How a pair of San Francisco Giants fans found love through podcasting and Twitter
June 1, 2012: A Giants game of historic proportion.
Not long after graduating from UC Santa Cruz in 2009, Daniel Zarchy found himself talking frequently with a friend about baseball. San Francisco Giants baseball, to be precise.
“We would just talk about the Giants constantly,” Zarchy recalls. “In what, in hindsight, seems like a shocking act of arrogance on our part, we decided that maybe other people would want to listen to what we had to say.”
So Zarchy and Thomas Todd launched a podcast in December 2010. They called it Two Guys, a Glove and a Coke Bottle, an affectionate reference to the outsized props that adorn the Giants’ home ballpark. Among fans, it’s simply known as “GiantsPod.”
The two friends haven’t made any money to speak of off the podcast but it turned out people enjoy listening to what they have to say. Zarchy and Todd still record sporadically and the series is rated four-and-a-half stars on iTunes.
But finding listeners for a podcast is one thing. Finding love through that podcast with assists from other corners of the Internet and some cosmic serendipity is something else entirely. This is how it happened.
The guy, the girl and the podcast
Image: Giantspod, apple
In April 2011, Ashley Varela was a recent college graduate preparing for a family vacation by downloading a supply of baseball podcasts. San Francisco Giants baseball podcasts, to be precise.
“GiantsPod was the first one, and I think the only one at the time, to pop up,” Varela recalls.
Varela graduated in 2010 from Westmont College, where, during her final year, she made a point to try everything. A friend invited her to join an intramural softball team. She knew nothing about softball or baseball so of course she was in. The chance invitation sparked a passion.
“I’m kind of an obsessive person,” Varela says. “If I get an interest in something, I go way overboard.”
Varela concocted a plan to force-feed herself knowledge about baseball by starting a blog and writing something about the sport every single day. She kept writing while living back at home with her parents and looking for work after graduation.
“No one was reading it, which was really good at the time,” Varela says with a laugh now about that first blogging foray. “But I would write about anything, from recaps of games to merchandise I thought was interesting, to promotions or news that caught my eye.”
Although she’s from Seattle, Varela adopted the Giants as her initial favorite team they were quite good at the time. (In a bit of foreshadowing, they’d also been her college boyfriend’s favorite team.) So, before that April 2011 family vacation, she downloaded an episode of the podcast Zarchy and Todd had started only months prior about her adopted team.
“My first thought was these guys are really smart and know a lot about baseball,” Varela says of the duo’s analytical, statistics-heavy approach.
“And then my second thought was that I thought his voice was sexy,” Varela says of Zarchy, whose “podcast voice” and confident, laid-back comportment immediately drew her in.
So began a relationship spanning many years and apps.
Romance on deck
Image: Alex Menendez/AP
At first, Varela and Zarchy simply bantered back and forth on Twitter about the Giants, their shared favorite team. Eventually the conversations became more natural, and they moved some of the discussion over to GChat and Skype, apps that are less public. Varela typed from Seattle. Zarchy typed from the Bay Area.
But when Varela said she would be passing through San Francisco in June 2012, neither necessarily thought romance was on deck.
They met in person on June 1, 2012, a Friday. Zarchy got out of work early and the two had what in retrospect turned out to be a classic San Francisco date.
First, they ate sandwiches from Ike’s Place in Dolores Park. Then they took a walk across the city, through the Mission District to the waterfront and AT&T Park. There, they watched a Giants game in person, together.
The night ended well, and both were quickly smitten with each other. A few days later, Zarchy took more time off work to drive to Sacramento and hang out with Varela for an afternoon before she had to return to Seattle. Not long after, he flew to Seattle and they attended all three games of a weekend Giants-Mariners series together.
The relationship wasn’t official, but it was on. The internet helped narrow their geographic distance.
“We’re both very, like, internet people, so we were in contact everyday,” Zarchy says.
Varela: “We would Skype every night for, like, five or six hours.”
Zarchy: “There was a lot of: I’m doing my thing, she’s doing her thing, but we both have our cameras on.”
Varela: “We’d co-exist on Skype.”
Zarchy: “So, yeah, we would hang out!”
Feelings for one another grew from there. Verala moved to the Bay Area in August 2013. She and Zarchy have now been for-real together for more than three years.
If there was another sister …
Image: Eric Risberg/AP
“Hes the kind of person that, no matter who you meet, if theyve met him, theyre like Oh, yeah, Danny! Hes such a good guy. So good,'” Varela says of Zarchy.
“Seeing how she is with my family, my friends, it means the world to me,” Zarchy says of Varela. “It just feels right and it always has.”
That’s a pretty good return on the podcast Zarchy started with a friend on a whim almost six years ago. But much else has changed since Varela first downloaded Two Guys, a Glove and a Coke Bottle before that family vacation in April 2011.
Zarchy went to law school and now works as an attorney. Verala grew her initial curiosity about baseball into a freelance writing career; she now covers the sport for USA Today, Baseball Prospectus, SB Nation and others.
Right around the time she and Zarchy attended that weekend Giants-Mariners series in 2012, Varela also switched her still-budding baseball allegiance over to her hometown team. The upshot: She ditched the Giants but kept the Giants podcaster.
Zarchy and Varela now live in Oakland. Among their favorite people to spend time with are Varela’s sister and her husband who, no lie, met on Instagram.
“We’re the Twitter couple, they’re the Instagram couple,” Zarchy says. “If there was another sister, she’d be in the Tumblr couple.”
[Disclosure: Daniel Zarchy and I were colleagues at City on a Hill Press, the UC Santa Cruz student newspaper, for two academic quarters in 2006-07. I had neither seen nor spoken to him since then (he graduated a couple years after me), until a reunion for the student paper this spring. We got to talking, he mentioned he started a podcast some years back, then he mentioned he met his girlfriend through that podcast. I said it sounded like a story now, some months later, here’s the story.]
Read more: http://mashable.com/2016/09/08/giants-fans-love-meet-via-podcast/
