Nine Innings In: Steve Perrault and the Beautiful Mess of Being a Red Sox Fan
Some people fall in love with baseball. Steve Perrault was born into it — wiffle ball in the backyard, his dad throwing hundreds of pitches a day, a Griffey Junior poster somewhere close enough to count as a roommate. The obsession started before he could put words to it.
Now he’s 613 episodes deep into Section Ten, one of the most beloved Red Sox podcasts in existence, and the team they cover just fired basically everyone — Alex Cora, Jason Varitek, Pete Fasi, Kyle Hudson. “I think they fired some peanut guys,” Perrault jokes. “Everybody’s gone at this point.”
That’s what Steve Perrault brought to the third episode of Nine Innings In, Vincent Samperio’s baseball fandom podcast on Sideline Sports: a real, complicated, occasionally infuriating love story with a sport that’s given him everything and a team that makes it very difficult to say thank you.
The LinkedIn Message That Started Everything
Eleven years ago, Steve Perrault was working at NESN, terrified. By his own admission: “100 Ops+ kind of employee, maybe like a 90.” Live TV wasn’t for him. He knew it. The pace, the stakes, the energy of a broadcast studio when everything can go sideways in thirty seconds, not his lane.
What he did have was an obsession with the Red Sox that bordered on clinical and a gut feeling that podcasting was about to be something real.
He’d heard about Section Ten through Gary Strike, now at SportsCenter, then at NESN, who’d been a guest on the show. Tried to reach Jared Robinson on Twitter. DMs were closed. So he did something almost no one has ever admitted to doing successfully: he messaged him on LinkedIn. Led with the fact that they both went to Endicott College in Beverly, Mass. Said he was a diehard Sox fan and would do anything to get involved.
Jared replied. Section Ten was ten episodes in and needed a producer.
That was 603 episodes ago.
“I can’t believe they did Section Ten Night,” Perrault says now, talking about the back-to-back branded nights at Fenway the show has pulled off the last two years. Custom gear. Their own corner of Red Sox Nation. A community that grew out of one guy cold-messaging a stranger about a college they shared.
Baseball does that. It turns obsession into opportunity if you give it enough time.
Griffey Was the Guy (He Always Was)
Ask Steve Perrault about the players that hooked him and Griffey Junior comes out before anyone else. Not surprising. But the way he describes it is worth sitting with.
“He was just the dude. I just gravitated towards him, thought he was the coolest player of all time. Everything was smooth.”
The backwards hat. The shoes. The swing that looked like it was in slow motion even at full speed. Perrault talks about Griffey the way kids from that era always do, not like a ballplayer, but like a myth. Something that made you want to be a fan of the game just by existing in it.
“Be like Mike,” he says. “No. It was be like Griffey.”
But then there was Nomar. And if Griffey was the national crush, Nomar Garciaparra was the hometown guy — the one who made Fenway feel personal. The tapping the feet, fixing the batting gloves, never stepping on the foul line. Every kid in a Little League uniform in Massachusetts was doing all of it.
Perrault went to a summer baseball camp. Met Nomar in person. Was “peeing his pants, probably literally.” Nomar signed autographs every game. Showed up for the fans consistently in a way Perrault says he understood even then, that there’s a generation of fans whose lifelong love of the sport runs directly through one player’s willingness to stop and sign a baseball.
“It got to the point where it was almost more important to me to get Nomar’s autograph than anything that happened in the game.”
Mo Vaughn also gets love here, which is correct, MVP, face of the franchise in the mid-90s, had his own Pizza Hut bat. The man deserves more credit than he gets.
The 1998 ALCS, Being Seven Years Old, and Crying
The first baseball heartbreak for Steve Perrault was the 1998 ALCS. The Indians swept the Red Sox in four games. He was seven, maybe eight years old. He cried all night.
“That’s when you start to realize, oh, they’ll break your heart.”
Nothing tops 2003, he admits. But ’98 was the original wound. The one that introduced him to the other side of fandom, the side where caring deeply about something means being completely exposed when it falls apart.
And then there’s the Curse of the Bambino, which in Boston in the late 90s was inescapable. Every few days someone brought it up. Yankee fans wielded it like a weapon, “1918” in four syllables, clean and devastating. The Sox fan response was “Yankees suck,” which Perrault now calls “the dumbest thing ever” with the clarity of someone who’s had 25 years to think it over.
“They were whooping our a**. They won three World Series in a row. They’re the opposite of sucking.”
He still knows exactly where he was when the Red Sox finally broke the curse in 2004. He always will. That’s the deal with baseball.
The Take He’ll Go to the Mat For
Vincent asks every guest for their one hill to die on, the take they will not back down from no matter who’s in the room.
Steve Perrault’s answer is the most technically precise of any guest so far, and the most genuinely righteous.
A double steal is not a steal of home.
Full stop. If someone else on the bases creates a distraction and you sneak in from third while the defense is looking elsewhere, that is not a steal of home. That is a double steal. They are different things. The scorebook is lying to you.
“You steal home if you’re Benny the Jet Rodriguez and you snag home when no one else is on base. That’s how you steal home.”
He’s seen it happen with Trevor Story. With Jarren Duran. With Jacoby Ellsbury, the one time he caught it live, he’d looked down at his phone for a second and came back up to this confused roar from the Fenway crowd, like everyone had witnessed something impossible and wasn’t sure if it counted.
“I still vividly remember. It was the weirdest sound. The crowd was like ‘oh’, like everyone was confused at the same time.”
The steal of home is one of the most electric plays in baseball. Which is exactly why crediting someone for one when they didn’t actually do it is an offense against the sport.
When Baseball Is at Its Best
For Steve Perrault, baseball at its best is the All-Star Game. Not the game itself, the access that comes with it.
“You look to your right and there’s Shohei Ohtani.”
Getting credentialed for All-Star events has been a grind, a different process every year, never straightforward. But once you’re in, talking to Aaron Judge, Freddie Freeman, Garrett Crochet, and then turning to Brian Wu who hasn’t had fifty people fighting for his attention and has just as much interesting stuff to say, that’s the version of baseball Steve Perrault will keep chasing.
He’s also honest about the other side. Section Ten went independent this year. Sponsors, business development, all the grinding behind-the-scenes stuff that exists outside the actual game. There are stretches where it drains the love for the sport.
And then there’s the stuff that brings it back: the Dodgers champagne celebration last October, the Section Ten Night at Fenway, sitting on a couch and moving seats every inning trying to spark a rally, watching a game as just a fan again for a few months and realizing it still hits.
“At the end of the day, whatever my career ends up being, I’m still going to have baseball.”
The Pitch for Non-Believers
At the end of every episode, Vince asks guests to sell baseball to someone who doesn’t watch it. Steve Perrault wrote his down beforehand. He reads it:
“Baseball is something that ages like a fine wine. If you give it time, you need to allow yourself to learn the game at your pace and let it be whatever you want it to be for you. It can be the ballpark experience, following a favorite player, getting obsessed with stats and analytics. Let it be your out-of-work hobby and you will have a better life.”
He knows it’s a hard sell. 162 games. Eight, nine months of season. A big ask for someone whose sports attention is already maxed out.
But his counterpoint is simple: what other sport lets you turn on a game on a random Wednesday in June with nothing to do and immediately feel like you’re somewhere? No other sport gives you that. The park, the pace, the rhythm of it. Baseball fits into life in a way other sports don’t.
“There’s different levels of dedication you can give and still feel like you’re in the loop.”
Listen to Nine Innings In
Nine Innings In with Vincent Samperio is the baseball fandom podcast where the stories behind the love of the game matter more than any box score. Episode 3 features Steve Perrault on building Section Ten from a LinkedIn message to 613 episodes, why a double steal will never be a steal of home, and what it means to love a team that is currently making it very hard to love them.
If you’re loving the series, you can find the full show on Spotify and on every major podcast platform.
Find Steve Perrault at @Steve_Perrault on socials, the Section Ten podcast at @SectionTenPod on Twitter and @sectiontenpodcast on Instagram. Find Vincent at @vincesince91.
Also from Nine Innings In: Episode 1 with DSARM | Episode 2 with Xavier Scruggs
