OK, Boston, congrats. But who won the World Series of fans?
The Boston Red Sox defeated St. Louis on the field. But how much does it matter when baseball fans step up to the plate for their team?
Alex Kaufman, 23, had a lot invested in tonight’s game. A native Bostonian who went to college in St. Louis, he roots for the Red Sox, and is willing to ignore how their fate impacted his second favorite Major League Baseball franchise.
“They don’t even boo in St. Louis,” Kaufman said. ” That shows you how much they care.”
You see, Kaufman says there’s another matchup beyond pitcher vs. batter, or David Ortiz vs. Michael Wacha.
This, rather, is a meeting of the fans, a competition as fierce as the one on the field – at least, according to a vocal subset of bloggers, op-ed writers, and my Cardinals-devotee-of-a-mother.
Both sides lay claim to the title of “great baseball fans,” and the conversation has turned into a debate over fan-dom technique:
Unimpressed by the back-and-forth, a Cardinals blogger writing under the name El Machino decided to figure out where “best fans” feud began. The first instance he could find? A column about the 1946 World Series between, yes, the Cardinals and the Red Sox.
The Cardinals won those games; the Red Sox won for fan fervor. But according to El Machino, the intervening years haven’t made this off-the-field competition any more meaningful.
“Is either a better fan than the other? I’m not sure,” he wrote in an email to Marketplace. “To have a superior fan base, you’d have to first come up with a universal definition of what that means, which you’ll never do, then somehow be able to measure that, which you’ll also never be able to do.”
This leaves the business-minded, baseball-watching among us wondering: Can we figure out what makes for a “good fan”?
Who collects the dividends of a fan’s investment in the Red Sox? Are their any productivity or economic impacts when the Cardinals’ delayed flight leads the evening news in St. Louis?
The analytics of a fan-base, callous and otherwise:
We know there are more reasons that fan-dom pays off. Fans of Marketplace, what makes for a “valuable” baseball fan? Comment below, send us a tweet, or post on our Facebook page.
