Tampa Bay and Fandom

*Yes, I realize the event that inspired this post happened quite a while ago and that the team involved was eliminated from the playoffs. I just wanted to put my views on the issue out there since it appears that I have a different view from almost everyone else in sportswriting, and because the Diamondbacks may have similar problems very soon, if trending attendance records are to be believed.

As you've almost certainly heard by now, the Tampa Bay Rays made headlines in September by drawing only 12,446* to a game where they had the potential to clinch a playoff berth. This spawned a number of angry, condescending articles by moralizing East-Coast sportswriters who consider loyalty to the hometown team to be an unwavering given. I'm certainly in favor of as many fans going to see games as possible, but it is unreasonable to hold the Tampa Bay Rays to the same standards as, say the Phillies or Yankees.

*To put this number in perspective, consider that the Arizona Diamondbacks, another newer, sunbelt team with its own attendance problems, set their low-attendance record this season during a meaningless August game near the end of a 97-loss season. That record: 15,509, over three thousand more people than the crowd to watch the young, exciting Rays clinch a playoff spot. Though, to be fair, I bet those 12,446 still made more noise than the 15,509 poor souls that watched the Dbacks.

For starters, let's consider the stadiums. Both the Phillies and Yankees, who were ranked 1. and 2. in total home attendance, play in new, state-of-the-art ballparks within the city limits. Both facilities are easily reached by public transportation and are moderately close to the downtown cores of their central city. Contrast that with the Tropicana Field, home of the Rays. Tropicana Field is in St. Petersburg, FL which, for those readers unfamiliar with the Tampa Metropolitan Area, is across the bay from the central city of Tampa. Thus, fans coming from Tampa have a commute of up to an hour just to get to the stadium. And when they do arrive, what fans see is a far cry from the attractive ballparks of their Northern counterparts. Tropicana Field is a multi-use dome built in the early 1990s, meaning that Tampa Bay residents, who live in a city that may have the best weather in the country, have to go indoors to watch baseball.

The economy is also a significant factor that is keeping fans from attending games. Sure, this problem isn't specific to Tampa, but you would be hard-pressed to find an area that has been harder hit by the recession. For a city and state based on tourism, retirement, and cheap housing, the economic crisis has led to a record number of foreclosures in the area. This indicates that people are leaving the area, and that the people who remain are trying to cut unnessessary expenses. For many families, a trip to the ballpark is one of those expenses. And for national columnists with steady jobs to criticize people for spending their limited money on things other than baseball speaks to a disconnect between sportswriters and the people they write for.

But I believe the biggest reason for the lack of support, as well as the outrage from national columnists, is a fundamental misunderstanding of the way that fandom works. Obviously, everyone has their own theories on this issue because everyone supports teams for different reasons. Personally, I disagree with almost everyone that people from certain regions are fundamentally "better" fans than people from other regions (i.e. if the residents of Boston and Tampa were all switched at birth without knowing about it, the fan support for both teams would be exactly the same). Fan support everywhere has to do with the tradition and relative success of a given team, as well as the demographics of that city. For example, cities such as St. Louis and Boston are proud baseball towns because the teams that play there are fixtures in the community. People come by fanhood through different means, but one of the most common methods is inheiritance. People in Boston and St. Louis and other well-established baseball cities become fans of the hometown team because their parents or other relatives were fans. The fact that people from New England and the Midwest tend to stay in their respective regions also helps this cycle.

However, in places like Tampa, there is no cycle. Nobody goes to Rays games because the have visions of fantastic Rays teams in the past dancing in their heads. The Tampa Bay Rays became a team in 1998, meaning that today, any fan over the age of 20 either already had a baseball team that they cared about when the Rays moved to town, or didn't care enough about baseball to bother with supporting a team at all. Is it really fair to expect these people to instantly become die-hard baseball fans? It would be somewhat understandable if the Rays had won right away, the way the Diamondbacks did, but they didn't win more than 70 games until 2008, so their attempt to capture the hearts and minds of Tampa Bay residents open to a new team more or less bombed. Thus, Tampa is left attempting to drum up support from fans who are either a) too young to have a disposable income, b) a converted fan from another team (can't really blame them for being fairweather fans) or, c) people who never cared that much about baseball to begin with.

Baseball is not dying in Tampa Bay, or in any other Sunbelt city that is suffering from poor attendance. Tampa, and state of Florida in general, is still a hotbed for baseball prospects and local college baseball teams are successful and well-supported. Fanhood does not exist in a vacuum, with fans mindlessly flocking to games as soon as the local team posts a record above .500. True fandom is spawned over time, through many heartbreaking and compelling seasons. Well-established baseball towns became that way because the local teams were supported by parents who passed on their fanaticism to their children. But in Tampa Bay, that cycle is just beginning, with thousands of kids watching the Rays on TV, prepared to pass on the love to their own children in the future.