Hours after the Texas Rangers beat the Houston Astros on Monday night to advance to the World Series, Rangers right fielder Adolis Garcia posted 29 silent face emojis on X, the social platform once known as Twitter.
It was a message to Astros fans who had booed him during his at-bats. Dozens of Rangers fans immediately intervened. Sports reporters shared the post, and hundreds of other observations about the Rangers’ victory quickly followed.
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter last year, many users have abandoned the platform, prompted by a series of unpopular changes. Others have declared him dead.
But just as many households stick with cable for game broadcasts, sports fans and reporters still find X indispensable because, they say, it’s still the place to go for live updates and hot takes on decisions. of coaches and calls from referees.
For some journalists, abandoning thousands of followers and starting from scratch somewhere else was a failure. Many fans didn’t want to give up on communities where real friendships were forged between people interacting for the first time as strangers. And while some features on the platform have changed, X is essentially business as usual when it comes to catching up on scores and watching highlights.
Lisa Delpy Neirotti, an associate professor of sports management at George Washington University, said sports fans had several sources for in-depth coverage, but the real-time nature of X made it an ideal place to consume game updates. and breaking sports news.
“If they fire a coach or trade a player,” he said, “boom, I look it up on my Twitter account.”
Sports aren’t the only reason some people have stayed on X. Many continue to use it to post or catch up on politics, pop culture, and other topics. But sports fans are still among the most loyal users, making up about 42 percent of the X audience. depending on the platform. X did not respond to requests for comment.
“Why move if you’re happy?” Said Professor Delpy Neirotti. “People are creatures of habit and there is no need to move if they continue to get the content they want and need.”
One reason sports Twitter has remained active during the tumult of the Musk era is that the alternatives that have emerged are less attractive to sports fans. Meta’s rival app, Threads, displays posts in a user’s feed via an algorithm rather than in real time, making live events harder to follow. Bluesky, which was funded by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, displays posts in reverse chronological order, but the app is still invitation-only and less active than Twitter.
Kennedy LandryThe 25-year-old, who covers the Rangers for MLB.com, said he had noticed that some people he followed on most of it.”
In addition to interacting with readers, Ms. Landry also uses X to share links to her articles and live tweet during games.
“As long as it’s up and running and I seem to still be interacting with the fan base in a conducive way,” he said, “it doesn’t seem necessary to make a full transition yet.”
Josiah Johnsonthe host of Gil’s Arena, an NBA podcast, said that despite the changes to X, its feed had remained largely intact. Johnson said he recently signed up for Threads to see what it’s like, but with more than 260,000 followers on X, quitting isn’t easy.
“It’s hard for me to want to go somewhere else and give up all the work I’ve done,” he said. “I’m a Twitter guy. That is what it is. “I’m going to stay on the boat anyway.”
Within the sports Twittersphere, there are smaller communities of sports fans and reporters who regularly post about a specific team or sport. There is tennis Twitter, F1 Twitter and Yankees Twitter. And for Shannon Enty of Colleyville, Texas, there’s the Texas Rangers Twitter.
Enty signed up for Twitter in 2009 or 2010 to keep up with his favorite hosts on Ticket, a sports radio station in Dallas. She said she stayed on the app to post and keep up with her favorite baseball team.
At first, he said, “I was just tweeting into the ether.”
As more people signed up for the app, Enty said he saw a community taking shape. Over time, she became friends with some of those Rangers fans, and even met some in person.
“I think these are all people I initially contacted because they tweeted,” he said. “It’s hard to imagine now because we’re good friends on top of that, but it was originally thanks to Rangers Twitter.”
Ms Enty said she had noticed that some people she followed had stopped using X in recent months.
“But those people are not the athletes,” he said. “The sports tweeters just stayed.”
While many sports fans have stuck with X, some have abandoned the app. Casie LaBella, 49, a Chicago native who lives in Seattle, used to use Twitter to keep up with the Chicago Bears and Cubs.
“I was like the fourth person in our family watching a game,” he said. “We would have my husband, my son, me and my phone.”
But after Musk took over, LaBella said she became concerned about security on X. She left the platform in the spring and was an early adopter of Threads, which was introduced in July. LaBella said that she had enjoyed using Threads, but that it is no longer the same as Twitter once was.
“As humans, we want to connect with other humans, and I think Twitter before Musk was a really interesting tool to do that,” he said. “It helped us connect even though it was online.”
