Blind during commercial breaks. Saturday’s game eschews the local broadcast as well, going straight to FOX. Sometime next month, you’ll have to subscribe to Apple TV to watch the Giants play the Baltimore Orioles … while you’re there, I suggest binging Severance, unless the state of the world is bringing you down, in which case I recommend Ted Lasso.
What you shouldn’t do, is what I have a knack for doing with my accounts: waiting until 30 seconds before game time to make sure you’re logged in, and missing the first inning as you try to use your phone to send a code to your computer to let you in on your TV.
Technology, baby. Life’s never been more convenient.
You don’t just need to log in to Netflix and whatever platform you use for NBC Sports Bay Area broadcasts. Now’s also the time to check your written subscriptions, so you can digest as much Giants baseball as you’d like. I’m begrudgingly reporting that Vox Media still won’t allow me to take your money, so McCovey Chronicles will remain free to you. But we only cover so much: if you want reports from behind the scenes and the locker room, you’ll need to subscribe to Susan Slusser and Shayna Rubin at the San Francisco Chronicle, or Andrew Baggarly and Grant Brisbee (who?) at The Athletic, or Justice delos Santos at the Mercury News, or Kerry Crowley at the SF Standard.
Want to follow the Minor Leagues closely? You’ll need Roger Munter’s newsletter, which is second-to-none in Giants prospecting … or Baseball America and/or Baseball Prospectus if you want to follow prospects beyond those in Sacramento, Richmond, Eugene, San Jose, Papago, and Boca Chica. And if you want in-depth analytics and breakdowns, you’ll surely run through your monthly dose of free articles at Fangraphs.
If you’ve got a lot of money to spend and want to ingest as much Giants content as possible, you could easily spend triple digits monthly on subscriptions. Each one is well worth it, though you’ll probably want to pick and choose.
Also, if you’ve got a lot of money to spend, shoot me an email. I just want to talk. Got some questions.
4. Catch up on old friends
Sure, the Giants are your team, but we always end up watching extra baseball. And the best baseball, other than Giants baseball, is old friends baseball. Which means now is the time to see where those old friends are, so you can follow them this year.
Kyle Harrison is starting the year in the Milwaukee Brewers’ rotation. Mike Yastrzemski had a first Spring Training with the Atlanta Braves that would make Barry Bonds drool (seriously: he hit .400/.526/.900). Mason Black pitched well for the Kansas City Royals, though he’s beginning the year in AAA. Marco Luciano has been knocked down to AA for the New York Yankees. Wilmer Flores is headed to Mexico.
There are many, many others. We all have the players we’ve grown attached to over the years, even though they ultimately left. So see how they’re doing and where they are, so you can follow them.
Speaking of which…
5. Pick a second team
Having a second team is a rite of passage in baseball. If you don’t have a second team, who are you going to watch at night when the Giants play during the day? Who are you going to watch on Thursday and Sunday, when the Giants inexplicably don’t play? How can you be expected to survive on 162 games instead of 324?
My second team is the Houston Astros, because love makes you do things you previously thought were inconceivable. But if I’m recommending a second team to you, might I suggest the Seattle Mariners? They’re a fellow west coast squad, making them easier to follow. They have one of the most joyful players in baseball in Julio Rodríguez. They have a brewing intrasquad feud from the World Baseball Classic. Their best player is an MVP candidate with a nickname formed entirely due to his fat ass. They’ll likely make three or more trades with the Giants over the next 12 months.
But we all must choose our own journey, so pick the second team that makes sense to you. There are no wrong answers.
Except the Los Angeles Dodgers. That is emphatically a wrong answer.
6. Make sure your hat fits
Look, this one is very simple. You might be watching Opening Day from your couch, but you still need your gear. Hats have a way of magically changing size. Sometimes your head does a bit of Bruce Bochy wizardry and gets bigger. Sometimes you cut your hair and your size shrinks.
You can’t watch the first game without your memorabilia. Make sure your hat fits. Make sure your shirt is at the front of your closet. Make sure your lucky underwear is clean. I shouldn’t have to explain this to you.
7. Catch up on your lingo
Baseball has become a great sport for math nerds and english nerds alike. There are acronyms and initialisms and phrases galore. If the future follows the recent past, you’ll hear some, like OPS and WHIP, on the broadcast. You’ll hear a lot more, like FIP, IVB, and WAR, on the radio and the podcasts. You’ll get deeper still, with things like wRC+, xwOBA, and TOOTBLAN in these articles, and with the ever-present FYMM in the comment section. You’ll venture into territory I can’t even prepare you for if you geek out on Fangraphs.
No time like the present to get caught up on your lingo. Unless you don’t want to, in which case a well timed YOU SUCK when sitting in the bleachers still works wonders.
8. Familiarize yourself with the roster
Spring Training is a joyous time, but everyone utilizes it differently. Obsessing over the minutiae of the roster isn’t for everyone. There are plenty of you reading this who don’t have a great idea as to who will be on the Opening Day roster, and that’s completely fine. We all fan differently. Again: there’s no wrong way. Except rooting for the Dodgers.
Fangraphs has a great tool called RosterResource that you can look through to get a feel for the team’s depth chart, and familiarize yourself with the names you’ll see on Wednesday … and in April, May, and June. Get to know your guys: they’re about to break your heart, after all.
9. Make some bold predictions
Now is the time for bold predictions: we’re late enough into spring that they carry meaning, but early enough that they can easily be forgotten. Which means you can go wild. Making bold predictions in late March is like buying scratch-off tickets with someone else’s credit card: you get to enjoy the spoils of victory should things break your way, with no cost.
Head to the comment section, or to social media, or call your friends, and tell them your bold predictions for the season. If you predict that Patrick Bailey hits 20 home runs, the Giants win the World Series, and Casey Schmitt reinvents himself as an All-Star closer, you’ll get all the glory if PB somehow puts 20 balls over the fence, and no one will remember anything you said if the Giants win 70 games and Schmitt continues along as an infielder.
All glory, no accountability. Have at it.
10. Go toss a baseball around
This reads like the baseball equivalent of telling you to touch grass, but I really mean it. If you’ve got a ball, a mitt, and a friend, family member, or neighbor, go toss a ball around. Stand in the sun. Smell the grass. Take some Advil when your shoulder flares up after throwing 20 heaters at 45 mph. You’re not as young as you used to be. Don’t worry; I’m not either.
Baseball’s back. Enjoy it.
