In Part 2 of a five-day sequence on how DC-area sports fans comply with their groups, Rob Woodfork learns what fans can nonetheless solely get from listening in the automotive.
Editor’s Note: This is Part 2 of a five-part sequence on what it means to be a D.C. sports fan in 2026. WTOP’s Rob Woodfork talked with dozens of fans about how they comply with their groups, what it prices them and what retains them coming again. Some of what they stated was about protection. Most of it wasn’t. Read all 5 components and learn more about how this sequence was reported.
In Part 1 of this sequence, the takeaway was that following your crew has quietly turn into a do-it-yourself job — extra protection than ever and, someway, you continue to find yourself assembling your individual.
Here in Part 2, we take you to the one place you may’t try this — the place someone else is answerable for what you get.
The automotive.
In a region defined by its commute, it’s the 20 minutes to work, the hour and 20 residence, the late drive in for a shift that begins when everyone else’s day is ending.
For an enormous share of the individuals I talked to, the automotive is the place they atone for their groups. And what they need in that window seems to be a really explicit form of data, delivered a selected approach, at a selected second.
Let me present you what I imply with a real story.
The uncommon grand slam and the drive residence
You met Jonathan in Part 1 of this sequence. In May, he was at Nationals Park when James Wood hit an inside-the-park grand slam. The bases had been loaded, a ball glanced off the glove of a leaping Nick Morabito (a McLean, Virginia, native making his main league debut for the New York Mets that evening) and Wood sprinted all the approach round, sliding headfirst into residence in simply over 15 seconds.
“I’ve never seen that,” Jonathan informed me, nonetheless glowing from the pleasure.
And then he acquired in his automotive.
On the drive residence, the radio gave him the evaluation his personal eyes couldn’t: that he’d simply witnessed the first legit inside-the-park grand slam in the main leagues in practically 4 years, and solely the second in Nationals historical past.
He’d seen the second. The sports report gave him the greater story.
That, in a single evening, is the complete of what Jonathan desires from sports protection — and it’s virtually precisely how he described it after I requested:
“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 sufficiently old now, he stated, that he activates the radio at a selected time to catch sports, site visitors and climate in a single cross, timing his day to a broadcast the approach you’d set a watch.
And the Wood evening is why. The rating he might’ve gotten wherever. The context that made it particular got here to him dwell, from a voice, whereas it nonetheless mattered, earlier than the 24/7 information cycle pushed it off a web page.
Mickey, who really works at Nationals Park and lives and breathes his groups, put the order of operations much 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 quantity isn’t the vacation spot — it’s the factor that makes somebody lean in for the story behind it.
Javon goes even leaner — he desires the naked minimal to get began:
“I just need a snapshot — who won, who lost, who hit what, who stinks. Then we can go from there.”
But discover the place “there” leads. The snapshot isn’t the meal for Javon; it’s the desk. It’s the few information he wants in hand so he can sit down and speak sports together with his son — the rating as the worth of admission to a dialog he doesn’t need to miss (and it’s a slight sneak-peek into the coronary heart of Part 5 of this sequence).
When your fingers are tied
For some individuals, the automotive isn’t simply the handy place to get sports. It’s the solely 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 drawback is one most of us by no means have to consider: he can’t pull out his cellphone to examine a rating. So when he’s listening to sports content material on the street:
“Whenever they do their updates, they need to do, you know, everything.”
The nationwide reveals frustrate him, he stated — a handful of scores, not even all of them, after which having to attend out the complete cycle, 20 minutes, half an hour, earlier than it comes again round. And, even then, you won’t get your crew.
For a man who’s left his residence market someplace again on the interstate, that’s the distinction between realizing what occurred and never realizing in any respect.
His preferrred: lead with the native stuff, give the rating, then a few the key performs and the gamers who made them. The relaxation he can examine when he will get residence.
A truck driver and a instructor, in fully completely different lives on reverse ends of the clock, describing the similar replace virtually phrase for phrase.
Ronnie isn’t preventing a steering wheel the approach David is, however his day runs on the similar rails. He’s a psychological well being skilled nearing retirement and works 12-hour shifts, with the radio serving as the bookends — he listens on his approach to Bethesda for work and on the approach residence to Upper Marlboro.
And he’s no drive-by-score man; he describes himself as “detail-oriented” and needs the context and the deeper learn on what really occurred.
Two lengthy commuters a technology aside, each shaping the unfastened hours of the day round a broadcast that reaches them proper the place they’re — fingers free, in the solely free time their unorthodox sleep schedules will permit.
The half you may solely get by listening
Here’s the half that stunned me most, as a result of it cuts in opposition to how we normally speak about radio — as the factor you compromise for when you may’t watch.
Lauren B., a D.C.-area WNBA and school basketball devotee you met in Part 1, informed me flatly that for her, the audio is the better part.
Not the fallback. The better part.
She’ll rewatch video games she’s already seen particularly to hearken to the commentary, as a result of she says she learns the sport from it. She follows what’s occurring higher with a voice strolling her via it than she does together with her personal eyes alone:
“I’ve tried to watch without listening and it’s not the same.”
We are likely to assume the image is the foremost occasion and the sound is the garnish. She says, it’s the different approach round. The name is the expertise.
A radio lifer agrees with Lauren, however not for the causes you’d suppose. WTOP’s personal Reada Kessler — a longtime Commanders fan, a season-long sufferer, fantasy participant, the works — went to the NFL Draft in Pittsburgh this yr. One of the most anticipated dwell occasions on the sports calendar, and he or she was there in the constructing.
And what she discovered herself lacking was the commentary.
“I like the analysis because it makes me think about things that I haven’t normally thought about,” Kessler stated. “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 individuals, reverse conditions — one rewatching at residence to listen to the name, one at the occasion itself wishing she might. Same conclusion, arrived at from reverse instructions: the voice provides one thing the eyes can’t provide on their very own.
Be part of the dialog … share your ideas about DC sports in the WTOP app. Click on the suggestions button to depart us a voicemail or e-mail (Apple | Android).
Don’t make me wait to search out out
None of this implies individuals are affected person. They are emphatically not.
Alyssa, a mother of two younger youngsters in Northern Virginia who was taking in a Nats sport, described the factor that loses her immediately:
“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 acquired a toddler and a child not but a yr previous in the home, which suggests she’s additionally acquired, as she put it, a brief window of her personal time. And she’s an energetic chooser, not a passive listener. Hook her in the first few seconds or lose her completely.
And it’s not simply pace she desires. It’s vitality:
“I need a little pep, I need a little enthusiasm … a little joy, a little jazz and pizzazz.”
Derrick, a special-education instructor in Centreville, painted a relatively artistic visible — a “Whitman sampler of sports” for his replace in the automotive:
“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 truthful, not everybody’s clock runs as quick as Alyssa and Derrick.
The queue
Molly, a stats-minded Caps fan at Nats Park, is the exception. She has considered one of the longest drives of anybody I talked to so she’d fortunately play “something I can put on and not have to change.”
But ask her what she desires from a sports replace on the drive and he or she says cheerfully that she isn’t actually 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 somebody who nonetheless works in radio, it will be dishonest to write down round this reality: The commute isn’t only a radio anymore. It’s a queue.
And that doesn’t essentially profess a choice for one format over one other. It’s a special job completely.
Jonathan does each, and he’s clear about which is which. He activates the radio at a set time to get sports, site visitors and climate in a single cross. He’s additionally a loyal listener to Tony Kornheiser’s podcast. One is what he desires driving residence from a ballgame, trying for added context to what he simply noticed. The different is what he desires when he’s acquired an hour and no one’s ready on him.
Danny Jolles comes at it from the reverse finish. The D.C.-bred comic lives in Los Angeles now, out of vary of the station he grew up with, and what he describes isn’t a choice — 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 extra methods to pay attention than ever, the majority of sports-audio time in the U.S. — 61% — still happens on AM/FM radio, whilst podcasts climb. It’s the similar cut up Molly and Danny describe from reverse ends.
The automotive has two settings. Most individuals use each. What no one has persistence for is the improper one at the improper second — and Danny, three time zones away, would take both.
The thread
If you need the complete commute want listing in a single breath, Ricardo — the Carolina transplant we met yesterday — packs it into the quarter-hour between residence 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 again and see what each merchandise has in widespread. Not considered one of them survives a delay.
David can’t wait out a cycle that will by no means circle again to his crew. Lauren desires the name because it unfolds. Jonathan acquired his grand-slam context whereas nonetheless reveling in it on the drive residence that evening, not the subsequent morning when focus shifts to his work day. Alyssa isn’t lingering — she’ll give about 5 seconds.
What they described, every in their very own approach, is that timing issues as a lot as content material — data arriving whereas they had been nonetheless in the expertise, earlier than life moved on to the subsequent factor.
Coming up tomorrow partially 3 … what it more and more prices to get all of it.
Because following your crew has quietly turn into an costly, fragmented, hard-sold proposition. We spend Part 3 including up the invoice: the tickets, the streaming, and the wager the complete business is pushing on a fan base that principally isn’t shopping for.
Be part of the dialog … share your ideas about DC sports in the WTOP app. Click on the suggestions button to depart us a voicemail or e-mail (Apple | Android).
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