What Is Fan Loyalty, Exactly?

As I cruised through web today, I stumbled on a Bleacher Report feature judging baseball's worst fair weather fans. It's an easy story for the site, famous for slideshows and captions, to do. These can be fun to buzz through. This one, though, just doesn't hold up.

Sports is apparently the one business where the customers are castigated for not buying the product. If a movie bombs or a car doesn't sell, critics point out the deficiencies of the product. Maybe it's because teams disguise themselves as representatives of the cities they play in.

That makes it seem almost unpatriotic to not go the games. While it's easy to get wrapped in the notion, the reality is that  team owners are quick to move or threaten to move to get whatever tax breaks or new stadiums they want.

And then there's the biggest problem with the thesis of the post: Somehow it was deduced that when teams had bad years attendance dropped. And, amazingly, when teams play they sold more tickets. Sherlock Holmes would be proud.

Even the Yankees have had their problems at the gate. Back in the early '90s when George Steinbrenner was suspended by major league baseball, getting tickets to a game was not so difficult.

Hall of Famers, from A to, Well, Y

Arcane fact: If you list the 205 players elected to the Hall of Fame alphabetically, the first and last on the list started and ended their careers in a uniform that read Milwaukee on the front. At the top of the list, of course, is Henry Aaron. At the bottom, in name only, is Robin Yount.

I saw both of them play many times (and, in fact they suited up together for Aaron's final two years in the big leagues.) Looking back it makes a tidy story line.

Yount was the young phenom who was the starting shortstop for the Brewers when he was just 18. (Being 14 at the time, it seemed impossible to think anyone in high school could be a major leaguer!) And in Robin's third season, Hammerin' Hank was traded to the Brewers so he could end his career where it began. (Trivia: Aaron was acquired from the Atlanta Braves for outfielder Dave May.)

Sports and Bin Laden II

One day of sports radio being turned over to serious news is good; two appears to be too many. I figured that today sports talk radio would return to the usual topics of baseball, picking apart every managerial move and lambasting one team or another's NFL draft.

Unfortunately it didn't work out that way. Rashard Mendenhall (OK, he plays football for the Pittsburgh Steelers), inserted himself into the Osama bin Laden discussion with his idiotic tweets about 9/11 being a conspiracy. I'm not exactly sure why anyone cares what someone who makes a living being hit in the head thinks, but his comments dominated WFAN for a time this afternoon.

It was hard to listen to. Silly comments from listeners that invoked the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II (one caller was quick to say he wasn't saying whether that policy was right or wrong) were cringe-inducing.

The morning announcers, Evan Roberts and Joe Beningo, had it right when they addressed a question about why they weren't talking about the tweets. They just didn't think it was worth their time

Enough said.