Fandom, sports fandom, is such a strange concept. You decide – usually arbitrarily, based on geography or a parent’s influence – to entrust your heart to a group of strangers who are not aware, in the specific, of how much they control your ups and downs. With so much unavoidable heartbreak in life, why do some of us sign up for extra helpings?
My family moved to Baltimore in 1965; the Orioles won the World Series, in four straight, in 1966. How could I not succumb? And it wasn’t a fluke, that team. Throughout my childhood, the Orioles were an easy team to root for – two World Series and three pennants before I graduated from college. I loved Brooks, Frank and Boog, of course, but also Andy Etchebarren and Mark Belanger and Don Buford. (I have a crystal-clear memory of Buford going into the stands to confront a heckling fan, but I’ve never found anyone else who shares the memory, so perhaps I am mistaken.) The Tess novels often make dark references to 1969, the nadir year of Baltimore sports; NO GOOD DEEDS also has a running gag about the “Baltimore Four,” in which longtime Baltimoreans assume it’s a reference to the four 20-game winners of 1971, Palmer, Dobson, Cueller and McNally. Those were my Orioles.
So, when family members arranged a last-minute trip to Cooperstown over the weekend, I passed. I admire Cal Ripken Jr., but not enough to get me to overcome my antipathy toward crowds and heat. And, as it turned out, an estimated 75,000, a record-breaking number, converged on that lovely New York town for the induction, and the weather was brutal. I watched on a television in the bar of a local restaurant, and have no regrets.
But if I had to pick an all-time favorite Oriole season, it would include Ripken: 1989. After the abysmal ’88 season, in which the Orioles lost twenty straight, the ’89 season was like something out of a film, with the Orioles contending up until the final weekend, in Toronto. As I recall, they needed to win two out of three to take first place. They lost the Friday night game in a heartbreaker, then dropped the Saturday game as well. I had just moved home, after eight years in Texas, and I remember walking the streets of Baltimore, feeling very . . . melancholy. A good friend laughed at my use of that word recently, when we were discussing the passions aroused by professional sports, but it’s the right word. I don’t cry or curse. I just wander the streets, feeling an existential despair.
Why do we give our hearts to sports teams? I’ve read FEVER PITCH and watched countless films, trying to understand this phenomenon. I’ve pondered the masochistic relationship between the Chicago Cubs and their fans. Just this past Friday night, I went to the ballpark on an overcast, humid night, in which rain spit on us from time to time, and experienced the most inordinate pleasure over the Orioles’ (meaningless) victory over the Yankees. Really, my stomach was jumping with nerves as the Orioles took their slender two-run lead into the ninth inning. Why?
Do you root, root, root for the home team? Or some other team? Do you ever feel silly, giving these strangers control over your emotions?
Meanwhile, Cal did us proud at the ceremony; you can watch him <a href=”http://www.baltimoresun.com”_blank”>here</a>. (Scroll through the video menu.) Okay, it’s not the Gettysburg Address, but it was a nice job.
Hey Laura, I have to chime in. Back in 1969, I was rooting for the other team, well, sort of as I was a little bit young to appreciate the magic of the moment. Here’s the thing about sports fandom. It’s like love. It feels really good when it’s good and it sucks when it goes bad. But you hold on hope that it will someday find you and it will be magic. You can’t explain stuff like that. You can try but it will never live up to the real thing. Nice series against the Yankees last week, by the way. Your young pitching looks great.
Laura, I cannot understand it either. But also, I was amazed at how quickly I moved my allegiance from the Orioles to the Nationals two years ago. Fickle. Well, at least we are not in the same League. I agree Cal did a competent job reading his speech but his words were somehow touching, especially the references to Billy and Cal, Senior. To me, there is nothing quite like a baseball park at night in the summer.
“Do you root, root, root for the home team?”
Yes.
No.
I stopped root rooting for the Seattle Mariners some years back. I grew up a Red Sox fan. When I first moved to Boston, I was walking distance from Fenway and saw several games. I once saw an Oakland A’s game and ick – enclosed arena, so far away you couldn’t see the damn ball.
When the ownership of the Mariners, combined with the politicians ignored the citizenry of the state and said “of COURSE you want to build a new stadium, what’s the MATTER with you? How dare you vote it down, twice? You MUST be kidding – we know you really want it.” I said bye-bye. The old stadium sucked. The new one sucks harder and I don’t like being told I want something when I don’t. The handicapped seating in the Mariners stadium sucks rocks hard and they have fewer cheap seats than they did in the Kingdome. The hell with that.
They traded the best pitcher in baseball – no one is clear who was at fault but it was fairly clear the M’s thought Randy Johnson too old to keep playing after back surgery. I watched several games where he pitched for the Diamondbacks, then gave up on baseball.
I find other big sports pretty awful – I hate football or any level and men’s basketball is so uninteresting and awful.
Do I root root root for a home team? Damn right i do. The Seattle Storm. This is likely my last year doing that too since an Oklahoma group bought the sonics/storm franchise and again told the citizenry “you want ‘em, you gotta build us a new arena” even though the arena they play in was remodeled about 10 years back, putting in all the “luxury boxes” and spending lots of money. I prefered the ABL, but that was crushed by the WNBA. I watch the WNBA because it’s what there is. And because it’s real basketball – a TEAM sport. I so admire these women, who earn a fraction of what the swaggering self-important men earn and play off season in Europe, South America, Israel, anywhere they can rather than sit around counting their Mercedes and acting like gods.
I read the sports section. Cal made ME proud and i have no connection with Baltimore. His “I’m just a guy who got lucky about the job I got to do” is refreshing.
I love this exchange from the original, British version of FEVER PITCH:
Fan 1: What about last season?
Fan 2: What about it?
Fan 1: They were rubbish. They were fucking rubbish.
Fan 2: They weren’t that bad.
Fan 1: They were fucking rubbish last year. And they were fucking rubbish the year before. And I don’t care if they are top of the League, they’ll be fucking rubbish this year, too. And next year. And the year after that. I’m not joking.
Fan 2: I don’t know why you come, Frank. Honest I don’t.
Fan 1: Well, you live in hope, don’t you?
That just sums it up so perfectly to me. The very nature of sports addiction.
I’m not a baseball fan but I was at a game Friday nite also. Citizens Bank Park is in its third season and I promised my son I would go to a Phillies game with him before he left for college. Since we’re down to the final weeks, I went but wasn’t upset when they called the game after a rain delay.
I was raised a fan of the Texas Longhorns, the first song I ever learned was The Eyes of Texas, and I’m still a huge fan of theirs. Their basketball team came up here last year for a pre-season game so I was able to see them live instead of TV.
The only local team that I’ve rooted for was the Philadelphia Charge. I LOVED the WUSA and was so sad when the league ended after 3 seasons. It looks like there will be a women’s soccer league again next year, but Philadelphia isn’t getting a team.
That ’89 season was magical, Laura.
I was also at one of those losing games at the beginning of ’88 — might have been Game #18, I’d have to look it up but it was in the high teens. My then-boyfriend and I had driven up from DC thinking it was going to be kind of funny, but it was horrible — bleak, grim, _thwarted_. I’m not crazy about crowds in the best of circumstances, but to this day I’ve never been in a crowd like that, oppressed by futility and impotent rage.
Sports teams become our virtual tribes, I think. We support them the way we support members of our extended family; their victories are our victories, their shame our shame.
I remember Saturday afternoons when my Dad would say, “let’s go see the Orioles tonight” and we’d hop into the station wagon and before we knew it we were ordering hot dogs and peanuts.I loved Boog and Brooks and Frank. What a team to have as your hometown team. I was so proud to root for “dem O’s hon”. I remember going with my friend and her Mom who was Spanish and she would talk to Luis Aparicio in spanish as he came in off the field. I loved Don Buford he seemed to be such a gentle giant.Earl Weaver was a great manager and a great showman.
Even though I don’t live in Maryland anymore, they are still my team!
When I first moved to Cincinnati, a lot of people (including my wife) were shocked that I was a fan of the Big Red Machine. “But you’re an Indians fan.”
I’m sorry, there are only three cities in the US where rivalries are allowed to cross the gulf between the AL and the NL: New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. (Sorry, but the Angels play in the OC, so any rivalry with the Dodgers is a joke at best.) So when a bunch of Westsiders told me I had to choose between the Tribe and the Reds, I said, “Why? They’re not in the same league.”
“You have to choose between Cleveland and Cincinnati.”
“OK, I choose not to cross Vine Street [the line of demarcation between sides of Cincinnati.”
When the Browns were kidnapped, they said, “You now have to root for the Bengals.”
“When they win,” I said. I had to suffer four humiliating years as a Bengals fan.
Honestly, I don’t get this town. It seems obsessed with a city that barely knows it exists. Could Cincinnati secretly have a town crush on Cleveland?
I grew up a Cubs fan, and lived in Chicago for 12 years, on the North Side. Now I work for the Colorado Rockies, and tell people that 51 years of being a Cubs fan was excellent training to be a Rockies fan.
I wish I could explain the connection between a baseball fan and team allegiance, but I can’t. But I will always be a baseball fan. Not too much for other sports, however.
I’ll have to track down FEVER PITCH. But this time of year as we move toward the end of the season, I always get an urge to buy myself a copy of BULL DURHAM. Best baseball movie ever, I think. Maybe this is the year I’ll buy a copy.
We all screamed in joy and jumped up and down the first time dem O’s beat the Yankees this season!
Damn Yankees.
My favorite game to go to in the past couple of years is the one they organize against the Nationals. We live smack dab between the two cities, but I think the hubby would be fired from his job (in Baltimore) if he even hinted at liking the Nationals.
I was an Eddie Murray/Memorial Stadium girl myself, but I’m still jealous of my sister-in-law’s office in the Camden Yards office building all these years. Don’t know how she manages to make herself go home at night when there’s a game just outside her window.
It hits some people and some just don’t get it. Ah, well.
Yes I definitely “root, root, root for the home team” but that would be the Orioles of the 60′s-Brooks and Frank, et al. and I have those wonderful memories of going to baseball games with my father. It was a favorite father/daughter, just us activity. Then, in 72-76, I went to a high school within walking distance of Memorial Stadium and it was a tradition to take the afternoon off and walk to Opening Day (we had “LAPS” too and so often afternoons were just “Resource Center” time anyway).
Now that I live in Colorado, to the extent I’m a baseball fan at all, it is still of the Orioles (I mean why give up even today’s Orioles for the Rockies?) but it is getting harder and harder. My husband, on the other hand is the eternal optimist. You can mark the exact day that last year’s season started to tank: they had a brief but good start to the season and so my husband buys the MLB satellite package. The losses began at that moment.
Wow some really great responses to this. I don’t have a home team here in Anchorage. At least not a pro team. I’m from California and as a child I loved the Brooklyn dodgers though I grew up with local non pro teams. My step father of any real length of time was a baseball umpire and I learned a lot about the game as a child. I love to watch baseball and I still root for the Dodgers even though they are in Los Angeles. I have witnessed unbelievable things over the years, such as Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale as pitchers. Orel Herschiser who went through Tommy John surgery and came back to pitching for a while, or Fernando Valenzuela, they had the very best in the business over the years. I’ll never forget Kirk Gibson as he rounded the bases after hitting a game winning home run with his fist in the air that put the Dodgers in the race for the WS while he had the flu and wasn’t even at his best.
It’s hard to remember the details but I think I chose the Dodgers because my step father didn’t like them and he had tought me enough about baseball to know that I could love any team I wanted to for any reason. My love of the Dodgers has never wavered in the least even through all the years that they didn’t play as well as they coulda, shoulda.
So here I am chiming in but with no real help for you to find out why we are so committed to certain teams. I know that I love the Oakland Raiders because they were my home team and not the Oakland A’s who were also my home team, shrug. I had watched the Raiders come up from a local team known as The Conquistidors so that is one explanation for that alligence.
I also really look at how the guys look in the uniforms. One of the things I enjoy is the way they wear their clothes while they’re playing. I can tell who a player is by how they move in their uniform even if they aren’t on my team.
Beside the team thing I appreciate good play no matter who the player is or what team they are on. Baseball is a little more sublte than some sports so people who don’t understand the game won’t get those bits out of watching. To many people it looks like what another of my step faters used to call it, “cow parture pool” I always hared it when he said that. I thought to myself how ignorant, obviously you don’t get the game at all.
But of course there are a lot of sublties in pool too.
I could go on and on about baseball so I’ll stop now before this gets to be book length.
Andy Etchebarren? Someone else who loves and remembers Andy Etchebarren? Every one else,everybody knows, but Andy was my special guy. And until now, nobody I knew even recognized the name.
And the World Series? I’d just moved out of Baltimore County (before 6th grade), and I won a whopping 75 cents on the series at a quarter a game. I couldn’t believe they’d win the third game, so I wouldn’t bet.
Cindy
Linda,
The only time I have ever routed for the Lions to lose is last Thanksgiving when Joey came in with Miami and kicked the crap out of them. And I agree about New England, because Tom Brady is my boy. He was underrated at Michigan (Drew who?) and I’m glad to see him get the respect he deserves.
I never feel silly, but I can’t really explain it. My father started taking me to Padre games when I was five, so many of my earliest memories are tied to the team, the players and the games. I have openly cried as a child and as an adult during both unbelievably low moments (letting Dave Winfield go to NY in ’80, the WS loss to NY in ’98) and unbelievably high moments (Garvey’s HR in Game 4 of the ’84 NLCS, winning Game 5 of that same series, Trevor Hoffman setting the all-time saves mark this yr and watching Tony Gwynn go into the HOF this past weekend). I think some of it is tied into caring passionately about something that in the whole scheme of things really means nothing – it is the best form of escapism I know, living and dying with wins and losses. And some of it is still just hanging onto to being a kid – I would trade everything I’ve ever accomplished for the chance to be the closer for the San Diego Padres for one day. (Would like it to be a home game, against the Dodgers, in late September.)
My daughter sits with me at the computer many nights, watching the Pads over the Internet (MLB.TV is a brilliant invention, btw), wearing her pink Pads hat and, on occasion, her little Hoffman T-shirt. She knows it matters to me – she regularly runs to the living room to inform her mother that “Daddy is mad at those Padres again!” or will cheer wildly with me, for reasons I’m sure she’s unaware of – but I hope that it really begins to matter to her because I would love to share that with her as she continues to grow up.
I agree that 1989 was a special season.
It was the season that helped my wife get the game. She had not grown up with the game like I had. Living in MD from 61 to 65, I lived and breathed the Senators. I inhaled the daily sports page in both the Post and the Evening Star (or whatever it was called then). Even though we moved to the NY market and I hooked up with the metsies and the skankees, there was always hope for our Natties. Returning to maryland in 76 I followed the Birds and hoped for DC.
My wife had not had that experience or frame of reference built up over the years likie I had. She thought it was fun to go to games occasionally and drink beer with the boyfriend, but the passion of experience was not there for her and difficult for her to understand.
And then came “your 1989 Baltimore Orioles”.
And Peggy discovered Jon Miller and Joe Angel, in my mind one of the best two man broadcasting teams of the modern erea. By hearing Jon and Joe call the game, which on slow spring nights was much more entertaining than the actual game, Peggy began to get it. There were exciting young players like Gregg Olsen and pre-juice Brady Anderson. As the season progressed, I would proudly come home late from work to find Peg watching the game with the TV sound down and the radio sound up. Finally, by that last weekend of the season, we were out of town, and Peggy was calling the WRCTV George Michaels Sports Line every hour from whatever payphone she could find.
1989 is the season my wife became a baseball fan and I thank Jon and Joe and Otter and Brady and Cal etc., for helping her see the light.
and . . .
Go Nats!
I’m a diehard Red Sox fan. Here in Connecticut, it’s really either Red Sox or Yankees. Very fierce on both sides. At the New Haven Register, the editor is a Yankees fan. The managing editor is a Red Sox fan. Lots of arguments about how to play stories in the paper.
I grew up with the Red Sox. I cringed when the ball went through Buckner’s legs in 1986; I’ve cursed Bucky F**king Dent; I was overwhelmed when I realized I’d witnessed history when the Sox finally won the Series. I’ll probably never see that again. Red Sox fans take losing fairly well since we’re so used to it.
We’ve got the legendary Red Wings, we’ve got the championship Pistons, and we’ve got the AL defending champ Tigers.
But no, my heart has to belong to the fucking Lions.
Byron, you have my deepest sympathies. Millen is determined to let you down, season after season. After watching Joey Harrington, I had to switch teams just to keep my self respect. My pick? Why, the Patriots, of course. Whether they win or lose, you can at least look at yourself in the mirror.
Perhaps THIS is the year they’ll turn it all around.
Kevin,
It’s worth tracking down a copy of The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant (the basis for Damn Yankees). I love the musical, but there is a sly humor in the book that is all its own.
By the way, while Bull Durham mentions the Pappas-Robinson trade as one of the worst in history, I have to think the Orioles trade for Glenn Davis is up there — Schilling, Finley and another outstanding player, IIRC.
In 1970, when I was ten, I was a huge Johnny Bench fan. I wanted to be a catcher because of him, bought the glove and protective gear and all. I think I might have cried when Baltimore beat Cincinatti in the series that year.
The next summer, though, I played on a little league team called The Orioles. They put me in the outfield.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while. And I think what you mentioned (“You decide – usually arbitrarily, based on geography or a parent’s influence – to entrust your heart to a group of strangers who are not aware, in the specific, of how much they control your ups and downs. With so much unavoidable heartbreak in life, why do some of us sign up for extra helpings?”) And I think it’s why–in the past 6 years–I’ve gravitated more toward college sports than pro (even though we all know I’m a die hard Yankees fan). In college, if you root for the team where you attended, you have a connection to the athletes, to the school. It’s school pride. If you’re in school and watching, you attend classes with these guys. It gives you a reason to get up and root.
When my boys were born, my dad gave me a copy of FOOTBALL FOR DUMMIES.