I AM a Nats Fan!!

REPRINTED FROM POST ON MAY 8, 2012 – Little did I know!!

Finally after a drought of 30 years, Washington has a good baseball team.  Not just one, but two – the Washington Nationals and the Baltimore Orioles.  I remember the good old days when I would listen to Orioles’ broadcasts on the radio – a very bygone tradition reminiscent of my youth.  On hot summer Saturdays my father and I would sit in the backyard and with the familiar unhurried sounds of whirring lawnmowers and children playing next door, we would listen to the Red Sox game.  Life was much more hurried when my own children were growing up, so we listened to Cal Ripken, Eddie Murray, and Jim Palmer on the car radio; but my ears were glued to the broadcast just as they were in the 50s.  So many years and so many bad Orioles teams came and went that I lost interest. 

I was a casual fan, not a real one, the kind who called WFAN late at night.  These fans referred to the Mets, the Yankees, the Jets and the Giants as “we”, and the anguish over losing was acute.  Caller after caller searched for reasons – the manager, the poor defense in left, the declining skills of a former hero.  If the losing streak continued, the calls were more impassioned, calling for the heads of players, coaches, and head office staff.  If the team was winning, the genuine spirit of support was jubilant.

Now that the Nationals and Orioles are winning, I watch games every night, and have even listened again on the radio.  I have always followed the Yankees and the Red Sox since my childhood, and they always have good teams, so I could easily have continued following them; but my interest was always desultory.  I followed individual players, and if the team was especially good, rooted for them to get into the post-season so I could watch more good baseball.

I have concluded that my newfound interest in the Nats and Orioles is because I like baseball and now that I have cable, I can watch the local teams on FIOS.  The fact that they are good teams makes watching them more interesting, and the arrival of two young phenoms on the Nationals makes it compelling; but I am still not a fan.  I don’t go to the ballpark, do not have paraphernalia, and do not feel passionately about winning or losing. 

David Brooks of the New York Times wrote about how he tried to change allegiances from his longtime team, the New York Mets to the Washington Nationals.  After all, he reasoned, sports allegiances were certainly no more than residence, availability, and performance; so it would be a simple matter of changing his support to the Nats.  He found that it wasn’t so easy, and he suggested why:

It’s probably more accurate to say that team loyalty begins with youthful enchantment. You got thrown together by circumstance with a magical team — maybe one that happened to be doing well when you were a kid or one that featured the sort of heroes children are wise to revere. You lunged upon the team with the unreserved love that children are capable of.

The team became crystallized in your mind, coated with shimmering emotional crystals that give it a sparkling beauty and vividness. And forever after you feel its attraction. Whether it’s off the menu or in the sports world, you can choose what you’ll purchase but you don’t get to choose what you like.

The neuroscientists might say that, in 1969, I formed certain internal neural structures associated with the Mets, which are forever after pleasant to reactivate. We have a bias toward things that are familiar and especially to those things that were familiar when life was new: the old house, the old hometown, the people, smells and sounds we knew when we were young.

Scholars have more predictable answers relating to psychological and social needs:

"When individuals identify and form a strong connection with a local team, it is related to psychological health," says Daniel L. Wann, PhD, associate professor of psychology at Murray State University in Kentucky and co-author of a book about sport-fan psychology. "The more they identify with the team, the higher their self-esteem , the higher their vigor or energy, the lower their fatigue, confusion, depression , and alienation."

"Chicago Cubs fans go to Wrigley Field to have a good time, feel that camaraderie, and sense of belonging. Whatever the Cubs do is a side issue," says Dr. Wann. "The beauty of it is that it doesn't matter how good the team is, you get the effects anyway."

Edward Hirt, PhD, associate professor of psychology at Indiana University, feels that sports provide many avenues for meeting the human need to belong. "People can go to games together, watch broadcasts together, talk and commiserate on the radio or through email or play fantasy sports together," he explains. 

Dr. Hirt studied fans of Big Ten basketball and found that those with an allegiance to a particular team felt better about their own abilities and sex appeal when their team won. After a loss, fans were far more pessimistic about their chances of making a free throw, completing word games, and getting a date. "When the team does well, fans treat it like they themselves did well," says Dr. Hirt.

Other researchers have suggested that social class is a factor in fan allegiance.  British soccer has always been a lower-class sport and the hooliganism and ultra-passionate allegiances, say some observers, is because of the circumscribed nature of working class life, lack of varied social and cultural opportunities, and resultant close identification with local teams.  This is not true in America where many sports, football and baseball especially, have varied class audiences.  This is partly due to the cost of admission, but also because of a certain intellectual cache attributed to an intellectual appreciation of sport, especially baseball.  In short, in Washington, DC everyone is passionate about the Redskins.  In towns like Boston or Chicago baseball fans are more likely to be white working class because those towns still have significant proportions of that demographic segment.

Long-term fan allegiance, like that of David Brooks or the callers on WFAN, is surprising because over the years the teams change personnel completely.  It is like the conundrum posited in Philosophy 101: If you progressively replace all the parts of your car – a fender here, upholstery there; new engine, transmission, headlights – when all the parts are replaced, is it still the same car?  Yes, most of us would answer, and so goes fan allegiance.  The Mets may have a totally different roster, manager, head office, stadium from when Brooks began following them, but the Mets are still the Mets in his mind. 

I grew up in New Britain, CT which according to a recent article on the Red Sox – Yankees fan rivalry is right on the dividing line:

The midpoint between Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium is approximately Rocky Hill, Conn., a few miles south of Hartford and east of New Britain. Some adventurers have dared to guess where allegiances are perfectly balanced, usually pointing to a place near Route 91, anywhere from north of Hartford to New Haven in the south.

This split has always been there, although never so scientifically studied.  My family were always Red Sox fans while my cousins, 30 miles to the south in New Haven were devoted Yankees fans.  I suppose there is a certain geographical imperative, and if I were now to live in New Haven, I would find myself with switched allegiances – unless of course David Brooks is right and I got hardwired in 1950.

I have never heard or read that fans of the New York Giants gave up on them when the stadium moved across the river to the New Jersey Meadowlands.  They were still the Giants; but if the name had changed to the New Jersey Giants, I suspect there would be a major reshuffling of the fan base.  New Yorkers have always considered New Jersey a foreign land.  I have also not read of any grumbling when the Anaheim Angels became the Los Angeles Angels.  Perhaps in the sprawl of Los Angeles the Angels were Los Angeles’ team, regardless of exactly where they played.  This year the Florida Marlins became the Miami Marlins, and we will have to wait and see whether former fans in Orlando give up on the newly named team.  I doubt it.

I am always amazed when I am close to a big college football stadium when the home team is playing.  Stadiums like that of Michigan, Alabama, Mississippi State are enormous – all 100,000 capacity and always filled.  Not only are they filled, but they are filled with rabidly passionate and loyal fans.  College football is particularly big in the Midwest and the South, and fan allegiance spreads within a large radius.  I know in the small Mississippi town near Starkville where I have spent many months, the pep rallies for Mississippi State were large, long, and wild.

Perhaps David Brooks has it right when he says (in Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There):

“Everything in the Bobo’s life is purposeful.” Sports and physical activities are no different. The purpose of participating in a sport in a Bobo’s life is to build muscles and look good.

Bobos want to show and prove that they are serious about their sports. Being “serious” is the best compliment that one can give to a Bobo. In fact Brooks writes, “You want to be a serious skier or a serious tennis player or a serious walker or a serious cross-country skier or even a serious cross-country skateboarder.”

By inference, spectator sports are no different.  It is OK to be a fan if you take it ‘seriously’, that is, intellectually.  Winning and losing is secondary to understanding the intricacies of why.  George Will, the consummate baseball intellectual is the example of the Bobo sports mentality:

It's a bit difficult these days to imagine a public intellectual—the kind of deep thinker who opines on financial regulation and the politics of Kyrgyzstan—writing a book about baseball. Soccer, maybe—novelists like Dave Eggers and Alexsandar Hemon will write about it on the least provocation, while New Republic editor Franklin Foer wrote a very good book on the sport and globalization.

In 1990, the bow-tied pundit published Men at Work, a treatise on the inner workings of the national pastime. The book, one of the best-selling sports titles of all time, is often derided as fussy and overly intellectual. These qualities are parodied to great effect in the Saturday Night Live sketch "George F. Will's Sports Machine," in which Dana Carvey flummoxes Tommy Lasorda and Mike Schmidt by asking them what Willie Mays' over-the-shoulder catch in the 1954 World Series "was not unlike." The answer: "It was not unlike watching Atlantis rise again from the sea, the bones of its kings new-covered with flesh." (Slate Online)

So, I am not really a fan.  I will probably stop watching the Nats and Orioles so regularly once they start losing or when the Nats phenoms are on the DL.  An interesting article appeared recently in the Washington Post asking why attendance at the Nationals Stadium is still far from capacity.  It is because the Nats are still a new team, and just like any commercial product, customers do not want to invest in it unless they know if it is any good.  If the Nats are still in first place in June, attendance should go up, the sports analyst concluded.  On the other hand if they drop down to where they have been over the past five years, their stadium will be the usual one-quarter full.

In any case, it is interesting to follow the Nats and the evolution of their fan base because there are so many sports paradoxes here.  Washington is the quintessential Bobo town, and yet fans from Oxon Hill to Georgetown are passionate about the Skins.  It has no white working class to speak of, so baseball should be a hard sell, but the buzz over the Nats is real.  The Orioles are not really a Washington team, especially since we now have our own; and Baltimore is solidly working class with passionate Oriole fan support.

I grew up a Red Sox fan, but the allegiance never took like it did with David Brooks.  I wear a Red Sox hat because I lost my favorite Apalachicola Oyster hat in a Cambridge Chinese restaurant and the easiest replacement was a Sawx one.  I am always amazed at how many people stop me, wave to me, or signal me because of that hat.  I had heard of the Red Sox Nation, but only when I started sport some paraphernalia did I finally understand what it meant.  Sox fans, whether in Mississippi, San Francisco, or DC are still Sox fans; while, although I am trying, will always be a casual observer.

OCTOBER 3  - I HAVE PROVED MYSELF WRONG. I AM A FAN!!