Big Blue

It used to all be so simple.

It was 2001, and the Seattle Mariners were facing the New York Yankees in the American League Championship Series. I was a junior in high school, and my girlfriend at the time — our relationship lasted less than two weeks, so she might dispute that title — was a die-hard. The Mariners, led by Randy Johnson and Ichiro Suzuki, had tied the Major League record for most wins by a baseball team with a 116–46 record. The last time that had been done was in 1906, when the Chicago Cubs went 116–36. There was a case to be made that the 2001 Seattle Mariners were among the greatest teams in baseball history.

The Yankees had been dominating the Mariners, and by the seventh inning of game five, the writing was on the wall. The Yankees were up 3–1 in the series, and they led 12–3 following a Tino Martinez three-run home run. The Yankee Stadium faithful started to chant: “Nah nah nah nah, nah nah nah nah, hey-ey-ey, goodbye!”

My girlfriend (?) cried. “We’ll get ’em next year,” I said.

As baseball fans will know, that did not happen. In fact, it’s been 21 years and the Seattle Mariners have not made it back to the playoffs, cementing what is by some measures the longest playoff drought in the history of professional sports. (As of this writing, the drought continues, although it looks very likely that the curse will finally be broken this year — we shall see.) I mostly tuned out from the futility after the 2009 season, when I would check the score every night while working at a Japanese izakaya and preparing for grad school. I liked Russell Branyan, for some unfathomable reason, who was on a one-year deal and having a pretty good season. I always tuned in for a Felix Hernandez start. I moved to New York that year, and Mariners and Seahawks games kept me connected with my friends and family in the Pacific Northwest. The following year, the Mariners would crumble once again, with manager Don Wakamatsu getting into an actual physical fight with leadoff hitter Chone Figgins, Milton Bradley was all kinds of crazy, and the Mariners marketing team laid an egg with a “Believe Big” slogan that culminated in one of the worst seasons I can remember experiencing as a baseball fan. After that, I was pretty much done.

This essay is not about the Seattle Mariners. This is about the sports teams we follow and root for. It’s about the very strange concept of being a “true fan,” which is mostly about using your free time, energy, and hard-earned dollars to engage in suffering, of buying in to a painful story with the hope that eventually the triumph will be all the more sweet. And it’s about relationships, and localities, and civic pride.

Yes, sports fandom is about all those things.

I’m not a die-hard. For me, watching sports is something to pass the time and keep engaged with other people. My dad and I talk about sports, maybe more than any other subject. I watch the games with my brothers, even over long distances — Seahawks games are one of the central times we have to come together across time and space and engage with one another. It’s a way to show civic pride, too, and to engage in intraregional rivalries.

A confession: I have abandoned the Seattle Mariners. I live in Los Angeles, and I’ve sacrificed them on the altar of civic community. I root for the Seattle Seahawks, and Seattle’s new hockey franchise, the epically named Kraken. My brother and I went to the first game in franchise history (which, in typical Seattle fashion, they lost to the Vancouver Canucks). But I’ve started to cheer for the Dodgers in baseball, and although I don’t really understand the NBA and still am smarting from their insane decision to move the Seattle Supersonics to Nowheresville, Oklahoma, I’m trying to become a Lakers fan.

In some sense, this is the lowest-stakes decision imaginable. It literally matters to no one. The teams don’t care, people don’t care. And yet I struggled mightily over the last year to make that decision. I lived in New York for six years, and yet, when the whole city was celebrating the Yankee’s World Series win in 2009, I went straight home from work and read a book. I never bought in to New York sports. Why? The city didn’t belong to me. Los Angeles feels different.

Los Angeles doesn’t have many civic institutions. It’s a sprawling, famously decentralized city, with few public gathering places. We don’t have a Central Park or Union Square — the concrete-saddled Pershing Square and the coyote-infested, honestly amazing Griffith Park might be the closest approximations — and the Los Angeles skyline isn’t half as iconic as that of New York or Chicago. People are more likely to picture palm trees, sandy beaches, and dingbats, strip malls and endless miles of pools and streetlights.

But LA does have the Dodgers, and the Lakers. The famous LA symbol can be found all over the city, on shirts, on hats, one of the few civic identifiers that unites the city from Santa Monica to Pasadena. Go Big Blue.

People pick up new sports affiliations for all sorts of reasons. To feel a part of the fabric of a city, for instance, or sometimes simply because a loved one cares and we want to join them, we want them to be happy. My brother Matt’s wife is a lifelong Coloradan; they live in Denver, and when he’s not cheering for the Mariners, he’s decked out in Rockies purple. (The 2014 Super Bowl was almost a cause of civil war in his house.) My dad is a purported Seahawks fan, but his true passions lie with the Kansas City Chiefs — because his wife likes them.

My mom, for her part, just likes Marshawn Lynch, because, she says, he is good to his mother.

I was born in Los Angeles, even though I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, which might be part of the reason it felt natural to start rooting for the Dodgers. My first sports experiences were at Dodger Stadium, watching Darryl Strawberry (I liked his name) and Tommy Lasorda. I still remember the interminable drive from Orange County to Dodger Stadium, the excitement and impatience, seeing the “Chinatown” exit sign and knowing we were close. The lights of the stadium, the roar of the crowd, the Dodger Dogs and souvenir mini-helmets: hokey or no, these are things no child forgets.

Some sports fans — the “true fans” — demonstrate their loyalty, their commitment to place, their sacrifice and suffering through their commitment to one franchise, and this probably says a lot about them. For others, we pick up sports affiliations as we move through life, like nicks and scars, a steady accumulation of relationships and experiences and loyalties that is as fluid and complicated as any human existence.