Meet Kate Stanwick from Bluebird Banter

We have dozens of women covering pro and college sports for our team brands here at SB Nation. Meet one of those talented writers, Kate Stanwick, who writes for our Toronto Blue Jays blog, Bluebird Banter.

A love for baseball was something I never saw coming. Three years ago, my dad was explaining batting average and ERA to me during a game at Dodger Stadium. I was never particularly fond of sports, and I was terrible at every one I tried to play. In the second half of the 2015 season, the Blue Jays were all anyone in my non-sports watching family back in Toronto could talk about. I had been living in Los Angeles for five years and was completely intrigued, so I thought I’d give baseball a shot. If you watched the post-2015 deadline Blue Jays at all, you can understand how one might get hooked — they were truly such a fun team to watch. The playoffs that year were absolutely captivating, topped off by Jose Bautista’s legendary bat flip in the seventh inning of ALDS Game 5 against the Rangers. I have been in love with baseball ever since.

Hands down, it has been the relationships I’ve formed with other members. It is such a joy to visit the site every day and chat both about the team and about life in the comments. I have also been fortunate enough to have now met several people in person, and a few have grown to be friends I have gone to games with and even traveled with. I feel very blessed to be a part of this community and am so grateful to everyone who has chosen to invest in it.

I don’t know about unique, but the biggest and most unexpected challenge I’ve faced is how to keep the morale up in a lost season. I wasn’t a part of the site during the glory years of 2015 and 2016, and these past two seasons have been nothing short of a disaster for Blue Jays fans. Two seasons marred by freak injuries, unexpected regression, and one gut-wrenching loss after another can make it pretty difficult to be invested in a team most expected to be competitive. A goal of mine from the day I joined is to try to lighten the mood when times are rough and find little things to be excited about. As someone who is just as emotionally invested as any other dedicated fan, this can be pretty hard to do. However, I figure if we can poke fun at ourselves and laugh through the terrible games together, then we can keep the site an enjoyable place people want to come back to.

I have been officially writing for BlueBird Banter for just over a year, which is surreal. I had only discovered the site a few weeks prior, and it quickly became my go-to source for Blue Jays news. Tom Dakers, who runs the site, mentioned in a game thread they were looking for an additional voice or two, and despite the fact I’ve never had a single sports journalism ambition in my life, I was confident I could capably contribute. I inquired with Tom, and he suggested I do a FanPost. My first piece was a fun compilation of tweets from a series against the Detroit Tigers in an effort to inject a little humor and light into a trying season, and I was initiated in soon after that. I started with news posts on roster moves and trades, then started to experiment with more feature style pieces. Nowadays, I do a little bit of everything.

Emily Waldon is one of my favorite writers, and a remarkable sports journalist. Her love for baseball and passion for minor league players is evident in every feature piece and tweet she writes.

I’d also like to include Rachael McDaniel in this list, for her ability to cover such difficult topics so remarkably well. The vulnerability she writes with is truly inspiring.