Rooting interest

Some friends of mine are watching the baseball playoffs. But they only watch the games (in replay) when they know their team will win. More specifically, until now, only when the Yankees lose. They were cheering for Tampa Bay, not so much because they cared about the Rays, but because they wanted New York to go crashing down in fire and fury. 

I understand the animus against the Yanks. It is a longstanding prejudice in the South, for obvious reasons, but it is not just in Dixie that the Yankees are team non grata. Everyone loves to hate the pinstripes. Why this should be so is curious. 

Obviously, one reason is that for so many decades the Yankees were the bullies of the American League. They have more than twice as many World Series titles as any other team. Heck, they’ve lost more series than the second place team has won. (Twenty-Seven wins for New York, 13 losses; 11 wins for second-place St. Louis). And the Yankees have not been gracious about their hegemony. 

But more to the point is why people other than the players feel they have a stake in the won-loss record of a bunch of hyper-paid athletes. Yea for our team! But it is their team, not yours. You had nothing to do with their winning or losing. 

I wonder all this, not because I am so above this sort of silliness, but because I share it. There are teams I root against, too. I always pull for anyone to beat the Dallas Cowboys. Why I should despise the Cowboys is hard to explain. They are just another NFL team, and indeed the players on the field this season could just as well have been on a favorite team last year. It may have something to do with reviling the team’s owner — it’s easy to do — but it’s not as if other owners are less venal, greedy, and condescending.

The reasons for rooting are irrational. Yes, you may cheer the hometown team. But most people don’t live in a major-league city. When I lived in Virginia in the 1980s, the TV station broadcast Orioles games and I followed the team. When I lived in North Carolina, Braves games were all over the TV. I followed them as a kind of substitute home team. But there are so many other reasons people follow teams. Much has to do with history and trivial grievance, like the hatred of the Yanks. My old friend, Michael Johns, from Seattle, says: 

“At this writing (unless I jinx it), the Atlanta Braves are headed to a 2-0 lead in games against the Dodgers.  I approve.  In the American League, the Tampa Bay Rays are up 2-0 over the Houston Astros.  Again, I approve.”

“Unless it’s the Mariners, my loyalties shift from year to year,” he writes. The Dodgers “are like the Yankees of the National League. While not as clean-cut as the Bronx Bombers, they come close, and they have too many guys named Cody, Corey, and Justin for my taste.” And not enough Dizzies, Pugs and Catfishes, I might add. 

He’s rooting for Tampa Bay in the American League, because the Astros are “a powerhouse team that needs to be taken down a peg.” And besides, they were caught cheating. 

“Having been a fan for over 60 years, I have plenty of memories to share and grievances to air,” he says. 

We all have those “grievances,” although they are ultimately pointless, and they drive much of our fandom. I, too, am rooting for the Rays. I have always despised the Astros — even back to their days as the Colt .45s — and for three very substantial reasons. First, the Astrodome was truly ugly, and besides, baseball was meant to be played outdoors. Second, because Astroturf is a crime against humanity and it spread, like a virus or the designated-hitter rule, across too many stadiums. But most important to me — and silliest — because they had the stupidest uniforms in baseball — the equivalent of tie-dye and bell bottoms. For these sins, they have captured my eternal enmity. Reasonable, right? 

Those uniforms were substantially mooted by the later White Sox atrocities with short pants and collars. And then the San Diego Padres kept coming up with newer and worser ideas. Always a good reason to root against a team. 

I grew up watching hockey. I went to Ranger games at Madison Square Garden. There were six teams in the NHL. Maple Leafs, Canadiens, Red Wings, Bruins, Rangers, and Black Hawks. Then, the league expanded and because of my long-standing sports conservatism, none of the new teams ever seamed legitimate. I couldn’t root for any of them. To this day, I will pull for any of the originals to beat any of the newbies, even though the oldest of them has been in the league for more than half a century now. They are still interlopers and not “real” hockey teams. 

I have a similar prejudice against baseball expansion teams, although not quite as strong. It began with moving teams. My father — and I, as a little boy — rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers. When they absconded and went to Los Angeles, it took a piece of my Dad and me with them that we never got back. Then the Giants took Willie Mays away from us. The world was suddenly not permanent. Anything could change. The Braves moved to Milwaukee; the Browns moved to Baltimore; the Athletics moved to Kansas City; the Senators moved to Minnesota. What could we count on?

My father later shifted his loyalty to the Mets, but I never could. And then, other new teams began popping up. The Angels, the Colt .45s, the Mets and a revised Senators. Then the Seattle Pilots and the Royals, the Expos and the Padres. Where would it end? The Marlins, the Rockies, the Diamondbacks, the Devil Rays. How could you take a team seriously from Florida? 

Of course, none of this actually matters. It’s just sports. Yet the loyalty so many feel towards such an irrational attachment can be overwhelming. Consider the rioting that breaks out every four years during the World Cup. Soccer hooligans are not much different from Crips and Bloods. 

The National Football League went from 12 teams in 1955, when I was 7 years old and first becoming sports-aware, to its current 32 teams, with many bouncing from city to city like caroming billiard balls (Las Vegas Raiders?) The league merged with the AFL in 1960, but my loyalty remains with the original teams, even when they have shifted from the National Conference to the American. History has shown the supremacy of those original teams. In 2011, I wrote a story for The Arizona Republic looking at the history of the Super Bowl and discovered that original NFL teams held a two-to-one edge in Super Bowl wins: 30 wins for the old NFL, 15 wins for the AFL and all other expansion teams. (The ratio has shrunk some since then.)

I realized that watching football on TV, I root for the team that is older — that I root for any team that was in the original NFL before it became the NFC. Even the original AFL teams, which joined the NFL in 1960 seem like interlopers to me. And expansion teams since then hardly deserve notice as teams at all. Tennessee Titans? Give me a break: Real teams are named Packers, Giants, Bears.

Is there any good reason for this. No, and I don’t pretend there is. Its just stubborn cussedness. An unwillingness to accept change. 

I don’t have a team I follow. When I watch a game, football, baseball or hockey, my rooting interest is always based on which team I judge more “legitimate,” i.e., original. So, if the 49ers are playing the Ravens, I root for the San Francisco. But if the Giants are playing the Niners, I root for New York, since San Francisco didn’t enter the league until 1950. They are the junior team. If the Giants are playing the Packers, I have to root for Green Bay; they are four years older (1921) than New York (1925 joining the league).

(I pull for the Rays against the Astros only because my animus toward the Astros is so overwhelming. Those uniforms, I can never forgive.)

This may seem silly, but what other method can one choose for rooting? Hometown teams make sense, but on “any given Sunday,” as they say, for most Americans, there is no home team. You choose between Tampa Bay and Tennessee? Toss a coin.

But I bring all this up not to badmouth football or sports, but to discuss the impulse towards conservatism. It is something I discover in my own makeup that confuses me — the ineradicable desire for stability and a disdain of change.

This is, of course, the heart of genuine conservatism (as opposed to the radical loony movement that has coopted the name in the service of what is really a kind of anarchism frosted over with religious intolerance).

Political conservatism — as it was once formulated — is the belief what worked for generations of citizens before you shouldn’t be changed lightly. All that now-gone population in aggregate had a kind of multiplied wisdom, and the institutions and laws that have been in place for perhaps centuries  have a kind of legitimacy in numbers: A group is wiser than an individual. If change is needed, we should be slow to believe we are smarter than our forebears en masse, and be slow to adopt the reform until it can be proven the better route. Such conservatism never forbade reform, but took a cautious approach to it. 

One of the things it held onto in England was the primacy of the monarch. Kingship had served us well for so many centuries, why should we give it up? But even there, a parliamentary system eventually became the real government. The Windsors hold on out of sheer habit.

The conservatism of Bill Buckley or Barry Goldwater was more or less of this sort. Let’s not move too quickly. But even such a conservative as Everett Dirksen signed on the the Civil Rights bills because the change was truly needed. 

Now, of course, to be a conservative is not so thoughtful, but rather the same sort of autonomic response we have when rooting for our favorite sports team. There is very little conservative about the Republican Party anymore. It is merely a team to root for against that other team from across town. Especially in the Trump era, even policies are not notably conservative, but radical. Rather than “Let’s keep what we have until we can prove better,” we have “Let’s uproot everything and see what happens.” Grievance is a driving force, and surprisingly like the grievance I still maintain against the Dodgers for moving to California. It has little to do with reality.