Rooting for fav team not relegated to home
By Mile High Mouth
BaseballBigMouth.com baseball news
My friend Martin is a huge fan of the Chicago Bears. He is a loyal supporter, and wouldn’t give up his team for anything in the World. The funny thing is, I can’t say for certain if Martin has ever made the trip to Soldier Field. In fact, I don’t even know if Martin has ever been to Chicago. He just likes the Bears.
I can’t fault Martin for this. I’ve been a Red Sox fan who is not interested in living in Boston. I have lived there, but I like mountains better. The other thing is that I’m not a rare occurrence. Even though the average American lives within 50 miles of their birthplace, a lot of them aren’t big supporters of their local club. Which begs the question why? I think the answer may lie not with the fans, but with the owners, clubs, and even the players. I’ll show you what I mean.
Since the days of Harry Frazee (the man who sold Babe Ruth to finance a musical), and Charles Comiskey (the man who paid his players next to nothing, and charged them for things as ridiculous as washing their uniforms), owners have been both a blessing and a *ahem* curse to baseball. They have bailed out teams, and gotten them into more trouble than we can remember all in the name of the almighty dollar. This shouldn’t be surprising. They are, after all, businessmen. Should we be surprised that some of them don’t even hold any loyalty to the teams they own? I’m not.
However, there is a new businessman on the map. The players themselves. Granted, the idea behind the players making tons of money is rooted in relatively decent standards. They want to make sure that no gambler can try to rig a series like one did in 1920. In order to do that, they have to pay players enough to get an honest game out of them. If we’ve learned anything from the HGH scandals, it should be that we can’t always trust ball players.
The other reason is that baseball, as a business, is an oddity. It is a monopoly, but it should also be noted it is a legal monopoly. The upside? We can be sure the market of the best of the best baseball players is not spread too thin. After all, if there was no monopolized major league baseball, any group of investors would set up a league where they could pay ball players, and ruin baseball for all of us. Don’t think they wouldn’t either. The downside? This means if you have the skill to be another Ted Williams or Nolan Ryan, you can’t just send out applications to a bunch of leagues (at least not in the States anyway). You have to play for MLB.
However, somewhere in this monopoly where players are paid tons of money, and forced to work for, essentially, one organization we end up with an oddity. Players who chase money, and lose sight of what is really amazing. The fact that they play baseball all the time, and get paid to do that. In their chase for money, clubs and players alike, move folks around. Free agents sign with new teams for the better financial bargain. Labor deals gave us arbitration. Owners and Managers trade off the players whose output doesn’t equal the pay.
All this moving around happens very fast too. In fact, in 1982 Joel Youngblood was traded from the Mets to the Expos so fast, that he actually played for the Mets in the morning, and then for the Expos in Philadelphia. Why was that fast? It happened all in one day.
So in this topsy-turvy world where your favorite player could be with the Red Sox one week, and the Cubs the next there is another question that should be answered. Why do the fans have to be any different? If the owners, managers and teams hold no loyalties to the fans, why should the fans hold any loyalties to the clubs? I asked Martin once why he was a Bears fan and this is what he told me. Why should he be a Falcons fan? The Falcons aren’t a great franchise, and the Bears represent what he wants in a football team.
This isn’t such a crazy idea either. The Cubs and Braves have had out of town fans ever since TBS and WGN went on the air. However, Hunter S. Thompson gave us a warning in his last sports column, Hey Rube…
“This kind of faithless fan base is a disaster waiting to happen. Like they say in Politics, ‘It’s a mile wide and an inch deep.’”
Is there danger in having fans spread too far and wide? Are we already seeing the effects? One thing I’ve noticed in my travels is that you can usually get Yankees hats, Red Sox hats, and the local team at sports shops. It could be that the increased revenue from merchandise is what makes the Red Sox and Yankees the two teams with the highest payrolls, and the one most people bet on. I don’t say this often, but I think the alcoholic, compulsive gambling, psychopath has a point.
Photo used with permission of Early Era Baseball Photos.com
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