A few surprises in the 'favorite baseball teams' poll

A few weeks ago, Harris Interactive released the results of its annual poll on America's favorite baseball teams. It's almost a month old now, but anything that illuminates who roots for what team (even unscientifically, like Nike's United Countries of Baseball map) is still fascinating to me. A few things from the poll that struck me:

--I hadn't really pegged the Indians as a fanbase full of bandwagon jumpers, but they haven't shown themselves well this year. The team dropped from a nearly perennial top-half team in terms of numbers of fans all the way down to 25th, tied with the Florida Marlins(!). You'd think that if a franchise had gone a half-century without a World Series title, one awful year wouldn't be enough to cause fans to leave in droves, but that's apparently what happened to the Tribe.

--The Angels are even lower, at 27th. And they've always had no fans, never finishing higher than 16th. I guess I had always thought of them as a pretty strong fan base. It's tough to end up with the fourth-fewest U.S. fans in baseball while playing in the second-largest market, but the Angels' brass must have done something seriously wrong. And don't tell me it's the Dodgers' fault.

--I'm amazed the A's have hung tough, solidly occupying the 19-23 spots for nearly all of the past six years. That's certainly not great, but I always thought of the A's fans as sort of a ghetto of "Moneyball" enthusiasts or the unwanted stepchildren of Giants fans.

--The Tigers were much higher than I expected. I didn't think they had much appeal outside the state of Michigan--or even all that much within it, until they started winning again a couple of years ago. Turns out they apparently have more fans than the Mariners, who own the Pacific Northwest, or the Mets, who partly own the national media.

--I thought Braves fandom had dropped off since that dominant run during the 1990s, especially since TBS doesn't broadcast all their games anymore. But they're almost as strong as ever, even remaining in front of the Cubs. As Nike's map shows, if you're in the South and you like baseball, chances are you're a Braves fan.

Anything that struck you?

The guys on TV don't hate your team. Get over it.

We've just completed college football's bowl season, the time of the year when Americans engage in two time-honored traditions: 1) watching mostly meaningless bowl games and 2) whining about how We've just completed college football's bowl season, the time of the year when Americans engage in two time-honored traditions: 1) watching mostly meaningless bowl games and 2) whining about how much the media hates our favorite team/conference.

I've heard more of it this year than any other I can remember. It's the vicious circle of the victim complex: Big 12 fans complain about the media pushing the SEC's "speed" agenda, while the SEC kvetches about having some combination of schools in Texas and Oklahoma being foisted on them by ESPN every Saturday night. Meanwhile, USC picks up its annual grievance about being left out of the national championship game by the media who forget the Pac-10 exists, while the rest of the country complains about how the media is once again calling a USC team who's played exactly no one since September the best team in the country. And the Big Ten realizes (rightly) that everyone hates them right now, and that certainly doesn't stop everyone else from whining that "biased" ESPN keeps pushing mediocre Big Ten football on them.*

*I think much of this collective pity party stems from our culture's obsession with victimhood in general, but that's a sociological discussion, not a sports one.

The problem is, pretty much all of it is complete crap. First of all, the national sports media (and by this I mostly mean ESPN) can't possibly hate everyone. (Well, I suppose that's possible, but I'm not that cynical...yet.) More importantly, that media has no deep-seated love or hatred for any of those conferences or teams within them. They're biased toward one thing: money. They're in favor of anything insofar as it can bring in more viewers, clicks or advertisers. That means their coverage will be heavy on teams that more people care about. That's most obvious in baseball, where the disparity in size of fan bases is greatest, and much less of an issue in the NFL, where so much of the fan interest is spread league-wide (you can thank fantasy football for at least part of that).

But as regional as college football is, it doesn't make any business sense for ESPN to hold any systemic grudge against any conference, thereby alienating an entire section of the country.* And ESPN controls enough of the sports universe that it has a tentacle--and therefore a business interest--in every corner of the sport.

*Of course, it makes complete business sense for them to favor major conferences over minor ones, so if your favorite team is in a non-BCS conference, then, um, disregard this post's title.

As for the individual announcers/analysts/reporters, I can tell you as a journalist (though many of them are far from journalists) that their only real bias is in favor of good stories. For them, covering games is like when I cover a meeting: I really don't care which side wins; I just want the end product to make for a compelling story. And I'd imagine that the feeling is even greater when your audience has to watch the thing with you. So when Thom Brennaman made his rather ridiculous ode to Tim Tebow on Thursday, it didn't mean he or Fox is in the tank for Florida and the SEC; it just meant he's in love with the story of Tim Tebow.

A final note: Just because an announcer says something negative about your team, it doesn't mean he hates them. (Exception: Billy Packer and mid-majors.) Think about it: You make negative comments about your team or the people on it all the time, and you're a fan of them. So, for the last time, the fact that Kirk Herbstreit said this once does not mean in any way, shape or form that he hates Nebraska. It just means that, like any sane college football fan, he doesn't believe Nebraska has both of the top two teams of all time. Say it with me: There's no cheering in the press box.

A little bit of perspective.

This post is about sports, but I promise it has substance. Hang in there.

Losses in baseball don't get much worse than the Brewers' loss yesterday. They were up by 4 with two outs and nobody on in the Cubs' bottom of the ninth ... and somehow found a way to lose.

Fortunately for my own sanity and that of everyone who would've been around me, I was working while all this happened. But as soon as the boxscore came across the wire, my head was firmly implanted in my hands. A coworker who's a big Cubs fan walked into work 15 minutes later, stopped at my desk, gave me a look as if one of my family members had died and just said, "Mark ... I'm sorry."

I tried to vent to Dana, but with 13 Brewers losses in the last 17 games, I long ago used up all my empathy points with her. So I did the only thing I could think to do to get myself out of my funk: I called my grandma.

My grandma is the diehardest Cubs fan I know--she's been following the team for 70 years. She started listening to the team on the radio with her dad as a little girl in Wisconsin, long before Milwaukee had its own major league team. Now she watches every single Cubs game on TV while she knits at home down in Texas.

Now, calling my grandma was a major violation of the unwritten rules of sports fandom--if your team gets beat in gutwrenching fashion by your rival, your buddy who's a fan of that team calls you--you never call them. To do that would be asking for punishment, voluntarily subjecting yourself to gloating during your worst hour.

But I needed to remind myself that someone--and not just someone, my grandma--was made happy by yesterday's game. And it was so good to hear her laughing about the game, talking about how she was thisclose to turning it off, marveling at one of the Cubs' ejection in extra innings, asking about the Brewers' starting rotation.

I'm usually driven nuts by the Cubs fans' bellyaching about 100 years since a championship. I mean, how many of those years have most of those fans lived through, let alone been a fan through? 20? 30? 5? But my grandma is the real deal--she's gone almost three-quarters of a century as a dedicated Cubs fan without a World Series title. As much as I get upset about one September collapse, that's misery. And she takes it all in stride, just a laugh and a sigh when they blow it yet again, and a genuine joy when they do well. I could stand to learn a lot from that.

So if--or, let's be honest, when--the Brewers don't make the playoffs, I'll be rooting for the Cubs to win it all. It's heresy for a Brewers fan, but it's just the right thing to do by Grandma.

Ugh.

It's been a brutal week to be a Brewers fan.

Stat of the year: The Brewers have come up to bat this year 113 times with the bases loaded. They have a grand total of 19 hits. They have 7 extra-base hits. They have yet to hit a grand slam. Their batting average is .202. Their OPS (for all you stats nerds) is .557. 557!

By comparison, the Cubs (the team the Brewers are chasing) are batting .321 with the bases loaded. They have 21 extra-base hits, including 6 grand slams. Their OPS is .928. 928!

How the heck is the least clutch team in the National League 20 games over .500 again?

The (soulless, computerized) boys of summer

As any of you I've talked to in the past two months or so has undoubtedly learned, I've fallen hard for baseball again this summer. Baseball was my first love, starting at about age 5, a good three years before I tried two-timing with football. About the time I moved to Nebraska (1997), baseball and I took a break while I saw other sports.

Well, I've gotten back together with baseball this summer. Let me count the ways:

--I've become a genuine Brewers fan again, for the first time since the glory days of Yount and Molitor. There are good days ... and there are bad days.

--I'm reading Moneyball, the bible of 21st-century baseball. And remembering why I always loved Bill James.

--Dana and I bought baseball gloves to play catch with.

--I'm going to the College World Series in Omaha on Friday. And I actually know who the Brewers' draft picks in the CWS are. And whether they plan to sign.

--And I'm playing Strat-O-Matic baseball. No clue what it is? Good--one box on the nerd checklist you don't have to check. Basically, Strat-O-Matic is Dungeons and Dragons meets baseball. I've never played D&D, but I believe both involve 20-sided dice, so, um, that makes them the same.

Basically, SOM is a way of re-simulating baseball games using players' past stats to create really complex probabilities for a bunch of dice rolls. It's been around since the '60s using real dice, but the online version lets the computer do all the dice-rolling for you--which is great, because computers are way faster than us at rolling dice.

It requires a lot of managerial skills in tweaking lineups, maximizing matchups, setting strategy, getting the most for your money. You play a whole season in a couple of months, so every day you have your box scores from your team. It's good times.

I'm a cheapskate, so I first discovered SOM this spring--coincidentally enough, when they offered their first free trial season. And last week, I completed an epic three-game comeback sweep to make the playoffs in my league. My computer-generated probability-grid 1986 "players" demonstrated so much heart and chemistry ... sniff ... The playoffs begin tonight, so I hope they behaved themselves this weekend.