First time since I became a fan around age 8 that I don’t have a favorite team. It feels strange.
I began as a Yankee fan, around 1961, because they were literally the only game in town, and that lasted through the 1962 season (I remember whooping when Richardson caught the season-ending McCovey line drive), but by the beginning of the 1963 season, I was a Met fan. (I remember equally vividly enjoying an early 1963 Ron Hunt-driven victory over the Braves.) That lasted a long time, roughly forty years, until I got into a series of increasingly ugly arguments with some of my fellow Mets fans (who, me? Arguing? Inconceivable, I know) over Mike Piazza and Willie Randolph, both of whom I felt should be set aflame, around the same time a guy I knew personally and admired professionally took over as the Red Sox GM. The difference between the way the Mets were being run and the Sox were justified my driving to Boston (200 miles) rather than to Shea/Citi (2 miles) for home games.
But now that guy, Theo Epstein, has left the Sox and joined the Cubs, where I’m never going to drive and whom I despise (as a former Met fan, I developed a loathing for the Cubs in the 1960s, which I still enjoy today), so I don’t have a team to root for any more.
I think I’ll try following baseball in general next season, no rooting interests. Or better yet, I think I’ll enjoy rooting against certain teams, though I do feel conflicted continuing to root against the Cubs at this point.
The same thing happened to me, in regards to football. In my childhood I rooted for the 49ers, until the Rams moved to St. Louis so I followed them for a few years. After that I was left mostly with teams I don’t like (Cowboys, Patriots, Broncos, Bills), but even that is waning, I no longer care what happens to the Bills or the Broncos. I do still hope the Cowboys and Pats lose. Oh, and I’m getting some mild perverted pleasure from the Colts sucking, since my ex is a Colts fan.
I hear you, prr. As a Vikings fan (though their my 4th favorite team behind my cfb, soccer, and MLB teams), I’m not too bothered if they ever move to Los Angeles. Frankly, I’d rather see the state of Minnesota tell the NFL and Vikings to fuck off and not give out a billion dollars for a new stadium while the state keeps cutting other programs. I’d maybe even remain a fan of the Los Angeles Vikings. But to have no vested interest and to just enjoy pro football for the games themselves would be a bit of a relief. I don’t think it will matter, though. The state will probably cave and the Vikings will get their stadium for next to nothing (they’re supposedly committed to paying $400m, though I have my doubts that this will come to pass).
Welcome to the world of a kid growing up in a fairly big city which had no pro teams within 300 miles (Jacksonville Florida). It becomes hard to root for teams when you never got a chance to see them on TV (since if they truly start to suck after a period of dominance no network will ever show their games). In baseball for example I went from rooting for Cincy (1976-1981) to Milwaukee (1982-83) to Boston (1985-present, tho this past season just nuked my enthusiasm in ways that '86 and '03 didn’t). The Raiders in football and the Sixers in basketball were very constant however (until the Jags came to town and the NBA became a crashing borefest-respectively).
As a British Soccer (Football) fan, I know nothing of the idea of rooting for different teams. Generally you stick to your local team (although, as in every sport, you get the glory hunters) which seems to be the case here but the switching?
Is it the franchise influence? Do that many teams really move around? Do I just not understand your crazy American sports?
Teams very rarely move around, but it happens enough that it would come up in a conversation like this.
In North American sports, the upper leagues are made of a set number of franchises. Each franchise is an individual business that represents an investment by one or more interests who convinced the league to allow their franchise in. There’s no concept of “relegation” to lower leagues. Major League Baseball consists of 30 franchises, and they’re all equally major league; they cannot be relegated to a lower level.
As a consequence, it’s possible for a given franchise to move cities if business conditions are better elsewhere. To some extent, of course, this is a natural process that HAD to happen to account for shifting population. When baseball became a major professional sport, the city of Los Angeles was a little town and in terms of travel was so far from the major leagues that it might as well have been in Japan. After the war, with economic power shofting westward and jet travel making it possible to have a truly continent-wide league, it was natural for teams to migrate from the declining EAstern cities to Western ones, so teams from from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, fram New York to San Francisco, from Philadelphia to Kansas City and later to Oakland, and so forth. And, of course, to account for the new opportunities that population and economic growth brought, new franchises were granted, so baseball has grown from 16 teams to 30, hockey from 6 teams to 30, football from 10 teams to 32, and basketball from anywhere from 8 to 11 teams (it was very chaotic) to its current 30.
Or sometimes a franchise will simply fail in one place. This year the Atlanta Thrashers, a National Hockey League team, went broke, and nobody in Atlanta wanted to own them. However, some people in Winnipeg did, so they bought the team and moved them to Winnipeg.
It doesn’t actually happen as much as it used to. Baseball has moved franchises just twice in my lifetime, once in 1972 and then in 2004. Moving the Thrashers was the first NHL franchise move in over a decade. Basketball recently relocated Seattle’s team to Oklahoma City and I think that was the first move in ten years.
So as you can imagine this could result in a person reasonably choosing a new team. A fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who moved to Los Angeles after the 1957 season, might understandably not elect to support a team 3000 miles away, and so might have switched allegiance to the local Yankees, or to the newly created New York Mets, who were a franchise created in 1962.
It’s not just teams that move, it is also the fans. America is a very mobile society in comparison to Europe. People tend to root for the team they grew up with, despite that they take jobs and marry thousands of miles from where they grew up. It is not at all uncommon for a family in New York to have Dad rooting for Dallas, Mom rooting for Green Bay, and the children rooting for the New York Jets.
Of course, they should all be rooting for my team, the Oakland-Los Angeles-Oakland Again Raiders. In this case the team went mobile, and then returned to the fan base that they grew up with.
Which is almost precisely what happened to me: I was born in Brooklyn in 1953 to a Dodger-rooting family, but by the time I was eight the Dodgers had been in Los Angeles for four seasons, so I rooted for the Yankees, but soon became a Mets fan when they started up in 1962 (it took me a year.)
After over 40 years of rooting for the Mets, the team had engaged in policies that were disgusting to me, and I began to criticize the team in a series of online posts at a Mets-fan site I had started years earlier. After a few years of posting all sorts of critical comments of how the team was mismanaged (mostly having to do with its obsession with acquiring useless veterans to lure in dumb fans, and playing them long after they had demonstrated their uselessness) the base on the website turned against me, eventually booting me off my own website.
Around the same time, my friend’s son became the GM of the Red Sox, and as an extremely intelligent young man, began doing for the Sox exactly what I felt the Mets should be doing (i.e., acquiring players who could play but who were unknown to the fans) and my Mets-fans (before booting me off the site) began deriding me whenever I used the Red Sox as an example of good management by jeering “Yeah? Well, why don’t you become a Red Sox fan and stop bothering us?” I resisted this course for a year or so, but when I would visit my friend in Boston, he would treat me to his son the GM’s box seats, and I would then write (on the Mets-fan site) about how delightful the Sox experience had been, and what the Mets management could learn from them.
I declared myself a Red Sox fan living in New York in 2004, and that season the Sox won their first pennant since 1918. I haven’t looked back.
Until last month when my friend’s son took a job as the GM of the Cubs. I hate the Cubs (ever since the 1960s, when they were the Mets’ worst enemies), I never go to Chicago, and my friend naturally has shifted his rooting interests to follow his son. I can’t do that, and my own daughter (who I’ve been taking to Sox games while she is in college outside of Boston) is about to graduate and leave Boston.
So now I’ve got a load of Mets and Red Sox paraphenalia, and no real interest in any particular team.
Why don’t you just bury the hatchet and return to the Mets? The ownership is still kind of sucky, but with Alderson there player decisions are going to be a lot more intelligent. Plus, think of the money savings, no need to buy new Mets stuff, you already have it!
I still don’t accept bad management as a justification for shifting loyalties. Management comes and goes, the same way as success does. You don’t change loyalties for failure to perform. You don’t change loyalties for bad management. And the same with bad fellow fans. Realistically, athletics tends to disproportionately draw assholes, as participants, management, and as fans. The majority of people involved in professional athletics from every perspective are assholes, so that’s not a good reason to shift loyalties either.
The legitimate reasons for choosing a club:
(1) It’s the local club where you grew up.
(2) You “inherited” the loyalty from a relative or some other person you were close to in your youth (it has to be in your youth – people you met only as adults – including spouses – don’t count).
(3) It’s the local club where you live now. (And this only can count as a “secondary” loyalty. It can’t replace a loyalty earned under (1) or (2)).
(4) A new franchise has moved to or appeared in your home town or your current location.
The major exception here is if your original team no longer exists for reasons such as a franchise shift. But in this case, all the teams mentioned in the OP still exist. And I just can’t buy shifting loyalties that start with the New York Yankees and drift to the Boston Red Sox. That’s a no-no. Someone who once rooted for one of those teams can never legitimately switch to the other one.
You are going to have a great deal of difficultly convincing me that sports fans are disproportionately likely to be assholes. We’re not taking about a tiny niche market here.
This strikes me as being akin to saying a person can’t love one person and then fall in love with another.
Rivalries are fun and all but many sports fans, if not most, don’t really care about them. The supposedly super-intense Yankees-Red Sox rivalry is a phenomenon of fairly recent vintage, by baseball standards, which flared up in 1978 but for the most part didn’t really amount to much until quite recently, for the simple fact that for most of the last ninety years the Red Sox were an irrelevant, second-rate franchise that couldn’t have much of a “rivalry” with anyone because nobody outside of Boston cared that they existed.
Even now, I’m not entirely convinced that a lot of sports fans take rivalries as being some kind of religious war. I’m an Ottawa Senators fan and so am obliged to despise the Maple Leafs, and my disdain for them is much documented on the board, but, really, it’s not that important to me. If my daughter grows up to be a Leafs fan that’s fine. I can and do discuss the team intelligently with Leafs fans. It’a a sport, it’s supposed to be fun.
I don’t see it as being at all unlikely that a person could legitimately switch allegiances between teams for a lot of reasons. A short period of bad management is a strange reason to switch, I’d agree, but a team that’s also psychotically incompetent, like the Orioles or the Pirates, I could see why someone would just give up. It’s one thing for a team to have a dry spell, but the Orioles are something else entirely; they’re on 14 losing season in a row and there is no end in sight (the Pirates are on 18 in a row but showed signs of life this year.) If an Orioles fan were to just surrender and say “Fuck this, I’m cheering for the Phillies/Nationals/Whomevers” I can understand; it’s one thing to stick with someone through the bad times and quite another to accept being abused. It’s certainly better to switch teams than to lose interest in the sport as a whole.
Or there’s logistical concerns. When I first started getting into baseball I was a fan of the Phillies, because they had Pete Rose (held up as an example to all kids of how to play baseball) and Mike Schmidt. But I switched my allegiance to the Blue Jays, in part because they became an exciting, well-run team, but in large part because in southern Ontario on the 1980s, following any other team was nigh on impossible.
I was an eight-year-old–need I say more? Well, also that the Yankees were the only game in town when I was eight.
It took me only two years to comprehend that 1)there was something far more pleasurable about rooting for an underdog to overcome stiff odds than there was in rooting for a supremely well-financed franchise to continue beating up on weaker opponents. I’d say, in fact, that this was a political understanding I reached at age 9, and one that marked my character as much as any has.
I stayed loyal to the Mets, through horrendous season after World’s Championship after horrendous season, for over 40 years, until I became convinced that the franchise (the ownership) was intentionally deceiving its most loyal fans, by feeding them glitzy well-paid superstars from other franchises who could no longer play as well as their resumes indicated, and were committed to this policy rather developing young players of their own, young players who might well become superstars.
More or less at the same time, the Red Sox were being run with frightening intelligence. To contrast, their GM, whom I knew personally (through an odd series of coincidences), was a Yale graduate who knew baseball better than most people know their own dietary preferences, and the Mets’ GM was an illiterate, incomprehensible baseball lifer who believed firmly that the secret to baseball success lay in signing and developing players who came from the same ethnic group as he did.
It was an easy switch, and taught me much about loyalty, stubbornness, and stupidity, which I can summarize as follow: YOU make your own choices. You choose to be a loyal citizen or a rebel. YOU choose to prefer the films and books you like, not which are dictated by the intellligencia to be the best films and books, YOU decide to stop associating with vile people you grew up with rather than rationalize the continued friendship as something over which you have no choice. In a dozen other ways, YOU are the master of your fate, and you choose your path. The path doesn’t choose you.