I have the good fortune to live in Atlanta and cheer for a baseball team that has been extraordinarily successful. But not every baseball fan in America enjoys the thrill of a pennant race year in and year out. Imagine living in Kansas City or Pittsburgh. Fine cities, to be sure, but when it comes to baseball, not so much.
That’s the way it was for Braves fans in the seventies and the mid to late eighties. Abject failure on the field, five-thousand die-hards in the stands. It was ugly. I was around for much of that too.
But in a way, rooting for a losing team has its advantages. At least that was the premise of a story I did for a show on TBS called The Coors Sports Page back in the eighties. In those days, the Cleveland Indians represented the dregs of baseball, and their stadium—the Mistake on the Lake—was a cavernous mausoleum where hopes and dreams of baseball success were laid to rest after they died, which was usually around mid-May.
But surely not every team’s fans suffered so. The pennant race actually meant something to fans of the Anaheim Angels, as I believe they were called back then before they went all Rand McNally on us (The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, Orange County, California, USA, Earth. Or something like that.)
So I took a crew to Cleveland—and Anaheim—to investigate a tale of two cities.
Is your favorite team a winner or a loser? Any advantages to losing or disadvantages to winning that I failed to mention?