Baseball always makes me think of summer, of the quintessential American experience of green grass, the murmuring of the crowd punctuated by the shrieks of happy children all with the smell of grilling meat backed by the fleeting hoppy undertone of beer floats through the air.
Normally it takes at least until Memorial Day for that image to really fill in, like an old tube TV warming up to the point where the picture is being received at full strength. Given that we had three days this year in the first week in April in DC that were +25degF above average, I’m not surprised I’m already seeing that picture in full color complete with sounds and smells.
And now that baseball season is fully under way (did we start in Japan again this year? wait, “opening day” was one game? at night? on a Sunday? WTF?), I thought I’d take a stab at explaining the complicated math behin
d how a lifelong fan roots for the season to proceed.
Most people who follow a sport are fans of a specific team, and in any given contest where that team is playing, a fan will always hope that their team wins. In baseball, for me, this team is the New York Yankees, and it has always been the New York Yankees. Why is fairly simple.
It doesn’t have anything to do with back-to-back-to-back World Series wins from 1998 to 2000 as some bitter Red Sox fan accused me of in September 2001 as we strode past vendors selling “Yankees Suck!” t-shirts outside Fenway where the Red Sox were getting ready to play the Texas Rangers.
It doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of the baseball they play, which is and has been admittedly amazing. It doesn’t have anything do with the team’s history or uniforms or the fact that they beat the crap out of my step-father’s beloved Dodgers in the 1978 championship.
No, it has to do with the simple fact that my aunt and my uncle rooted for the Yankees when I was a kid. And if they Yankees were good enough for them, they were good enough for me. Why they rooted for the Yankees probably has a lot to do with Washington DC’s repeated abandonment by the Senators and the fact that the only other American league alternative wasthe Baltimore Orioles (nee the St. Louis Browns), but that’s a completely different story.
This is how the fan calculus begins: You root for your team. Which means, manifestly, you are rooting against anyone who is playing your team. And its in the rooting against that things get complicated.
Rivalries, natural or media created, exist in all sports. Yankees vs. Red Sox, Cubs vs. Atlanta, Washington Redskins vs. Dallas Cowboys, Boston Celtics vs. LA Lakers, New York Knicks vs. Washington Bullets, Celtic vs. Rangers, Manchester United vs. everyone: the sport is immaterial. Because rivalries exist, this means that as a dedicated fan of a particular team, there are times when you will root against another team.
To put it another way, you’re rooting for whomever is playing your rival at that time. So, as a Yankee fan, I’m rooting for the Yankees and for whatever team is playing the Red Sox. It’s these rivalries that inform the rest of the complicated math any fan does, ranking each team in proximity of loathing to the team you follow.
Take the American League: 14 teams spread across three divisions, and I can tell you exactly who I’d root for in any given match up just based on a team’s history against “my” team, that team’s record in the post-season, the team’s overall relevance to the game of baseball as a whole, and, honestly, how big a team’s reputation is for being, corporately, assholes.
In an Oakland A’s vs. LA Angels match-up, for example, the fan calculus works like this: Oakland…long history as an incubator team for a lot of good players. Scrappy, plays good, honest baseball. As recently as 5 years ago you could get really good seats to a mid-week day game for under $20 a piece in Oakland. LA Angels…Is that the Los Angeles Angels who used to be the California Angels? No, wait, they’re the Los Angeles Angels at Anaheim now. Yeah, corporately the name change puts them well into the asshole category. Plus, their stadium is more of an amusement park than a stadium which means despite recent play-off appearances, neither the team nor the team’s fans take the game seriously.
Yep, it calculates out to rooting for Oakland.
It seems hard but when you’ve been doing it for 30+ years, it’s almost like breathing.
The calculus gets strange and complicated when you have loyalties across league lines. TGF is a life-long Cubs fan and over the years I’ve grown to know and have deep affection for the Cubbies. Sports-wise, the worst thing that could ever happen to us is a Yankees/Cubs World Series. I also, for reasons I can’t quite explain, have a deep affection for both the Philadelphia Phillies and the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Because DC is now favored with a National league team, and because two of the other teams I’d care to see succeed are in the same league, there are several times a season when I am, as I have been this week, conflicted about which team I’d like to see victorious.
The great thing about rooting for a sports team, though, no matter what their reputation, no matter how much they might lean toward choking in the end, any team can beat any other team on any given day.*
* Variously attributed to Yogi Berra and some NFL commissioner I couldn’t be bothered to look up his name (what, it’s football…I really don’t care.)
My Oakland v Angels math is easier and is based on the two most prominent players (prominent in my mind, your mileage may vary) that I associate with them:
Oakland = Scott Brosius = full of win
Angels = Chuck Finley = steroid cheat
I appreciate that the Venn diagram you could draw with Oakland and steroid cheat would include some boy called Giambi in the middle, but I always hated him anyway.
PS I’m calling Celtic v Rangers a shout-out to me!