For people who don’t understand sports, by people who don’t understand sports
The Interesting Times Harold strives to be your only source of information about everything. Whether Putin has just invaded Boise, Idaho or Taylor Swift has deployed her own tactical nuclear weapons to be within striking distance of Canada, we want you to hear it from us first. To that end, we’ve hired new sports correspondents to cover that kind of thing. Well, by “hired” we mean we’ve changed the contract of our existing unpaid computer science intern so that they have to do sports as well as all the other stuff they have to do at the newsletter. You can force interns, contract writers, and digital journalists to do practically anything. Seriously, give it a try.
The Key to Understanding Sports
A few nights ago I was relaxing in my living room, working on some non-sports related stuff when a buddy of mine who lives in a different state sent me a text message. He was at a minor league baseball game, he said. What’s more, his local team was playing a minor league team from my state.
As you can imagine, the testosterone started flowing pretty quickly. Here an actual excerpt from our texts:
Two things probably jumped out at you. The first is that the original text has been altered. This was simply to protect an employer of ours who technically is not this newsletter. A newsletter, we may add, that is certainly not run by an editor who would not hesitate to burn down the offices of said employer.
The other thing that may have jumped out was the use of specialized “sports jargon.” To someone who is not a “die hard fan,” some of the above banter may seem confusing. What is a touchdown? And a hectare? And who would just come out and say “y’all suck” out of the blue like that?
The last question is easiest to answer: only a fan of a rival team who definitely cheats all the time to win would say something like that. But more on that in a moment.
The other questions revolve around how a particular game is played, in this case how a team scores points and what sort of calculation is used to add up points. The true sports fan(atic!) will probably have noticed something that the fair-weather fan may have overlooked: the “banter” above doesn’t, in fact, make any sense.
Something our editor failed to take into account when assigning us the sports desk was that we happen to be dudes who are woefully uninformed about most things sports-related. This unfortunate reality creates awkward conversations quite frequently since we (the two dudes writing this article and who participated in the texting within), live in states that are simply rabid about sports: Kentucky and Ohio.
So that means all our athletic coverage is going to be, at best, wild guesses of what it was that we think other people saw, because frankly the only time we’re watching a sports event is when our wives make us. Seriously. This is us.
Let’s show the conversation that took place the following day, after the (checks notes) minor league baseball game was played.
But we want to point out that, like Rincewind the Wizard from Discworld who argued that one shouldn’t have to be good at magic to be a wizard, a guy shouldn’t have to be an expert at sports to argue about sports. One of the most critical aspects of sports, as far as we can tell, is that they offer friends and total strangers something to argue about in a manner that almost never results in violence.
Except in Kentucky. Those people are nuts.
What we’re getting at is, it doesn’t really matter whether the sport involves full body contact, like with Football or little league parents going at it in the parking lot, or absurdly dull lack of contact like with baseball. It also doesn’t matter the seemingly random assignment of points per score (is it 1? 2? 3? 6?). What matters is that we can look with pride at our own team, regardless of whether or not we know anything about them, and also then mock anyone not of that team. That’s the kind of quality reporting you’ll get from ITH’s Sports Desk.
Also, please tell our families we’re being forced to write in a basement located at the corner of East M….