Steve Perrault on Gut Feelings and Loving the Red Sox Anyway
Some things you don't learn. You absorb them. Baseball found Steve Perrault before he could explain it — wiffle ball in the backyard, his dad throwing hundreds of pitches a day, a Griffey Junior poster close enough to count as a roommate.
That's how everything that matters starts. Not with a decision. With a repetition.
Today, Steve Perrault has 613 episodes on his back as co-host of Section Ten, one of the most beloved Red Sox podcasts in existence. And the team he covers just fired practically everyone: Alex Cora, Jason Varitek, Pete Fasi, Kyle Hudson. "I think they fired some peanut guys," he says. "Everybody's gone at this point."
That's what Steve Perrault brought to the third episode of Nine Innings In, the baseball fandom podcast hosted by Vincent Samperio on Sideline Sports. Nine questions. Nine innings. A real, complicated, occasionally maddening love story with a sport that gave him everything and a team that keeps testing him.
The LinkedIn Message That Started Everything
Eleven years ago, Steve Perrault was working at NESN and lived terrified. Live TV, that relentless pace where everything can fall apart in thirty seconds — not his thing. He knew it. He admits it without drama.
What he did have was a Red Sox obsession that bordered on clinical and a gut feeling that podcasting was about to be something real.
He heard about Section Ten through Gary Strike, now at SportsCenter, then at NESN, who had been a guest on the show. He tried to reach Jared Robinson on Twitter. DMs were closed. So he did something almost nobody has admitted to doing successfully: he messaged him on LinkedIn. He leaned into the fact that they both graduated from Endicott College in Beverly, Massachusetts. 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 cold message to a stranger who happened to go to the same school.
Baseball does that. It turns obsession into something real 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. The backwards hat. The shoes. The swing that looked like slow motion even at full speed.
"He was just the dude. I just gravitated towards him, thought he was the coolest player of all time. Everything was smooth."
Perrault talks about Griffey the way kids from that era always do. Not like a ballplayer. Like a myth. Something that made you want to be a fan of the game just by existing in it.
"Be like Mike? 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 and Nomar in person. He was, by his own words, "peeing my pants, probably literally." Nomar signed autographs every game. Showed up for the fans consistently in a way Perrault understood even then: there is a whole 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 his credit here, which is right. MVP. Face of the franchise in the mid-90s. Had his own Pizza Hut bat. The man deserves more recognition than he gets.
The First Time Baseball Breaks Your Heart
The first real 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 1998 was the original wound. The one that introduced him to the other side of fandom: the side where caring deeply means being completely exposed when things fall apart.
And then there was the Curse of the Bambino, which in Boston in the late 90s was inescapable. Every few days someone brought it up. Yankees fans used 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 calm clarity of someone who has had 25 years to think about it.
"They were whooping our ass. They won three World Series in a row. They are the opposite of sucking."
He knows exactly where he was when the Red Sox broke the curse in 2004. He always will. That is the deal with baseball.
The Take He Will Not Back Down From
Vince asks every guest for the one opinion they will defend no matter who is in the room.
Steve Perrault's answer is the most technically precise of any guest so far. And the most genuinely passionate.
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 miscalled with Trevor Story. With Jarren Duran. With Jacoby Ellsbury, the one time he caught it live. He had looked down at his phone for a second between pitches and came back up to the weirdest sound from the Fenway crowd, like everyone witnessed something impossible and wasn't sure if it counted.
"I still vividly remember 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 giving credit for one when it didn't actually happen 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 different process every year, never easy. 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 is the version of baseball Steve Perrault will keep chasing.
He is also honest about the other side. Section Ten went independent this year. Sponsors, business development, all the grinding that exists outside the actual game. There are stretches where it drains the love for the sport.
And then comes what brings it back: the Dodgers champagne celebration last October, the Section Ten Night at Fenway, sitting on the couch and changing 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."
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 listen to the full show on Spotify and on every major podcast platform.
Find Steve Perrault at @Steve_Perrault on socials, Section Ten at @SectionTenPod on Twitter and @sectiontenpodcast on Instagram. Find Vince at @vincesince91.
Also from Nine Innings In: Episode 1 with DSARM | Episode 2 with Xavier Scruggs