I think St. Louis is a “baseball town”, where they care much more about the Cardinals than any other team they have/had.
How would you rank the order of sports franchises in your town/fanbase currently and historically, and why?
I feel like NY and Boston are both baseball towns first and foremost.
Boston cares far more about the Red Sox than they ever did for the Braves. They like to claim the Patriots as their own but they aren’t a town team, they are the team for all of New England. Boston in the end is a basketball town though.
Philadelphia cared far more about the Athletics than the Phillies for a very long time because the Athletics weren’t losingest team in MLB history. They’ve been gone a long time so there isn’t much memory of them anymore. The Eagles had some good moments over the years, but Philly is one of the original baseball towns starting long before football was a thing. Philadelphia will never forget the days of the Broad Street Bullies, the greatest team in the history of the NFL and all of hockey history. Hundreds of thousands of people say they watched Wilt Chamberlain score 100 points in a game nowhere near Philadelphia because the city didn’t care about them at all.
Washington DC probably cared more about the original Senators during the 1920s when they were winning than the Nationals now, but Senators success didn’t last that long before they faded. They don’t care at all about the hapless Senators of the 1960s. The Nationals only had a few good years in their short history but not many people remember either Senators team to compare them to. The current football team is the Generals. Pretty spotty history but they’ve still done better than the baseball teams.
St. Louis loved the Browns more than the Cardinals when the two teams were roughly equivalent. During the 1944 Browns-Cardinals World Series, the town was pro-Browns.
Having (once) lived near Columbus, Ohio for many years, I can assure you that the city’s two pro franchises (NHL and soccer) and Triple A baseball team (minor league baseball has a long history in the city) put together, probably draw a quarter of the interest and devotion given to the the Ohio State Buckeyes.
And that’s being generous .
I’ve lived in the Chicago area for 35 years. The city was mad for the Bulls in the Jordan era, and for the Blackhawks during their still-fairly-recent run of titles, and the Cubs are always popular, win or lose. But, I do think that, first and foremost, it’s a football town, and a Bears town.
Ranked right now, based on what I see:
- Bears
- Cubs
- Bulls
- Blackhawks
- White Sox
The Fire (MLS), Sky (WNBA), Red Stars (NWSL) are probably well below even the Sox in overall interest; of the three, the Sky might be the highest of the three overall.
I didn’t include college teams, partially because there aren’t any really strong college programs in the metro area at this point, and when it comes to college football, some of the teams which seem to get the most interest here (Notre Dame, Illinois) aren’t “local.”
Rank the teams. It feels like the Knicks are a real odd case in the New York sports scene, where they’re super important and influential if they’re good, but they’re easily forgotten if they’re bad.
I don’t have a handle on Chicago. I want to say its the Bears first and foremost, but I think there’s a lot of love for the Cubs there too, and wouldn’t bat an eye if they were actually tops there.
IMO, there’s usually a pretty big gap between the Bears and Cubs, and then any other team (Bulls, Blackhawks, Sox), and that gap only closes when and if another team is doing particularly well.
Cub fandom is interesting; there are a whole lot of people who identify as Cub fans: they love going to Wrigley, seeing an afternoon game, and drinking beer. But, for many of them, it seems like the actual outcome of the game is secondary to the Wrigley experience. OTOH, it seems that fans live and die by what the Bears are doing, and hate the fact that the Packers have dominated them for the past decade-plus.
Well, I live in a Canadian city, so we all know what’s first.
Curling?
shakes fist at @Tripolar, who beat me to that by a minute
Los Angeles is either a baseball town or a basketball town, depending on who you ask. Both the the Doyers 
and the Lakers have a storied and championship rich history. My assessment of the teams in the greater Los Angeles area:
Lakers
Dodgers
(big gap)
Rams
Angels
Clippers
Chargers
Both the hockey teams (LA Kings and the Mighty Ducks) would probably slot in ahead of the Chargers.
Hell, the MLS’s Galaxy probably does, too.
When the Rams moved back, at least they had been previously based in Los Angeles for nearly 50 years, and were only gone for 20; they likely still had a fan base in the area. The Chargers had only previously been based in LA for one year (1960), and have to compete with the Rams for fans. Barring a sustained run of excellent play, they’re doomed to be eternally overshadowed.
The Clippers are in the same boat. They preemptively moved into the LA market (40 years ago, but we have long memories) and have a long history of mediocrity and bad ownership. I still remember the reaction to their hanging a Pacific division winner banner when they shared the Lakers venue (who have a few more banners hanging, none of them celebrating winning the division).
Yanks
Mets
Giants
Jets
Knicks
Rangers
Nets
20 years ago, I would have put the Dodgers after the Knicks, but those fans are largely gone now…
Seattle is definitely a football town. The Seahawks get a lot more respect than the Mariners.
While it’s not a city, the fandoms in my home state of Wisconsin pretty much rank as:
- Packers
- University of Wisconsin Badgers football
- Brewers
- Bucks
- Badgers basketball
- Badgers hockey
The Bucks were probably #2 or #3 when they won the NBA title a few years back. Badgers football, which had pretty consistently been a strong team since the 1990s (though never really in contention for a national title), looks like it might have entered a down cycle, which could move it down the list a bit.
I guess if I were to rate Seattle’s fandoms it would go something like this;
- Seahawks
- UW Huskies
- Sounders
- Mariners
- Kraken
- Supersonics (who don’t currently exist but we’re hoping will come back at some point)
- Storm
- Reign FC
- Tacoma Rainiers
- Bryan Danielson
- Dragons (who no longer exist but I still see people wearing their gear)
- Apparently we have a pro rugby team?
- Holy crap, turns out there’s such a thing as professional Ultimate Frisbee and we have a team for that also
No Kraken?