It's strange seeing TheScore.com in 2024.
It started as a Canadian cable TV text-only sports ticker in the 90s.
Then in the aughts, it became a plucky 3rd-place live sports network showing Canadian varsity football, WWE wrestling, out-of-market major league sports games and zany commentary shows. Sid Sexeiro, who currently does Breakfast Television for Toronto moms, was on the network for years with his terrible takes. Adnan Virk, who I believe left for ESPN or possibly the MLB network, was also a host.
Then in the early 2010s, they went heavy with their online presence, hiring edgy bloggers. They hired the amateurs from the Drunk Jays Fans blogspot and Drew Fairservice of Ghostrunner on First.
Andrew Stoeten and Dustin Parkes of the DJF were edgybois in the aughts who wrote classics before being hired such as "DJF Guide to Punching Kitty at the Ballpark" and the lore of the Wade Boggs head where he drank 70 beers on a cross-country charter flight.
The boys unfortunately went corporate when they got hired by The Score, memoryholing their back catalogue.
They'd write daily baseball content for a few years for The Score, mostly about the Jays, the Giants and the Dutch soccer team.
One day a few years later, The Score pulled the plug on their whole online division overnight. They sold their 3rd-position sports cable station to Rogers, the Jays owner, who folded it into their interchangeable stations, rebranding it as Sportsnet 360, a dumping ground for second-rate live games and radio simulcasts.
Stoeten continued covering the Jaya jumping from independent platform to platform. He eventually got hired as The Athletic's Jays beat reporter for a few years until getting fired for interviewing ?Stephen Brunt drunk on the brand's podcast. He also unfortunately developed TDS.
The Drunk Jays Fans community was eventually reborn without Stoeten himself. A new Blogspot message board called Jays In the House was established by an artsy woman from Toronto. The community unfortunately also succumbed to TDS.
Dustin Parkes would get a job running the Arts section of the National Post.
Drew Fairservice returned to his day job, later co-host The Athletic's Jays podcast with Stoeten then took it over after his dismissal.
The Score brand itself seems to live on a decade later as a gambling-based sports app accompaniment.
