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Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Monday, June 29, 2009
Freakonomics author Stephen Dubner was at the Mets-Yankees game last night, and he wonders why Yankees and Mets fans are so darn economically inefficient when it comes to their cheers and taunts:
A pattern quickly emerged. The many Yankees fans regularly broke into their thunderous cheer: “Let’s go Yankees!” (clap-clap-clap-clap … clap-clap). If you are a Yankees fan (we are; but we do not hate the Mets), this was a sign of what might be called prideful hubris, or maybe hubristic pride: we can come into your stadium and rock it very, very hard.
How’d the Mets fans respond? Succinctly. In the space where the Yankees fans did their rhythmic clapping, Mets fans shouted “Yankees suck!” . . .This pattern was repeated all night. What surprised me is that neither side found a way to improve their effort. I kept waiting for the Yankees fans to fill in their clapping with some chanting that couldn’t be hijacked by the Mets fans, and I kept waiting for the Mets fans to either be proactive in their chanting or to move beyond “Yankees suck!” But neither side budged . . . I fear not that we are teaching our children to be coarse but that we are teaching them to be uncreative and unskilled in the use of game theory.
I can think of no greater indictment of the new expensive ballparks in New York than the fact that they have priced out one of the greatest forces of nature in the universe: verbally abusive, yet incredibly clever New York baseball fans.
Fat Al
Posted: June 29, 2009 at 03:54 PM | 18 comment(s)
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1. RoyalsRetro (AG#1F) Posted: June 29, 2009 at 04:45 PM (#3236662)I do object to chanting "Yankees suck." That just adds to the little brother syndrome. "Let's go Mets", that's what's important.
Actually, the rarity of Marlins fans only helps my cause. Further fans would dilute my cleverness contribution. So, yes, the Marlins have the cleverest fans because they have the Barry Bonds of clever fans: Me.
Finally, the only way a team could have a higher cleverness factor is if I invented a team and cheered for it as its only fan. That would be the platonic ideal of a clever fan base.
How about we run both sets of fans through the Prisoner's Dilemma?
Also, one of the things to keep in mind is that silence can be more effective than noise. A full-throated cheer followed by dead silence would be really cool.
Nats fans. They're smart enough to realise that their ownership is a joke, the team stinks, and there's no point in paying to watch the team play.
Nats fans. They're smart enough to realise that their ownership is a joke, the team stinks, and there's no point in paying to watch the team play.
You've got a point there, but it's also possible that the Nats fan base exists only in Thomas Boswell's imagination or in a Douglas Wallop novel. And it's entirely possible that the 876 known MASN viewers for Nats games are nothing but channel surfers who happened to be passing through when the Nielson meter kicked in.
I rarely text, so I don't know the answer to this. Can you text a broad range of people? Or do you actually have to have all of them in your phone's address book? This seems like an ideal situation for Twitter. But I don't know if there's a delay in Twitter. This only works if everyone gets the message at the same time.
Wouldn't it be easier and more efficient to just get with the team and put something on the scoreboard? (Granted this would nix anything that wasn't fairly vanilla and inoffensive, but still...)
Those guys know how to organize a fan base for chants, songs, flares, chair throwing, beatdowns and general rioting.
I kid, but they do really have good chanting/singing in the stands. I went to catch a B-level game (Charlton Athletic, before they got demoted another level) and they were quite good.
Oakland A's fans have got us outwitted to the tune of around 5,000 fans per game on the same list of criteria!
This had been going on for years at Shea; the new ballpark has nothing to do with it.
One thing footie has going for it in this regard is that the supporters know they've only got 90 minutes of cheering, chanting, and singing to do, come hell or high water. Maintaining that level of enthusiasm (and volume) for a ballgame that will usually clock in at 150-200% of the duration of an EPL match would be a tall order indeed.
That said, we Americans could certainly learn a thing or two about fandom from our colonial oppressors. I am as proud of the Fenway atmosphere as anyone, but it doesn't hold a candle to a good footie ground of comparable capacity. It's not even close. The singing and chanting that goes on over here is a bit like the "Sweet Caroline" experience at Fenway...for 45 minutes at a time.
Some of the more common chants would be easily adaptable to baseball games as well. "Can we play you every week?" would be perfect for Sox fans to break out during Yankee games this year. There's also "Are you [insert name of rubbish team or player here] in disguise?" when the opposing team or star player is having a bad game. For NL fans, "Are you the Nationals in disguise?" would be a beauty.
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