On Bandwagons and Baseball

The World Series starts tonight in case you hadn't notice. We'll get to that in a second, but first we wanted to talk about the bandwagon fans popping up this time of year. One of us lives in DC and it has been beyond rampant. What we've got is a bunch of shameless, fair-weather, Colorado Rockies bandwagoners. Do you know how many people wearing Rockies caps we saw during the baseball regular season? Can't remember a single one. For fairness sake, let's say we saw one and forgot about it. This week, we've seen at least 3 or 4 Rockies fans walking around. Can you imagine if you saw a 300% or 400% increase in Red Sox fans walking around? There probably wouldn't be any hatless people (random Simpsons reference: "subject is hatless, repeat, hatless") out there. We don't know any Rockies fans, but we assume that you're better than this.

Now on to baseball. You undoubtedly noticed that Benji Orlansky called out Red Sox fans last week for being identical to the hated Yankees. That's cool. Actually, that's really cool. You know why? Because we aren't talking about the Sox as chokers, or cursed, or doomed to devastating Bartman-like failures. Instead, the Red Sox are good and that's what goes for smack talk these days. 16-3 in the last 19 postseason elimination games, having come back from a 3-1 deficit outscoring the Indians roughly 500-5 over the course of the last three games.

All thanks to Dave Roberts. 2004 ALCS Game Four, steals second, Sox win series, wins World Series, goes to World Series again three years later. Anyhow, the Sox have been to two World Series in the last four years, have a strong pitching staff, a dominant closer, good farm system, and one of the best managers in the game, all for $40 million less than the Yankees.

In other words, go Sox!