St. Louis Cardinals.
Ever since I was a wee 'un.
I’m a Dodgers fan, and probably always will be, even if this year they cruelly dash my hopes on the rocks of the Midseason Nose Dive as they do every year. Despite the fact that they’re now just a division of News Corp; despite the fact that they couldn’t manage their way out of a paper bag; and despite the fact that, if given a chance, they’d trade all their star players for $3.79 and a couple of shiny rocks.
My Evil Corporate Overlords would love for me to be an Angels fan. That’ll be the day – how can any team named the Angels play like such a bunch of soulless 'droids? Hmmm. Wait a minute – Disney owns the Angels. Disney makes robots over at Imagineering. Hmmmmmm… 
A cubicle is just a padded cell without a door.
A. I love Joe! How can you say that a Hall of Famer doesn’t know baseball?
B. He doesn’t even work for the Giants anymore, as far as I can tell. He might broadcast a few games on TV, but he’s definitely not a part of the regular team, and hasn’t been for a few years now.
BTW, the Giants have great announcers. Mike Krukow used to kill me, but he’s improved a lot, and Jon Miller is great. I miss Hank, though. ::sad::
~Harborina
“Don’t Do It.”
The so-called “White Flag” trade was a GREAT deal for the Sox, dumbass. Let’s look at it:
The Giants got Danny Darwin, a withered old man, Wilson Alvarez, an overpaid lump of crap, and Roberto Hernandez, who was the only one I was sad to see go. They would all have been gone at the end of the season anyway.
In return, the Sox got Keith Foulke, the best reliever in the AL, Bobby Howry, a quality closer, Lorenzo Barcelo, another excellent pitching prospect, and Mike Caruso, who still has his prime ahead of him.
Yeah, I’m a Sox fan. Unless management does something unspeakably stupid, with all of the young talent (especially pitching) that they’ve amassed, they’ll finally be able to put Cleveland in second place where they belong in a couple of years. I, for one, can’t wait.
“The world is everything that is the case.” --Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Amazin’ Mets.
I come by it honestly, as my father was always a Brooklyn Dodger fan, throughout the 30s, 40s, and especially the 50s, when they finally came into their own. I am therefore genetically predetermined to not root for the Yankees (although they do kick ace). My heart will always be with the Mets.
Speaking of listening to baseball on the radio, Bob Murphy has THE best radio voice for calling a game. Nothing is better than a somnolent Sunday afternoon, listening to the balls and strikes on the radio. Ah, baseball. It is spring once again.
The Dave-Guy
“Since my daughter’s only half-Jewish, can she go in up to her knees?” J.H. Marx
[QUOTE]
Originally posted by Cowboy Greg:
I’m a Dodgers fan…(snip)…despite the fact that, if given a chance, they’d trade all their star players for $3.79 and a couple of shiny rocks.
QUOTE]
ROTFLMAO! 
Of course, Dodgers trading history has always been a little eccentric. They’ve always found something irresistible about an aging player with three or four surgeries behind him, and preferably a couple of arrests. (How about Adrian Beltre for Daryl Strawberry? Eric Gagne for Tim Raines? Is Eddie Murray still available?)
I love them, but they make it really, really difficult…
Catrandom
My sentiments exactly, ruadh. Such a fine announcer, too.
And one more reason to hate Angelos. Too bad we can’t trade the owner. 
I guess the Cubs. I personally don’t get into baseball, but I married into it. Mr. Jeannie says this will be their year. He says that every year. It’s like a mantra. So, I guess you can send congrats to him through me (or, more likely, condolences).
The Cincinnati Reds, but also National League baseball in general.
I’ve noticed quite a few Giants fans here. Tell me…is Estes going to have a big year this year?..how about Ortiz?..also, do you think Russ Davis will win the 3rd base job or be stuck in a platoon with Mueller?
Krispy Original - I survived the SDMB outage
I hope so. But I don’t know, he’s awfully unpredictable. After watching him for a few years, I’m convinced that he has multiple personality disorder. One of his personalities pitches one- and two-hitters with apparent ease. His other personality can’t throw a strike to save his life and thinks it’s real fun to give up five runs in the first inning and not make it out of the third. Ha ha.
I was out of the country for the second half of the 1998 season and the first half of the 1999 season, so I’m kind of backwards on what’s going on.
~Harborina
“Don’t Do It.”
ruadh and RTF nailed it. I’ll always love the O’s, but the current ownership had done so many bad things that I rarely go to Camden yards anymore. ( tho last time I went, I caught a foul ball which was so cool!) Jon Miller is the best announcer out there. You folks in SF are very lucky.
Cecil said it. I believe it. That settles it.
Let’s go Royals!
You may suck now, but once, you ruled the AL West.
Our motto: just wait for revenue sharing!
Chaim Mattis Keller
ckeller@kozmo.com
“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.”
– Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective
Start spreading the news…
Another Cubs fan checking in. Been a fan since 1983, and that mainly started because I could see all of their games on WGN after I got home from elementary school. Now, I am hooked, and will root for them whether in good times or bad. Or, really bad. Or, those years where you wonder if you and a couple of buddies could give them a competitive game.
Voted Rookie of the Year in MPSIMs and the Pit, along with Best One-liners.
And I don’t plan on keeping this as my sig for long, just until the winning buzz wears off.
Rangers and Astros! Gotta support the home state teams!
RANGERS
And this will be the year that we finally beat the Yankees in the playoffs. Assuming, of course, that the entire Yankee organization comes down with salmonela or the flu or something right before the series.
But I stand behind them, anyway. Go Rangers!
(And, when I’m paying attention to the NL: Go Astros!)
I’m a Yankees fan. I don’t really care much for baseball, but growing up near NYC you just gotta love the Yankees.
This life is a test. It is only a test. If it had been an actual life, you would have received further instructions on where to go and what to do.
All right smug and DAVEW!.
I too became a Mets fan through my dad, a Brooklyn fan. At times it was really tough for him because most of his cousins lived in the Bronx, leading to some dissenting opinions, shall we say.
By the way psycat, growing up near NYC, you do NOT have to love the Yankees.
Longtime Tigers fan here. Hey, Adam? You think we can get them designated as God’s Team? After all, the Yankees are Already Taken!
Well, currently, the Braves. As a kid, the Cardinals, and their AA affiliate the Arkansas Travelers. The only baseball you got growing up in rural eastern Arkansas was Cardinals games on KMOX with Jack Buck and Mike Shannon calling the action, and a couple of trips a year into Little Rock to see the Travs at Ray Winder Field. It seemed to me the coolest thing in the world that I could be watching guys like Keith Hernandez, Garry Templeton, Hector Cruz (OK, but you should have seen him tear up the Texas League in '73), and Al Hrabosky as Travs and then hear them playing for the Cards a year or two later. The only major league game I saw before moving to Atlanta was in the summer of 1971 when my family visited my Dad’s two brothers who were living near Houston. We somehow managed to schedule the trip for a time when the Astros were at home against the Cardinals, and I consider it my great good fortune to have seen Bob Gibson pitch in person, even if he was slightly past his prime by then.
As a pretentious pseudointellectual in painfully provincial settings in the early eighties, it was entirely infra dig to admit to any interest in sports of any description (except perhaps soccer, but I’m afraid I never acquired the taste). Nevertheless, I still lived and died with the Cards in their World Series bouts with the Brewers and Royals.
When I moved to Atlanta in the mid-eighties, it was possible to walk up an hour before game time, buy tickets seven or eight rows behind the visitors dugout, and sit and enjoy watching whatever team you were really there to root for (the Cardinals, in my case; the Mets, for my most frequent companions). Chances were good that there’d be more people rooting for the visitors than the Braves, by a margin of say . . . 5,000 to 3,500. After doing that 15-20 times a year in the late eighties, I began to feel a certain affection for the Braves, and by the end of the year in '90 I had a sense that things were going to be different soon. I won’t claim to have predicted such a complete turnaround, or even that I fully believed it was for real until very late in '91, but you couldn’t watch that year’s model without being won over, so I was. Now, of course, the seats I used to buy on game day for ten bucks are sold as part of season ticket packages at thirty a throw for corporations to use as baksheesh (which means they’re empty a good bit of the time), and even upper deck seats are hard to come by for most games. Between the expense and the hassle of having to plan six months in advance, I only go to three or four games a year now.
Or rather, only three or four major league games. With the Braves suddenly successful, and tickets suddenly scarce, in the early nineties, I decided to return to my own baseball roots: the minor leagues. Within four hours or so of Atlanta, there’re over a dozen minor league teams, so I set about seeing as many as I could, using buisness trips, visits to family or friends, etc. as excuses. Since my wife’s family is in Asheville, NC, I’ve become a quasi-regular at Tourists games, and only regret that I didn’t see McCormick Field before the renovation (though I’m very pleased at the result). We even had most of the family and friends as our guests at a Tourists game the night before the wedding – my dad threw the ceremonial first pitch, etc. I also became quite fond of the Chattanooga Lookouts. Engel Stadium was truly a wonderful ball park (brick, concrete, and steel construction, 20-foot-high cinderblock outfield walls, and that amazingly deep (475’) centerfield, with the steep bank planted in flowers to spell “Lookouts”, and in recent years, the camels, Larry and Lumpy, in a pen in deepest center). Chattanooga’s become such a wonderful place to visit with the revitalization of its downtown, the Tennessee Aquarium, etc., that it’s our default weekend getaway for the family. Sadly, the Lookouts are moving to a new ballpark this year – it simply wasn’t possible to renovate or remodel Engel Stadium to bring it up to National Association standards for a Double A park anymore. I will miss it.
One of the best things about the Internet for me has been that it’s allowed me to become a fan of the Arkansas Travelers again and follow them from afar, particularly since Scott Parton started his TravsFan site.
And I do still follow and enjoy the Braves. There’s nothing particularly inspiring about them, but then I’ve grown to appreciate the virtues of doing one’s job in a professional, mature, responsible manner, and they certainly exemplify that (with the exception of Mr. Rocker, who stands out more against the background of the Braves than he would with many other teams). I could wish for slightly solider infield defense (especially up the middle) these days and first base is still a big question mark (though Gallaraga’s looked good so far this spring). You also never know if this is the year that Maddux, Glavine, or Smoltz starts downhill for good. But if Sanders and Jordan stay healthy I’m not sure there’s anywhere in fair territory for a ball to fall in the outfield without being caught by them or Andruw Jones, and last years team established that with Chipper, Jordan, and either Lopez or Gallaraga healthy in the middle of the lineup, if anyone gets on base ahead of them (something Veras and Sanders are almost certain to do more often than G. Williams and B. Boone), the offense will manage. And despite the grief the Braves have caught for not having won it all more than once, I’d still rather be watching a team that comes out of spring training every year pencilled into the playoffs than one that’s guaranteed to be on a Florida golf course in October.
“Ain’t no man can avoid being born average, but there ain’t no man got to be common.” –Satchel Paige