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Editor’s Note: This is Part 2 of a five-part series on what it means to be a D.C. sports fan in 2026. º£½Ç¾«Æ·ºÚÁÏ’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. 

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. º£½Ç¾«Æ·ºÚÁÏ’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. What 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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