Xavier Scruggs Knows Baseball Is a Family Thing
There’s a version of Xavier Scruggs that lives in a baseball card: Former MLB player. Cardinals. Marlins. First home run with Ichiro on second and Barry Bonds waiting in the dugout to hug him. Two seasons in Korea, where his first son was born. Mexico. Dominican Republic. Colombia.
But sit with him long enough — the way you would at a table where the plates haven’t been cleared yet and nobody’s in a rush to leave — and a different story comes out. One that starts with a dad who loved the Giants, a little league field in San Diego, and a swing that cleared the left field wall before anyone knew what to make of the kid stepping up to the plate.
That’s the Xavier Scruggs that showed up on Nine Innings In, the baseball fandom podcast hosted by Vincent Samperio on Sideline Sports. Nine questions. Nine innings. One person’s real relationship with the game.
Xavier Scruggs Learned Baseball the Way You Learn Everything That Matters
His father put a bat in his hands and showed him how to love it. Giants fan, played through high school, passed the game down the same way you pass down a recipe — not with instructions, but by doing it together until it becomes yours.
“After I hit my first little league home run, I was locked in. I was ready to go.”
Then he got to go to a Padres game at 11 or 12. Got on the field. Met Tony Gwynn and Ken Caminiti. Saw it up close, from his own neighborhood. That’s the moment it became real — not a dream, but a direction.
Gwynn was his guy. Not for the fame. For the fluidity. The way he worked the strike zone like he owned it, low line drives to all fields, always balanced, always in control. Scruggs watched that and filed it somewhere deep.
He also loved Gary Sheffield — which, if you know both hitters, is either a contradiction or a complete education. Sheffield was everything Gwynn wasn’t: violent, tight, powerful, going to get that baseball whether it wanted to be gotten or not. Two completely different approaches to the same problem, and Scruggs loved them both.
He still lives in Tampa. So does Sheffield. They talk about hitting.
The Kid at the Table Who Paid Attention
Some guys make it to the majors and admit they were never really fans. They loved playing. The watching, the studying, the obsessing over stories — that was somebody else’s thing.
Xavier Scruggs was never that guy.
He was deep in the video games. Ken Griffey Jr. Slugfest on Nintendo 64. La Russa Baseball. The kind of games that taught him what a double cutoff was before anyone explained it in practice. He watched local broadcasts and fell in love with the stories around the players, not just the at-bats. He was the kid at the table who was actually listening.
“You don’t get any better by not watching those little details of the game. That’s why I love talking about it now.”
There’s a straight line between that kid and the analyst on MLB Network’s morning show breaking down the same game he grew up watching. The love of paying attention was always part of it.
He played basketball and football until junior year of high school. Genuinely loved basketball more for a stretch. But the college offers came through baseball, and the path got clear.
“My lane was chosen for me,” he says. Calm about it. Clear.
Korea, a Son, and What Baseball Looks Like Somewhere Else
Xavier Scruggs played two seasons in Korea. His first son, Zeke, was born there. He and his wife stepped into a country where nothing was familiar and decided to embrace it instead of survive it.
Korean baseball crowds are something else. Everybody has their own song for every player. The chanting is choreographed. It’s not just noise — it’s organized joy. Scruggs talks about it the way you talk about a meal you ate somewhere that reframed what food could be.
“Baseball is just not an American pastime. It’s something that’s celebrated all over the world.”
He also played in the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Colombia. Every country handed him a different version of the same game — a different tempo, a different flavor of fandom, a different reason people showed up. You spend enough years moving through those rooms and you stop thinking about baseball as one thing. It becomes a language with a lot of dialects.
That perspective is exactly what ESPN wanted in 2020, when the world stopped and Korean baseball kept going. They called Xavier Scruggs. He came on for ten minutes. One segment.
“After that first time, I liked doing that. How do I get more opportunities to do that?”
From there: more ESPN segments at 4 a.m. because of the time difference. Sirius XM. MLB Network Radio. A podcast picked up by Major League Baseball in 2021. Then the full-time analyst role. None of it felt like a career change. It felt like the next room in the same house.
The Take He Won’t Back Down From
Vince Samperio asks every guest for the one baseball opinion they’ll go to the mat for.
Xavier Scruggs doesn’t pause.
The World Baseball Classic is the best competition in the sport right now. Not the World Series. The WBC.
When players are representing countries instead of franchises, something changes. The Dominican games feel like parties — music, color, everybody moving. Korean games have a synchronized energy that belongs in its own category. Puerto Rico’s pool play has an electricity a Tuesday game in April simply can’t replicate.
He brings up Julio Rodríguez, who said publicly that winning a WBC title might mean more to him than a World Series ring.
“There’s something about representing your country that takes it to another level.”
The Home Run That Had Ichiro, Bonds, and Mattingly in the Same Frame
The rapid-fire extra innings segment is where the stories you didn’t know you needed come out.
Favorite baseball moment: his first MLB home run.
Ichiro was on second base. Barry Bonds — his hitting coach — was in the dugout waiting to hug him when he came home. Don Mattingly was his manager.
“Everything felt like you’re floating. There was going to be no bigger moment I had ever had previous to that.”
He didn’t black out. He remembers rounding the bases. He also remembers immediately wanting to do it again — the specific tension of trying to stay inside a moment while your whole body is already reaching for the next one.
His first heartbreak was the 1998 World Series. He was 12. The Padres made it. The Yankees swept them. He watched the other side celebrate and instead of just hurting, he noticed something.
“I can tell this really impacts them. I want to do something on a large scale like that.”
That’s the thing about being raised around a game instead of just taught it. You absorb more than mechanics. You absorb what it means to care.
What Baseball at Its Best Looks Like to Xavier Scruggs
More voices. More creators. More brands using their audiences to bring new people closer to the game. He talks about New Balance, Easton, Franklin, Nike — not as sponsors, but as amplifiers. Companies that already have the people and can use that reach the way a good host uses a dinner table: to bring everyone in, make room, and let something real happen.
“We truly need more voices in baseball to elevate the game.”
From a man who grew up watching Tony Gwynn on a TV in San Diego, who played under stadium lights on four continents, who found his second career because a pandemic forced the world to stop and Korean baseball kept playing — that’s not a take. That’s a testimony.
Listen to Nine Innings In, Episode 2
Nine Innings In with Vincent Samperio is on Sideline Sports and everywhere you get your podcasts. Episode 2 features Xavier Scruggs on growing up in San Diego, what two seasons in Korea taught him about fandom, the home run with Ichiro on second and Bonds in the dugout, and why the WBC hits different than anything else in the sport.
Find Xavier Scruggs at @XavierScruggs on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, and X. Catch him on MLB Network mornings at 9 a.m. Find Vince at @vincesince91.