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Others: top 5 most hated sports teams

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posted on Dec, 7 2005 @ 01:22 PM
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Lol. If you're expecting me to leap to California's defense, don't. The Giants had one of the greatest players of all time, until he turned into the grandest fraud of all time, and their fans are infamously fairweather and rowdy. In the mid-1980's, an MLB player poll rated the worst fans in baseball as follows: (1) Yankees; (2) Giants (all 10,000 of them, but boy could they start fights and jump on dugouts); (3) Mets; (4) Phillies. That's heavy company.

The A's "fans" didn't support them when they had the second-greatest dynasty in MLB history, winning 3 straight World Series. And the A's most recent spate of success, over the past 7 years or so, was, as we all know now, a fraud.

The 49'ers are a joke and will remain one for the indefinite future, having previously p.o.'ed everyone with their aura of superiority when they were great. The Golden State Warriors are spared the label of the NBA's worst only because of the L.A. Clippers, pro hoops' perennial black hole and counterpart to the Arizona Cardinals. And the Sharks are a hockey team. As for Southern Cal, all one need know is what I reported earlier: A law school friend of mine was present when Dennis Martinez threw a PERFECT GAME against the Dodgers. She told me lots of Dodger "fans" were leaving in the 7th, 8th and 9th innings. I wonder how many true fans from Brooklyn heard about that. And I wonder how they felt.



posted on Dec, 7 2005 @ 04:11 PM
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Originally posted by BaseballHistoryNut
Lol. If you're expecting me to leap to California's defense, don't.


No i wasn't expecting that, it's purely political. I'm currently boycotting California, and New York, but that's politics and this is sports so i won't get into it.

It really is too bad that california doesn't support it's teams, do you think it's because alot of people in California aren't from there and support the teams from their old home town? I know Tampa has that problem, and it's one of the reasons MLB won't let a team go to Vegas, that is that there wouldn't be a large enough fan base since nobody that lives in Vegas is from Vegas.



posted on Dec, 7 2005 @ 05:35 PM
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No.

If you've read my other posts, you'll know what I think. I think a lot of people from this state, and especially from the Bay Area and L.A. area, consider themselves "above" sports--and especially football and hockey. With the steroid/HGH scandal becoming increasingly impossible to deny, and Bonds' involvement in it equally impossible to deny in light of recent data about his HR distances over the years, baseball will probably also become "too lowbrow" for these good people.

I wrote about this at length once here, and got my blood pressure up real good, remembering the night I took one woman to a Giants game late in the season, when they were in the division race and one of their hitters was in the HR race (no, not him). She told me the intensity of some of the fans (in half-empty Candlestick Park) was "laughable," and when I asked a guy with a radio behind me if the other guy had hit a HR that night, and he avidly replied, "No," she said, "Hmm, must be a male bonding kind of thing." I probably don't need to tell you how many more baseball games--or, for that matter, dates--I took her on.

A lot of other people I know who knew nothing about baseball got very interested in the Atlanta Braves--not because their team rose like a phoenix in the late 80's en route to a historic string of successes, but because of their "appalling tomahawk chop." Well, I happen to agree with those people about "The Chop," but they don't know what they're talking about, never saw the behavior of drunken Braves fans toward Native Americans engaging in 100% peaceful, silent protest (something the aforementioned self-righteous folks I know don't engage in), and have never taken the time to hear Don Sutton run his mouth. In other words, they're offended because it's the party line and the chic thing to do, not because they really know anything about it.

It's like their agreeing with me that Gaylord Perry, Fred Lindstrom, Rick Ferrell, Ray Schalk and Travis Jackson don't belong in the Hall of Fame... without taking the time to have an INFORMED opinion first. Hell, I'd MUCH rather talk to someone with an informed OPPOSING opinion than a self-appointed guardian of our political correctness who doesn't know what the hell he/she's talking about. I'm sure you feel the same way about your socio-political perspective. Right? I mean, who needs spokespeople like those? Some people are just plain embarrassing to have on your side, no matter what your side is, and you wish they'd just shut up.

And these people, who USUALLY (but not always) agree with me about social and political matters--e.g., they voted for Clinton in 1992 and 1996; I'm proud to say I never did--look down their self-important noses at such plebian activities as following organized sports and having a passionate loyalty for a team.

Trust me. I have lived in the Bay Area (1953-1971), the Sacramento area (1971-1994) and far Northern California (1994- ) my entire life. And I've heard more than enough about Southern California to know that, though the politics can be very different, the attitude toward sports is the same. Walking out of a PERFECT GAME in the 8th or 9th inning?!? W.T.F. is THAT?!? Those people should have had their photos taken and been banned from Dodger Stadium, and the ones who were season ticketholders should have had them revoked.

I like the small town of 15,000 that I live in, on the coast, near Oregon, but I would die before I would live in the Bay Area again, and anyone who wants to move me to the greater L.A. or San Diego area should come well-armed.

Hell, I think L.A. has passed Chicago as the country's second greatest metropolitan area, and they cannot even support a football team?? Wanna explain that to me? They're all too damn sophisticated, even in the more conservative part of the state, to support a football team. Perhaps they prefer watching soccer, where far superior athletes run all over the field in a dazzling display of athleticism and, oh, once every 2 or 3 days, someone scores a goal.

It's a state which thinks itself too sophisticated to follow sports. And mind you, I love brie, French Bread, haute cuisine, classical music, fine furniture and lots of other highbrow stuff--just like lots of people from the rest of the country do, and just like I'm sure some of y'all do. I also like REAL people. I played poker for a living, and then ran a poker game for a living, while in college--hanging out with people the average student at my university couldn't relate to in a zillion years. And I liked them better, on average, than my fellow students. I used to take great joy in watching arrogant univeristy students get chopped up like so much meat by auto mechanics who hadn't finished high school....

I do not understand why liking fine things means one cannot also appreciate NORMAL things. I do not understand why having a good formal education means one cannot understand and genuinely like people who have lots of common sense and lots of real-life experience, but little formal education. I do not understand why having one set of views makes one superior to those who disagree and have very different views.

And I don't understand--at all--how not watching or caring about your area's sports teams makes you a "sophisticate." But trust me, my site-friend, that's how it's viewed by a lot of Californians. There are obviously many others who don't agree, but not enough to support a football team in the cancerously well-populated L.A. area, for god's sake.

B.H.N.



posted on Dec, 8 2005 @ 03:03 AM
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Originally posted by beckman
1. CUBS
2. eagles
3. CUBS
4. sac. kings
& most of all the CUBS



Do you mean "CUBS" or Steve Bartman?

And please, nobody tell me they would have lost that game anyway. They almost certainly would NOT have lost it, since there would have been two outs and nobody on base in the eighth, with them up by 3 runs. They might have gotten annihilated in the Series, but they were going there before a cementhead who'd been a "lifelong" Cubs fan--and coached Little League, for god's sake--was too busy listening to his Walkman to hear Alou calling for people to get out of the way.

The next time you look at that play, note that at the very last second, the person next to Bartman pulls back the hell away from the ball, properly making room for Alou. But not our lifelong Cubs fan.

Ugghh.

Now, should Prior have taken a long walk and cooled down, instead of throwing a trantrum which more or less guaranteed his ensuing implosion? Yes. Should Baker, who's been in the game forever, have foreseen the problem and brought in a reliever when Prior didn't stop his psychotic episode? Hell, yes. And should their shortstop have fielded a ball the average Little Leaguer could handle? Um, yes. Shame on Prior, Baker and Gonzalez for all of those things, and perhaps they're more culpable than Doofus, since they're ridiculously well-paid pros and should be expected to keep their heads in places where the sun shines.

But none of it ever happens without Bartman.

Oh, well. They probably WOULD have gotten killed in the Series, just like they have in most of the Series they went to between 1910 and 1945. And now Bartman gets to live with it forever: the most notorious fan in baseball history.

But man, the Cubs have sure let themselves go right back to hell since then, haven't they? And I don't think that can be blamed on Bartman or the goat, can it?

B.H.N.



posted on Dec, 8 2005 @ 07:25 AM
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ah but isn't it things like this that makes baseball th great game that it is, as Dizzy would have said "who would have thunk it"



posted on Dec, 8 2005 @ 02:29 PM
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LOL, I sure wouldn't have.

But tell me the truth, Toejam: After that happened and Prior et al. came unglued, didn't you feel the implosion coming? That, I did foresee.

But Bartman? No, that's almost like the Stanford band. You'd have to have been a genuine seer to have known some nancy dressed in THAT garb and wearing a Walkman was going to do THAT....

(Mea culpa to anyone in the P.C. brigade whom I've offended with my comments in the preceding paragraph. I might normally be offended by such remarks, but this is Bartman I'm talking about.)

B.H.N.



posted on Dec, 8 2005 @ 04:44 PM
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you certainly could see "BIG MO" jump off the cubs bandwagon on that one play, imagine, an entire season and all those years of futility swinging on a bizzare play on a pop foul......it is after all a very human game played by real people.....



posted on Dec, 8 2005 @ 09:37 PM
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Yeah, and I don't mean to sound like Bartman's the worst fan who ever lived. Like I said, the Giants' "fans" at Candlestick in the late 70's and early-to-mid 80's, when they stunk, would come there just to get real drunk on those huge beers, get rowdy and start lots of fights. If you flattened one of them, as I once did, you would find yourself having to fight 3 or 4 more at once--as I once did, with far less success.

Every single night game was like that, and while I didn't attend day games, I'm sure many of them were, too. And every single one of those randomly violent, subhuman "fans" was worse, by far, than the goofy looking, bespectacled Cubs fan who picked the worst possible time to interfere with a catchable foul ball.

So, speaking as someone who attended scores of games where Bartman would have been one of the absolute best fans present, maybe I should lighten up on him. I know of precisely no reason to think he's a bad guy. I just wish he'd picked a better time for his 15 minutes of fame, which, to the misfortune of all (especially him), will be a lot more than 15 minutes.

Good luck, Steve. You're stuck with it, so I hope you can do like Ralph Branca and make a fortune off of it for the next half century.

B.H.N.



posted on Dec, 9 2005 @ 04:15 PM
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I'm sorry, but I just can't blame that one fan, with one goof up, on the team losing that playoff series. If they would have focused on winning the game, and not on blaming Bartman, they would have won. Instead, they point the finger. Maybe the play did change the momentum of that game, but why didn't one of the players on the field make a play to swing that momentum back? IMHO, it takes a real man to admit that it was his own fault, and not lay the blame on another.



posted on Dec, 9 2005 @ 10:47 PM
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Gibbs,

Oh, I agree. And the person most responsible from that point of view is not a player, but the manager. Is anyone going to tell me he couldn't SEE that Prior had gone postal and would not be able to get his youthful head back on his shoulders, relax, focus and PITCH--as opposed to throw--long enough to get five more outs?

Hell, I saw the game, saw Prior's hockey goon/Warren Sapp impersonation, and certainly would have gotten myself and my pitching coach out there are at once to talk to him. And, I'm sure it would have taken me and my coach about 10 seconds to figure out Prior, infuriated youth that he was, could not regain his equanimity, poise, etc., and get back in his groove, which means a new pitcher--preferably a veteran--would have come in after having ample time to warm up. And none of that is exactly Rocket Science.

That, of course, is exactly the sort of experience, insight, etc., they pay a MANAGER to have, and I think you'll agree, Gibbs, this was not an instance where it took a person of extraordinarily recondite vision to figure out how out-of-control psycho Prior had gone. So, yeah, both Baker AND his pitching coach get a HUGE share of the blame for what happened. So does their hotshot defensive shortstop, who butchered a ball I could have fielded--and I've almost always been the worst fielder (but best or near-best hitter) on any team I've played on, relegating me and my long legs to 1B.

Of course, Bartman was just a fan doing a very stupid thing. Yeah, given his background in baseball, he was a fan who for sure should have known better, but he wasn't getting paid huge money to play or manage baseball. The clowns who came unglued after his blunder, and the manager who left the decomposing-before-his-eyes Prior in there to "pitch," AND DIDN'T TALK TO HIS OTHER PLAYERS, EITHER, were the real idiots. And they got paid princely sums to be there and engage in their idiocies.

Still, ya gotta admit, it never happens without Bartman....

B.H.N.



posted on Dec, 10 2005 @ 09:36 AM
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Originally posted by BaseballHistoryNut
Still, ya gotta admit, it never happens without Bartman....

B.H.N.


True, but if they were truly winners they wouldn't have to be pointing at that incident, they would have overcome it. Just like when I saw some highlights from the '93 series the other night, Mitch Williams was saying that game 4 was the turning point. Fregosi should have saved him some more, and not had him pitching so much in the post season.

Of course, hind sight is 20/20...




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