“She doesn’t have to be fed to eat,” Winters-Scott said of two-time All-Star Kiki Iriafen, reaching for a metaphor about cutting grapes for a toddler in a high chair. “The ball finds energy and she is energy.”

That is not a broadcaster dodging a question. Winters-Scott is in her 17th season as the Mystics’ color analyst, and for most of that run, she was also the head coach who took South Lakes High in Reston, her alma mater, from 0-21 to 19-4 in four seasons before she stepped away in 2022.

So ask her whether the Mystics offense should run through its best interior scorer and she answers as a coach who had to install one.

Her answer is no, and the reason matters more than the verdict.

“If you do that, you lose the organic beauty of the game,” Winters-Scott said.

Structure an offense around a single entry point and everyone else plays for scraps — bad for spacing, worse for a locker room. Her alternative is the thing this team already does well: read the coverage and punish it.

Winters-Scott pointed to two backdoor cuts to All-Star Sonia Citron in Wednesday’s win over Las Vegas, run twice because the Aces refused to believe they’d see it again.

“Straight from the whiteboard to the court,” she said.

So if the answer isn’t a hierarchy, what explains the droughts? The 57 points at Connecticut, the 49 points against Golden State and the 56 points against Portland a week ago?

The numbers describe a team at war with itself. Washington leads the WNBA in rebounding at 37 per game, which means nobody in the league wins more possessions. It also leads the WNBA in turnovers at 16 per game and its 80.8 points rank second-worst in the league. The Mystics get the ball more often than anyone and do less with it than almost everyone.

Winters-Scott separates the two halves that most people bundle together. The turnovers, she says, aren’t a basketball-IQ problem. They’re a familiarity problem.

“They go too fast for themselves,” she said. Washington has, by her count, 12 developmental players and a five-day training camp to teach them each other. Eight Mystics have made their WNBA debuts this season, the most any team has run out in more than a quarter-century.

The Aces team they beat Wednesday has three titles in four years and the same core taking the same reads. One of those rosters gets to play on instinct. The other is still learning where the cut is coming from.

The Washington Mystics are officially the youngest team in WNBA history

The team’s average age went down to 23.5 years old, after the franchise waived 32-year-old Alex Wilson on Tuesday.

— Ball Don’t Lie (@Balldontlie)

The scoring is a different diagnosis with a specific fix. Washington is among the league’s best at generating points in the paint, which is precisely why teams stopped letting them get there. The counter isn’t volume from deep — Winters-Scott was explicit that she doesn’t want 15 attempts a game falling. It’s enough to change how they’re guarded.

“Eight, nine, 10,” she said. Make that many and the defense has to play honest. Pack the paint anyway and you get punished.

There’s evidence she’s right and it’s recent. Winters-Scott told a story about Shakira Austin putting a price on hesitation — telling Georgia Amoore she’d owe $100 every time she pump-faked an open look on a kickout. Amoore, who missed all of last season with a knee injury and is effectively a rookie, went 3 of 4 from 3-point range in Monday’s win at Golden State. Against the Aces on Wednesday, Washington hit 7 of 13 from deep and won 100-99 despite four-time MVP A’ja Wilson pouring in 38 points.

Winters-Scott doesn’t read the Mystics’ two All-Star nods as a workload story at all. She reads them as a coaching outcome — and she’d know the difference. Citron led the league in 3-point percentage last season and now gets top-locked off every pin-down she used to score from. Iriafen answered a similar problem by adding a 3-pointer that wasn’t in her game a year ago.

Both were forced to remake themselves in Year 2, and they are the only returning All-Stars in the league to have raised their points, rebounds and assists per game while doing it. Winters-Scott credits Sydney Johnson’s staff for getting them there.

Which is where the argument gets complicated.

Because if the offense is genuinely democratic, then the story everyone is telling during All-Star weekend in Chicago is the wrong one. Citron and Iriafen are the All-Stars — the first teammates in the league since 1999 to make it in each of their first two seasons. But Wednesday, Citron turned it over six times and Iriafen shot 4 of 12.

Washington won because Austin scored 25, because Lauren Betts gave them 13 off the bench, because six players reached double figures. Austin also ranks second in the WNBA in individual defensive rating, on a team whose case rests on defense.

Winters-Scott said unprompted that Austin had done enough to make the All-Star roster herself. Her own logic points at the same place: the team’s best argument is not its two headliners.

The harder problem is the calendar. Youth is a real diagnosis, but it is also the most comfortable one available, because it requires nothing but patience. The Aug. 2 trade deadline is the point where waiting becomes a decision rather than a condition.

Washington is 14-12 and eighth in the league — in playoff position, but eighth. It is also the only team in the WNBA to have beaten Minnesota, Golden State and Las Vegas this season. Both of those things are true, and the front office has 10 days to decide which one is the tell.

Winters-Scott declined that one and did it honestly.

“I’m so kumbaya,” she said, explaining that as a coach she couldn’t bring herself to cut players and kept them on as managers instead. She’d keep this group whole. She also volunteered that she has no front-office intel and that the answer was feeling, not analysis. It’s worth taking her at her word on both halves of that.

What she would commit to is a standard for the second half, and it isn’t a win total.

Stay elite defensively, she said, through the stretch of the schedule where opponents see you a third and fourth time and arrive with adjustments. Washington is third in the league in defensive rating, behind only Golden State and Minnesota and Iriafen ranks seventh individually — putting two Mystics among the WNBA’s 10 best defenders.

Get the incremental jump from the bench — Betts, Cassandre Prosper, Alicia Florez. Let Citron keep solving the coverages that took the 3-pointer away. Let Iriafen keep extending her range.

Asked for one word, she gave two: “Be consistent and ascend.”

That’s the standard. The Mystics can hold the second one — this roster has spent three months demonstrating improvement. The first is the one that beat them in the games nobody wants to talk about (losses to expansion Portland and the two worst teams in the standings, Connecticut and Seattle) and it’s the only thing between the youngest team in league history and a postseason it has no business reaching yet.

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Four days ago, I told you there’s never been a better time to follow a team, and that it’s never felt more like work. Both are still true. The abundance is real, and so are the noise, the costÌýand the quiet little fictions we tell about the kind of fan we are.

But sit under all of it long enough and you reach the floor this whole series was standing on the entire time.

It was never the winning — after all, D.C. sports has been an education in heartbreak for most of the last few decades: The Capitals spent years inventing new ways to lose in the spring before they finally broke through in 2018. The Nationals made an art form of the early October exit until 2019. The NFL team, under three nicknames, spent the better part of three decades wandering the wilderness.

Yet through all of it — the collapses, the rebuilds, the ownership soap operas — almost nobody left (save for the swaths of die-hard Burgundy and Gold fans who couldn’t get over the 2020 name change). Why?

The answers turned out to be the truest and most beautiful part of the whole exercise.

‘You feel them in your bones’

At the end of nearly every conversation, I asked some version of the same question — the one this whole series had been circling: What does sports give you that nothing else does?

Rich, the die-hard from Laurel you met in Part 3, put it in terms I haven’t been able to shake. The great sports moments, he told me, aren’t entertainment. They’re milestones — and they sit on the same shelf as the milestones that have nothing to do with sports at all:

“You feel them in your bones, in your very being. There are very few things in life like that: holding your child for the first time, seeing your spouse on your wedding day.”

He can name his the way you’d rattle off birthdays — Jayden Daniels’ rookie season and ; to lift the Orioles to victory in the 2014 ALDS most people outside of Baltimore have already filed away.

And they don’t fade out with the box score. ÃÛÌÒÊÓƵapp’s own Rob Stallworth played college basketball a lifetime ago, and he’ll tell you the body keeps what the standings forget:

“That exhilaration about being an athlete — it never leaves you. Your body may get old … but that never leaves you.”

Ronnie expressed a similar sentiment on his long commute home to Upper Marlboro, saying the watching is how he copes with being well past his own competitive days. Ask him what he gets out of sports, even as a spectator, and he doesn’t reach for anything small:

“Oh man, complete satisfaction and fulfillment,” he said. “You know, my playing days are over, so it’s where I get the fulfillment from really participating in watching and learning.”Ìý

A lifelong fan, a former college player, and a man who never quite stopped being a player in his own head — and all three describe the same thing.

A great sports moment doesn’t file itself away like a fact. It settles into the body and stays.

Sometimes for a lifetime.

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You don’t feel it alone

That permanence is rarely something you keep by yourself. David — the Hagerstown truck driver you rode along with in Part 2 of this series — gave me the version that requires a second person in the room.

By now, you’ve seen it a thousand times: Then-rookie Jayden Daniels heaved a Hail Mary after the clock hit triple zeros against Chicago, and it . David was watching with his teenage son:

“Me and my son jumped up and hugged and high-fived without even planning it. Sports is the only thing that gives you that.”

Anybody who’s lived with a teenager knows what that unplanned collision is worth. For a lot of the fathers I talked to, it’s far more intentional.

Stallworth’s teams are all Philadelphia — a city that spends most of the year rooting against Washington. He follows a D.C. team anyway. And he does the legwork:

“I follow the Wizards to a certain degree only because my sons, two of them happen to be Wizards fans. So I’m always keeping them up on updates via the app or the web or whatever the case may be, so they also understand what’s going on, so that we can continue to build our relationship as fans, and not just as father and son.”

Read that last part again. He isn’t following the Wizards to have something to say to his kids. He’s building a second channel to them.

While Stallworth uses the game to reach the sons he has, Scott’s opening a channel to one he might get.

A tech professional in D.C. and an empty-nester, Scott told me he moved into the city from Montgomery County to create opportunities like these:

“My daughter’s dating a new guy, and it’s like, ‘hey, it’s going to be 65 and sunny … do you want to go to the Nats game with us?’ You know, we went there and we sat in the outfield and talked, and was all, you know, amazing … great, great experience.”

You don’t even have to root for the team to feel it. Corey — a proud New Yorker with love for Giants and Knicks, and no particular use for the locals — went to his first game at then-FedEx Field years back, and was talked into wearing a borrowed Sean Taylor jersey by a D.C.-native buddy.

Corey had no stake in the outcome. Yet for three hours, in the middle of a home crowd his own rooting interests taught him to revile, he was helplessly part of it — swept into belonging to a thing that wasn’t even his.

In a city where half the people are from somewhere else and plenty of them are just passing through, that’s no small magic: a game can hand even a rival transplant one afternoon of belonging to the same thing as everyone around him.

The word two strangers reached for

As I kept asking the closing question, near the end I saw a pattern I haven’t been able to shake.

Though the answers scattered — escape, joy, a reason to call your brother, a Tuesday-night break from the news — two people, brought together by this story and little else, answered with the same single word.

Derrick, our “can’t fax a handshake” special-education teacher and volleyball coach, said it first, flatly, like it was obvious:

“There’s hope. There’s always, always, always hope.”

He meant it almost cosmically; Derrick figures two strangers on opposite sides of the planet, watching the same Elite Eight buzzer-beater, feel the exact same thing.

Chris is the other one: a casual fan who’ll tell you he checked out of the modern sports machine a while ago — but in reality, he left the packaging and quietly kept the parts he loves. Yet, by his own account, he’s the last guy you’d expect to wax poetic, but on a different day, in a different conversation, he reached for Derrick’s exact word and, with a laugh, aimed it even higher:

“Hope. I know I say that loosely, and kind of like tongue in cheek, but when I say hope, I don’t think that there’s anything better than watching a person achieve something that for all intents and purposes should not have been achievable.”

The all-in coach and the checked-out casual, landing on the same syllable: Hope.

The part that can’t be put into words

But the truest answer I got didn’t come as a word at all.

It came from David again — the same no-nonsense truck driver who, like a lot of DC die-hards, gives his baseball heart to Baltimore — a man nobody would define as sentimental.

All these years later, he admitted, he still can’t get through the full footage of — 2,131 straight games — without being moved to tears.

“I don’t know why, but it’s just something, like, that’s magical.”

That’s the whole thing, right there. The stoic guy, undone by a 30-year-old clip of a shortstop jogging along a wall of outstretched hands, and the closest he can come to explaining it is magical.

Despite her general disinterest in sports, my old friend Priscilla has a similar story: Her husband, Zach, was traveling abroad for two weeks and at the point she missed him most, she simply turned on the Orioles game in the background to make her feel like he was still in the room with her.

That’s the power of sports as a connector. It ties the former athlete to the game itself, long after the body quit. It ties the non-sports fan to the people they love an ocean away, same as it does to the die-hard strangers side-by-side in the stadium. One feeling, big and strange enough to overwhelm a grown man, closing every one of those distances.

That’s what sports gives you that nothing else does.

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Over the past several weeks, I set out to answer a question that sounds simple but isn’t: what do D.C.-area sports fans actually need and want to help them follow their teams?

I thought that was the whole question. It turned out to be the doorway to a much bigger one.

So, I asked dozens of people across the D.C. region — inside multiple local sports venues, including Nationals Park, Audi Field and CareFirst Arena, and well beyond them in D.C., across Virginia, and as far in Maryland as Hagerstown and the edges of Anne Arundel County.

They ranged across ages, backgrounds and rooting interests, and included the kinds of fans we all recognize: the die-hards, the casuals, the transplants rooting for somebody else, and the people who barely (if ever) follow sports at all.

That last group was the hardest to reach. People who don’t care about sports don’t answer a call for sports fans — not caring is the whole point. So to hear from them honestly, I went to a few people in my own life I knew would give it to me straight (my sister, Lauren, among them; she can take or leave a game and has never once sugarcoated anything for me).

The risk in asking people who know you is that they’ll tell you the truth about themselves — and, every so often, about you. That candor helped form the spine of this series.

This series walks you through what these various people told me: where they go to find the latest on their teams, what they’re missing, who they really are as fans versus who they think they are — and, at the end of it, what still connects us to sports in the first place. The answer had almost nothing to do with coverage — and everything to do with why people keep sports close.

Part 1 (Monday, July 13): The struggle of convenience for sports fans

Part 2 (Tuesday, July 14):ÌýWhy the commute is clutch time for sports fans

Part 3 (Wednesday, July 15): Tickets, streaming and betting — the rising cost of being a sports fan

Part 4 (Thursday, July 16): The fan you think you are vs. the fan you actually are

Part 5 (Friday, July 17): Family, community and the enduring power of fandom

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This episode could read as a setup for a punchline at the expense of the good folks who took the time to talk to me for this project — catch them being phony, point, laugh.

That’s not what this is. Everyone I spoke to, from the man on the street to the little sister I grew up with, was straight up authentic.

And, interestingly, I found many elements of my own journey in sports fandom.

I didn’t get D.C. sports as an inheritance like Danny Jolles did. I wasn’t born here and my dad wasn’t much of a sports fan. But I found this passion at 12 years old and it ran deep enough to steer a huge part of my career.

And having a career in sports reporting has shifted what was a die-hard D.C. sports fan into more of an observer whose interest lies more in telling great stories than in any singular outcome. Truthfully, even if I hadn’t landed here, my relationship with sports would probably look more like Javon’s.

‘Are they still terrible?’

I haven’t seen Javon since we worked together at a local sports talk radio station in the early 2000s. He’s no longer in sports talk and he cites factors such as the NFL’s handling of Colin Kaepernick, and the commodification of sports (which we touched on in Part 3 of this series) as to why he’s transitioned from a die-hard sports fan to a more casual consumer.

“Sports used to be a necessity and a way of life. Now it’s an escape, and one of the elements where I get a little bit of joy.”

A tidy story about a man who moved on and not a bitter one. Then I asked how he actually keeps up with his teams:

“When your team is bad, you just sort of check in: are they still terrible? OK, they’re still terrible.”

That is not how a man who moved on behaves. That’s a guy still phoning the hospital for updates on a patient he swears he stopped visiting.

The connoisseur who skims

You remember Ricardo, who follows his Carolina teams from up here and reads about them constantly. Ask him what he wants from coverage and he’ll describe a connoisseur we met earlier this week: the deep dive, the breakdown, the kind of analysis a box score can’t touch. “I love the dive into the games,” he told me. And then, a breath later, the other Ricardo showed up:

“I’m a skimmer. Get my attention from the get-go.”

The instant a piece slows down — the instant it starts reaching for filler to stretch to a commercial — he’s gone, thumb already moving to the next thing. So which is he, the diver or the skimmer?

Both, of course. He wants the depth of a documentary delivered at the speed of a highlight. He isn’t confused about what he likes. He’d just never had to hold the two halves of it up next to each other until somebody asked.

The proud fair-weather fan

Lisa, a schoolteacher and a D.C. native, doesn’t bother with the costume at all. She’ll tell you exactly what kind of fan she is:

“I’m a fair weather fan — if a D.C. team is winning, I’m out there. I went to the Nats parade.”

No defensiveness, no little speech about how she’s secretly been there through the lean years. The Caps win a Cup, she’s in. The Nats win it all, she’s at the parade. The teams slide back into the standings and she’s got other things going on.

We’ve built a whole vocabulary for fans like Lisa — bandwagoner, front-runner, fair-weather — and we swing it like an insult. She just nods and picks her sign back up. No costume to keep straight.

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The nonfan with a back door

And then there’s Priscilla, who would object to being in this story at all — because she’ll tell you (and does tell me, regularly) that she doesn’t follow D.C. sports. Not a fan. Not her thing. Except:

“I don’t feel any connection to D.C. sports except through you.”

The “you” is me; we’ve been friends since we were 12 years old. And that turns out to be the entire on-ramp.

She couldn’t find the Wizards in the standings, but send her a story — this player came from nothing, this team’s a long shot — and she’s all the way in. Her fandom doesn’t run through the teams. It runs through the people who hand her the teams. Which sounds like the opposite of a sports fan, right up until you notice it might be the most common kind there is.

The ‘chill base’

The aforementioned Danny Jolles has a theory about D.C. sports fans he means as a compliment.

We’re “a chill base,” he said — a fanbase that takes its losing gracefully:

“The Wizards stink, we all just went, ‘All right, have a good season, see you next year.’ We understood the assignment.”

He likes this about us. He’ll defend it. In his telling, it’s practically a civic virtue — proof that D.C. keeps its perspective while other cities lose their minds:

“Every athlete should want to play in Washington, D.C., because you won’t get booed.”

It’s a lovely self-portrait compared with, say, Philadelphia.

Also, if you’ve been faithfully reading this series, it’s not quite who we are.

Because this same series is full of D.C. fans who are anything but chill. Andrew B. wants a broadcaster willing to call the Wizards what they are: the die-hards who’ve been keeping a ledger of every heartbreak for decades and the ones still mad about a name change.

Danny describes a city at peace with losing from inside a project full of people who very much are not. He’s sure he knows exactly what kind of fan this city contains. He’s just as sure about himself — and that’s where he turns out to be onto something.

At both ends of the gulf …

Here’s the surprisingly common thread I found across these interviews: despite the gulf between non-sports fans and die-hards, at their core they both want the same thing.

Danny ran a sports podcast for a while — Everything But the Scores — and the name was the whole thesis. What he noticed was that the people who loved it weren’t all sports fans:

“The average person does not care about the defense the Commanders are planning to run … but the average person wants to hear about Jayden Daniels’ family and why he’s here … about Bobby Wagner and his journey. The average person just wants to hear about the stories.”

That’s the loudest die-hard in this series — the man who’ll root for a D.C. team that doesn’t even exist yet — telling you the games aren’t always the point.

And then, from the other side of the gulf, the person who proves him right. My sister Lauren — who has about as little use for sports as anyone I talked to:

“I’m more interested in the people more than the sports.”

She’s describing, without realizing it, the exact thing Danny and every die-hard in this series also kept circling back to — not the result, the human being inside it.

And Lisa, the fair-weather fan from a few paragraphs back, saw the whole size of it the year sports briefly went away during the COVID shutdown. She came across a podcast about what that absence was doing to people:

“The loss that so many men felt — it really showed me … this is really a huge part of people’s being.”

Neither Lisa nor Lauren lives and dies with a team, but both saw the size of the thing clearly.

In this episode, maybe the biggest surprise wasn’t discovering that people had misjudged themselves. It was discovering that fandom is less a fixed identity than a series of changing relationships — with teams, with family, with time and with each other.

Which leads us to the series finale. After four days of talking about time, money, habits and identity, one question remained: What does sports give us that nothing else does?

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Editor’s Note: This is part 3 of a five-part series on what it means to be a D.C. sports fan in 2026. ÃÛÌÒÊÓƵapp’s Rob Woodfork talked with dozens of fans — die-hards, casuals, transplants and people who barely watch — about how they follow their teams, what it costs them and what keeps them coming back. Some of what they said was about coverage. Most of it wasn’t. Read all 5 parts and learn more about how this series was reported.Ìý

Part 2 was about what fans want in the car: the score, the detail that makes it matter, fast, from a trustworthy voice with some life in it. They’ll take all of that gladly.

The catch — the thing that surfaced over and over once I started asking — is what it now costs them to get it.

And not just money, though there’s plenty of that. But also friction, time and attention. Following your team in 2026 has quietly become something you pay for in four different currencies. Today focuses on the hidden cost of staying connected.

The cover charge

Start with the most basic cost of all: getting in the door. By — the standard yardstick for what a day at the game actually runs — taking a family of four to an NFL game now clears $600 once you fold in tickets, parking and a round of concessions.

. A single seat to a Nationals game is on the higher end at an , which feels reasonable right up until you multiply it by a family and a parking spot and a couple of ballpark beers. And these costs have outrun inflation for years.

Jonathan, who outlined the inside-the-park grand slam at Nationals Park in Part 2 of this series, has been going to games since he was a kid in the 1980s — $3 nights at the ballpark with his dad, watching the Orioles. He’s done the quiet math on what’s happened since:

“My salary has not increased as fast as ticket prices.”Ìý

That’s the whole squeeze in 10 words. Same team, same seats. What’s changed is the distance between what they cost and what an ordinary paycheck can absorb.

ÃÛÌÒÊÓƵapp’s own Reada Kessler, a lifelong Commanders fan, spent years on . By the time her name finally came up, her interest in meeting the steep price had drifted out of reach.

Kessler still spends on the team merchandise, but even the cost of following the Commanders via online subscriptions is a bridge too far:

“I just don’t have all that money to be putting into those things.”

Death by a thousand subscriptions

The same explosion of choice that was supposed to make following your team easier has instead splintered it across a dozen apps, each with its own login and its own monthly charge.

Watching every NFL game in the 2026 season can require Ìý— a tangle frustrating enough that the into the migration of live sports to streaming, the agency calling the shift a “real pain for consumers.”

A recent — and an even larger share of sports fans, 75% — now say there are simply too many platforms required to watch live sports.

That brings us to Shadrick, who told me while taking in a Nationals game he’s seen that thousand-dollar figure to follow NFL football up close and personal. He grew up in Chicago, moved here, and now pays for MLB.TV to follow his Cubs from afar. And the Nats — the team he adopted as his second team, in the city where he now lives?

“I pay for MLB TV to watch my Cubs, but I can’t watch the Nats — they’re blacked out.”

That’s not a glitch. The blackout is baked into the out-of-market package by rule — the local team is the one Shadrick can’t see on the service he already pays for.

“Long gone,” he told me, “are the days of just regular broadcast TV.”

And even broadcast television is guilty of the gut-punch version of fragmentation — Allison couldn’t even see the conclusion of a tightly-contested women’s golf tournament recently:

“We were just watching the LPGA last weekÌýand they turned off the coverage to go to the men’s event, and we had to find another streaming app to be able to watch it … it’s kind of ridiculous.”

The friction shows up even when nobody’s charging admission. Miguel, another transplant from Chicago who turns up at Audi Field for D.C. United, just wants to read about his team:

“Too many ads … I’m filtering through like crazy little ads to get through to the story.”

That’s the tax you pay in attention — the seconds and the patience spent getting past the thing in front of you to reach the thing you came for.

Remember Molly at Nationals Park? Since her work subscription to the Washington Post went away, so did her habit of reading the sports section.

“Since we got rid of it, it tends to be whatever recommended articles pop up. I don’t always seek stuff out.”

She didn’t decide to follow her teams less closely. Cost decided it for her.

“A lot of stuff is behind a paywall, just in general,” she said.

Add it all up — the blackouts, the splintered apps, the ads, the paywalls — and the abundance that looked so promising in Part 1 starts to feel like a maze you pay admission to wander.

Before this turns into nothing but a ledger of grievances, though, one thing worth saying plainly: these people are all still paying. Still subscribing, still driving to the ballpark, still hunting down whatever app has the game. You don’t resent the price of something you don’t care about — they grumble precisely because what’s on the other side of the turnstile is something they love.

A few have even beaten the system. Jonathan eventually found his Nats games tucked into a streaming package right next to his Orioles, blackout dodged thanks to DirecTV. The frustration running through this episode isn’t the frustration of people walking away. It’s the frustration of people who want in — and keep paying to stay there.

Derrick, a special education teacher in Centreville featured in Part 2, put the perfect words to exactly why they keep paying:

“You can’t fax a handshake — you want to be at the stadium, you want to get the hot dog … I’ll pay 20 bucks for popcorn. Buy once, cry once.”Ìý

No app reproduces the walk up to the gate, the noise, the hot dog that costs too much and tastes better for it. Plus, there’s the emotional pull Derrick added:

“We’re not going to have our kids in our house for much longer, right? You want to create those memories and just get, even for a few minutes, just get everybody rolling in the same direction, for once, as a family.”

More on that in Part 5 of this series. But now …

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The bet they’re not making

There’s one more thing the industry is pushing at fans right now, harder than tickets or streaming or anything else. And it’s the one place where, almost across the board, the people I talked to are pushing back.

Betting.

Let’s start with the size of it: In 2025, , in and the District itself — wagered in a single year across the D.C. region and beyond. In Maryland, Ìý— the long-shot, many-legged bets the house loves most.

And yet, for all those billions, most Americans aren’t betting at all. Only about 1 in 5 U.S. adults — — bet money on sports in any form in the past year. Which means the fans in my conversations who shrugged at the whole thing aren’t outliers. They’re the quiet majority.

What’s growing is the most aggressive corner of the business. Live, in-game betting — wagering on the next pitch or the next possession while the game is still being played, the kind the apps push hardest — , to roughly 1 in 6 Americans.

And the unease is climbing right alongside it. In that same polling, 49% of Americans said sports betting lessens the integrity of the games, up from 41% at the start of the year.

Ironically, one of the most grounded and pointed comments I got from respondents came not from a die-hard sports fan, but my sister, Lauren, who barely follows sports.

But after years of studying and working in psychology, she talks about betting ads as a mechanism:

“This influx of ads that are like getting us dopamine hits from playing on sports games — and then that leads to cheating at the highest levels.”

That sounds a lot like the There’s also another NBA betting scandal to add to an already-long list of examples of in recent years.

Chris, a casual sports fan and a father of two, objects on different grounds — and his worry runs to the next generation.

He doesn’t hate all of it; bet on your team if you like, he said. What unsettles him is the prop bet, the wager on whether one specific player hits one specific number, and what the whole apparatus is quietly teaching the kids coming up:

“We’ve come to this place where we have commodified things that are not supposed to be commodified.”

Young athletes, he points out, can now pull up their own draft odds on a phone — read what the market thinks of them before they’ve so much as arrived.

“The players know they’re not supposed to know,” he said — a quiet, unsettling picture of a game rearranging itself around the bet.

And it isn’t only the people who never bet. Even the bettors are easing off. Rich, a die-hard fan from Laurel, actually wagers — but carefully, and less than he used to. He’s traded the long-shot parlays for straight bets on the sports he knows cold, and he’s watched what the other road does to people:

“I’ve also seen the negative effect it’s had on others always chasing the +3500, 10-leg parlay.”

Put it together and you get the strange shape of this moment. Betting is the industry’s loudest bet on the future of being a fan — the thing it is spending the most to sell. And the very people it’s being sold to are mostly declining. Quietly, without a protest.

Looking ahead to Part 4

Over and over, the fans you’ve met so far knew exactly what they wanted and exactly what bugged them — sharp, certain, no hesitation.

Ask them what kind of fan they are, though, and the description hardly ever matched the behavior. The bandwagoner who owns it. The die-hard who’s quietly checked out. The guy who swears he’s done with a sport he still watches every weekend. And the surprising part isn’t the gap — it’s that the most honest people I met are the ones grinning while they admit it. (Myself very much included.)

Part 4 centers on the fan you think you are, versus the fan you actually are. Not a single fraud in the bunch — just a lot of us a little funnier than the version we’d present on game day.

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In Part 1 of this series, the takeaway was that following your team has quietly become a do-it-yourself job — more coverage than ever and, somehow, you still end up assembling your own.

Here in Part 2, we take you to the one place you can’t do that — where somebody else is in charge of what you get.

The car.

In a region defined by its commute, it’s the 20 minutes to work, the hour and 20 home, the late drive in for a shift that starts when everybody else’s day is ending.

For a huge share of the people I talked to, the car is where they catch up on their teams. And what they want in that window turns out to be a very particular kind of information, delivered a specific way, at a specific moment.

Let me show you what I mean with a true story.

The rare grand slam and the drive home

You met Jonathan in Part 1 of this series. In May, he was at Nationals Park when . The bases were loaded, a ball glanced off the glove of a leaping Nick Morabito (a McLean, Virginia, native making his major league debut for the New York Mets that night) and Wood sprinted all the way around, sliding headfirst into home in just over 15 seconds.

“I’ve never seen that,” Jonathan told me, still glowing from the excitement.

And then he got in his car.

On the drive home, the radio gave him the analysis his own eyes couldn’t: that he’d just witnessed the first legit inside-the-park grand slam in the major leagues in nearly four years, and only the second in Nationals history.

He’d seen the moment. The sports report gave him the bigger story.

That, in one night, is the whole of what Jonathan wants from sports coverage — and it’s almost exactly how he described it when I asked:

“I love any kind of radio or TV update where it’s a score plus two or three tidbits — ‘Hey, did you know that so-and-so hit a home run, and now he’s had four in his last five games.’ I love consuming that kind of information.”

He’s old enough now, he said, that he turns on the radio at a specific time to catch sports, traffic and weather in one pass, timing his day to a broadcast the way you’d set a watch.

And the Wood night is why. The score he could’ve gotten anywhere. The context that made it special came to him live, from a voice, while it still mattered, before the 24/7 news cycle pushed it off a page.

Mickey, who actually works at Nationals Park and lives and breathes his teams, put the order of operations even more plainly:

“The score comes first because the scores will get you excited to learn how they did it.”

That’s the gateway in a sentence. The number isn’t the destination — it’s the thing that makes someone lean in for the story behind it.

Javon goes even leaner — he wants the bare minimum to get started:

“I just need a snapshot — who won, who lost, who hit what, who stinks. Then we can go from there.”

But notice where “there” leads. The snapshot isn’t the meal for Javon; it’s the table. It’s the few facts he needs in hand so he can sit down and talk sports with his son — the score as the price of admission to a conversation he doesn’t want to miss (and it’s a slight sneak-peek into the heart of Part 5 of this series).

When your hands are tied

For some people, the car isn’t just the convenient place to get sports. It’s the only place.

David, a die-hard Commanders fan and lover of D.C. sports since childhood, lives in Hagerstown, Maryland, and commutes to Baltimore to work the graveyard shift as a tractor-trailer driver.

His problem is one most of us never have to think about: he can’t pull out his phone to check a score. So when he’s listening to sports content on the road:

“Whenever they do their updates, they need to do, you know, everything.”

The national shows frustrate him, he said — a handful of scores, not even all of them, and then having to wait out the whole cycle, 20 minutes, half an hour, before it comes back around. And, even then, you might not get your team.

For a guy who’s left his home market somewhere back on the interstate, that’s the difference between knowing what happened and not knowing at all.

His ideal: lead with the local stuff, give the score, then a couple of the key plays and the players who made them. The rest he can check when he gets home.

A truck driver and a teacher, in completely different lives on opposite ends of the clock, describing the same update almost word for word.

Ronnie isn’t fighting a steering wheel the way David is, but his day runs on the same rails. He’s a mental health professional nearing retirement and works 12-hour shifts, with the radio serving as the bookends — he listens on his way to Bethesda for work and on the way home to Upper Marlboro.

And he’s no drive-by-score guy; he describes himself as “detail-oriented” and wants the context and the deeper read on what actually happened.

Two long commuters a generation apart, both shaping the loose hours of the day around a broadcast that reaches them right where they are — hands free, in the only free time their unorthodox sleep schedules will allow.

The part you can only get by listening

Here’s the part that surprised me most, because it cuts against how we usually talk about radio — as the thing you settle for when you can’t watch.

Lauren B., a D.C.-area WNBA and college basketball devotee you met in Part 1, told me flatly that for her, the audio is the best part.

Not the fallback. The best part.

She’ll rewatch games she’s already seen specifically to listen to the commentary, because she says she learns the game from it. She follows what’s happening better with a voice walking her through it than she does with her own eyes alone:

“I’ve tried to watch without listening and it’s not the same.”

We tend to assume the picture is the main event and the sound is the garnish. She says, it’s the other way around. The call is the experience.

A radio lifer agrees with Lauren, but not for the reasons you’d think. ÃÛÌÒÊÓƵapp’s own Reada Kessler — a longtime Commanders fan, a season-long sufferer, fantasy player, the works — went to the NFL Draft in Pittsburgh this year. One of the most anticipated live events on the sports calendar, and she was there in the building.

And what she found herself missing was the commentary.

“I like the analysis because it makes me think about things that I haven’t normally thought about,” Kessler said. “I wanted to see what was [longtime ESPN draft analyst] Mel Kiper saying about this, what was somebody else saying about this, and I got none of that when I saw it in person.”

Two people, opposite situations — one rewatching at home to hear the call, one at the event itself wishing she could. Same conclusion, arrived at from opposite directions: the voice adds something the eyes can’t supply on their own.

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Don’t make me wait to find out

None of this means people are patient. They are emphatically not.

Alyssa, a mom of two young kids in Northern Virginia who was taking in a Nats game, described the thing that loses her instantly:

“Sometimes there’s a long lead-in, and I don’t even realize I’m listening to sports for a good three minutes.”

By then, she’s gone. She’s got a toddler and a baby not yet a year old in the house, which means she’s also got, as she put it, a short window of her own time. And she’s an active chooser, not a passive listener. Hook her in the first few seconds or lose her entirely.

And it’s not just speed she wants. It’s energy:

“I need a little pep, I need a little enthusiasm … a little joy, a little jazz and pizzazz.”

Derrick, a special-education teacher in Centreville, painted a rather creative visual — a “Whitman sampler of sports” for his update in the car:

“The quick little bites here and there … Yes, you can click a link online and go search some more stuff up, but yeah … I like just little witticisms thrown in there, man. When that sports paddle hits the river, you know which way you’re going, right?”

To be fair, not everyone’s clock runs as fast as Alyssa and Derrick.

The queue

Molly, a stats-minded Caps fan at Nats Park, is the exception. She has one of the longest drives of anyone I talked to so she’d happily play “something I can put on and not have to change.”

But ask her what she wants from a sports update on the drive and she says cheerfully that she isn’t really listening for one:

“Most of the time when I’m listening to sports stuff in the car, it’s like a podcast. I don’t listen to the radio a lot, unless I know a player or coach I like is going to be on a radio show.”

As someone who still works in radio, it would be dishonest to write around this truth: The commute isn’t just a radio anymore. It’s a queue.

And that doesn’t necessarily profess a preference for one format over another. It’s a different job entirely.

Jonathan does both, and he’s clear about which is which. He turns on the radio at a set time to get sports, traffic and weather in one pass. He’s also a devoted listener to Tony Kornheiser’s podcast. One is what he wants driving home from a ballgame, looking for added context to what he just saw. The other is what he wants when he’s got an hour and nobody’s waiting on him.

Danny Jolles comes at it from the opposite end. The D.C.-bred comedian lives in Los Angeles now, out of range of the station he grew up with, and what he describes isn’t a preference — it’s a workaround:

“I don’t have access to the local radio station out in LA, so I’m having to play a lot of going to YouTube — catch me up, what’s going on over here. I have to do a lot more work to get what I want, and almost have to do it myself a lot of times.”

They’re not outliers. Edison Research finds that even now, with more ways to listen than ever,, even as podcasts climb. It’s the same split Molly and Danny describe from opposite ends.

The car has two settings. Most people use both.ÌýWhat nobody has patience for is the wrong one at the wrong moment — and Danny, three time zones away, would take either.

The thread

If you want the entire commute wish list in a single breath, Ricardo — the Carolina transplant we met yesterday — packs it into the 15 minutes between home and work:

“Scores, the scoop, the rant, the rave, the ‘did you know’ tidbit, and the laugh. I’ve parked, I’m pumped, I’m ready to clock in.”

Read that back and notice what every item has in common. Not one of them survives a delay.

David can’t wait out a cycle that may never circle back to his team. Lauren wants the call as it unfolds. Jonathan got his grand-slam context while still reveling in it on the drive home that night, not the next morning when focus shifts to his work day. Alyssa isn’t lingering — she’ll give about five seconds.

What they described, each in their own way, is that timing matters as much as content — information arriving while they were still in the experience, before life moved on to the next thing.

Coming up tomorrow in part 3 … what it increasingly costs to get all of it.

Because following your team has quietly become an expensive, fragmented, hard-sold proposition. We spend Part 3 adding up the bill: the tickets, the streaming, and the bet the whole industry is pushing on a fan base that mostly isn’t buying.

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Source

Editor’s Note: This is part 1 of a five-part series on what it means to be a D.C. sports fan in 2026. ÃÛÌÒÊÓƵapp’s Rob Woodfork talked with dozens of fans about how they follow their teams, what it costs them and what keeps them coming back. Some of what they said was about coverage. Most of it wasn’t. Read all five parts and learn more about how this series was reported.Ìý

What I’m about to say isn’t me being a prisoner of the moment: There has never been a better time to follow sports.

Every game, every score, every highlight, every hot take is a tap away, on more screens and more apps and more feeds than any fan a generation ago could have imagined.

So here’s the thing I kept running into talking to D.C.-area sports fans over the past several weeks: with all that at their fingertips, a startling number of them told me, in one way or another, that following their teams has started to feel like work.

The thing they want isÌýburied — sometimes under everything bigger and more popular than it, sometimes under the sheer noise piled on top.

Narrow

Take Jonathan, a political science teacher and lifelong D.C. sports fan who adopted the Orioles growing up in suburban Maryland. He’s a self-proclaimed “sucker for local” — following his teams while living abroad, including those that never crack the national crawl, from Tony Skinn’s George Mason men’s basketball team to Maryland soccer.

So while Jonathan understands the appeal of the national stuff, he just knows where he’d rather the minutes go:

“I don’t care if you tell me who won the Indianapolis game — that’s fine. I would much rather that time be taken to say, ‘here’s what the Maryland soccer team did today.'”Ìý

Which sounds perfectly reasonable until you sit him next to Bill, who landed in Springfield, Virginia, by way of New York and had a full Army career that moved him all over the world but never moved his rooting interests.

“I wasn’t going to change teams every three years,” he told me from a Nationals game, so it’s still the Yankees, Giants, Rangers and Knicks.

So when the radio comes on in the car, he said he’s actually looking for out-of-town scores:

“I’d like to see more coverage of the entire MLB, and maybe in relation to where the Nats are.”

Neither’s wrong. And that’s the quiet, impossible math: aim the coverage of a 90-second update anywhere, and you’re aiming it away from somebody.

That’s narrowness as a matter of geography — there’s also a filter based on how popular a sport already is.

Ricardo spent his formative years in Charlotte and still follows his Carolina teams from just outside the Capital Beltway in Maryland — a curious, motivated fan, the kind who goes digging. Yet somehow, he still got blindsided:

“I just found out there’s a professional women’s hockey league! I’m always on the hunt to learn more, but outlets seem to share only what’s popular. That annoys me.”

Some of that is structural. The PWHL has no team in this market, so there’s no local hook for D.C. outlets to hang coverage on.

But that’s the point, not the excuse: a whole professional league, three seasons old, and a fan who actively hunts only tripped over it by accident, because nearly all the coverage that reaches him is calibrated to what’s already big.

Lauren B., a passionate Mystics fan from St. Louis, made a similar complaint at CareFirst Arena. She put her finger on a kind of narrowness most coverage never even clocks — not just which games get told, but who gets to tell them:

“We need more women who have played the sport reporting on the sport. We need player-coaches on the broadcast systems.”Ìý

It’s a point about expertise as much as representation. The voices telling the story, she figures, should look and sound a little more like the people it’s being told to.

The cruelest version of narrow isn’t a niche league or a club down the road. It’s a major team that’s simply stopped being worth anyone’s airtime.

Andrew B., a Wizards die-hard who bartends at night and catches up on his team through next-morning highlights, has spent years watching his franchise vanish from the national conversation. For him, the silence stings worse than anything a pundit could say:

“Not having it covered is worse. It’s just like, is there hope for my franchise?”

Local team, entire league, who holds the microphone — different fans, different gaps, but the same machine behind every one of them. Coverage chases what’s already popular, and if your interest lives anywhere else, you’re mostly on your own.

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Loud

The second burial is sneakier. The first one crowds your team out with something deemed bigger; this one leaves the game right where it is and piles so much on top that you can barely reach it. So much of what fills all that space is noise.

Andrew S. still remembers watching an NFL game between Tampa Bay and Washington — the two franchises where Doug Williams made history quarterbacking — and listening to the whole broadcast go by without hearing a single mention of him.

Williams was the first Black quarterback to lead the Buccaneers to the playoffs, and then, in a Washington uniform, the first Black quarterback to win a Super Bowl — its MVP, no less. At the time of that broadcast, he was still working in Washington’s own front office.

A game between the two teams where Williams had made history twice over, and his name never came up.

What bothers Andrew S. more broadly is all the talking — the wall of speculation and opinion that’s broadcast over actual insights that allows him to get a better grasp on the games he loves.

“It’s a lot of opinion in it, and I kind of want to hear the factual stuff that those reporters know … because they are in the locker room or they are on the beat with that team, and the little things that I will not be able to glean off the stats, I want to know that.”

LA-based comedian and D.C.-area native Danny Jolles (who was profiled here recently) put the same frustration more bluntly: He doesn’t want to be handled. He doesn’t want the spin. Just give it to him straight.

“I don’t need somebody pretending the Wizards were playing basketball all season.”

And sometimes the trouble with the noise is that it isn’t even new — it’s the same handful of items cycling past again and again. Bill confessed to me he’s a ÃÛÌÒÊÓƵapp listener and had a complaint:

“It is kind of repetitive. If you listen to the radio for more than an hour, you’re going to hear the same thing over and over.”

He’s right, and I’d be a fraud to pretend otherwise — you may well be reading this courtesy of an outlet that runs sports updates twice an hour.

The cycle is the cycle. The job is making the second pass worth your while: a fresh detail, a sharper read, a reason the same score lands differently at 8 o’clock than it did at 7.

And then there’s the fan the noise finally chased off for good. Andrew P. spent nine years following Philadelphia sports from D.C. before he hit his wall listening to national voices:

“(ESPN’s Pat) McAfee’s got his shirt off half the time, Stephen A. (Smith)’s yelling,” he said. “I’m not consuming sports anymore, I’m consuming entertainment or perceived entertainment. I’m out on that … I want good coverage of actual sports.”

For some, that’s where loud ends. Certain outlets figure fans who grumble are still watching anyway. But there are a significant number who decided the game had gotten buried too deep under the show to be worth digging out.

So, , you do it yourself

Put the two together — your team buried under what’s bigger, the game buried under what’s louder — and you arrive at the quiet thesis of nearly everything I heard.

Take Kevin and Diego, two Gen-Z soccer fans at Audi Field. They don’t really have a single place they go for sports anymore; they’ve built their own — a little Instagram, a little Twitter, the ESPN app, whatever surfaces what they want fastest — because no one source does the whole job.

“Everything just comes up like automatically. So I can’t remember the last time I looked up,” Kevin said.Ìý

And sometimes, the routine just quietly falls apart. Molly, a Caps fan who commutes in from Woodbridge, was one of multiple respondents who named the Washington Post sports section as a daily source. When her subscription through work went away, she told me, “it tends to be whatever recommended articles pop up” online. A deliberate daily ritual became a passive scroll.

Not every ritual died. Allison, while taking in a Mystics game, said she still spreads out the actual Sunday paper at her home in Springfield, Virginia — the same Washington Post Molly let go of — and that’s where she’d just caught women’s basketball on the front page.

Same institution, opposite fates: one fan’s daily habit dissolved into a feed, the other’s is still folded on the kitchen table. The print on-ramp is thinning, but hasn’t yet closed.

That’s the whole paradox. The promise of all this abundance was convenience — that following your team would get easier, automatic, frictionless. For a lot of fans, the opposite happened. They’ve quietly become their own producers, stitching coverage together out of a dozen sources because no single one gives them what they want.

The buffet is enormous. Yet still they leave a little hungry.

Which brings us to part 2

There’s one place where this collides hardest with real life — the place where you can’t (or at least shouldn’t) tap through seven apps and build your own coverage, because your hands are on the wheel and your eyes are on the road.

The commute in the car. The few minutes a day when a fan is a captive audience and somebody else decides what they hear. On part 2, folks sound off on what they actually want.

Source

Let’s start where there is no argument to be had.

Alyssa Thomas — a six-time WNBA All-Star, a former Maryland great, and now the face of a weeklong national firestorm — said . Racial slurs. Threats against their children. Addresses leaked online. All of it over a basketball play.

That is indefensible. Full stop. No foul, no suspension, no rivalry, no marketing engine justifies threatening a human being’s life. A league that wants to be taken seriously has to protect the people who make it worth watching — every one of them — and it has to do it loudly, immediately and without waiting for the threatened party to speak first.

So let that be unambiguous before I say the harder thing.

Somewhere over the past two years, protecting Caitlin Clark stopped being about safety and became a cause — a running argument that the league owes her a smoother path than anyone who came before her.

It doesn’t. And the history of this sport, and every sport, is the proof.

What actually happened

On June 24 at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indiana, Clark and Thomas tangled for a loose ball. Clark fell. Thomas, reaching for the ball, pressed her fist into Clark’s throat, then stepped over her. No foul was called in the moment — the officials said afterward they didn’t see it. Clark would leave the game with a back injury from a separate play.

Then the clip went viral in slow motion, the outrage machine did what it does, and the next day the WNBA reversed course: a retroactive Flagrant 2, a one-game suspension, a $1,000 fine. and said neither she nor her teammates even realized it had happened until they saw it online after the game. You can accept that explanation or not. The fist still landed on the throat, and the suspension is defensible on its own terms.

What is not defensible is what came next — the threats. And what is worth examining is the assumption underneath all of it.

The dues every great has paid

Ask Michael Jordan what the welcome-to-the-league tax looks like.

Early in his career, the Detroit Pistons built an entire defensive philosophy — — around punishing him every time he drove the lane. The idea was simple and brutal: make the young superstar pay a physical price until he proved he could take it.

Nobody handed Jordan protection. No commissioner issued an edict. He earned the league’s respect the only way it can be earned — by bulking up and winning, until beating him up stopped working and his Chicago Bulls swept Detroit en route to their first NBA title.

That’s not a tragedy in Jordan’s story. It’s the origin of it.

Clark is a generational talent and, let’s be honest, the single biggest financial engine women’s basketball has ever had. The television deals, the sold-out arenas, the ratings — a real share of that traces to her.

But she hasn’t won anything yet. And the physicality she absorbs, the target on her back, is not evidence of a league conspiring against her. It’s the dues.

The same dues Jordan paid. The same dues, frankly, that far greater indignities were piled on top of when the pioneers who integrated this country’s leagues paid them — while also enduring hostility no hard foul will ever approach.

The inversion nobody wants to name

The classic sports-pioneer story runs one direction: a player who doesn’t look like the league’s establishment breaks in, and the hostility comes from the gatekeepers — the owners, the media, the old guard protecting their turf. Jackie Robinson. Bobby Mitchell, right here in Washington, on the last NFL team to integrate. The pioneer’s burden was to absorb the abuse quietly and let the winning speak.

Clark’s situation is the photo negative of that. The gatekeepers — the networks, the sponsors, the casual fans, the money — have embraced her completely. The friction is coming from inside the league, from players who’ve spent years building it for a fraction of the attention and now watch the newcomer harvest the spotlight. That’s a real and human tension that deserves to be understood, not shouted down.

But it morphs into something ugly when “Clark deserves the spotlight” becomes “Clark deserves to be protected from the game itself.” Because that second claim asks the league to do something it has never done for anyone: hand a player reverence she hasn’t earned on the floor, and treat the normal violence of elite competition as a personal affront when it happens to her.

And let’s not pretend Clark is some passive bystander in all this. She talks. She throws elbows. She jaws with opponents and celebrates in their faces — all of which is great, competitive basketball. But you can’t then have your defenders cast you as a victim every time the same chippiness you dish out comes back around. The greats never wanted that deal, and Clark, to her credit, doesn’t seem to either. It’s the discourse around her that keeps trying to strike it on her behalf.

It’s worth remembering that the league itself lit some of this fuse. — “one white, one Black,” she said, framing it as an asset. You don’t get to market the racial contrast as a growth strategy and then act surprised when the conversation it fuels turns toxic.

Where the critics have a point

Here’s the unifying factor amid all the controversy: Inconsistent, reactive officiating is a major problem for the WNBA.

The refs didn’t call anything on the Thomas play in real time; a fist to the throat went unwhistled until the internet found it. Then the league overcorrected, upgrading it to a Flagrant 2 a full day later.

That sequence failed everyone. It failed Clark, who took contact the officials should have caught in the moment. And it failed Thomas, who got no due process on the floor and instead had her punishment adjudicated by viral clip. Even and she’s right.

So hard plays escalate and then gets litigated in the worst possible venue: the social-media replay booth, where nuance goes to die and death threats get typed. Fix the whistle, and you take the oxygen out of half these firestorms.

But notice what that argument is really asking for: better, more consistent officiating for everybody.

That’s a call for competence, not a call to gently place one player in bubble wrap.

Protect the players and the meritocracy

There’s a version of the league’s response this week that’s being contested in real time. . The league said it reached out privately — texts, an offered phone call, security coordination — days before the public statement that, notably, only arrived after Thomas went public with her frustration. Both things may even be true: private outreach and a public failure of nerve are not mutually exclusive.

Either way, the fix is the same. Protect every player’s physical safety without exception, and do it out loud. That’s not negotiable, and it shouldn’t take a viral clip or a press-conference callout to make it happen.

But protecting players’ safety and protecting a single player’s comfort are not the same thing — and the league cannot afford to conflate them. Because the moment respect in this sport becomes something granted by decree rather than hard-earned in competition, what elevates A’ja Wilson, Breanna Stewart, Sue Bird and the rest of the greats to the game’s pantheon becomes meaningless.

Caitlin Clark is on track to be a superstar and may end up being the most important player this league has ever produced. But she’s going to have to pay dues through the same trail of blood, sweat and tears every one of the greats took to get to the top of the mountain. If she ascends to the same heights as Jordan, it will make her journey that much sweeter.

That’s not the league failing her.ÌýThat’s the league treating her like she belongs.

Source

Danny Jolles is sitting in front of a camera in Los Angeles wearing a black Jayden Daniels Commanders jersey and a burgundy hat with the team’s throwback rallying cry, “hail.”

He’s touched every corner of the DMV and bleeds Burgundy and Gold, so putting him in the same vein as fellow actor and Commanders fan Matthew McConaughey is a problem.

“He’s not a D.C. sports fan,” Jolles said. “And it kind of annoys me…he just kind of picked our team randomly. And I don’t like it.”

It’s a small distinction, but it’s a bigger deal to Jolles, which tells you everything about his fanhood. The comedian and actor — known for his roles in Hacks, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and appearances on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert — has been based in Los Angeles for more than a decade and he first landed in my social media algorithm after the Commanders’ run to the NFC Championship Game in January 2025.

 

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He is also, by his own description, a D.C. sports fan in the fullest sense of the phrase.

Not just a Commanders fan. Not someone who bought a bandwagon starter pack assembled from marquee franchises.

All of D.C. sports. Always. Including the UFL’s D.C. Defenders.

“When the USFL or XFL, or whatever they’re calling it now, whenever that thing starts up, and they go, ‘Do we have the D.C. Defenders?’ I go, ‘That’s my team,'” Jolles said. “I’m not well. There’s no decision in my mind of who to root for. I root for the Washington, D.C. team.”

Born Into It

If being a D.C. sports fan is an illness, it’s hereditary.

“My dad said we root for D.C. Sports,” Jolles said. “I said you got it. That was it. No discussion, no debate.”

Jolles grew up in Fairfax County, Virginia, but makes a point of establishing his full DMV credentials: born in D.C., first couple of years in Maryland, then Northern Virginia. He touched every part of the region, and the region left its mark.

And he shares my (correct) assertion that Baltimore is its own entity and absolutely not a part of the DMV.

“I don’t think we need to have a rivalry, but I definitely think we’re not Baltimore,” Jolles said. “Love Baltimore, enjoy Baltimore, great place, hung out in Baltimore —Ìýbut different sports town.”

“IÌýjust never understood anybody who’s like, ‘Oh, I’m an Orioles fan, but I’m a Commanders (fan)…What’s wrong with you?”

He came of age without a baseball team, rooting against the Orioles on principle and waiting for the Nationals to exist. When they finally arrived, he was already all-in.

And more than a dozen years into a life in Los Angeles — where, he says, he’s among roughly 20 D.C. sports fans who have “assembled” to support each other and their teams — he hasn’t wavered.

‘The Greatest Casualty’

Ask Danny Jolles for his biggest D.C. sports heartbreak and he doesn’t go where you might expect.

Not the years of the Capitals’ early playoff exits before the 2018 Stanley Cup. Not the Wizards, who have never been competitive enough, in his words, to really hurt.

He goes to Robert Griffin III — the knee, the mismanagement, the whole spiral — and he gets genuinely sad about it.

“We did have a generational guy, and we blew it for no reason, stupidly,” Jolles said. “I just always have such…that’s probably my greatest heartbreak. It’s wrong. And I just always like — I just feel so bad when I see him sometimes.”

Griffin infamously reinjured his right knee in Washington’s first-round playoff loss to the Seattle Seahawks in January 2013, and the situation around him unraveled from there. For Jolles, the grief isn’t really about wins and losses. It’s about what he perceives the franchise did to a person.

“He’s the greatest casualty of that situation,” Jolles said.

The Greatest Season

The flip side is the Nationals’ epic 2019 World Series run.

And context matters here: Jolles was born in 1987, which means Washington’s last two Super Bowl titles — in January 1988 and January 1992 — landed when he was either an infant or a 4-year-old. He never got to fully feel those.

The 2018 Capitals’ Stanley Cup is the only championship he absorbed as a conscious adult fan — until 2019 came along and rewrote everything.

“2019 Washington Nationals is the greatest run ever,” he said. “That season was a magical ride.”

He ranks it above the Capitals’ Cup precisely because of how it felt in real time. Every round seemed like it might be the last. Every win felt borrowed.

“The whole season we were playing catch up,” he said. “It was such a chaotic, wild ride of just like, the amount of times it was like, ‘What a run. Hey, it ends today.’ And then it just kept going.”

The Nats famously started that year 19-31, clawed to a 93-69 record, entered the postseason as a wild card team and won the whole thing in improbable fashion, culminating in a come-from-behind Game 7 victory in Houston over the Astros to win a championship series in which the road team won every game and Washington got to celebrate its first World Series title since 1924.

Still Out There Fighting

Jolles watches and keeps track from afar, all the while arguing with people in L.A. who don’t even know what a Capital is.

But he maintains the Caps are Washington’s best-run organization, he’s cautiously optimistic about the Commanders and is even bullish on the Wizards’ rebuild on the heels of the NBA’s first string of three straight 64-loss seasons.

“I talk myself into anything,” he said. “That’s what I do.”

So when his gaze turns eastward, he’s not looking for neutrality in his sports coverage.

“You’re ÃÛÌÒÊÓƵapp,” he said. “We all know what we’re here for. I don’t need you to pretend you’re down the middle.”

For Jolles, that’s the whole point of listening to local voices over national ones.

“I want to hear my guys,” he said. “I like to hear my people personally, that’s me.”

He even has a model for what’s missing from most broadcast booths — a third voice, there strictly to keep things loose. He points to in the Monday Night Football booth alongside Al Michaels and Dan Fouts.

“That was a good idea, I stand by that was a good idea,” Jolles said. “Just wrong person.”

The question of what D.C. fans actually want from their sports coverage in a fast-changing media landscape is the subject of a ÃÛÌÒÊÓƵapp series I’ll be rolling out in the coming weeks. Jolles, it turns out, was a fitting place to start asking.

Jolles hosted his own sports podcast, Everything But the Scores, built on the premise that the stories around the game are a valuable complement to what happens on the field. The research load of a one-man operation prompted him to discontinue it but he said he’d revive it tomorrow if someone gave him “an ounce of money.”

Jolles closed out the interview with an unprompted declaration: if his comedy and acting career ever opens a door into D.C. sports media, he’s walking through it immediately.

“That,” he said, “would be the peak of my career.”

ÃÛÌÒÊÓƵapp may have just found its West Coast correspondent.

Danny Jolles is a comedian and actor based in Los Angeles. He can be found at and on social media .

Photo by Michael S. Schwartz/Getty Images

ÃÛÌÒÊÓƵapp/Rob Woodfork

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The team that beat him that October in 1948 split its home schedule between Pittsburgh and a ballpark right here in D.C. on Georgia Avenue.

So Washington has a stake in the most sacred ground of baseball’s Juneteenth. Right?

Careful. The two people who know this history best can’t even agree on how big that stake is.

“I’ll say a second home,” Sean Gibson, the great-grandson of Grays Hall of Fame catcher Josh Gibson and president of , told ÃÛÌÒÊÓƵapp.

Not the home. Pittsburgh was the home, where Cumberland Posey built the franchise into a juggernaut and Josh Gibson built the .372 career batting average that, as of 2024, stands as Major League Baseball’s all-time best. Washington, Sean Gibson said plainly, “never really had their own team.” It had a Pittsburgh club playing half its games down here.

Thom Loverro sees it differently. The longtime Washington Times columnist wrote the book — literally, “The Encyclopedia of Negro League Baseball,” and to him the Grays were “a little bit more than a second home.”

When I asked whether they belonged to Washington, he didn’t hedge: “I really do think it does.”

He’s not inflating the team to make the point. “They’re the New York Yankees of the Negro Leagues,” Loverro said, “the dominant franchise,” and once they came to Washington, a dynasty that “even outdoes what the Yankees did.”

‘I consider DC a home’

Here’s the thing about a second home, though. It’s still home.

I know that math personally. I’m a child of divorce, and a divorced parent myself, and the lesson runs the same from both sides of it: a kid can have two homes and mean it about both. There’s a primary address and there’s the other place, and both are real, both are yours.

When I put that to Gibson, he didn’t flinch. He’s in Washington two or three times a year working with the Nationals, and he’s blunt about what that makes the city to him: “I consider D.C. a home.”

Loverro would just tell you the second house was grander than we let ourselves remember.

Which is exactly where Washington keeps getting it wrong. The argument was never really about the size of the claim. It’s that we’ve barely bothered to honor the one we’ve got.

Start with what most fans here couldn’t tell you. By the time the Grays made Griffith Stadium their Washington home in 1940, they were already a defending champion — in the middle of a run of nine straight Negro National League pennants from 1937 to 1945, 10 in all, and three Negro World Series titles. Gibson and first baseman Buck Leonard, both Hall of Famers, anchored the order.

They wore a “W” on the sleeve for the Washington Homestead Grays. Same franchise, two cities.

And yet, Gibson said, some people still think the Washington club and the Pittsburgh club were “two different teams. It was the same team.”

Loverro has watched that amnesia up close, and it gets under his skin. Ask Washington to name its greatest athletes — the Mount Rushmore argument every sports town loves — and he says he “constantly” has to “chirp and fight to make sure people include Josh Gibson.” A man who is, by the integrated record books, “the greatest hitter in the history of baseball.” He played here for nine years. And he’s an afterthought in his own city’s bar arguments.

Negro Leagues night pays tribute

Give the Nationals their due, because they’ve done the work. A bronze Josh Gibson statue greets you at the home-plate gate, beside Walter Johnson and Frank Howard. Six Grays Hall of Famers sit in the park’s Ring of Honor. Tuesday was the franchise’s second-annual Negro Leagues night. And this spring, — a curriculum Gibson’s foundation helped the District build, one the team and the schools have pledged to run again. The kids are being handed the history. The ballclub remembers.

Now for the honest part, because forgetting is apparently the norm across much of the nation. Loverro points out that most Yankees fans have no idea the New York Black Yankees played in old Yankee Stadium, and that Philadelphia, murals and all, lets its Stars fade. If anything, he says, “there’s probably more recognition” of the Negro Leagues in Washington “than almost any other city in America.”

But here’s where the historian and the family land in the same place: the city itself has done almost nothing. There’s no street named for the Grays, Gibson noted. The grandest civic marker he could point to is a mural in the back alley behind Ben’s Chili Bowl, one he helped put up.

Loverro’s verdict is shorter — “the city has dropped the ball” — and his theory for why isn’t conspiracy, it’s neglect. “I’m not sure there’s been anyone to basically rattle their cage about it.”

A street, honestly, would be generous, because Washington didn’t even keep the ballpark. Griffith Stadium, where the Grays won the 1943 and 1944 Negro World Series, was torn down in 1965. Howard University Hospital has stood on the site since, the spot of home plate marked inside the entrance and a small plaque out on Georgia Avenue. The ground is gone.

It’s worth remembering why the Grays were here in the first place, because it wasn’t civic embrace. Senators owner Clark Griffith brought them in for the gate. Grays games often outdrew his own team, Loverro said. And Griffith, by Loverro’s account, staged “phony workouts” for Grays players “never with the intention of signing them” to the majors.

The city’s white baseball establishment was happy to cash the checks. The honoring is the part that never came.

Deep Negro League roots

Other cities chose differently. Birmingham preserved Rickwood Field, poured money into restoring it, and made it the place baseball returns every Juneteenth. Kansas City built a museum to the Negro Leagues at 18th and Vine. Loverro’s point is that those cities had deep Negro Leagues roots worth enshrining — “and Washington has as deep roots as any.”

Two cities staged the final World Series of an era in 1948 and went opposite directions with the memory: one enshrined its Black baseball ground, the other paved it.

The ballclub built a statue. The city offered a service entrance.

In fairness, that’s not the whole picture. The name still lives on the field: The DC Grays, a nonprofit Loverro is part of, field a college summer team and run a youth program — uniforms, equipment and coaches for more than 250 kids in Wards 7 and 8 — .

The greatness didn’t vanish. It got handed down, in the parts of the city that most need it.

Which brings us back to Juneteenth — and to the thing both men kept circling. It was Gibson who lobbied MLB to move its Negro Leagues legends game, the East-West Classic, to Rickwood, and who pushed hardest that it not be “a one and done type thing.” It worked; the Classic returns there this Juneteenth.

But his bigger point was that the calendar is a trap. Black history gets crammed into 28 days, he said, and now risks getting crammed into a single one. It deserves to be “told 365 days a year, not just 28 days or one day.”

Loverro, who spent years on the kind of research that finally got those numbers into the record book, won’t pretend the stats fixed anything.

“I don’t think anything can fix the forgetting,” he said. The records, like a mural or a street sign, are a symbol — something that sends a 15-year-old online to find out who Josh Gibson was. And they are something more than that. He put it this way: you “can never get full justice for a full segment of the population being denied the same opportunity,” but “it is a sliver of justice.”

Gibson never got even that in his lifetime. He died in January 1947, months before Jackie Robinson took the field in Brooklyn and a lifetime before the record book admitted what he had done.

A Washington team recorded the final out of the Negro Leagues’ last championship, on the ground the whole sport now treats as holy. The greatest hitter who ever lived spent nine years playing in this city. And the man who knows that history best says the only thing still missing is someone willing to rattle the city’s cage about it.

Consider this the first knock.

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That contradiction is the price of admission for the Nats’ most consequential homestand in years: three against Seattle starting Friday, three against Kansas City starting Monday, and a fan base trying to figure out whether the away team it keeps reading about actually exists in person.

Spencer Nusbaum of The Athletic, who covers the Nationals daily, has heard the theories.

Manager Blake Butera told reporters this week he thinks the answer lives in the first inning; The Nationals lead baseball in first-inning runs, and on the road, the league’s highest-scoring offense gets to land that punch in the top half, forcing opponents to play from behind before they’ve taken a swing.

A player offered Nusbaum a different explanation a few weeks back: This team simply likes adversity, pointing to its winning record against clubs over .500.

Nusbaum isn’t ready to endorse a grand unified theory.

“I struggle to read into it too much, because again, I think that stuff generally evens out,” he told ÃÛÌÒÊÓƵapp.

“But it’s absolutely fair to have the talking point like a third of the way through the season, because it is so drastic.”

The question has changed

Last month in this space, the question was whether the Nationals were for real. That question has expired.

The new one is harder: When does this franchise’s window open — and who gets to decide?

It won’t be the front office. Not yet, anyway. Nusbaum figures the organization is roughly 20 to 25 games from knowing its own answer.

“I think these next 30 games are uber important,” he said.

Everything in Paul Toboni’s brief track record points to deliberate. Nusbaum read the MacKenzie Gore trade as a front office chasing value and depth over proximity — willing to push its window deeper into the future in exchange for more bites at the apple.

Don’t bank on a July splash, either. If Washington is active at the deadline, Nusbaum expects “a mix of buying and selling,” with the buying aimed at undervalued arms stuck in someone else’s Triple-A logjam, not headliners.

And the dream scenario — extending James Wood or CJ Abrams to bolt the core in place?

“Extensions are one of the hardest things to get done in sports,” Nusbaum said. “I think it’s still highly unlikely that one of those guys gets extended, though not impossible.”

Translation: The suits aren’t going to declare a window open. The players will have to kick it open themselves.

Nobody is kicking harder than Wood, who leads the team in home runs and the National League in walks a year after his post-Derby spiral. Nusbaum points to two changes: an offseason spent strengthening a lower half that betrayed him down the stretch last season — “when you don’t have your legs, you don’t really have anything,” he said — and a swing that’s quietly more patient than it looks.

Wood, Nusbaum said, is “letting the ball travel further this year,” waiting an extra beat before committing. That split second explains the opposite-field shots into the red seats and the walk totals alike: “You see the power, you see the walks go up.”

It also explains why this offense plays anywhere. It isn’t riding hot streaks. It’s riding a young superstar who got better at the hardest part of hitting.

The case against — and why it’s wobbling

If you’re skeptical of this team, your evidence is on the mound, and it’s legitimate.

The Nationals’ run prevention sits among the worst in baseball, the team ERA is bottom five and Jake Irvin is on the injured list.

Nusbaum put it plainly: “it’s really hard to pitch in chaos your way to October.” The 2024 Tigers bullpenned their way there, sure — an exception that mostly proves how rarely it works.

But the skeptic’s case is shakier than it was three weeks ago. Since mid-May, Nusbaum notes, Washington’s rotation owns the fourth-best ERA in baseball — a small sample somewhat inflated by the use of an opening pitcher, but still real innings against real teams.

And there’s this: over the last 20 games or so, “they have the third-best run differential in baseball, so it feels real,” Nusbaum said. The only thing left to fear, he added, is the swoon Nats fans have been conditioned to expect.

Six games, then we’ll talk

So strip away the wild card math, which Nusbaum concedes is a brutal path in a National League where almost nobody is selling. The actual stakes of Mariners-Royals week are bigger than a standings page.

“This is when we find out whether the timeline starts in 2027 or whether it starts in 2028 and hell, maybe there’s a 5% chance it starts in 2026,” Nusbaum said. “These are the most important games the Nationals have played in a long time.”

And for the first time all season, the most important games are the ones in their own building — the one place this team has given its fans the fewest reasons to believe.

The front office will spend July deciding what the Nationals are. The Nationals get six games at home to decide first.

You can find more Nationals coverage from Spencer Nusbaum at .

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Last Wednesday, members of Congress who can’t even agree on what to order for lunch laced up cleats at Audi Field and, by every account, had the time of their lives.

Republicans and Democrats on the same grass, chasing the same ball, pretending for a couple of hours that the other side wasn’t the enemy. Call it a miracle.

Also, call it a warm-up act. Because the main event starts Thursday — and Washington, D.C. won’t host a single minute of it.

When FIFA divvied up the 2026 World Cup, the District and Baltimore made their pitch and got turned away. The closest you’ll get to a live match is a drive up Interstate 95 to Philadelphia or the trek to MetLife Stadium in the Jersey swamp, which somehow landed the final on July 19.

“We tried,” D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser recently said .

Sixteen host cities across three countries — and the capital of the United States isn’t one of them.

And yet, watch who keeps turning up to talk about this tournament and where they made their names.

Alecko Eskandarian was the MVP of the 2004 MLS Cup — in a D.C. United uniform. Tony Sanneh anchored the United dynasty that won the league’s first two championships in 1996 and 1997. Last month, he was enshrined in the National Soccer Hall of Fame.

The draw that set the entire bracket? Held in , a Metro ride from the Capitol.

For a city that didn’t make the guest list, Washington’s fingerprints are all over this thing.

There’s a thread running through these men (aside from the fact that they each took time to speak with Jose Umaña, who I consistently proclaim as ÃÛÌÒÊÓƵapp’s soccer guru) and it leads back to the last time the men’s World Cup touched American soil.

“The ’94 World Cup was a defining moment in my life,” Eskandarian said to ÃÛÌÒÊÓƵapp’s Umaña. “It made me dream of being a professional soccer player.”

Back then, the country didn’t even have a top-flight league; he watched one get built, from “10 teams” to “30 clubs across the country and in Canada.”

Alexi Lalas actually played in 1994 and he traces a straight line from that summer to the U.S. Soccer Foundation, the charity behind last week’s game.

“I’m standing here today because of the summer of 1994,” he said.

The lesson for D.C. fans: A home World Cup isn’t a month of soccer. It’s a down payment on the next 30 years.

Which brings us back to Audi Field and to the thing soccer does that almost nothing else in this town can.

“It doesn’t matter to me which side of the aisle I’m technically playing on,” said Stu Holden, the former U.S. midfielder and Fox’s lead analyst, who suited up alongside Lalas.

“This is a sport that brings people together. This isn’t a time to be divisive.”

Lalas put it plainer: for a couple of hours, he said, we get to remember “we’re really not so different.” That’s not naive. It’s the whole proposition.

And no American city is built to deliver on it like this one — a place where, depending on the match, half your neighborhood is suddenly, loudly, gloriously from somewhere else.

So Washington is going to throw the party it was denied a seat at. The National Mall becomes a FIFA Fan Zone from Thursday through the final, stitched into the country’s 250th birthday celebration. D.C. United is running free watch parties at Franklin Park and down in Navy Yard. The bars will be standing room from the group stage on.

Eskandarian is right about where the soul of this tournament lives: “People are going to come together … they’re going to cry when their teams lose, but most importantly, get to experience the beautiful game.”

For most of us, that was always going to happen in a fan zone or a barroom, not a luxury box. D.C. just gets to do it at scale.

Now, I won’t insult you. A fan zone is not a stadium. The money — in the form of the hotels, the broadcasts, the tourists with no price ceiling — is getting spent in Philadelphia and the Meadowlands, not here.

Tickets to the actual matches run from about $60 to nearly $11,000 and even at those prices, demand has been soft enough that thousands of seats are still unsold days before kickoff. The live World Cup was never really built for the city throwing it the warmest welcome.

And there’s a harder truth: A World Cup on American soil in 2026 carries a different meaning that watch parties can’t paper over.

Days before kickoff, a Somali referee with a match to work was turned away at the Miami airport.

For a region as international as this one — the same neighborhoods that will pack these fan zones — the question of who feels safe making the trip isn’t abstract.

The “soccer town” badge deserves the same honesty. The trophies we keep pointing to are a quarter-century old and today’s D.C. United is a solid mid-table club, not a juggernaut. Heritage is doing some heavy lifting here.

But heritage is the point. You don’t measure a soccer city by whether FIFA blessed it with a fixture. You measure it by who shows up when there’s nothing on the line — and Washington has been showing up since before half the country could name a single player.

When Lionel Messi and Inter Miami came through in March, United moved the match out of Audi Field and packed a far bigger house. That’s not a city waiting for permission to care.

As for the home team, the optimism is calibrated.

Sanneh likes the “energy” and the “quality.” Holden — who lost his own career to his knees at 30, and knows the price of a wasted window — calls the quarterfinals “the minimum expectation,” a bar the Americans have cleared exactly once in the modern era, in 2002, with Sanneh on the field.

Eskandarian is more measured: quarterfinals, “and after that, anything could happen.” A win over Senegal last week settled some nerves. For Washington, though, the bracket is almost beside the point.

Because the question this summer was never whether the World Cup would come to Washington. It came to the Kennedy Center in December. It came to Audi Field last week, in cleats, wearing both parties’ colors. It comes to the National Mall on Thursday.

Washington didn’t get a match, but it got the tournament anyway. And for six weeks, the rest of the country gets to see what this city has quietly known for 30 years.

It’s a soccer town. It always was.

ÃÛÌÒÊÓƵapp’s Jose Umana contributed to this column.

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At 29-28, and winners of back-to-back series against first-place teams, the Nationals have the highest-scoring offense in baseball through roughly the first third of a 2026 season many predicted would feature somewhere between 90 and 100 losses, catching even the most plugged-in observers off guard.

“I don’t think anybody, even the most optimistic person around the team, would have predicted that they would be the number one offense in baseball,” said longtime Nationals beat reporter Mark Zuckerman of Nats Journal, who covers the team daily.

“I mean, they’ve scored the most runs in the major leagues.”

Zuckerman spoke with ÃÛÌÒÊÓƵapp as Washington heads into a critical homestand, starting Friday against the San Diego Padres. He said perhaps the most telling sign of how far the Nationals have exceeded expectations is that their own front office may not have seen this coming either.

“The messaging we were getting from the new front office was that they were taking over and really thinking more about the long-term plan than anything in the short term,” Zuckerman said, pointing to the offseason trades of Mackenzie Gore and Jose Ferrer as signals that 2026 was meant to be a bridge year.

“Maybe even the front office didn’t quite realize that they had a chance to be successful right now.”

Coaching, players or both?

The arrival of manager Blake Butera and a revamped coaching staff, including new hitting coach Matt Borgschulte, has drawn considerable attention and credit for the Nationals’ quick turnaround — .

“I know to go back to last year, the line from Davey Martinez, that it’s never on the coaching, is still going to stick with people, because they’re going to say, ‘Well, see, maybe it was all about the coaching,'” Zuckerman said.

“Well, it’s not entirely that. Sure, the new group has come in with new ideas and a new approach to things, and it’s been very well received, and you can’t deny them the impact that that’s had. But let’s give some credit to the players for being responsible for their own performances, both good and bad.”

He pointed to role players like Curtis Mead, Jose Tena and Foster Griffin — acquisitions that didn’t generate headlines at the time — as evidence that the new front office found value others missed and then put those players in positions to succeed.

“When you’re standing in the box in the bottom of the eighth with two outs and the bases loaded, it’s up to you now to be able to get the job done — and they really have done a good job of that,” Zuckerman said.

On the ‘small ball’ philosophy specifically, Zuckerman said Butera deserves credit for reading his roster rather than forcing a system.

“I think it’s an understanding of what they have and trying to figure out, OK, if this is our roster, how do we get the most out of it?” Zuckerman said.

“If you’ve got runners on first and third, nobody out, the infield back, and Nasim Nunez is at the plate, it probably makes sense to put a play on — because that suits their skill set.”

Wood, Griffin, Cavalli and the players driving it

James Wood entered Wednesday’s games leading all of baseball in runs scored, tallied 15 home runs, and ranks in the top 3 in on-base percentage and OPS. But the Olney, Maryland, native is also among the league leaders in strikeouts — a tension Zuckerman addressed directly.

“When he gets hot, he drives the ball and hits home runs in bunches and draws walks and just tears the cover off the ball and is one of the best hitters in baseball,” Zuckerman said.

“When he goes south, it can get kind of ugly.”

The key, Zuckerman said, is that Wood has learned to be more aggressive with two strikes rather than passively hunting walks — and the consistency he’s shown across most of this season is genuinely new.

Perhaps the biggest wildcard has been starting pitcher Foster Griffin, despite being 30 years old and having spent the past three seasons pitching in Japan.

“He doesn’t wow you with his stuff, but he throws seven different types of pitches,” Zuckerman said.

“He’s a really smart guy who studies hitters and patterns and keeps you off guard with everything that he throws.”

Then there’s Cade Cavalli — the former first-round pick whose development has been derailed by injury but who is now emerging as the closest thing this staff has to a true ace. Zuckerman has watched this one build for years.

“By default, he kind of is [an ace] and I know a lot of people just want to see it all the time, right now,” Zuckerman said.

“But we have to remember, even though we’ve been hearing about Cade Cavalli and he’s been kind of on our radar for a while now, he’s still got far less than one year of major league experience, and so he’s still got plenty of room to grow and learn — and he’s going to get that on the job as he’s pitching for them in the big leagues right now.”

Zuckerman noted that Cavalli’s recent efficiency — seven innings on just 84 pitches in one recent start — suggests a pitcher learning how to pace himself, not just overpower hitters.

Are these Nationals the new Commanders?

The Nationals’ hot start has inevitably invited comparisons to Washington’s other feel-good sports story of recent vintage.

The 2026 Washington Nationals remind me of the 2024 Washington Commanders:

– New front office & coaching staff breathing much-needed new life into the franchise

– Elite offense led by a phenom (Jayden Daniels & James Wood)

– Great on the road

– Good injury luck

— Al Galdi (@AlGaldi)

A former colleague of mine, Al Galdi — who also happens to co-host the Nats Chat Podcast with Zuckerman — floated the idea that this Nationals team mirrors the 2024 Commanders: new-regime energy, youth and the outperformance of expectations.

Zuckerman largely agreed — with one important caveat.

“James Wood is a great player, no doubt about it. He cannot single-handedly take over a game the way that a quarterback like Jayden Daniels can. That’s just not the way baseball works,” Zuckerman said.

“But I do like the idea of a new regime coming in, a whole lot of new energy, and some young, exciting players that allow you to exceed some expectations and lay the groundwork for the future.”

It’s definitely a fun comparison for D.C. sports fans. But I’d push back with a different one out of market: the 2017 Los Angeles Rams, like these Nationals, had a historically young first-year head coach in Sean McVay, a talented and youthful roster and won the NFC West with an 11-5 record to end a miserable string of 10 straight losing seasons. They weren’t close to winning it all, but they announced themselves.

That feels closer to what’s happening at Nationals Park.

The trade deadline question

Since the 2019 World Series run, Washington has largely been a seller at the MLB trade deadline, and with control questions looming over players like CJ Abrams, the summer will test the new front office’s convictions.

Zuckerman said GM Paul Toboni has been deliberately non-committal — and that the team’s performance could shift the calculus not just for 2026, but for 2027 and beyond.

“If the players keep doing what they’re doing, and they’re in the middle of a pennant race, I don’t think Paul Toboni is going to step in and say, ‘Nope, we’re breaking this up, because that’s part of a larger plan,'” Zuckerman said.

If Washington remains competitive, Zuckerman suggested, the bigger impact may be on how aggressively the front office pursues a contending window — perhaps accelerating a timeline that was never supposed to arrive this soon.

The bottom line

Zuckerman’s message to Nationals fans was optimism, tempered with perspective.

“Be realistic, in addition to optimistic, and understand that this was never about trying to go all in and change it all in one year,” he said.

“There’s a lot to be optimistic about what’s still to come in the next few years.”

That’s sound advice. But here’s the thing — even if this Nationals team doesn’t sniff the wild card and slides below .500 this summer, what Blake Butera’s crew has already given this fan base is something it hasn’t had in years: a reason to turn on the game (you know, if you’re able to find it).

Steal attempts, squeeze plays, James Wood launching one into the seats — this is a team that’s actually entertaining. And after six straight losing seasons, that’s more than enough.

You can find more Nationals news and analysis from Mark Zuckerman on and the Nats Chat Podcast.

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, Washington enters 2026 with more than nine days of net rest over its opponents — meaning across 17 games, the Commanders will enjoy substantially more rest than their opponents on a cumulative basis. That figure ranks fourth in the entire league, alongside Dallas, Buffalo and Chicago.

“In four of the last five seasons prior to this year, they have had negative net rest handed to them by the NFL,” Sharp told ÃÛÌÒÊÓƵapp. “So to get not just positive net rest, but plus nine days of net rest should stand out.”

Furthermore, the Commanders will face zero opponents off a bye week, have only one short-week road game and a Week 7 bye placed near the midpoint of the schedule. Sharp noted that Washington’s one rest-disadvantage game is almost an advantage itself.

“They only have one game where they play at a rest disadvantage all year, and it’s only a one-day rest disadvantage that happens to come Week 12 against the Arizona Cardinals, the worst team in the NFL this year,” Sharp said. “So if there’s ever a period where you want to be playing with a rest disadvantage, it’s against the worst team in the NFL.”

And when Washington has had that rest edge, it’s shown up in the results. According to Sharp, the Commanders over the last two seasons are 4-2 straight up in games where they’ve had a rest advantage — and 3-4 when they haven’t.

There’s one more subtle edge worth noting again after Thursday’s 2026 schedule announcement: Washington’s arguably toughest home games (against Super Bowl champion Seattle and the Los Angeles Rams) are both West Coast teams playing 1 p.m. EST kickoffs. Sharp said that used to be considered an automatic advantage for the home team, and while he cautioned the benefit is now more situational and team-dependent than it once was, he’s clear it is still not a detriment.

“It doesn’t hurt the Commanders to play a 1 p.m. Eastern time game against a West Coast team,” he said.

The 2025 season illustrated why the broader rest picture matters. Washington was among the three worst teams in rest differential, and all three (the Raiders, Commanders and Saints) finished with losing records. Of the five teams with the best rest differential, four had winning records, including the Super Bowl champion Seahawks.

Think about what that means in the NFC East race this year. Washington and Dallas each have just one game with a rest disadvantage. The reigning division champion Philadelphia Eagles have five, including their Week 8 road game at Washington, when the Commanders will be coming off their bye week.

And Sharp’s data on the Eagles in rest-disadvantage spots is striking.

“Since 2015, when playing with three or more days of rest disadvantage … the Eagles are just seven wins, 14 losses and a tie, straight up and against the spread, recording minus 36% (return on investment),” he said.

For a competitive division that may again come down to one or two games, those margins matter.

“The league has gone on record as trying to say that ‘we don’t believe rest matters,'” Sharp said. “But I think that if you have any level of common sense, you realize that having a slight rest advantage is a benefit.”

Sharp argued the most underappreciated reason why rest matters isn’t about fatigue — it’s about who can suit up.

“If you’re playing on short rest, a guy gets a concussion, he definitely can’t come back because we’ve got a game on Thursday,” Sharp said. “Whereas if you play on Sunday, maybe there’s a chance I can get this guy back. Same thing with ankle sprains … a guy might be able to return. So I just think that it’s silly and the data backs it up, that rest does matter.”

Those margins matter physically, competitively and especially late in the season when cumulative fatigue starts showing up on injury reports.

That said, let’s not schedule the Super Bowl parade down Constitution Avenue quite yet. The Commanders still have to prove last season’s 5-12 flameout was the fluke, not the 2024 run to the NFC title game. Jayden Daniels has to stay healthy. The revamped defense still has more questions than answers.

An uncomfortable truth

But pretending the schedule is neutral would be dishonest. And here comes the uncomfortable part.

Washington’s scheduling advantages didn’t come out of a vacuum. They came at other teams’ expense. And the way the NFL constructed this year’s schedule is the latest reason to doubt the sincerity of the league’s stated concern for player safety.

Sharp’s analysis describes the 2026 schedule as the least equitable in NFL history across most key metrics.

The best-rested team, the Chicago Bears, will have 15 more cumulative rest days than their opponents. The worst, the Los Angeles Chargers, will have 24 fewer. That’s a 39-day swing, the largest gap in any NFL season since at least 2000. There will be 110 games out of 272 where one team holds a rest advantage, 40% of all games and the most in NFL history.

Sharp said the league’s scheduling philosophy has quietly but clearly shifted in favor of maximizing matchups most attractive to networks — and the consequences are predictable.

“By prioritizing that strategy … they are going to wind up with situations where there are more haves or have-nots, teams that are getting screwed with rest, or teams that are benefiting with rest, because it’s no longer a driver for the league to try to be more balanced in that degree,” he said.

To be fair, the NFL did make genuine improvements in 2026 — eliminating the brutal three-games-in-10-days stretch entirely, reducing four-games-in-17-days situations to just one and cutting down on games played after road Sunday or Monday night appearances. Those are real wins for players.

But Sharp isn’t buying the broader narrative — and said the fix wouldn’t even be complicated.

“It would not take more than five minutes for them to just make an adjustment in their model,” he said.

The Commanders got lucky in the draw for what is a pivotal season for the franchise. They should take every advantage the calendar offers them and run with it.

But just know the schedule was built not with the health of players in mind, but the health of the league’s own bottom line.

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For your convenience | ️

— Washington Commanders (@Commanders)

The Commanders’ first two games come on the road against division opponents in 4:25 p.m. kickoffs, at Philadelphia and then Dallas in Week 2.

Washington’s first home game comes in Week 3 against the defending Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks on Sept. 27, marking the franchise’s latest home opener by date since the strike-shortened 1982 season and its first Week 3 home opener since 2012.

Though teams often get a bye after playing an international game, the Commanders go from the Week 4 game in London to hosting the New York Giants in Week 5.

After four straight years with a late-season bye week, Washington gets Week 7 off, their earliest bye since 2018.

The bye week is between the Commanders’ first primetime games of the season: Week 6 in San Francisco on Monday Night Football on Oct. 19 and Week 8 in a home rematch with the Eagles on Sunday Night Football on Nov. 1.

The rematch with the Giants at the Meadowlands comes on Thursday Night Football to open Week 10 on Nov. 12, providing a long rest before hosting the Cincinnati Bengals for Monday Night Football on Nov. 23.

The Commanders host the Dallas Cowboys to finish the regular season, the fourth time in the last five seasons the two rivals square off in the final week of the season and eighth time since .

Notable facts

The Commanders get the benefit of playing both of the NFC West teams visiting Northwest Stadium (Seattle in Week 3 and the Los Angeles Rams in Week 9) in 1 p.m. kickoffs.

Washington’s 18,491 projected travel miles rank 16th in the NFL but fewer than their NFC East rivals.

Based on projected win totals across the NFL, the Commanders have the league’s eighth-most difficult schedule.

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