Want some tea about Cleveland Guardians Twitter?
One of the good, or maybe "potentially fun" is a better word than "good," things about sports fandom communities is the popcorn-demanding dramas that can occur that are not worthy of national attention but are interesting in their own right.
First, some context: for years, the TV broadcast team for the Guardians has been play-by-play announcer Matt Underwood, analyst Rick Manning, and field reporter Andre Knott.
Knott chimes in on the broadcast, unprompted, way way waaaaay more often than I see "sideline" reporters typically do, so he's for all intents and purposes a third man in the booth. I actually like this setup and wonder why more teams only cut to their reporters a few times a game and only in a very formalized way. Is it because most sideline reporters are women?
Anyway, Knott gets a lot of flack online for seeming to be a organizational yes-man and never asking anything but the most flattering questions post-game.
I get it, though. As the demise of regional sports networks continue, the Guardians are one of an increasing number of teams that produce their own broadcasts, which includes the Guardians. So criticizing the ball club would be akin for Knott to be criticizing your employer. On TV.
Even before this year, when the Guardians TV home was Bally Sports Great Lakes and employed the same trio, they had to be nice about the Guardians, lest the team threaten to take their broadcasts away.
Anyway, this heaping helping of context, with generous portions of tangents out of the way, we get to the main course of today.
Arguably the Guardians' most prized prospect is AAA outfielder Chase DeLauter. The fans have been screaming for him to be promoted for some time now, but the Guardians have declined to do so despite serious holes in the outfield.
Knott has vocally endorsed keeping DeLauter, who has been beset by nagging injuries this year, in the minors. Today, us Guardians got the news that DeLauter has a fracture in his hand that will require 6-8 weeks of rehab.
Also today, Knott tweeted a gif of a toddler looking smug, with no further comments or context.
Everyone and his brother has decided this gif means, "I was right about not promoting DeLauter yet, suckers," and got big mad about it and equated it with Knott celebrating the DeLauter injury.
For his part, Knott said his gif was unrelated to sports, and I for one am not going to call him a liar. But questions remain! Like, why won't he explain what the GIF was about, then? (Edit: He finally said it has to do with something his family would understand.) If it was for the benefit of a select few, then why post it on such a mass-reach platform where everyone is open to misinterpret it?
Some people have asked him, basically, why don't you just say something like, "Whoa, bad timing for this unrelated tweet!" and his responses to that are hard to parse, e.g., "Easy presume a lie" and, "No when you know the actual truth you don't understand."
The best I can figure is he thinks it's so self-evidently insane that he would have a smug reaction to the DeLauter news that it's not even worth acknowledging except to roll your eyes at the people making that connection, but since he can't be arsed to take a moment and make sure his tweets are legible, I have to squint to even get that far.
At any rate, another common knock on Knott is that he's condescending to rank-and-file Guardian fans, and his response tweets to this situation have only bolstered that perception. He also spends a non-zero amount of Twitter time posting mildly horny reaction gifs to thirst trap pics. It's all a bit gross and unprofessional, and I gotta say in taking this Andre Knott deep-dive today I am a less of a fan of his than I was yesterday.
* Mass changes are afoot in the UFL, where Detroit, Memphis, Birmingham, and Houston's franchises are moving to Boise, Columbus (OH), somewhere in the Tampa Bay/Orlando area, and somewhere in the Louisville/Lexington area.
That's half the leagues' teams, and also spells the end of any tendrils of USFL remembrance. It also cannot be considered a positive sign for the health of the league that they are making changes this massive.
I don't how successful they will be in Columbus, Boise, or Louisville, since those cities' experiences with spring football leagues is very limited. Columbus had the Ohio Glory in 1991 in the World League of American Football, or WLAF (or as my uncle derisively put it, "We Laugh.") The WLAF might be better remembered for being the beta version of what would become NFL Europe.
Anyway, I'm looking at their attendance figures, and I think the UFL would take them - their low-water mark on the season was just over 20,000, which would be the highest attended game in the UFL this year outside of St. Louis (whose attendance absolutely dwarfs the rest of the teams). Additionally, riding the coattails of the Buckeyes might be more fruitful now than it was in 1991, when they were coming off years of mediocre seasons by blue blood standards.
Louisville, Lexington, and Boise have never had a pro football team (which I'm defining as "non-arena league and shown on national television").
Tampa Bay and Orlando are strange cases. They've both had a number of teams in these upstart leagues, with attendance figures all over the map. In the '80s, the Tampa Bay Bandits and the Orlando Renegades did pretty well, but I'm not sure that's has any relevance to anything in the 2020s, especially since that version of the USFL was trying to compete straight-up with the NFL for players.
The Orlando Apollos drew better-than-current-UFL average in the brief Alliance of American Football in 2019, and the Orlando Rage did better than that in 2001's XFL (remember He Hate Me?).
But the most recent attempt at pro football in Orlando were the 2023 Orlando Guardians (XFL), who drew worse than any of their Orlando predecessors and were not carried forward when the modern XFL and modern USFL merged.
All in all, it's hard to be optimistic about the league's future. League-wide, attendance is down and ratings are down, too. I have typed many, many words in this space over the years championing spring football. But I have to admit I watched very few UFL games this year, or any previous year.
So I'm asking myself, "if I want football year round so bad, why am I not watching it in the spring?" and I just can't explain it. I only have a theory.
I absolutely do look forward to, and watch, the CFL every summer. What's the difference? It has nothing to do with the quality of the players, because I don't care. I'll happily watch FCS football all fall.
Ultimately, I think it is this: the CFL, and most of its teams, are established. Most of them have been around since before I was born, and I'm 49. So with that, we have some storylines that endure: The Eskimos and the Argonauts are the league's most successful and iconic franchises, though their local fan bases are as different as that of the New York Giants and The Green Bay Packers. The Saskatchewan Roughriders and (especially) the Hamilton Tiger-Cats are the leagues' hard luck franchises. And so on.
So I think the moneymen of the UFL are going to have to endure an unprecedented amount of patience and years of loss before getting somewhere profitable and letting these team narratives organically grow.
Unfortunately, I have zero faith enough owners will have enough of that patience to keep it afloat. But I can watch more games next year. Remind me.
Speaking of the CFL, here's a wager for this week:
Calgary (-7) over Montreal
This is a Thursday night game, so get those bets in.
Calgary has a very strong case as the best team in the league right now. They are 5-1, have scored the second-most points in the league, and have allowed the fewest. They have a league-best 3-game winning streak going. They are at home.
In 2025, Montreal is 4-0 when Davis Alexander has started at quarterback, and 0-2 when 37-year-old journeyman MacLeod Bethel-Thompson has started. Guess which of those two went on the six-game injured list this week?
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