A Defense of California Baseball

People on the East Coast tend to believe they have a very strong grip on what it means to be a baseball fan. In some ways that makes sense; baseball was originally played in the Eastern cities and their teams are over a hundred years old and well enmeshed in their cities’ fabric. New York is the largest city in the country, making it by default America’s largest baseball town. The Red Sox are part of what makes New England special along with the sea, the historic buildings and the flintiness (and that sweet delicious lobster). But occasionally this crosses over into a form of chauvinism. Only East Coasters love baseball so much and people in other areas besides St. Louis or Chicago aren’t great fans. At times I agree with them. For example the Tampa Bay Rays are on track for their 2^nd American League East title in 3 years with an immensely exciting team. But the fans don’t come – they’re 9^th in the American League in attendance and didn’t draw 30,000 for any of their three games versus the Yankees. But let me stick up for the baseball fans of California. They’re characterized as casual fans ready to leave at the end of the 7^th to beat the traffic, eyes glazed over and uncaring. Not true.

California is a state steeped in baseball. There’s been professional baseball in the state since the 1880s and the Pacific Coast League, drawing primarily from the Golden State, was the most successful minor league of all time, with near Major League quality support in San Francisco and Los Angeles. It’s the only state with five major league teams and with the exception of the Athletics, whose rootlessness is in part their own making, all of them are well entrenched in their local communities and have experienced success on and off the field in the past decade. All of them, except for the Athletics, have drawn 3 million people this decade, and even the struggling A’s once drew 27,000 people a game. The Dodgers have led the National League in attendance for 27 out of the last 51 years. Californians just love going to games. California has strong college baseball programs up and down the state and has produced 600 more major league players than any other state. That difference becomes starker when you notice that the 2^nd most productive state, Pennsylvania, has produced just 140-odd ballplayers in the last 30 years – compared to over one thousand from California. Obviously part of this is because California is our most populous state. But Texas, which has two-thirds the population, has produced only one-third as many ballplayers and New York, which has a little more than half the population, has produced about one-fifth as many ballplayers. Little League, Pony League and high school programs in California are of a very high quality and the state’s constant good weather (year-round baseball is realistic, especially in the Bay Area and Southern California) helps players refine their craft 12 months a year.

Now that we’ve established that California baseball is historic and of a very high quality, we’ll talk about the fans. There’s no doubt Californians approach baseball different than East Coasters, but I’d argue the lack of outward intensity doesn’t mean we don’t care. One positive about the West Coast is the media covers the sport with a less critical eye. Not critical in the sense that they don’t analyze, but critical in the sense of trying to find people to blame when things go wrong. There is no pulling of hair when things go wrong and while that can lead to stasis (there’s no question Brian Sabean would be out of a job if he was a general manager in Boston or New York) it can also lead to success through continuity. The Los Angeles press weren’t trying to run Walter Alston out of a job, and that continuity undoubtedly helped foster the year in, year out juggernaut that was the Los Angeles Dodgers. A great deal of this is because there’s no market for it. Californians generally want to feel good about their team and assume their owners want to win. That doesn’t make them stupid – the Dodgers have had an ill feeling about them for a while now after the O’Malley family sold the team, and the Athletics have their problems because their owners are cheap and entitled. But this positive feeling encourages a more symbiotic relationship between fan and team rather than an antagonistic one. What this relationship also does is lessen the emotional bipolarity of fans. Fans possibly do not experience the intense euphoria the Red Sox winning the World Series in 2004 set in motion in New England, but they don’t experience the heartbreak that Game 6 of the 1986 World Series instigated either. Believe me, when the Giants lost in 2002 people were crushed; life did go on, however. Instead people live in a smaller but healthier emotional state of sadness or joy while keeping the games in a healthier context.

Perhaps this is all unconvincing, an apologia for apathy. But I think Californian baseball fans get stick they don’t deserve and while I wouldn’t want the unparalleled richness of Eastern baseball life to be lost, perhaps we could accept each other’s differences as fans a little more.