Rooting for the Bad Guys

I’m not sure when it really dawned on me. It might have been when I heard about adding payroll. It might have been when they added Jim Thome, giving up the (nationally) underappreciated Aaron Rowand, or when they picked up Javier Vazquez as part of their ongoing quest to prove Don Cooper’s superiority to the Yankee’s pitching coaches. But I think it really happened at the beginning of the season…the slow start, which was accompanied by everyone proclaiming the team dead, followed by going on a tear against overmatched opponents like the Royals and Tigers. Then I realized, “this is kind of how a lot of Yankees seasons start…

HOLY CRAP I’M ROOTING FOR AN EVIL BIG MARKET BASEBALL TEAM.”

The tricky thing is, I hated teams like this. I had a little bit of a soft spot for the Red Sox thanks to my dad, but I never liked that the Sox wouldn’t have a shot at any top level trade or free agent because of them, the Yanks, the Cubs, Cardinals, Mets, Indians for awhile, Angels, Braves, etc. (and yes, I’m aware that not all of those teams are even good anymore). Except now, we do.

But it’s more than that. It’s knowing that anything less than a Division Championship would be a complete failure, and also knowing that it would pretty much take a disaster to miss the playoffs…and it’s April. It’s also knowing that, if I wasn’t a Sox fan, I’d be sick of hearing how Mark Buehrle and Paul Konerko are such humble leaders and good guys, how everyone still loves Aaron Rowand, how Thome fits right in, or what crazy thing Ozzie Guillen said this week, or what a nut-case AJ Piersynewski is (I’m not checking the spelling. Just be glad I’m finally writing an article, ok? But AJ warrants his own column at some point. He’s also ramped up his crazy person persona this year by growing out his hair and having 1930s circus music play before his at bats. Ok, enough spoiling the future column).

And maybe the Sox Saturation isn’t that bad if you don’t live in Chicago. The whole country has had to deal with Yankees-Red Sox hype for years, even when neither team was defending a championship. Maybe the White Sox-Indians rivalry deserves some of the spotlight for awhile (although, please, everyone, I don’t like the Indians, and most Sox fans don’t, but please understand that the Twins are our rival. Not the Indians, not the Cubs. I don’t know a single non-Sox fan who really gets this. I’ll just say that when there were rumors about the Twins being contracted…well, I got a little bit excited). But it’s a bigger problem than competitive balance or talent monopolization. Teams like this are the reason that baseball is no longer the sport where you can spend $5 on upper-deck seats and wind up watching most of the game from the tenth row. It’s good for the game financially, but I still kind of miss that (even if I never did it myself).

The problem is, this is every medium-to-small market baseball fan’s dream: have the team take a couple of risks that pay off, get the right manager and the right group of guys, win the whole thing, and use the boost in attention to become a big market team indefinitely, like the Sox are doing now or the Angels did in 2002 (people forget that the Halos team that won it all was a bunch of no-names, although at least the team had a name people could recognize back then). And once you reach a certain age, your rooting interest in a team stops being conditional. If it’s true of teams that are crappy indefinitely, it’s also true when a team gets good and changes it’s identity into something you didn’t like before.

Looks like I’m coming to the Dark Side.