Glove Is Blind: How Netflix’s Best and Brightest Held Up Against Big League Pitching

One of the most exciting developments of 2025 is also one of the most surprising: Love Is Blind has its mojo back. After a white-hot start in 2020, Netflix’s reality dating show put out three consecutive snoozefest seasons in 2023 and 2024. (The entire D.C. season could’ve been an email.)

But the first six episodes of Season 8 debuted last Friday, covering the first phase of the show, and it’s been a hot minute since we saw this much drama in the pods. Far from the usual slate of boring couples playing along just to stay on TV, this season has had (I’ll try to avoid spoilers) a love quadrilateral, a shocking violation of show norms, and multiple contestants just packing it in and going home. It’s been a blast.

Here’s something else Season 8 has: Multiple former college baseball players. That’s right, it’s not a nightmare, we’re talking about reality.

Every reality dating show has some former jocks. Athletes tend to be confident and in shape, and that plays well both on TV and in a dating context. (Or so I’m told. I’ve never had self-confidence or athletic ability myself.) Thing is, whenever someone on a trashy dating show says they played sports in college, the first thing I do is pause the TV and look up their stats.

Usually, those sports credentials are — and I apologize for sounding blasé — somewhat overstated. Not always; Clay from Love Is Blind Season 6 won fame and glory as a four-time All-American in track at South Carolina. Then he brought shame and disgrace upon Gamecock Nation by going to pieces and leaving AD at the altar. But New Jarred from Season 1 of Fboy Island was a professional football player in name only. It’s all part of the proverbial game.

Talking yourself up is a big part of reality TV. Find love in the pods first, then let your fiancée know that you never got off the bench. But the two ballplayers in the Twin Cities season of Love Is Blind both actually had pretty legit college baseball careers, both at the University of Minnesota.

The Golden Gophers have a pretty strong history for a Big Ten team. They’ve won three College World Series, albeit none more recently than 1964, and produced two Hall of Famers: Paul Molitor and Dave Winfield. (In one of the weirder bits of baseball trivia I can think of, that’s as many as the entire SEC put together.) Big Ten baseball supremacy is fleeting these days, though Minnesota had a recent turn on the top of the pile that I’ll get to later.

More to the point: Minnesota isn’t LSU or Florida State, but it plays at a very high level against very tough competition, including future high draft picks and big leaguers. Anyone who starts for a team like the Gophers is a real player. In other words, both of these guys have a Baseball Reference page.

David Bettenburg, a 33-year-old medical device salesman, played four years at Minnesota from 2011 to 2014, as an outfielder and designated hitter. And a decade after his baseball career ended, he got engaged on TV even though his icebreaker line was “So, what’s wrong with you?” God bless him.

Ben Mezzenga, 28, started for about two and a half of his four years at Minnesota, which included two trips to the NCAA Tournament. When I started poking around Mezzenga’s stats, I realized I had actually watched him play before. As a junior, Mezzenga was a spark plug center fielder for a Minnesota team that made it to the Super Regional against eventual national champion Oregon State.

The decisive game of that Super Regional was a thriller that featured three future top-five picks: Adley Rutschman, Nick Madrigal, and Max Meyer. Plus Trevor Larnach, Terrin Vavra, and a handful of other big leaguers. Rutschman drove in Steven Kwan for the winning run with two strikes and two outs in the top of the ninth. I vividly remember watching this game on TV, but if you missed it the first time around, here’s a two-minute highlight reel.

At around the 30-second mark, Mezzenga lines a game-tying single into center field, then gets gunned down by Rutschman trying to advance on the throw home. In a few short years, one of those guys will be a two-time All-Star, and the other will be giving unconvincing answers about his spiritual beliefs through a wall on a reality show.

As happy as I am to share that these guys played college baseball, in order to make it worth the post, I had to examine how they played.

So I went back through the box scores, as many of them as I could find, and cataloged every one of Mezzenga’s college at-bats, and most of Bettenburg’s. Minnesota’s athletic department website has game-by-game stats dating back only to 2012. That excludes Bettenburg’s redshirt freshman season, when he got into 25 games and hit .114/.204/.273 with two home runs in 50 plate appearances.

In what was a real low point for my sense of professional worth, I reached out to the University of Minnesota’s athletic communications department to see if they had the 2011 box scores kicking around somewhere. They didn’t. Undeterred, I spent more time than I would’ve liked copying seven seasons of box scores into a format that would allow me to draw conclusions about Bettenburg’s and Mezzenga’s careers.

Bettenburg played 96 games at Minnnesota, and hit .185/.246/.257 in 225 plate appearances. About half of that sample came in 2012, his redshirt sophomore season, when he played 41 games and hit .239/.300/.303. Bettenburg’s a tall left-handed hitter who played his high school ball at Cretin-Derham Hall, the St. Paul parochial prep school that produced both Molitor and Joe Mauer.

Come his time in college, though, Bettenburg never exhibited the power necessary to make it as a corner outfielder and DH. He had one season as a semi-regular starter, then spent his last two years as a bench bat. But he did face four future major leaguers in the final three seasons of his college career, during which time he did something extraordinary:

That’s right, sports fans. I just spent six hours watching this guy go through a personality crisis in a well-carpeted closet, and all the time he’s gone through life knowing he got a hit off Corbin Burnes. You know who doesn’t have a hit off Corbin Burnes in his pocket? Anthony Rizzo (13 career PA). Max Muncy (10 PA). Aaron Judge (8 PA). Aaron freaking Judge doesn’t have a hit off Corbin Burnes, but Dave from the Netflix dating show does!

At the beginning of this season, I thought David was a little immature and arrogant. I was wrong. If I were 1-for-2 lifetime off a Cy Young winner, I’d get it tattooed on my forehead. I’d legally change my name to Michael “Got A Hit Off Corbin Burnes” Baumann. Keeping that to yourself has to be the challenge of a lifetime. Still, you can see what that accomplishment does for a guy’s mojo. Look at our man, not only pulling off the Hawaiian shirt, but wearing it with the top three buttons open.

That’s a whole lot of swagger for a Minnesotan.

Bettenburg played with some pretty good players, but the best Minnesota team of recent memory was that 2018 team. And Mezzenga was an integral part of it.

Mezzenga was a regular pinch-runner and defensive replacement from the start of his freshman year, and worked his way into the regular lineup as a sophomore. Going through his career game by game, I was struck by an ironic discovery: Just like Love Is Blind tasks its participants with finding love sight unseen, Mezzenga is such a perfect example of a specific college baseball archetype that you know what his game is like just by looking at his stats.

Those of you who only watch the majors might not be too familiar with the OBP > SLG guy as a class of player, but they’re all over college baseball. In 177 games at Minnesota, Mezzenga batted 621 times — roughly the equivalent of a full major league season. He posted a 14.1% walk rate and hit .315, but in four years, he produced just 20 extra-base hits and zero home runs.

That 2018 Minnesota team in general was more on-base over power. That year, Mezzenga posted a .464 OBP and hit in front of Vavra, a future big leaguer who batted .386/.455/.614 and accounted for 10 of Minnesota’s 46 home runs. You’ll score a lot of runs that way.

Mezzenga’s offensive game was a little weird even beyond the contact-over-power aspect. Out of those 671 college plate appearances, at least 62 ended in bunt attempts. And that’s just what got logged in the box score; it doesn’t count slow rollers and Baltimore chops and swinging bunts and infield hits, which were numerous. The first two balls Mezzenga put in play as a college hitter were bunts, the first of 11 games in which he laid down two or more bunts.

And I’m not sure Mezzenga’s impressive walk rate was the result of exceptional plate discipline. Instead, I think his approach was just kind of passive.

Mezzenga posted a career strikeout rate of 17.8%, which is normal for a big leaguer but really high for a singles hitter who hits .300 in his sleep and punches out one extra-base hit a month. He shouldn’t swing and miss that much, especially not with two strikes.

Here’s the thing: He didn’t. Mezzenga got caught looking an astonishing amount:

In four years of college, Mezzenga struck out swinging on just 56.9% of his total strikeouts. The major league average last year was 76.3%, and out of 364 hitters with 50 or more strikeouts, only seven left their bat on their shoulder more frequently than Mezzenga. Even accounting for the lower-strikeout environment of late-2010s college baseball, and the fact that college umps change the zone from pitch to pitch based on whatever makes them feel powerful, that’s a shocking number.

The next batch of Love Is Blind episodes is going to feature the remaining couples going on vacation together at some Caribbean all-inclusive resort. Every season, one of the guys gets in big trouble by getting hammered and flirting with someone else’s fiancée. Like clockwork. One hopes that Mezzenga has kicked his habit of getting caught looking.

Joking aside, I’m sure you want to see how various major leaguers did against this reality TV guy. Only one season separated Bettenburg’s tenure at Minnesota from Mezzenga’s, but in that time, the level of play in the Big Ten went through the roof. Minnesota also made deeper runs in the Big Ten Tournament and the NCAA Tournament in the late 2010s, and as a regular starter, Mezzenga got more playing time. As a result, he faced no fewer than 26 future big league pitchers, and counting:

There’s no Burnes on this list, but Mezzenga did have a pretty exciting three-year running battle against Matt Waldron, and reached base (on a bunt single) in his only matchup with Tylor Megill.

Those of you who were into the draft or college baseball in the late 2010s would probably recognize additional names: Jared Janczak, Burl Carraway. Bettenburg actually put bat to ball against legendary UCLA closer David Berg. There was also an Iowa pitcher named Cam Baumann who walked Mezzenga three times in a row. Alas, we could remember some guys all day.

No position player with so little game power is ever going to get drafted, or even scouted seriously. Which is why Mezzenga’s Netflix bio lists his profession as “developer,” whatever the hell that means. But through bunting and running and drawing walks, he was able to put together an excellent college career.

In the next couple weeks, we’ll find out if being good at baseball has any correlation with being a good partner. I have my doubts, as the guys in general have not exactly covered themselves in glory so far this season. But anyone can get married; only a select few can get a hit off Corbin Burnes.