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Worst fans have to be the Rays, although they are located in a ultra low-wage town with poor job opportunities.
Best and most passionate fans have to be Phillies and Yankees fans. The energy at these ballparks is amazing.
Okay, Philly doesn't belong in this sentence. St. Louis, Boston, and the Chicago Cubs all are ahead and have been ahead for years. I say this respectfully, most Philly fans are neophytes.
Okay, Philly doesn't belong in this sentence. St. Louis, Boston, and the Chicago Cubs all are ahead and have been ahead for years. I say this respectfully, most Philly fans are neophytes.
BS. Just because you're a jealous Braves fan, whose fan base can't even get excited about a pennant race, don't make asinine comments about one of the best sports towns anywhere.
BS. Just because you're a jealous Braves fan, whose fan base can't even get excited about a pennant race, don't make asinine comments about one of the best sports towns anywhere.
1) What do I have to be jealous of?
2) This is what I'm talking about:
a) Philly fans can't ish on other fan bases like that because you are new to this and everyone knows that Philly (the majority anyway) fans hop on a bandwagon faster than jumping off. I know that you see this so stop acting as if you dudes are on the level of the 3 teams that I mentioned.
b) To give you credit, the fan support has been great this year and maybe they'll build off of it, who knows? In my opinion, I think it'll (a large % of "fans") go back to the Eagles & Flyers instantly and it'll just be that when they cool of a little.
Listen, you've told me before that you've been with the Phillies from day one, okay, cool...but you're stretching it when you give them a share of the top spot and not even mention other fanbases who've been doing it more consistently, through bad, average, and great years. While I'm at it, I'd say that the Dodgers, Twins, Brewers, Mess(oops), and Giants have all been equal if not better than Philly when it comes to this Fan Pissing Contest.
Another thing, remember when the 76ers were doing well some years back? I know you do, but, the point is that they supposedly had this loyal fanbase that was tortured/endured bad times but fast forward to today, it's nothing.
Say what you want about ATL, I've already given some facts on that subject/opinion.
Last edited by David Alleyne; 10-08-2010 at 09:47 AM..
a) Philly fans can't ish on other fan bases like that because you are new to this and everyone knows that Philly (the majority anyway) fans hop on a bandwagon faster than jumping off. I know that you see this so stop acting as if you dudes are on the level of the 3 teams that I mentioned.
Its not just this year...attendance has been great ever since they moved into CBP in 2004, and they always had decent attendance at the Vet, even though for most of their time there they were a cellar-dweller.
Its not just this year...attendance has been great ever since they moved into CBP in 2004, and they always had decent attendance at the Vet, even though for most of their time there they were a cellar-dweller.
So what's wrong with my saying that they're neophytes/being new to this? I've already discussed this in another thread, the Phillies fanbase correlates with the Braves base (I'm going off of time periods and raw #'s) a little. To me, it doesn't make any sense equalize your fans with the Yankees and leave out 3 bases who've are more constant. I think it's safe to say that I would've been laughed at if I compared ATL's base, from 91-00, and say: "We're top 3." Again, your base did well this year but I wouldn't put them past a couple of other teams because of the lack of consistency (past, present, and future*).
Okay, Philly doesn't belong in this sentence. St. Louis, Boston, and the Chicago Cubs all are ahead and have been ahead for years. I say this respectfully, most Philly fans are neophytes.
I agree that Boston should be ranked ahead, though it definitely helps that the Red Sox have been north of .500 almost every year for the last 40 years.
St. Louis IMO is a better baseball town than Philadelphia, though not a better sports town. Having said that, I doubt Cardinals fans are more passionate than Phillies fans - I think most St. Louis fans and for that matter Midwest sports fans in general have the "care about their teams a lot but act in a mild-mannered way about it" act down to a T.
I wouldn't put Chicago ahead of Philadelphia because A) Chicago has two teams and one of them usually only has decent attendance and B) I think many Cubs "fans" who attend games do so to see and experience Wrigley Field or perversely get satisfaction out of the Cubs' "lovable loser" image. It wasn't until ESPN really took off that the Cubs' attendance (and to a lesser degree Red Sox' attendance) really took off as discussion about Wrigley Field (and Fenway Park) became more prevalent nationally.
^^ Eh, not quite. Cubs attendance has been steadily improving since their 1984 playoff run. Since then and in the intervening 26 seasons, Cubs attendance has exceeded the league average for all but 3 of those seasons, by an average of 12% or 3,700 per game. That's pretty impressive for a team that's been dismal for most of those seasons. The steady climb in Cubs attendance has tracked with the climb in MLB attendance in general (though typically remaining ahead of the curve along the way), not because of undue attention from ESPN.
And I also don't get why people feel the need to separate support for the Cubs from the Wrigley Field experience. A big reason for the Cubs' success (as a business enterprise anyway) is that the franchise has worked very hard to build and maintain its image as a community institution different from the other institutions around it only in scale; and this gives the team a much stronger sense of "belonging" to the community around it instead of being some faraway attraction on the edge of town separated from anything near it by acres of parking lots. To me, this relationship between the team and community is the essence of fandom.
As for White Sox attendance, I will never understand it. In the midst of a heated playoff run this season they still had an average of about 12,000 empty seats per game. Sox fans speak passionately about their team but for some reason they're bizarrely reluctant to put their money where their mouths are.
1) There's little doubt in my mind that WGN broadcasting many Cubs games for many years also has played a major role in the Cubs' strong attendance over the last couple of decades, in combination with the increased national infatuation with Wrigley Field and whole (IMO, ridiculous) "lovable losers" nonsense. I've met a handful of people who grew up in the Midwest not near Chicago who became Cubs fans rather than fans of the closest MLB team. Their fan allegiance most likely didn't come about due to the Cubs' great success; it probably came about because they were able to see the Cubs on television on summer afternoons when they didn't have to go to school.
2) I attended a pair of Cubs games in 2009 at Wrigley Field in early July. I saw quite a few people leaving in the 8th inning in one of those games, a game that was 2-1 (Cubs trailing) in the 8th inning. Now I know from personal experience that getting out of Wrigley Field is a major pain in the butt, plus I was sitting in the upper deck in that game (where the access is narrow and limited), so it's possible people weren't actually leaving as much as they were positioning themselves to leave the park as quickly as possible when the game did end. On the other hand, the game was an afternoon game in July, so most people attending presumably didn't have to worry about getting home very late from the game and going to work the next day, and people also didn't have to worry about getting their kids off to school the next day either.
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