Make Me Pout At The Ball Game

I really do not understand all the (literal!) weeping and wailing over the near misses of the Cubs and the Red Sox at getting into the World Series. Why on earth do otherwise fuctional adults get so wrapped up in the fortunes of these sports franchises that they become so excited about the prospect of them winning, and reduced to tears when they lose? You'd think something had happened to them.

One clue is the widespread talk about "curses" against the two teams... something about trading Babe Ruth for a goat or whatever. Anyone over the age of 10 who actually gives more than a moment's consideration to such neolithic nonsense, apparently has some judgmental deficiency.

But the main issue is some kind of fixation on these outfits. You have people declaring themselves "life-long Cubbies fans" or profess that they "hate the Yankees". For them I have one question: Why?

I actually have asked this question of sports-team fans, and their answers generally amounted to nothing more than "because". At least when you ask someone why they're Christians or Muslims or Taoists they can often give you a thoughtful answer (even if someone else did the thinking for them) about how they came to have these beliefs or how those beliefs make a difference in their lives, or at the least an appeal to a divine authority that declares these beliefs to be an absolute universal Truth. There's no comparable reason for being faithful to the Sox.

As you've probably guessed, I'm not a "sports" kinda guy. I've never played on any teams, or even had much interest in the games themselves. I don't pay attention to who's playing against whom. But that's because I don't know any of them.

I do understand why people might take an interest in a sports team, cheer when they win, and be disappointed when they lose. If you're a parent and your child is on the team, you want to see your child do well, and since she or he is a member of this group, you want them to do well collectively, for the sake of her or his satisfaction. I can sort of understand why high school students would take a similar interest in their school teams. Unless you have a big school and/or a strong caste/clique system, odds are that most students at the school have friends or friends-of-friends on the team, and they want to see those friends succeed. I can see some of the same thing happening in college, though at most universities the odds of any given student knowing a member of the team become pretty slim. (I paid attention to my college's soccer team because my roommate was on it. I was aware of the football and baseketball teams only because I took photos for the school paper.)

Where it breaks down into nonsense is at the pro sports level. The typical fan of a given sports franchise doesn't know anybody on the roster. (If they are a fan of a particular player, it's because he's a player, not because they have some kind of prior relationship with him.) The team members generally don't even come from the same city as their core fans. Maybe once upon a time the Milwaukee Brewers were a bunch of guys from Milwaukee (some of whom had worked in a brewery), but that's ancient history. Today they're a bunch of guys who just relocated to Wisconsin for a job.

Now, if someone "adopts" a player they admire, and "follows" his career, that's a little more hero-worship-y than I'm comfortable with, but at least it makes sense. Devotion to - or even if we call it "admiration of" - a human being is a fairly normal human emotion. But being devoted to a franchise? Regardless of who's on the team? That's bizarre.

Americans often go "tsk tsk" over football ("soccer") hooligans rioting and brawling in Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere. But at least that particular lunacy has a basis in something. I'm no fan of nationalism, especially the kind the has people vandalising other countries, but at least I understand it. Same thing with civic pride that sends lads into a frenzy when someone insults their local football club.

But pro sports teams don't have anything to do with that. They're businesses. The Detroit Tigers have been based in Detroit for a long time, but that has nothing to do with the community of Detroit. Its just a business decision. They use the name "Detroit" for markeing purposes. (Some franchises use state names instead of city names for broader marketing opportunities.) If the owners of that business thought that they could make more money by relocating, they would. It's even happened before... and yet people still develop these irrational fixations on whatever franchise happens to be located in their city, or nearest to where they live.

So every rational - or even emotionally justifiable - explanation I can think of for this weeping at the fortunes of a corporate entertainment franchise, falls apart. Can anyone offer me a better one, or is this just another exmaple of people in our society just being fucking nuts?