Krista Lauren

This weekend has been filled to the brim with sports. If there isn’t football on Saturday, then there is baseball and basketball going on. If basketball is taking a break, there are three football games and another baseball game to watch. As someone who has enjoyed spending her evenings watching The Hallmark Channel or reality TV, getting married and having sports on television so frequently has been jarring to say the least. In fact, despite Robert claiming he doesn’t watch every single athletic event that is aired, I would be shocked if there was much more available for viewing.

Here are a few things I have learned since taking such a big “interest” in sports for the past few weeks:

#1: Baseball doesn’t sleep. Literally. Like, on Friday (Slash, through Saturday) they went into 18 innings and didn’t finish until 3:30 in the morning. What kind of sport makes its fans watch that darn late?! Rude!! Also, baseball is always on. They apparently have games basically every single day, with a few short months of a break in the winter months. I am skeptical, as I think they’ll still find a way to weasel their way into our homes the next few months. I’ll report back.

#2: A sports fan might root for a certain team, but they apparently like watching anyone play. For example, we are a New England Patriots family, but we still watched the Eagles play, the Chiefs play, the Panthers play, and the Steelers play. Fantasy teams have made this a lot more bearable for me, because it’s actually kind of fun having people on the field to root for, but it still seems excessive to have 3 games in a row on Sunday — especially considering the length of a football game. It seems counterintuitive that a sports fan would spend their entire Sunday sitting on the couch, but that’s how the world of sports works.

#3: Sports can be interesting even to clueless people like me because thinking about everything with a newly-forming sports brain is kind of entertaining. For example, the goal of baseball is to hit a grapefruit-sized ball as far as you possibly can, in hopes of avoiding a few people who are covering the entirety of a field. These people run to catch the grapefruit, and somehow grab it almost every single time despite having so much land to cover! I am shocked every time the grapefruit plops into the glove because despite Robert saying they almost always catch it, I don’t freaking understand how. The grapefruit is tossed far and high, and at incredibly fast speeds. It seems impossible that people could run that far and  fast to catch the tiny object, but they have become masters of it.

To make sports a little more bearable, I have started doing a few things. First, I try to get into the game by Googling any questions I might have. Not the boring questions like, “Why is that guy in the Red Sox uniform catching balls behind the LA hitter?” but ones like, “How many sunflower seeds are found on the baseball field after the game?” or, “Is Nathan Eovaldi dating anyone?” Here is a screenshot of the questions I Googled last night:

Since I love reality television and hearing all about other people’s lives, knowing more about the players as individuals is really crucial for me to have a good time watching any sport. The more I know about their dating lives, what they had for breakfast, how they caption pictures on Instagram, and whether or not they’re generally considered a “good guy,” the happier I will be to watch them play on the field/court/whatever you’d call the ice that is skated upon for hockey games. It’s a lot more fun rooting for people you feel like you know than a random man in a jersey. I mentioned that Robert should start studying about the athlete’s personal lives so he could tell me more about them while we are watching, and he told me that would be “boring.” How is that boring?! Something I think is boring is a game that’s score is 1-1 and has no end in sight and nothing to talk about regarding what watching. That was my Friday night, and I’m still bitter about it.

I am going to continue to watch sports on television and will keep you all in the loop of what I learn. In the meantime, I am thankful tomorrow is Tuesday, because it will give me a chance to start watching The Hallmark Channel Christmas movies without being interrupted by a football or baseball game… Please tell me there isn’t any basketball on then.