Baseball

[Talvenada]

Originally Posted by smc

I assume that by "The Professor" you mean me. Let's nip calling me that in the bud right now, please.

I may be old, but I wasn't even born when the Braves left Boston in 1953. I do know lots of people who were around then, though, and generally they say that when the Braves were here the breakdown was somewhat along the following lines (at least in the last decade of the Braves being here): fans for whom the Red Sox mattered most, 80%; fans for whom the Braves mattered most, 20% (a big part of why they left); baseball fans who followed both teams and couldn't get enough, 99%. People old enough to remember still talk about seeing Warren Spahn pitch.

I will say it again: there is no city where baseball is more popular than Boston.

I think Talvenada's explanation of the "old days in NY" is oversimplistic. One side of my family was in New York (the other up here in Boston), and so I spent a lot of time down there. My mother grew up in Brooklyn and was a Dodgers fan for the same reason most people were: a combination of geography (what makes a Phillies fan a Phillies fan, e.g., is proximity to Philadelphia) and a feeling of rivalry with "the city" (i.e., Manhattan). It didn't matter whether she was from a blue-collar or white-collar family (although it happens to have been the former). My grandfather, her father, had lived on the Lower East Side after coming to this country and was a Giants fan (and couldn't have been more blue collar). I can't speak for Yankees fans. Hell, I can barely speak to Yankees fans

SMC:

Thnx, for the info. I only have a very superficial knowledge of what happened in other cities in the late 40's and early 50's. My info comes from comments made about those days, which are few and far between.

I called you professor, because I though you taught college classes for PHD's.


It's nice to see one city get it right, and root for a team in each league.


TAL