Why These Guys Get Paid to Watch Baseball

How’s this for a job: Get paid to watch baseball, from the comfort of your own custom-designed cave. That’s reality for Mike O’Hara and Ryan Wagner. They beat out 10,000 others to win a Major League Baseball contest whose prize was to watch 2,430 games—sometimes 13 at a time, on a grid of screens—as summer work. It may be easy, but the hours are long: Work starts with the first pitch of the day and runs until the last out, even if it’s at 5am, explains the Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, they’re the stars of an online reality-TV series at MLBFanCave.com. They’re not new to performance: O’Hara acts and fronts a band, and Wagner has toured in the Wizard of Oz. So how do they stay fit? “I never sit down when I am watching baseball,” says O’Hara. “I usually stand with a baseball bat." And “yes: they both have girlfriends; both girlfriends are reported to be cool with the Cave,” writes Jason Gay. (More Major League Baseball stories.)