Nine Innings In: Xavier Scruggs on What The Best Baseball Looks Like
Xavier Scruggs has played baseball on four continents. His first son was born in South Korea. He hit his first major league home run with Ichiro on base and Barry Bonds waiting in the dugout to give him a hug. He spent two seasons watching Korean fans do choreographed dances in the stands, has had multiple conversations about hitting with Gary Sheffield in Tampa, and once spotted Denzel Washington in a Dodgers suite and — by his own admission — lost his cool.
The man has seen some things.
But ask him where his baseball fandom started, and it goes all the way back to a little league field in San Diego, his dad teaching him the game, a childhood infatuation with Tony Gwynn’s swing, and the moment a home run over the left field wall made him think: wait, I might actually be able to do this.
That’s the story Vince Samperio pulled out of him in the second episode of Nine Innings In, Sideline’s baseball fandom podcast. Nine questions. Nine innings. One fan — or in Scruggs’ case, a former big leaguer turned ESPN and MLB Network analyst — telling their story.
How a Little League Home Run Starts Everything
Baseball came to Scruggs through his father. Giants fan, played through high school, taught his son the game early. The story isn’t complicated. It didn’t need to be.
“After I hit my first little league home run, I was locked in,” Scruggs tells Samperio. “I was ready to go. It was like, okay, this is something I want to do.”
Then, around 11 or 12, he got to go to a Padres game. Got on the field. Met some players. Met Tony Gwynn and Ken Caminiti. Saw what professional baseball looked like up close, from the same neighborhood he was growing up in.
That’s when it got real.
Gwynn became his guy — not because of the fame, but because of the fluidity. The way he took the ball the other way, low line drives, controlled strike zone, always balanced no matter what the pitcher threw. Scruggs loved watching someone be that in control inside the batter’s box.
He also loved Gary Sheffield. Which, if you know anything about either hitter, makes perfect sense and zero sense at the same time. Sheffield was basically the anti-Gwynn: violent swing, big leg kick, tight, powerful, go-get-the-baseball energy. Scruggs fell for both styles precisely because they were opposites, because both worked.
He still talks to Sheffield today. They both live in Tampa.
The Kid Who Actually Liked Watching the Game
Something Vince brings up on the show: there are guys who make it to the majors who admit they were never really fans. They loved playing. Watching? Not so much. Baseball was a craft, not a passion.
Scruggs was never that guy.
He was deep in the video games — Ken Griffey Jr. Slugfest on Nintendo 64, La Russa Baseball, games that taught him the nuances before he even knew what “nuances” meant. Who backs up where. What a double cutoff means. What a hitter is actually trying to attack. He was watching the local broadcasters tell stories about players and falling in love with those stories, not just the at-bats.
“You don’t get any better by not watching those little details of the game,” he says. “That’s why I love talking about it now.”
There’s a straight line from that kid on the couch absorbing broadcasts to the analyst currently on MLB Network’s morning slot breaking down the same game. The love of watching baseball was always part of it. It never felt like homework.
Though — and this is the part worth sitting with — Scruggs also admits he played basketball and football until his junior year of high school and genuinely loved basketball more for a while. The sport didn’t choose him early. He chose it later, when the college offers started coming and the path got clear.
“My lane was chosen for me,” he says. Not as a lament. Just as a fact.
From Mexico to ESPN at 4 a.m.
The transition from playing to broadcasting didn’t happen in a boardroom. It happened because the world stopped in 2020 and Korean baseball kept going.
Scruggs had just finished a season in Mexico. He wasn’t getting calls. He was weighing his options. Then ESPN, broadcasting the KBO as the only live sport left on the planet, asked if he’d come on and talk about his experience playing in Korea.
Ten minutes. One segment.
“After that first time talking about my experiences and Korean baseball, I liked doing that. How do I get more opportunities to do that?”
From there: more ESPN segments at 4 or 5 in the morning because of the time difference. Then Sirius XM, MLB Network Radio. Then a podcast picked up by Major League Baseball in 2021. Then the full-time analyst role.
None of it felt like a pivot. It felt like the logical extension of being someone who had always been obsessed with the stories around the game, someone who had always been watching, who had played in Korea and the Dominican and Colombia and Mexico and absorbed something different from every country’s version of the sport.
When the door opened, he’d already been preparing for it without knowing it.
The WBC Take He’ll Go to the Mat For
Vince asks every guest for the one baseball take they’ll stand on, the hill they’ll die on.
Scruggs doesn’t hesitate.
The World Baseball Classic is the best form of competition in the sport right now.
Not the World Series. The WBC.
His argument isn’t complicated but it’s solid: when players represent their countries, something unlocks. The celebrations are different. The atmosphere is different. Dominican games feel like parties. Korean crowds are synchronized in a way that’s almost choreographic. Puerto Rico in pool play has an energy you won’t find in a regular season Tuesday game in April.
He brings up Julio Rodríguez, who said publicly that winning a WBC championship might feel bigger to him than winning a World Series. Scruggs believes it.
“There’s something about representing your country that takes it to another level.”
Samperio — who has been to at least one game in every WBC since the beginning — doesn’t push back. Hard to argue with someone who played in four countries and watched every version of baseball fandom from the inside.
The First MLB Home Run (And Who Was Watching)
The extra innings segment of the show is rapid-fire, and this is where the best stories come out.
Favorite baseball moment: his first major league home run.
Ichiro was on second base when he hit it. Barry Bonds — his hitting coach — was waiting in the dugout to give him a hug when he crossed home plate. Don Mattingly was his manager.
“Everything felt like you’re floating,” Scruggs says. “There was going to be no bigger moment that I had ever had previous to that.”
He didn’t black out. He remembers rounding the bases. But he also remembers immediately wanting to do it again — the tension between trying to stay in the moment and knowing you’ve just felt something you need to feel again.
The cast of legends around that one swing is almost absurd. Ichiro. Barry Bonds. Don Mattingly. Standing at a diamond somewhere and watching a guy from San Diego hit a ball over the fence.
Baseball does this. It stacks coincidences and names and moments until something that was just a home run becomes something you remember the architecture of for the rest of your life.
First heartbreak, for the record: 1998 World Series. The Padres made it. He was 12. The Yankees swept them. He watched the other team celebrate and instead of just feeling the loss, he noticed something: how emotional the Yankees were. How much it meant to them. His own father had cried watching baseball before.
“I can tell this really impacts them,” he remembers thinking. “I want to do something on a large scale like that.”
Baseball at Its Best
Near the end of the conversation, Vince asks what baseball looks like when it’s at its absolute best.
Scruggs’ answer is about voices. About many perspectives instead of just one. About brands getting involved — not because they have to, but because they already have the audiences and they can use that reach to pull people closer to the sport. He names New Balance, Easton, Franklin, Nike. He mentions a New Balance video of Shohei Ohtani in Australia swapping sports with a cricket player, and how something like that does more to grow the game globally than another highlight package.
He wants more creators in baseball. Not just MLB Network. Not just ESPN. Everyone with an angle and an audience and a love for the game.
“We truly need more voices in baseball to elevate the game.”
Coming from someone who started as a San Diego kid watching Tony Gwynn on a CRT television, then spent two decades playing across four continents, then found himself at a microphone because the world stopped and Korean baseball kept going — that reads less like a media take and more like a personal testimony.
Listen to Episode 2
Nine Innings In With Vincent Samperio is available now on Sideline Sports and everywhere you get your podcasts. Episode 2 features Xavier Scruggs on his road from San Diego sandlots to ESPN and MLB Network, what the World Baseball Classic means for the sport, and how a first major league home run with Ichiro on second and Barry Bonds in the dugout feels when it finally happens.
Find Xavier at @XavierScruggs on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, and X, and catch him on the MLB Network morning show at 9 a.m. Find Vince at @vincesince91.
