This weekend, I strapped on an Apple Vision Pro to watch a baseball game in immersive virtual reality for the first time. It was technically impressive, visually pretty remarkable, and also didn’t make that much sense. Apple and Major League Baseball chose a classic match-up of the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees for the first of its series of four games streamed on the device. I do not review tech for The Verge, but I do watch a lot of baseball — if there’s a game on and I’m at home, it’s likely on my television. If this is the future of sports, live events, and wearable technology in general, I’d like to see what all the fuss is about.

The first thing to know about baseball is that it is long: in season, in game time, and in the arc of history. Right off the bat, this reality makes having a screen strapped to your face a hard sell. It’s not just the physical burden — like many others, I find the Vision Pro heavy and cumbersome — but also because it’s a time-honored tradition to get up and go do something else for a moment while the game is on. It’s America’s pastime for a reason: the slowness, the buildup, the culmination of a long, sticky season where teams slump and get hot. Some nights are duds and others are classics; you are playing (and watching) the long game. Even at the ballpark, you might get up to grab food or another beer, and the seventh inning stretch is built right into live play to give fans a break. With an immersive environment, I struggled with whiplash; coming in and out of the headset’s reality, going from zero to one hundred and back again anytime I wanted to grab a drink, walk around, or eat dinner.

The immersive broadcast includes a floating jumbotron-style screen that shows a more traditional TV broadcast, along with player stats. I often found my attention drifting up to the standard broadcast, because once the ball leaves the vicinity of the batter, it’s quite hard to track what’s actually going on. The immersive replays from new vantage points like the outfield or closer to first base helped to bridge the feeling of being at a distance. But the Vision Pro’s view isn’t very reactive to what’s happening in real time. When Red Sox second baseman Nick Sogard hit a fly ball early in the game, it almost was a home run — but the immersive view was not very compelling. Baseball is full of weird moments, and it made me wonder how well those would be captured on the Vision Pro. What would the benches clearing in a heated moment look like, given the dugout is blacked out during innings? (For this iconic Red Sox-Yankees brawl, the dugout angle might actually be perfect.) How well could you follow the extremely rare and weird occurrences — like a ball getting wedged between the padding of a wall and the ground — that randomly become extremely important and that most people have never seen happen before? The Red Sox fly ball was caught up against the wall by Yankees centerfielder Trent Grisham in a hopping catch, but the immersive view alone wouldn’t be enough to follow the play closely. You need the TV broadcast screen to supplement the hyperreality.

It all made me wonder who or what watching a game on Vision Pro is for. There were a few moments that really did feel like a new way to experience a very old game. The brief look into the team dugouts, for example, offered views you don’t often get: the screens tucked away with a live feed of the bullpens, or the sunflower seeds flying into the dirt. The on-deck circle, where players do their ritual preparations before it’s their turn up to bat, is visible only occasionally on a broadcast but is in full view on the Vision Pro. After Schlittler was pulled from the game in the sixth inning, the immersive view showed him in the dugout, shaking his head in frustration and heading into the clubhouse, head in hands. You probably wouldn’t get these details in a typical broadcast, at least not up close like this.