The Big Lad. Photo : Mike Ehrmann ( Getty Images )

There are no inconsequential games left in this rapidly narrowing baseball season, and very few moments that won’t be suffused with at least some degree of tension. This is what makes October baseball cool, but also it’s not really a reflection of what baseball is actually like. What fills out the rest of the season—the inconsequential shit, the foregrounded background noise, the dazed and dreamy stuff—is the opposite of the refined and reduced game that’s played in October, but it’s also its equal. It depends what you’re looking for.


If you’re looking for sports-related excitement or whatever, obviously October is pretty good. If you’re looking for the kind of half-asleep scalp-tingly ASMR-adjacent satisfaction of meaningless baseball, my friend you happen to be in luck. Look at this marvel:


Like everyone else who periodically uses the acronym, I don’t really know what ASMR is, exactly. I edited an article about it five years ago—it’s how I know about this deliriously boring video of NHL great Pat LaFontaine getting a cranial nerve examination, which ASMR people have boosted to more than six million views on YouTube—and I’ve experienced the rustling tingly feelings just as you probably have, generally happily and generally while bored. I know that it’s an acronym for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response because I searched for that information online; I also know that people seeking that feeling look for videos of outwardly dull whispery stuff online. I am sure there’s some sort of sex component to the whole thing but I have very consciously tried to avoid knowing more about that part.

All of which is to say that while I don’t know very much, I do know that the video of Vladimir Guerrero Jr. taking a characteristically loud round of BP in an empty ballpark while a Rihanna song echoes vaguely delivers the goods. Vladito’s thunderous tater-mashing might be a little loud for your ASMR classicists, but on a day that otherwise features no baseball of any kind and before another week of the tense stuff and a winter of nothing, I’ll gladly take the tingles.