What/Who to follow for USA sports as a casual fan?
June 28, 2023 1:08 PM   Subscribe

Am meeting the SO's family in two weeks. They're a sports loving family, but I am not a sports loving person. Willing to learn though! What pages, sites, or people can I follow that do a continuing sports news and updates for a USA beginner or casual fan? Ideally something that talks a little bit about history for the season or overall, but isn't mired in said history. Something that'll make me a bit knowledgable about the current sport season in the States (i.e. baseball, football, basketball) as the year progresses, without drowning me in information and history.
posted by clocksock to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (18 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Is there a state, city, region, or university/college that might be relevant for them? And do you have an inkling of which sports they're interested in? Narrowing it down a bit will make it easier to get good recommendations.
posted by LobsterMitten at 1:19 PM on June 28, 2023 [3 favorites]


Can you be any more specific about what kind of sports your SO's family follows?

There are a whole lot of sports that are big in the USA and what your SO's family likes is highly likely to be regionally dependent, or even more specific than that! So if you don't know the answer yourself, best place to start is asking your SO what their family follows. There are rival colleges/universities and rival professional teams in the same state or even the same city sometimes, and you may not want to get all fired up about the "wrong" one of those (unless you enjoy "friendly" conflict)!

Barring more details, though, you could start with ESPN. They have a bunch of TV channels, SportsCenter is a daily show they may air several times a day that shows highlights across many different sports, and their website (literally just espn.com) has coverage of just about every sport you can imagine and several you may never have heard of.
posted by sigmagalator at 1:23 PM on June 28, 2023 [2 favorites]


Luckily for you, it's the part of the year we call "baseball only", as the basketball and hockey seasons have just ended and football doesn't begin until late in august.
Where you are going matters, so find out the name of the the local baseball team (So, for Seattle, for instance, that would be the Mariners) and then you simply say "how 'bout them mariners?" at which time you will find out all you will ever need to know. I'm kind of kidding, but sportsloving people LOVE to talk about their team(s) and don't really care if the audience is knowledgeable or not. so, they start to ramble until you get glassy eyed and then you can ask questions, fine, and they will ramble again. If you're a good sport (tee hee) they will sit you down in front of a game on tv and explain while it all happens. easy peasy.
posted by OHenryPacey at 1:25 PM on June 28, 2023 [6 favorites]


I am not a sports fan but I'm a huge fan of baseball movies, and you'd be surprised how often that's enough.

(I haven't run hard numbers on it, but in general the female love interests in baseball movies tend to be whole people and played by age appropriate actors, which is pretty unusual for movies overall and a huge vote in their favor for me!)
posted by phunniemee at 1:35 PM on June 28, 2023 [2 favorites]


Every Big Four pro team and most major colleges have blogs under the SBNation umbrella. Were i to try to learn a lot about a particular team in not much time, that’d be my first stop. Most SBN blogs do a daily/weekly roundup of links to other team blogs, local media, etc., making it an excellent starting point. They also run a lot of team history features in the offseason if you’re interested in backstory.

Caveat that SBN has had some labor issues in the past, but I think that’s pretty common for web media.
posted by kevinbelt at 2:19 PM on June 28, 2023


Showing your interest for the sake of our SO's family is very thoughtful and beginning to follow sports can probably feel quite overwhelming if you're not familiar (and as lobstermitten mentioned, there are so many teams, and not to mention, there are college and professional (and semi-professional) leagues, and men's and women's leagues as well).
Many sports fans will just follow a particular team or 2 and finding out what team(s) that your SO's family members are interested in would be a great

A lot of sports journalism is extremely time-sensitive ("top pick-ups for your fantasy team this week") and often assumes some existing knowledge of a team's current status, so don't feel discouraged if you're overwhelmed.

Besides what's already mentioned, The Ringer and Sports Illustrated are good ad-based sources that will have a mix of team-specific stories and larger league-wide trends.
the Athletic has great coverage (requires a paid subscription) but if you subscribe to the NY Times, you may get access through NYT.

Defector (requires paid subscription) focuses on more longer pieces but its layout may feel less overwhelming than other sites.

Also check out local newspapers if you're looking for coverage of a specific team; sports coverage by local newspapers is still relatively intact.
posted by fizzix at 2:33 PM on June 28, 2023


As others have said, this is highly dependent on what sport and what flavor of sport (professional or college) they're into.

So yeah, if you can find out what teams they like, read up a bit about that team and then ask questions -- "I read So-and-so just got injured and may be out for the rest of the season. How do you think that will affect the team?" I mean, don't try too hard to make it sound like you know more than they do, but sports fans love to talk about their teams (and I say this as a sports fan who is watching a baseball game as I type this).

If they are baseball fans and time allows, everyone watching a game together can be a great way to ask questions (once again, sports fans love to talk). Baseball has enough downtime that you don't need to be paying attention the entire time.

The NBA draft was last week (so in two weeks, a bit of old news) but also a good topic if they're basketball fans -- "Which of the new players are you most excited about?" or whatever. (Note: I know nothing about the NBA really, other than names of major players.)

I don't think you need to really try to prove how much you know -- just enough to show them you're interested.
posted by edencosmic at 2:53 PM on June 28, 2023


Response by poster: Is there a state, city, region, or university/college that might be relevant for them? And do you have an inkling of which sports they're interested in? Narrowing it down a bit will make it easier to get good recommendations.

They like the Cardinals, baseball wise. Otherwise, they're based in Illinois and Florida. Baseball, basketball, and football are their sport enjoyments.
posted by clocksock at 3:24 PM on June 28, 2023 [2 favorites]


They're Cards fans? Lucky you.

There are absolute firehoses of Cards talk you can drink from. Check out The Cardinal Nation (which is almost 25 years old) and Cards Conclave.
posted by box at 3:32 PM on June 28, 2023 [1 favorite]


For Florida: the Miami Heat were in the NBA finals last month against all expectations. They lost but the season would be considered to be a success.
The Tampa Bay Rays and Miami Marlins are both contenders in baseball, Tampa having had a storming start to the season.
The Cards (St Louis) are having a poor season and are last in their division at the moment.
posted by OHenryPacey at 3:37 PM on June 28, 2023


I have never been a sports person really, but I’m casually interested and recently started subscribing to Defector, which is absolutely worth the money. It’s all very accessible to a new fan and they cover everything from competitive chess to the tour de France, and right now there’s a series profiling every single women’s world cup team in detail. They also cover sports-related labor rights stories. I really can’t recommend them highly enough.
posted by showbiz_liz at 4:18 PM on June 28, 2023


Defector is indeed great, but I don’t think the TdF or women’s World Cup are what the OP means by “sports-loving family”.

Also, just living in Florida implies nothing about team loyalties. Florida teams, especially Miami teams, are infamous for their lack of fan support. Except for the Dolphins, all their teams are relatively new, and much of the local population are transplants, meaning that nearly everyone there grew up cheering for another team.
posted by kevinbelt at 4:59 PM on June 28, 2023 [1 favorite]


This is easy. As mentioned above -- ESPN Sportscenter. Watch it daily for a week or two. You will be able to have surface level conversations about any type of sports. I am a local politician who uses this to get through many conversations about sports.
posted by Mr. X at 5:15 PM on June 28, 2023 [6 favorites]


Sports people are usually more than willing to talk about sports to people who know nothing about them! I think the best thing to do is to try to catch a game with them- ideally in person- and just let them explain to you what is going on. Right now that would be baseball because basketball and football don't start until the fall.
posted by oneirodynia at 9:28 PM on June 28, 2023 [1 favorite]


Yeah, just be straight up about not knowing anything and ask questions. (I have, with sports loving partners. My eyes naturally glaze over as soon as I hear the sounds of the crowd, and imo few things are as boring as staring at a ball to see where it goes, but it helps to attend to neat things the athletes are doing in the close up shots.)
posted by cotton dress sock at 12:57 AM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]


Your SO should be priming you on their family's top teams/sports interests. I second the recommendation to watch SportsCenter for like a week before going--it's a quick 30-minute overview of sports highlights that runs pretty much all day (I actually find it soothing background chatter when I'm puttering around the house) and will let you be able to add stuff like "wow, I saw the [cool homer/team brawl/cat on the field] highlights of X game last night, that was great" and the sports fans will take over from there.
posted by TwoStride at 5:02 AM on June 29, 2023 [1 favorite]


One kind of fun way to bridge interest gaps is to analogize, and there are nearly infinite sports analogies out there. If Major League Baseball teams were characters from the Wire, which character would each team be? (The Cardinals are probably Stringer Bell - not everyone's favorite, but the people who do like them like them intensely. The Chicago Cubs are McNulty - even though they're super douchey, people just kind of like them anyway, and they never win anything. The Oakland A's are Wallace.) If NFL teams were countries, which countries would they be? (The Chicago Bears are France - important if you go back a century or more, but pretty irrelevant for most of the last 80 years. The New England Patriots are Russia - a fading authoritarian superpower.) If NBA players were classic rock bands, which classic rock band would they be? (LeBron James is Led Zeppelin - unquestionably good, but so good as to be a little bland; if you saw their poster on a teenager's wall, you'd think "basic". Luka Doncic is ZZ Top - Texas-based, appreciated by those in the know, but not really anyone's favorite. Ben Simmons is the Eagles - enjoyment of fame leads to copious amounts of drama.)

Some other fairly evergreen questions that you can look for up any team and then discuss without a whole lot of background information: Is the team doing better or worse (in terms of winning) this season than it has over the past few seasons? If they're doing better, is it good enough to win a championship? If not, what would they need to do to contend for a championship? If they're doing worse, why is that? Should they respond by firing the coach or by trading a player (or multiple players)?
posted by kevinbelt at 7:17 AM on June 29, 2023 [3 favorites]


Agree with the above, this is serious baseball time, and Cardinals fans will always talk ball. I grew up in Illinois near STL, baseball's a form of religion there.

If you really don't know anything about baseball, this video by a former pitcher goes through all the rules starting with the absolute basics.

Cards fan questions for this year:
"Tough season! What do you think they need to do to get out of this slump? Can they still make the playoffs with a strong August? Is the slump due to the loss of the veteran players in the clubhouse last year?"

Bonus hockey question since they're STL-adjacent and Floridians:
"Did Matthew Tkachuck trading to Florida instead of his native Saint Louis put the Blues in a hole for a few years?"

And don't try to come off as an expert, let them know you're a new fan!
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 10:51 AM on June 29, 2023


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