"These guys ... they become like your family."
OK, that's not actually a quote from anyone. But it's the sentence that best exemplifies baseball fans' relationships with their teams.
You see, baseball is unlike any other sport in the level of community you feel with your teams. No other sport, quite frankly, even comes close.
Part of it is how close you sit to the team during games. In football and basketball, only the closest seats can profess to be anywhere remotely close to the action, and those are naturally gobbled up by corporate sponsors and rich people - not average fans.
But in baseball many fans can be close to the game. Fans in the bleachers can chatter to the outfielders. Fans along the baselines are close to the dugout and the bullpen, where relief pitchers warm up and, mostly, goof around. Fans behind the plate can talk smack to the opposing batters and almost have an umpire's-eye view of the proceedings.
Another part of it is the length of the season. From mid-February to the end of September, fans are bombarded with non-stop information about their teams. If they're lucky, fans continue to hear about and watch games into October. On the other hand, football teams only play 12 or 13 games in college and 16 in the pros, with every piece of information closely guarded by scouts or coaches or captains.
In baseball, you can hear stories that you just don't hear in other sports. How many other sports would have a player that may or may not have trained to become a ninja, like the Chicago Cubs' closer Ryan Dempster? For that matter, what other sport would have intimidating players enter the game to "Enter Sandman" by Metallica, like Mariano Rivera of the New York Yankees does?
Part of it is the magnitude of the time fans devote to their teams. The average major league game lasts somewhere in the neighborhood of three hours. If a fan were to have watched - beginning to end - every game their team played last season, they would have spent the equivalent of more than 20 full days watching them.
Maybe that's why we care so much. When you spend enough time with anyone, you start feeling like you know them. For some reason, that phenomenon extends doubly to the baseball diamond. When St. Louis Cardinals' first baseman Albert Pujols strained an oblique muscle last season, it wasn't just him and the team that felt it. St. Louis fans nationwide felt the hurt. When Cubs' first baseman Derrek Lee found out late last season that his daughter Jada had a degenerative eye disease that was making her go blind, all Cubs fans felt for him. Some immediately jumped on board Lee's Project 3000 foundation dedicated to eradicating the disease.
And maybe all that time we spend with those teams is what makes it so rewarding when they climb the mountain, battle the rigors of a long season, fight into October and finally win that elusive trophy. Maybe that's why, when the Boston Red Sox and Chicago White Sox both ended interminably long World Series droughts in back-to-back seasons, the celebrations dwarfed those of any Super Bowl winner or NBA Finals champion. Maybe that's why, when the Chicago Cubs finally break through and end their drought, their celebration will put any previous champion's celebration in any sport, short of the World Cup's, to shame.
Maybe that's why we love this grand old game.
Write to Andy atndistops@hotmail.com
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