The baseball season is a special kind of slog. From the start of spring training to the World Series, the sport is about 250 days of play—with few breaks, and stardom measured by failing into success. Players have famously made it to the Hall of Fame with a batting average that amounts to getting a hit three out of every 10 at-bats. Hot streaks are expected as much as cold ones, constant adjustments are required whether during games or between them, and each player is trying to manage these rhythms through the heat of the summer at outdoor ballparks across the country.
But it all starts with hope. The possibilities of spring feel endless, as winter thaws, nature blossoms, and moods rise. It’s no coincidence that, when Opening Day arrives and everyone starts 0-0, baseball fans may feel more bullish about their team’s fate than do fans of any other league. Mathematically speaking, more can happen over a 162-game season of nine-inning games than in any other major American sport.
It’s in this alchemy of potential that, more than anything—aside from wins—positivity is required. Slumps and losses are going to happen, but then, too, walk-off hits, no-hitters, and winning streaks are never out of reach. And there are few people in and around baseball who better understand and embody all of this than journalist, data enthusiast, and beer lover Eno Sarris.
“The thing about Eno is, seeing him is like sitting down with an old friend, even though we were just casual Twitter acquaintances,” recalls Zack Newman, who knew of Sarris through his baseball coverage and had proximity to him in the Bay Area. That Twitter (now X) connection led to shared beers on a couple occasions in 2017 and 2018. “People know him because of how smart he is, but his laugh and smile to me are almost iconic. That’s what sticks out in my memory—he’s always smiling.” (In one interview for this story, Sarris averaged a series of laughs almost every minute. It was not an outlier from other conversations, either.)
Spending time and sharing stories with people who’ve known Sarris for a few minutes or years relays an incredible consistency of first-, fourth-, or umpteenth-impressions for the reporter who rose to prominence with FanGraphs (a news site focused on baseball analysis) and grew his audience with his current work at sports site, The Athletic. He’s a likable guy who also happens to be one of the smartest minds in a room, a seasoned storyteller, and one of the most important journalists covering baseball today. His work has been part of understanding how players can improve and even prolong careers, and how some sorta, kinda “cheat.” It’s also been used to grasp how players actually do cheat, leading Major League Baseball to alter the rules of its game.
“People know him because of how smart he is, but his laugh and smile to me are almost iconic. That’s what sticks out in my memory—he’s always smiling.”
Over the past decade, Sarris has brought that same kind of passion to beer, where his enthusiasm and advocacy for craft beer has inspired the seeking and sharing of recommendations on Twitter, led to collaboration beers with breweries across the country, and spawned professional pit stops where Sarris hoped his analytical mindset would help contextualize the beer industry and its fans.
“Eno is one of the best pitching analysts out there. He's brilliant and always trying to learn something new,” says Rob Friedman, better known as the Pitching Ninja, and a renowned analyst in his own right. “He asks a lot of questions and gets his hands dirty—digging into tough issues with his very logical and intellectual approach, but with his own unique angle.”
That angle, threaded through his work and everyday interactions, is held together by the same kind of resiliency and hope that’s woven into a baseball season. Friends, colleagues, and strangers all agree: What makes Sarris so good at his job is genuine curiosity and an outlook of what could be, even when the stats say otherwise.
“Eno gives me more optimism about humanity than just about anyone else,” says Derek VanRiper, a colleague and podcast co-host at The Athletic.
Eno Sarris is sitting at a patio table on the promenade level of Oracle Park—home to the San Francisco Giants—and he’s laughing as he tells stories about baseball, beer, and the people he’s met because of it all. For a person who's lived in a dozen different places over his 44 years, it’s almost irrelevant to ponder whether home might be a place or simply an element—because Sarris is clearly in his. The Giants and Boston Red Sox are in a one-run game, the home team behind. Sarris breaks down hitting approaches (pay attention to where warmup swings are placed) and gives insights on the pitcher. In the midst of this, Ellie, a gray-haired, long-time usher, walks up. She’s got an appropriate curiosity about the person getting his photograph taken many times over. (It’s Sarris.) “Who are you guys?” is the icebreaker, but when she learns she’s surrounded by beer lovers, that ice instantly melts. For 20 minutes, she trades stories and references to favorite beers from across California and explains why Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier Dunkel is one of the best beers she’s ever had.
For Sarris, baseball has always been a pivotal connection to others. And in this moment, Ellie is yet another person brought into his orbit because of it—with a little kismet mixed in, given her affinity for Oakland’s Cellarmaker Brewing Company and mixed-fermentation Saison. Baseball and beer are both languages for Sarris, and he speaks them fluently with strangers and fans alike.
After Sarris was born in Jamaica, his mom remarried to an American and the trio moved to Germany, where his parents operated a car import/export business. When Sarris entered first grade, he spoke Jamaican Patois, was learning German, and baseball became yet another foreign language that needed translating. His stepfather taught local kids the American pastime as a way to help Sarris make friends in a foreign country. After a year in Hamburg, it was a move to the U.S. that would solidify the sport in his life.
"Baseball was, for me at first, a way to be American and kind of a way to fit in in Atlanta when I was the weird kid with a German-Jamaican accent," Sarris recalls.It helped that he would learn, practice, and share in the fun of recreating the batting stances of famous players like Gary Sheffield and Julio Franco, whose uncommon bat movements and leg kicks created as much lore among kids as their prolific home runs. He also collected baseball cards, which gave him a connection to other kids and inspired a fascination with stats that would lead to a love of fantasy baseball.
“There was this feeling that in any situation, Eno could come in and be the life of the party. He’s very good at finding connections with people.”
But because of his parents' work in hotels and hospitality, Sarris and his family kept moving. After Atlanta it was smaller cities in Georgia, then Florida. When he earned a scholarship to Milton Academy—a Massachusetts prep school famous for its politico alumni, including multiple Kennedys—Sarris continued using baseball as a quick and easy way to make friends. “When I moved to a place, I’d become a fan of the team there,” he says. Sarris also admits that he sometimes partied with other students at Milton, which helped build connections as they would at any other high school.
“Eno was always very low-key chill and would laugh at just about anything,” says Ethan Kurzweil, who knew Sarris at Milton and stayed in touch when both attended Stanford University for undergrad. “There was this feeling that in any situation, Eno could come in and be the life of the party. He’s very good at finding connections with people.”
Constantly having to master socializing with new peers can bring its share of awkwardness—but it can also enforce a belief in positivity. Or, at least an understanding that carrying yourself a certain way leads to easier conversations.
“I’ve actually wondered if Eno’s perspective is because he’s been able to travel and live in different parts of the world so much,” says VanRiper, who’s known Sarris for nearly a decade. “When you get to see the world and surround yourself with different people, you have a perspective that can be more open and welcoming than closed off and bitter.”
It’s a personality trait that serves Sarris well.
Reporting is a lot like dating, Sarris asserts; you're constantly trying to get strangers to like you so they'll talk about intimate details of their lives. You have to be endlessly optimistic that your confidence, personality, and jokes can do the trick. The other person might seem like they're always playing hard-to-get. You’d better say the right thing to open them up.
Sarris is giving a CliffsNotes play-by-play of all this as he attempts to snag a few minutes with Giants shortstop Brandon Crawford, who's rehabbing an injury and, between fielding drills, getting lovingly mobbed by kids just a few feet away. "Just trying to make eye contact," Sarris relays in real time, trying to lock pupils with Crawford. The pre-game interview never happens, but it's a comparison Sarris turns to in other situations to describe what led him to understand, appreciate, and grow at his job. There’s a little bit of never-give-up ethos that any good reporter can never let go, and this first-date comparison is not so much a professional credo as a skill set Sarris has learned in his years on the job.
Sarris almost failed out of Stanford after receiving “lots of Fs” for papers that disagreed with what professors were teaching in his economics classes. “I couldn’t tell if maybe I wasn’t arguing it well enough, or they just didn’t like what I was saying,” he says. It didn’t matter, because when he swapped a bachelor’s degree program in economics for a trio of concentrations in psychology, art history, and creative writing, things clicked. He was also forming a deep love for beer, buying kegs of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale as the “good keg” to hide away at parties for himself and others. “Anytime I was around Eno, any intensity in my life faded,” Kurzweil says.
Sarris earned his bachelor’s degree in 2001, “but the economy was in shambles” and he returned for a master’s degree in media studies to buy some time before starting a career. With most of his friends graduated and elsewhere, he got into fantasy baseball, playing in open, public leagues via Yahoo!, and started a 12-team dynasty league with other fans he met in a fantasy baseball forum—a league he still competes in today.
“His work is endlessly fascinating in a way that explains the game, but it doesn’t program the game into a computer simulation.”
In 2002 he began an entry-level job at Wadsworth Publishing, and those fantasy leagues were a lifeline to escape workday boredom. On the side, he started writing and managing forums for Fantasy Lounge Sports, which eventually led to earning actual money covering baseball: In the mid-2000s he was making $40 total for about 12 stories a month at GodBlessBuckner.com, a now-defunct Mets blog. That turned into $50 a month for five-to-six stories at a Mets blog hosted with SB Nation, and in 2009, it helped him earn a spot netting $10-$15 a post from FanGraphs, writing about fantasy baseball. In 2011 he entered sports reporting for good, becoming a lead fantasy writer and manager at FanGraphs, one of the earliest analytics-forward baseball publications.
It was Sarris’ coverage of fantasy baseball that got him on the radar of fans all over, providing tips and insights about a game where everyday people draft fake teams of real players and compete against each other by trying to accumulate the best stats—like most home runs or lowest ERA (earned run average). His live Q&A sessions on FanGraphs became legendary among fans, mixing unique insights and pop culture references with random interludes, allowing non sequiturs from the public to fill gaps: “I like swimming with bow legged women,” one 2016 interlude post read, a callout to “Jaws.” Sarris’ use of sabermetrics—a statistics-focused approach to analyzing baseball—made him among the most popular mainstream writers in the 2010s to show people how new statistics could help them better understand the game.
“His work is endlessly fascinating in a way that explains the game, but it doesn’t program the game into a computer simulation,” says Jason Gudim, a pastor in Minneapolis. For years, Gudim has fed his love for baseball by devouring Sarris’ groundbreaking pitching analysis—first on FanGraphs and now on The Athletic. While he’s chatting about Sarris, Gudim glances at his computer, where he’s watching a game between the Arizona Diamondbacks and Atlanta Braves. “If there’s a random middle reliever who’s about to come up and he’s got the best slider in baseball, I want to know more about that thing, and Eno’s the one who helps with that.”
“By nature, every single person that plays or works in baseball is optimistic in nature, but Eno kind of embodies that constantly.”
Sarris’ work is littered with examples of how he can explain something seemingly mundane—such as a middle reliever’s pitch mix—in a way that’s fascinating. Nuances like how ivy on a wall can impact a hitter’s ability to make contact or how pitchers think about the makeup of the mound from which they throw can seem monotonous at face value. Or—in the right hands and with the right data, reporting, and curiosity—they can unlock new truths to a centuries-old game. (And inspire fan-made songs about that work.)
Sarris says relying on numbers allows him to be cynical: They don’t lie. How many rotations a pitch takes on its way toward home plate explains how far it’ll drop or how wide it’ll swing. Stats are cold and objective, giving us straightforward meaning we can use to get smarter, make a point, see new things, and maybe win an argument. But that’s only one way he talks about analytics. Because having a deeper understanding of common occurrences—the angle at which a bat hits a ball or how fast a pitch spins—means there’s always some wiggle room to expect better, and to look at what could be, whether it’s offering a new way to understand plate discipline or an analysis of how a pitcher earned an unexpected breakout season. What numbers represent is one side of the current story; what a player can do with that information is the rest. There’s always a case for hope—even for an everyday, nonathlete like MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes, who once wanted to know if he could get a hit against the best pitchers on the planet. Sarris ran the calculations to discover that he probably would.
“By nature, every single person that plays or works in baseball is optimistic in nature, but Eno kind of embodies that constantly,” says Danny Samet, a merchandise manager who’s long worked in music but is trying to shift his career into baseball. He met Sarris at the 2018 Society for American Baseball Research Analytics Conference (an annual gathering for presentations from some of the smartest minds in the sport, which has included Sarris), and the two have stayed in touch since. Samet says that if there was such a thing as a Hall of Fame for baseball’s most optimistic and influential thinkers, Sarris would be the equivalent of real Hall of Famer Lou Gehrig or likely eventual Hall of Famer and current Los Angeles Angels star Mike Trout.
“I don’t know the best adjective I’d use to describe him other than ‘hangoutyness.’ And he maxes that out,” Samet says, referring to Sarris’ innate ability to be around basically anyone and make them feel seen, heard, and appreciated. Pausing on the creation of a new word to detail Sarris’ personality, Samet notes he’d also be fine describing Sarris as a “super-positive ball of fun and happiness,” which also does a pretty good job getting his point across.
It’s these kinds of impressions that Sarris leaves in his wake—adoration of book smarts, free thinking, and the optimism to see something more in just about anything—that are probably why Sarris once had a near-fateful meeting with Nate Silver about a beer website.
There is no complete archive of posts from BeerGraphs anymore, just a curated list of 15 posts from 2014 to 2016. “BeerGraphs has retired and moved to Florida,” the site now reads. But less than 10 years ago, it was so popular because of Sarris’ particular brand of smarts that Silver—at the time, one of the most heralded reporters in the country due to his use of statistics to understand polls, politics, and sports—wanted to make it part of his website, FiveThirtyEight.
Sarris and a small collection of other beer-loving baseball writers at FanGraphs had started BeerGraphs, a sister site that kept the analytical eye of its parent site. Using data from beer rating app Untappd, BeerGraphs posts were meant to help enthusiasts better understand beer ratings and culture, and find new ways to appreciate the drink and its many styles. Rather than reduce beer to a ranking system, the goal was to elevate Untappd’s data to make what people saw on Untappd more fun and meaningful. (Sort of what Untappd is now doing on its own blog.) Brittany Ghiroli, a senior writer for The Athletic who covers baseball and co-hosts a podcast with Sarris, speaks about his use of baseball statistics in a similar way: With Sarris’ outlook, numbers become a fun way to deepen understanding, not factoids to be thrown in the face of others. “I think he genuinely likes helping people understand numbers as a way to share something with people who are just as passionate,” she says.
At one point, Sarris was trying to convince FanGraphs founder David Appleman to create a universe of -Graphs spinoffs: BeerGraphs, TacoGraphs, and beyond. He got the OK to start with beer; maybe other areas of interest would come later. A few years into BeerGraphs, Sarris says, Silver came calling. (This was after Sarris published “Is Sam Adams Too Big to Be Craft Beer?”—a 2014 op-ed using findings from BeerGraphs—on FiveThirtyEight.)
Sarris and Silver had a meeting at a bar in Palo Alto during the height of the former New York Times reporter’s popularity and power, centered around his forecasting of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Silver, “a fan of BeerGraphs,” says he was interested in Sarris’ sports writing while Sarris recalls the pair discussing in-depth the data and reporting featured on the beer-centric site. It was a brush with destiny that in another universe might have brought together two of the most admired data journalists in their fields in a professional way, but didn’t amount to anything more than a nice conversation.
Sarris says Silver was particularly curious about BeerGraphs’ use of information collected from Untappd, which seemed skewed because it solely relied on user ratings and more prone to human error. “One of our findings [at BeerGraphs] was alcohol by volume is positively correlated with ratings, but alcohol by volume is not positively correlated with sales,” Sarris says. That meant there was a hole in how the beer site—or any other—could most accurately report on trends if sales information wasn’t readily provided alongside reporting.
But the meaning of that meeting lingers today: Silver was a national figure on TVs across the country, a household name, and one of the most sought-after voices on anything data in America. He also was impressed enough with Sarris’ brand of reporting that he wanted to learn more.
It wasn’t long after that BeerGraphs faded away, but this moment emphasizes the site’s short but pivotal run influencing beer writing and rankings. It also opened the door for Sarris’ next project.
“Having worked around beer and concerts, I’ve had a lot of interaction with celebrities and public figures, and my friends didn’t care,” says Michael Raspatello, who worked for Anheuser-Busch InBev and its investor arm, ZX Ventures, in the 2010s. “But the minute they realized I was going to be working with Eno Sarris, they were the most impressed I’d ever seen them. He is a legend.”
Being among the writers to establish FanGraphs as a preeminent baseball publication gave Sarris the leeway to explore BeerGraphs, which made him the perfect person to be the managing editor of October, a beer-and-culture-focused site started in partnership between Condé Nast, Pitchfork, ZX Ventures, and Good Beer Hunting.
“The guy who was leading the charge to change the way craft beer was talked about to be less ‘inside baseball’ was literally a baseball insider,” says Raspatello, who recruited Sarris to join the project while he was president and co-founder of October. “There was just something about his lack of cynicism and energy that made people excited for his counterbalance to the experts at the time.”
With its mix of in-person events and lifestyle coverage that included travelogs, weekly release info, in-depth reviews, and Q&As with musicians and celebrities, October launched in January 2017 and briefly succeeded at connecting with a casual beer-drinking audience and enthusiasts alike. In the way Pitchfork brought music writing into the mainstream, Sarris hoped October could do the same for beer. “October would be fun, inclusive, nerdy—it’s a fine line but possible to walk,” Sarris says. He lasted a year—leaving because of creative differences with management at Condé Nast—and the site eventually shut down in 2020, its digital footprint now only captured via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
Sarris’ vision was to bring the kind of fun “nerdery” that made FanGraphs and BeerGraphs special—accessible writing with “some analytical bones” that would get readers invested in beer by understanding it better—whether through fun, casual pieces with celebrities, or explainers that covered trends with data and deep research. It proved too difficult. But like so many things, the ambition Sarris brought to October during his time there left lasting impressions.
“The guy who was leading the charge to change the way craft beer was talked about to be less ‘inside baseball’ was literally a baseball insider.”
“Oh, I’m forever indebted to him. He got me started in the beer industry,” says Will Robertson. Now lead brewer at Chicago’s Old Irving Brewing, Robertson in 2017 was a homebrewer and engineer looking for a career change. He had long followed Sarris’ work at FanGraphs, then BeerGraphs, and was a regular at the live, online chats Sarris had hosted as part of his work at those sites. Robertson had no writing experience but loved beer and wanted to work with Sarris. A cold email led to an October story assignment writing about Lagunitas Brewing Company and demonstrations sales reps gave about hop vapor and aroma. “It was a simple, little piece but started something bigger.”
Robertson’s assignment led to stories about Chicago and an insider’s guide on where to find the best beer around and inside Wrigley Field, where the Chicago Cubs play. In all, he wrote about 10 stories for October, and in the process met people from across the beer industry. That included Old Irving’s head brewer and co-founder, Trevor Rose Hamblin, who brought Robertson on to apprentice, eventually leading to full-time work as a brewer. “Eno offered what I consider a life preserver via October,” Robertson says—a life preserver which carried him to something more.
“Fans read and appreciate him because he’s quirky, appreciates the details of baseball, and he always has this childlike love of the game,” Robertson says. “I think baseball players like him for the same reason, but some probably see him and are like, ‘Oh no, it’s the Pitch Guy again.”
Robertson is the only person who’s used that tongue-in-cheek nickname for Sarris, but it’s a fitting—if not a bit generic—reference to Sarris’ current and everlasting impact on the game of baseball. (And a few connections to beer, too.)
In November 2020, Sarris published a culmination of years’ worth of reporting and research: “Your favorite pitcher is probably cheating,” he wrote in a story for The Athletic that highlighted the prevalence of foreign substances that helped pitchers get more ball movement from what they threw, giving them an against-the-rules advantage over hitters. It was a watershed moment for baseball and led to rule changes, TSA-like body searches, in-game outbursts, and pop culture coverage. It also got Sarris’ face on the side of a beer can.
“Sticky Stuff” was a clever play on words that tied a West Coast IPA and its use of hops to Sarris’ coverage of one of baseball’s biggest modern scandals. But for Dan Baumiller, co-founder of Baltimore’s now-closed Full Tilt Brewing, it was an extension of his relationship with Sarris, which had started in 2016 with a cold email to mention a shared love of baseball and beer, and an admiration for Sarris’ writing about both. It continued with exchanges to talk fantasy baseball, grew in 2018 with face-to-face time while Sarris was in Washington, D.C. for baseball’s All-Star Game, and became archived for eternity thanks to collaboration beers with check-ins forever captured on Untappd.
Reflecting on his years-long connection with Sarris over baseball and beer, Baumiller admits that he struggles for adjectives to describe Sarris’ impact on both. Statistical analysis and fantasy advice is what drew Baumiller into Sarris’ professional orbit, but their personal connection meant Sarris was along for some of the biggest milestones for Full Tilt: seeing the brewery under construction in 2018, collaborating on nationally-recognized beers in 2021 (Sticky Stuff) and 2022 (Stuff+, an homage to a statistical pitching model championed by Sarris), and commiserating from opposite coasts over the news of Full Tilt’s closure this past spring.
Baumiller talks about Sarris’ work in baseball in the same way he interprets the reporter’s connection to the beer industry: full of optimism. Studying and forecasting players is about seeing things glass-half-full and discovering how good they could be, he notes. Believing in the idea that relationships might be built from something as simple as talking or sharing a beer—especially when they can start with emails and texts from thousands of miles apart—represents something special. “It’s just refreshing when you know there are people who have 100% happiness to be a part of something and can see the best in what they do,” Baumiller says.
Along with collab beers with Full Tilt and Old Irving (Eephus, carrying a Hall of Fame eligible 4.07 on Untappd), Sarris left a lasting impression with drinkers and staff at Brooklyn’s Other Half Brewing on baseball’s Opening Day this year. As many as 250 people are estimated to have shown up for the release of Staring Into the Shift Pale Ale and The Knuckleball, a braised pork sandwich created with Other Half chef Ryan McLaughlin, incorporating ingredients and flavors inspired by Sarris’ Jamaican and German upbringing. There was a panel discussion with colleagues from The Athletic. And, as McLaughlin tells it, the success of the event—the beer, the food, the crowd—was largely due to the energy Sarris supplied over almost a year of planning to pull it off. “I’m very much the kind of person who will let things fall by the wayside, but I was telling myself, ‘No, let’s do this, you need to keep this going,’” McLaughlin says. For months, emails and texts kept the momentum. “It was a dream come true for him,” says Tim Health, director of brewing operations, recalling what it was like to see McLaughlin willing something to life in collaboration with Sarris. Like so many others, McLaughlin had read and listened to Sarris for years.
“I knew he loved sandwiches and Other Half, so I just thought I’d email him and see what happens,” McLaughlin recalls with a laugh. Maybe Sarris was going to be in New York City at some point for work. Maybe they could get a sandwich together or have a beer. It wasn’t likely he’d have time for other things. “But he emailed me back almost instantly to my surprise, while he was on vacation in Hawaii.”
This wasn’t supposed to be. “I took a screenshot,” he says. It’s at this point McLaughlin reflexively recreates an audible whoop-like shout and pumps his fist as if he’s reliving the moment all over again. “I tried to keep cool,” he admits.
“There’s just so much positivity that fills a room when Eno is there.”
There’s a cadence and commonality to hearing stories like this, the way Sarris makes people feel at ease, smile a bit more, laugh a lot more, and feel excited about telling stories in the way Sarris so freely does. And there’s often surprise, whether from Baumiller or McLaughlin or Danny Samet, the aspiring front-office staffer who still badly wanted to break into baseball in 2019 when he ran into Sarris a second time, then at the sport’s annual winter meetings. Samet and Sarris grabbed a beer, but Sarris had to go meet with members of a team’s front office. “Without questioning, without a moment’s hesitation, he asks me to come with him and I’m then standing in front of the entire backbone of this organization. This is a sport where everyone is always trying to outthink each other or would never be so kind,” he says. “The immediate willingness to put me in a room with people I wanted to work with showed me how much he cares about helping people. It’s one of the most surprising things that’s happened in my life.”
“There’s just so much positivity that fills a room when Eno is there,” Samet says.
For those who know Sarris or have even briefly met him, there’s a recurring feeling that his personality and outlook fit perfectly with the way he spends his time, whether professionally or personally. In baseball, there’s an interest in seeing and understanding what’s not obvious, and yearning for it to come true (even if unlikely). In one case, Sarris’ insights on hitting and defense helped prolong the career of Yonder Alonso, who played for nine teams across 10 seasons in the majors. Fantasy baseball magnifies this even more, when competition is reliant on the subjective hope that each player drafted for a person’s team maxes out their potential—and if they don’t, you can swap them for someone else who will. With beer, there’s an inherent social side of sharing a pint with someone, an excuse to draw out a conversation and connection.
“Everyone likes authenticity and when they know they’re getting the real you,” says Jason Gudim, the Minnesota pastor, baseball fan, and avid Eno Sarris reader. “There are people out there who really, really, really enjoy talking about baseball and invariably tell the most interesting stories. You can tell how much Eno cares about what he does because of how easy it is to connect with his work.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Eno in a bad mood, and people love to be around someone like that.”
Gudim, like thousands of other baseball fans, has come to know Sarris without ever actually meeting him. Thanks to years of podcasts and Q&As, details about Sarris’ personal life—from family to beer to a love for sandwiches and more—have long been part of the public persona people have come to know and appreciate. Sarris excels in an age when media members can seem to be everywhere. He’s often recognized as one of the brightest people covering baseball but also passes the classic American barometer for likeability: He’s a guy you just want to have a beer with. And you can.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Eno in a bad mood, and people love to be around someone like that,” Ghiroli says.
Sarris thinks he’s something of a cynic. There are too many stats, too much historical context, an overwhelming abundance of information that won’t allow him to remain overly optimistic when it comes to covering baseball. “I work in numbers all day, and the numbers are pretty cold and cynical,” he says. Stare at a spreadsheet for long enough, it’s easy for your brain to distrust what the heart wants. But every February and March, before baseball teams play their first games, that’s “hope season,” Sarris says.
“One of the things my wife says that I love is that ‘one of the things about being human is that we at any moment can make the choice to be different, and we can choose to change.’ And that's something that I think spring reminds me: ‘This year is going to be different, and it’s going to be different in all these ways,’” Sarris says. “There’s something about that, that renewal and hope every March that renews my interest in the game.”
That’s the special thing about spring and the resiliency baseball can bring when shared through the voice of the right person: Anything could happen when you’re equally as far away from heartbreak and elation, stats be damned. It’s just a matter of how your point of view can transform the stories that come of it all.
Words by Bryan RothPhotos by Michael Kiser
