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Thinking of how to boost content and participation in here. What's your sport(s) of choice and how can you best contribute?
Follow-up to an idea I mentioned here.
My "specialty" is definitely soccer. I primarily follow the Spanish league but more or less keep up with the big 3-5 European leagues. I can easily post related content. I have a medium level of interest in other sports in general but am pretty out of the loop with most American sports.
Any thoughts on what you want to see?
I'm interested in baseball, basketball and hockey. I'm not sure I'm interested in seeing on Tildes the kind of posts that would typically appear on a sports website, such as post-game summaries. However, I'm very interested in the more unusual or in-depth sports-related posts. Things like:
Totally agree. I would add articles and/or interviews of substance to that list, especially those giving insight to the player's perspective.
Being a baseball fan, how did you arrive at Earth and what do you think of the people? :P
Heh. Baseball is, at least for the last few years for me, the most interesting of the (North American) major pro sports.
Among these sports, baseball is the pioneer of the use of statistics and analytics -- using data to help you win. These stats are not just for the teams themselves; they can be very interesting to [some] fans.
The game itself involves a lot of thinking on the part of the players and coaching staff. A lot of the time, that thinking, and execution of a player's choice of action (among several alternatives) has to be made in a fraction of a second. Even the very best players in the world (MLB) make mistakes under these circumstances, because of how difficult it is to always choose the right thing to do and execute that play without making a mistake.
Another thing that is interesting about baseball is just how many ways something unusual can occur. In sports like basketball, hockey, (American) football, and soccer, the dimensions of the playing surface are strictly regulated, and are very simple shapes (a rectangle), and there are more or less no obstacles, objects or unevenness. In baseball, the field has a 90-foot square infield, with a home plate, and three bases that, literally, protrude up from the ground (you'll trip over them if you walk up to them blindfolded). The outfield of every single MLB ballpark is different from the others. Completely unique. The shape and size of the foul areas of each ballpark is different. The height of the walls/fences around the playing area differs, even from area to area within any single given ballpark. Because of this physical uniqueness, in any given season, watching one single team's games, you'll see maybe 5 to 10 unusual plays. Perhaps the ball bounces strangely off a base. Or runners on base are awarded [advancement of] one base because of catcher's interference at a crucial time. Or a manager will request to substitute a player in (very common) -- but then be denied by the umpiring crew because the incoming player's name was not present in the lineup card (submitted before the game). Or a catcher will throw the ball back to his pitcher (a normal part of regular play), but it accidentally ricochets off the batter, allowing a runner from third to be able to score -- with the defending team being bewildered about what just happened, but later being told that it was a legit play because the ball was considered live under those circumstances. (This actually happened in a real game, in the ALDS between Toronto and Texas a few years ago.)
Then there's the cerebral battle between batter and battery (pitcher+catcher). Each side engaging in psychological combat, trying to outwit the other with guesswork, deception, setups and calculated gambles. Baseball is one of the few games (cricket being the other, I suppose) where every scoring play begins with the object (ball) in possession of the defensive team, not the offensive team.
Anyway, I could go on and on. I hope this helps explain my fascination with baseball. I guess it would help you gain appreciation for it if you watched it with someone who already knew the ins and outs of the game, to help explain stuff to you as the game progressed.
This both make me understand why some are fascinated by baseball, while others are not. Well done my friend.
SUMO!
I'm an absolute nut for professional sumo, follow bouts, wrestlers, techniques, rules, traditions, career progression/regression, rumor, politics, the lot.
I also have a personal and familial background in motorsports and while the only motorsport I follow at present is Formula Drift, I follow motorsport tech/engineering very closely. I now have better access to motorsport broadcasts so the classes I follow may increase, but I won't commit to any just yet other than it won't be F1. F1 tech is interesting, the actual racing is not.
Like others here I follow some NFL teams, specifically the Dallas Cowboys and Washington Football Team.
Funny, I always thought the opposite, as a layman. I'm up for being shown why the tech's the fun part.
I'm also up for anything regarding sumo; it will launch me into all sorts of tangential reading about Japanese culture. Are the reports of its dwindling popularity exaggerated or no?
F1 is undoubtedly pay-to-win and the tribalism behind individual drivers or teams in modern F1 turns me off of it, the latter being less of an issue as every sport has such but I've only ever seen it on this level in another motorsport I don't watch, NASCAR. The actual racing is much like Saturday Night Live, the good bits will show up in clips/highlight reels as the rest of it isn't really worth watching. The cars are so fragile and expensive even minor contact (I don't encourage crashes in racing, but "rubbing is racing") takes both cars out of the race, so passes are almost exclusively done when there is zero risk to do so and the overall race is little more than management, so to me it is very much corporate racing. Add to it that the non-aero side of the tech has been made so limited now that all they can do is keep lobbying to stretch the cars in hopes of controlling the airflow for longer. Of note is that current F1 cars are absolutely massive, I'm talking longer than a Bentley Flying Spur, longer than base model pickup trucks. The thing about F1 tech, prior to the last decade or so, was that it had some chance of trickle down to other levels of motorsport, aerodynamic advances largely can't do that because nothing is shaped like an F1 car. So with any innovation being lobbied out by the groups that didn't develop it and greater restrictions each cycle in the name of controlling costs and increasing parity (both largely ineffective) even the tech is boring now. Yes, the hybrid systems have trickled down to other areas and hypercars, but those are incredibly simple (relatively speaking) additions that without F1 would have still occurred. So my F1 tech being interesting statement is largely limited to pre-hybrid with only a few interesting bits from time to time like hybrid turbochargers.
Real tech advances are in Le Mans for top tier racing and Time Attack for road car based racing.
Oh gods... where to start! I'd say the best way to begin would be with the simple Q&A on NHK's site and then on to the Sumopedia. For the latter I'd watch in this order Traditions, Rikishi, Stadium, Bouts. The reports of dwindling popularity are exaggerated and outdated, repeated by people that read one headline without having ever watched sumo and took it as unchangeable fact. I'll freely admit that sumo has had down periods over the decades, and most recently was especially apparent after the match fixing scandal, but has bounced back and is more popular than ever largely because of the adoption of social media by the new batches of wrestlers. This has allowed the fan clubs to no longer be limited to regions and a big push from sujo, which is short for sumo joshi or "sumo girls/fangirls", bringing in more/newer fans and access to the wrestlers is easier than ever. I could go on and on, but you'll want to pick up some knowledge of it before I start diving deep into subjects and lose you.
MMA is what I generally follow. NBA being my second (though much less kept-up-with) interest.
I’m not sure there are not enough users for sports topics to thrive here, currently. But I wouldn’t mind sharing some MMA posts if I think they’d garner some attention. Hmm ... I may be misrecalling, but I think @cfabbro is also into MMA?
Why not? There's close to 11k people subbed. Maybe they're not all fanatics but most probably have some level of interest.
It doesn't need to be sports-focused. Personally I would appreciate a quality post regardless of the number of replies it might garner, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that respect. I can again refer to mrbig's philosophy of cricket post that I am yet to comment on but am richer for having read.
Getting past that stage of little engagement is not solved by not contributing. Something as simple as linking us to an interesting hockey podcast episode or even some sort of youtube tutorial can open doors in ways you may not foresee.
What do you want to see here?
I think recurring topics on specific sports might be a bit unlikely to get enough participation in them to make worthwhile, just because everyone who does follow sports on Tildes seems to have wildly different interests... but perhaps a more generic, weekly or bi-weekly, "what has been happening in your favorite sport?" ~sports topic would be able to draw in enough participants to be worthwhile, and start growing the sports conversation potential here on Tildes. Thoughts?
I'd be up for that, maybe with a tweak or two so we could possibly combine @spit-evil-olive-tips's suggestion. I think it would need to be weekly though. Biweekly is probably irregular enough for people to forget about it or for it to fall away from the default group page view.
I used to be massively into mma some years back. I was staying up until 5am watching live, half the things i listened to were mma podcasts . I loved the sport but they started having so many events that i was skipping some, then more, then just watching highlights, then finishes etc. Before i knew it i was only watching when one of my favourites was watching and then they mostly retired. I've trying to start watching again but i barely know any of the fighters anymore and while i enjoy the sport aspect, it was the personalities that made me love it. Now because there are so many events they don't have time to build most fights and every fighter is dressed in the reebok gear i find most fighters are fairly forgettable, even if they are great fighters.
It also didnt help that the places i discussed MMA either closed down or became meme-y cesspits (/r/mma)
I'm in a very similar boat too (cc: @krg). I had been following MMA religiously since the early Pride and Pancrase days (yes, I'm that old) and still love the sport, but I have basically stopped watching most live events these days. The sheer amount of events going on now (and their cost to watch) is definitely a factor in that, but I think the biggest is due to my best friend of 25+ years, who also loved the sport and would regularly spar and roll with me, passed away a few years ago... so I no longer have anyone to watch the live events with anymore. :(
My leaving reddit and so no longer having anywhere to discuss the sport is also probably a factor in my declining interest too... although /r/MMA basically went from mostly shit to complete shit around the time Ronda Rousey and Conor McGregor started gaining popularity, so I was slowly participating there less and less already anyways.
I would love for a more mature place to discuss MMA here on Tildes, as hopefully that would re-spark my passion for it again... sadly, I just don't know if we have the userbase to really support that yet.
Speaking of oldschool MMA... Ken Shamrock did Mike Tyson's podcast tonight and it was fucking great. It's really worth watching/listening to even if you're not a fan of Ken, since his life story is incredibly inspiring, and he is a great storyteller who has a lot in common with Tyson too.
Ken Shamrock | Hotboxin' with Mike Tyson
cc: @JoylessAubergine and @krg
I watch primarily handegg (American football). Some actual football, but usually just my local MLS team (the Sounders) or the Men's & Women's World Cups, in years when they're happening.
There's something sports-related that I haven't been able to find anywhere on the internet, and maybe Tildes would be the right place for it and maybe it wouldn't...but to throw it out there anyway:
For example, I have a YouTube TV subscription. I told it to record every NFL and NCAA handegg game that it could.
But, that's a lot. I don't have the time or patience to watch every single one of those games.
If I look through the list of NCAA college handegg games that it has DVRed for me, I'll see a big list of:
Since they already happened, if I google any one of those games, it'll tell me the exact score, whether it was a last-minute squeaker or a blowout, etc. Which takes the fun out of actually watching the game. Even though it already happened, if I don't know the outcome, I just know it's a game worth watching, watching it time-shifted can be as good as watching live.
I don't subscribe to /r/CFB (US college handegg) for example, because for every game they have "Post-game thread: Foo State defeats Bar State, 42-41" and any big / noteworthy game will have that thread rocket to the top of the reddit sorting algorithm.
What I really want is an oracle that recommends to me "hey, watch the X vs. Y game" without spoiling any of the details of why it's a fun game to watch (assuming X and Y are teams I'm not normally personally interested in).
If we had a weekly thread for "what games are worth watching, even if you don't care about either team" (and with good discipline about spoilers) I think it'd be very useful.
Great idea. I used to be on a soccer forum years ago that had such a thread with ratings and it was tremendously useful. We could do that and incorporate whatever sporting events are currently happening. Maybe even a format more like the weekly "what games are you playing" thread in ~games, so you could explain your recommendation a bit too.
I don't know if they keep old broadcasts accessible, but for pro-handegg the only thing I can think of is NFL RedZone. Covers all the Sunday games showing the interesting drives, penalties, plays, and scoring.
Figure skating! I've kept a bit of a diary about my progression here in the fitness threads.
For how much I love the sport though I am deeply uninterested in all the olympics, competitions and what not. What a boring sport to watch most of the time. There's some beautiful content out there but you gotta look for it; classical figure skating is just massively repetitive.
I'm always intrigued by people who love playing/doing a sport but hate watching it. Don't you have greater appreciation for the quality of the elite performances? As for the beautiful content, where should we look (or even better, where can you post an occasional link from for us to appreciate)?
Oh I love this question.
I definitely have a deeper appreciation of the difficulty of various figures, as well as being better able to recognize the different components of skaters performances. But it's in the exact same way as, with 18 years of programming behind me, I can appreciate the difficulty and cleverness behind certain software, can admire how some code is written, and can easily find my way through a foreign codebase... And yet I find most coding streams utterly boring.
I love ice dancing though, and anything where the focus isn't on the skating but the rhythm and choreography.
Here's a playlist of some of my favourite videos (it also contains practice and Progress videos which are less relevant to your question): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCHbnTJHcU1-aYKvZ0FhsJuB1kAXKV0O3
I do not follow any sport, but I do possess a
non-trivial knowledge of soccer. The kind most Brazilian males acquire one way or the other. I believe playing soccer is usually much better than watching, and that is true about many sports.
I could contribute with an understanding of obscure rules, its “philosophy” and cultural differences between soccer and other sports, as well as soccer practiced in Latin America and in the rest of the world.
For example: why our players engage in seemingly ridiculous theatrics when receiving a foul?
I'm positive we can have a Q&A between us that would be more than mildly interesting to the rest of the community.
That would be nice. But would there be enough interest? :/
I'm involved in the fencing scene here in the US., although similar to @Adys, it's something I enjoy doing far more than watching. Since the sport is way more niche, I don't post about it on here mostly because there doesn't seem to be much of an audience for it. It's also somewhat difficult to get into because the rules are a total mess, with everyone holding their own, slightly different interpretations which makes things... complicated to say the least
I'll repeat my question to Adys: why is watching that much less enjoyable than doing? Don't you have greater appreciation? I'm pretty good at soccer (or used to be, anyway) and it tremendously informs how I watch the sport... and I am painfully aware when watching with fans who aren't good players. I wonder how much this is a team vs. individual dynamic.
Besides that, count me as someone interested in reading more posts about fencing, precisely because I know so little about it.
The first thing to know about fencing is that it can be considered three different sports wearing a trench coat masquerading as one. Epee, saber, and foil have similar equipment sets, but different strategies, rules, and targets. Since I focus on foil (the one with the most rules), epee (the one with the least rules) is kind of dull to watch, as its just "try to hit without getting hit", and saber looks like two people running and smacking each other over the head. I'm sure there's a lot more nuance for the people who use those weapons though. So that throws out 2/3s of fencing events right off the bat as far as my viewership goes. The next thing to understand is how tournaments work: upwards of 300 people might participate in semi-randomly selected groups, and the people who finish best move on to direct elimination. At this point you have a bracket of around 256 people, which is 128 separate 10-15 minute bouts, which can take hours. Then you move on to round of 128, 64, and so on and so forth. In essence, its not that there's anything inherently uninteresting about watching the fencing itself (although one-sided bouts tend to make up most of the early rounds, and aren't particularly interesting), its just that there's so much of it. Tournaments can take between 1-3 days to finish, so usually you want to pick one person to follow through the tournament, and then watch everything from around the semi-finals.
(I'm in a bit of a rush at the moment so I'll return and fix my terrible vomit of ideas)
Ahoy fellow fencer :) I used to be quite a bit into fencing as well but since I picked up skating, I'm looking to sell my kit ..
I don’t follow much organized sports, but I would love to see more posts about bicycling and bike maintenance. There is an elitist side of biking which I think Tildes could do without, but there is also the non-commercial, relatively eco-friendly, do-it-yourself’er side of biking culture that I think would fit right on here.
My primary sport is definitely cricket. Right now, relatively few cricket events are happening (though this includes Indian Premier League 2020).
Sometimes, I also check exotic sports, most notably muggle quidditch.
Cool! I still have a comment typed up in reply to @mrbig's Philosophy of cricket post in ~humanities that I need to refine. I know there's no shortage of cricket articles around, there must be some interesting blogs out there that you can link from.
Where is the online quidditch scene, I wonder?
Same. Cricket is really popular here.
I follow American football and MLS. Most of the stuff I see just seems too niche for this board right now though. Even in this thread there's only one other person that follows both those leagues. I've tried posting more general interest stuff when I can find it, but it's rare to see stuff that can appeal to most of the Tildes. So, I just don't post anything. I see sports stuff daily that interesting that I share with friends and what not, but it's like, how poorly the teams are handling covid or injury reports from the Green Bay Packers (our favorite team). Given the current state of Tildes, this stuff just feels way to niche to post.
So I think this is a good topic because it's something I've thought of too in terms of how "dead" the sports category is.
I see this sentiment mentioned across the site fairly often, and I think we are getting too caught up on what is niche rather than focusing on what is interesting. I don't follow NFL or MLS but that's more to do with having limited time than not being interested in them (OK, also because MLS isn't that great, but that's a cheap shot, forgive me :P). I support Real Madrid and while I may keep abreast of the mountains of transfer rumors, daily updates, and general drama related to the club that is churned out daily, I would say the majority of that stuff isn't really interesting, even to fellow fans who understand the context. In fact, rather get caught up in that stuff, I'd much sooner read a debate between two Mets fans arguing the merits of a signing that doesn't stack up on analytics yet is vouched for by a senior scout... and I couldn't tell you an ERA from an RBI.
To me, the obvious thing is to post content that you truly find interesting, and if you feel like going above and beyond you can even mention why you find it interesting. You just might help someone like me learn something.
I guess it is an egg/chicken situation where how does the community grow if there's no posts to draw people in. But that does mean a lot of thankless posting with little to no engagement, and while I'm sure that's fine for a lot of power users and people interested in "helping" Tildes grow or whatever, I'm more here because I want high quality engagement. And honestly, not even necessarily on my posts, like you said, it can be fun to see two passionate people just discuss something when there's a certain level to the discourse.
But I just don't know if I have it in me to post a bunch of Packers news to like two votes and zero comments for months while we wait for more people to show up. I'm glad other people have it in them to do that though because it does seem like it's necessary.
I closely follow football(American) and baseball.
Specifically the Jacksonville Jaguars and New York Yankees
I also follow hockey, the Dallas Stars, although I’m not nearly as familiar with the ins and outs and strategies as I am with football with baseball.
That being said, I’d love it if any sports talk gained a bit more traction if only to be able to talk sports without Reddit’s usual hive mind and echo chamber and opposing teams fans brigading my teams subs
I would love to get more into ice hockey. I have a general understanding as its fairly analogous to soccer, and I've also watched my share of field hockey, but I still don't know how people see the puck when they're at a game. My favorite player was Pavel Datsyuk, do the Stars have anyone in his mould? Anything interesting you can post from the Stanley Cup run? I didn't even realize the playoffs were held until I saw the Lightning lift the trophy on the news.
Sorry for the late reply, I was trying to educate myself on Datsyuk a bit and see if any Stars would be similar but tbh, I don't understand the intricacies of the positional play enough to make any sort of comparison that would hold up.
As far as the Run itself, the most notable aspect would be how....unlikely....it was. Dallas managed to get to the Finals despite being the underdog in every series they played. Dallas was also incredibly injured during the playoffs making their run even more unlikely. An article posted by the Athletic highlighted that virtually every major Stars player was dealing with injuries that required surgery or painkillers.
https://russianmachineneverbreaks.com/2020/10/08/the-dallas-stars-played-with-an-absurd-amount-of-injuries-during-their-stanley-cup-final-run/
This article gives an overview of The Athletic article and isn't paywalled.
The fact that Dallas was able to come within 2 games of winning the Stanley Cup, despite all the injuries, makes their run all the more impressive.