Tomorrow night, the 2026 MLB season kicks off and for the first time ever, Opening Night airs on Netflix. Yankees at Giants, Max Fried vs. Logan Webb, globally available. If you’ve never watched baseball, this is your excuse.

I know my audience. Most of you are from Austria. You grew up with football, skiing, maybe Formula 1. Baseball is that weird American sport where guys stand around in a field for three hours. I get it. I felt the same way once. But somewhere along the line, this sport grabbed me and never let go, and I want to explain why.

The Hardest Thing in Sports

I mean this literally. Hitting a baseball thrown by a major league pitcher is, by the physics, the single hardest thing to do in professional sports.

Here’s why. An MLB fastball arrives at 95 to 100 mph (that’s 150 to 160 km/h). From the pitcher’s mound to home plate is 18.44 meters. At 95 mph, the ball covers that distance in about 400 milliseconds. But the batter doesn’t have 400 milliseconds. The human brain needs roughly 100ms just to process visual information. Another 25ms to start a motor response. The swing itself takes about 150ms. That leaves the hitter approximately 125 milliseconds, an eighth of a second, to decide whether to swing, where to swing, and commit to it.

And that’s just the fastball. A good pitcher also throws a curveball that drops 15 to 30cm more than the eye expects, a slider that sweeps laterally, and a changeup that arrives 15 km/h slower but looks identical out of the hand. The batter has to identify which pitch is coming, predict its trajectory, and place the bat, a 7cm diameter cylinder, on a path to meet a 7.4cm ball, within a margin of error of roughly 6 millimeters. Miss by that much and you’re popping out weakly to second base instead of driving one into the gap.

This is why a .300 batting average, failing 7 out of 10 times, makes you an All-Star. No other sport celebrates a 30% success rate as elite.

It reminds me of Roger Federer’s Dartmouth commencement speech. He won nearly 80% of his matches over his career, one of the most dominant athletes ever. But he won only 54% of the individual points. Barely more than a coin flip. His lesson was: when you lose almost every second point, you learn not to dwell. You move on to the next one. Baseball is the same, but even more extreme. The best hitters in the world fail 70% of the time. The entire sport is built on mastering failure.

And honestly? So is building a startup. The odds are even worse. Most founders don’t succeed on their first try, or their second, or their third. From the outside, the ones who eventually break through look lucky. A .300 batting average looks like luck too, until you understand the thousands of hours of practice, the film study, the micro-adjustments between at-bats, the mental discipline to step back into the box after striking out three times in a row. It’s not luck. It’s world-class perseverance disguised as probability.

The founders who make it aren’t the ones who never fail. They’re the ones who don’t dwell on it. They learn, they adjust, they step back up. Same as a hitter. Same as Federer. The lesson is the same at every level: the game rewards those who refuse to let the last point, the last at-bat, the last failed pitch define them.

It’s Chess at 160 km/h

But what hooked me isn’t the physics alone. It’s the strategy.

Every pitch is a decision. The pitcher and catcher are running a chess match against the hitter. What did he see last at-bat? Is he sitting on the fastball? Does he struggle with breaking stuff down and away? Is he likely to bunt with a runner on first? The count changes everything. A 3-1 count (three balls, one strike) is a hitter’s count, so the pitcher has to come in with something hittable. A 0-2 count is a pitcher’s count, and now you’re expanding the zone, tempting the batter to chase something unhittable.

Then zoom out. The manager is thinking three innings ahead. Is this the right matchup for the lefty reliever? Do we sacrifice the runner to second with a bunt, or let the power hitter swing away? Do we intentionally walk this guy to set up a double play? Every decision cascades into the next. A single substitution in the sixth inning can determine whether you win or lose in the ninth.

And all of this happens within a sport where there’s no game clock. The game takes as long as it takes. That patience, that tension building pitch by pitch, it’s addictive once you feel it.

Shohei Ohtani Is Not Normal

If hitting a baseball is the hardest thing in sports, and pitching at an MLB level is nearly as hard, then doing both at an elite level should be impossible.

Shohei Ohtani does it anyway.

He’s a four-time MVP. He hits tape-measure home runs from the left side and throws 100 mph from the mound. He is, genuinely, the most talented baseball player alive and arguably one of the most talented athletes in any sport, ever. The last MLB player who was truly elite at both hitting and pitching was Babe Ruth, a hundred years ago. (Negro League greats like Bullet Rogan and Martín Dihigo did it too, but in the majors, the gap between Ruth and Ohtani is a full century.)

This year, for the first time as a Dodger, Ohtani will be a full two-way player from Opening Day. He missed most of the pitching side the last two years recovering from elbow surgery. Now he’s back. Pitching coach Mark Prior has teased “the full version.” His first pitching start is March 31 against Cleveland.

I’m a massive fan. Not of the Dodgers, of him. Watching Ohtani play is like watching someone break the game. He’s the reason I tell people to tune in. Even if you don’t understand baseball, you’ll understand that what he’s doing shouldn’t be possible.

The Kyle Tucker Superteam

Speaking of the Dodgers, they just signed Kyle Tucker for 4 years, $240 million. His present-day average annual value of $57.1 million is the highest in MLB history. And they added him to a roster that already has Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto.

They’ve won back-to-back World Series. The obvious pick for 2026 is the Dodgers completing the three-peat. No team has done it since the 1998-2000 Yankees. With Tucker added to what was already the best roster in baseball, it’s hard to argue against them. Vegas has them at +230. FanGraphs gives them a 27% chance to win it all, which sounds low until you realize it’s higher than the next three teams combined.

If you’re looking for a team to casually root for, the Dodgers are the easy choice. Ohtani alone is worth the price of admission. Tucker makes them cartoonishly good.

My Prediction: This Is the Year for Detroit

But I’m not a Dodgers fan. I’m a Tigers fan. And I have a feeling.

Detroit has quietly built the most dangerous starting rotation in the American League. Tarik Skubal won back-to-back Cy Young awards and is the favorite to three-peat. They signed Framber Valdez, an innings-eating machine, for $115 million, the richest deal in franchise history. And then they brought Justin Verlander home. He’s 43 years old, he left Detroit in 2017, and he’s back on a one-year deal chasing the one thing he never got here: a championship. His first start at Comerica Park is April 5 against the Cardinals. The script writes itself.

Oh, and today they announced that Kevin McGonigle, the No. 2 prospect in all of baseball, 21 years old, described as the best pure hitting prospect the Tigers have had since the 1970s, made the Opening Day roster. He bats leadoff on Thursday.

Now, if you know the Tigers, you know the pattern. They look good in spring. They compete through May, maybe June. Then the summer collapse comes. The bullpen falls apart, the bats go cold, and by August they’re sellers at the trade deadline. It’s happened so many times it’s almost tradition.

My prediction: not this year. This rotation is too deep. McGonigle is too good. The farm system behind him, Max Clark, Josue Briceno, is too stacked. And the Verlander narrative is too powerful. This Tigers team doesn’t just have talent. It has purpose.

Tigers make a deep playoff run. Book it.

Watch Tomorrow

If you’re reading this and you’ve never watched a baseball game: tomorrow night is your moment. It’s on Netflix. You already have an account. Put it on. Give it two innings. Let the rhythm of the game settle in. Watch a pitcher paint the corner at 98 mph. Watch a hitter foul off four straight pitches, battling, refusing to go down. Watch a fielder dive full extension and somehow come up with the ball.

And then tell me it’s boring.

I won’t lie to you, there’s a realistic chance you will. Nobody falls in love with baseball in one game. It’s not that kind of sport. It’s slow. It’s subtle. The drama builds over innings, over series, over a 162-game season. It took me years before I truly got it.

But that’s the thing. Once it clicks, it clicks forever. Give it a few games. Let the rhythm settle in. Pick a team. Learn a few names. And then one night, in the seventh inning of a meaningless Tuesday game, something will happen, a diving catch, a full-count battle, a walk-off hit, and you’ll feel it. That’s when baseball has you.