But man, being into the Braves is pretty much the most crap baseball thing imaginable.
Wow. I don't know for certain, but I think I may be the lone Braves fan on these boards. I guess it falls on my shoulders to defend them.
Your journey from this mortal coil shall be hastened by the hand of Dixie! Draw your weapon at once! I demand my Satisfaction!OK, maybe not like that.
My family lived in Austin until I was six. As with Hernandez, the closest Major League team to us was the Rangers, and since we were from England anyway we didn't really give a shit. We moved to Atlanta in the fall of '92. My very first baseball memory is of Sid Bream sliding home in the NLCS. The following year, the Braves came back from ten games behind the Giants to win their division. Pennant fever was still a relatively new phenomenon in Atlanta, and nobody was really all that used to winning yet. It was an exciting time to be a Braves fan, and I was hooked.
It was a long time ago, back when I was still a but lowly lurker here, but I recall LFM explaining his own rationale for being a Mets fan. Here it is:
Still, here's the thing about being a New York Mets fan. In the Northeast, you can be a Yankees fan, a Mets fan or a Red Sox fan.
To be a Red Sox fan is to be a self-flagellant, enjoying the pain of almost always failing by just an inch... digging on it, making it your personality, the sick pride of always being stepped on and almost feeling betrayed by success because you're not so special anymore.
To be a Yankees fan is to be completely obsessed with being The Best, to the point of not caring to understand any of the minutae of anything, only caring that you're destroying everyone else and... when you're not... being bewildered by it, as though up was down and in was out, to the point where you're asking why God has forsaken you.
And then there's being a Mets fan. The Buddha's Middle Path. Mediocre, just enough to not quite be in the playoff race, most of the time... some of the games are exciting, some are awful, a few stars, a few goats, the whole range of the experience and... every once in a while, every five ten fifteen years, they get it together enough to be the Best or quite near it. And that's nice but you sort of have the full view of the experience because you've spent the last ten years dealing with the depth and breadth of the experience of being So-So.
It's a balanced healthy kinda fan experience.
So, first of all, in the Southeast (at least in Georgia) your choice is basically limited to either being a Braves fan or watching NASCAR. Sure, there are a couple of other teams down in Florida, but something like three-quarters of the fans there are transplants anyway. But to describe my own team's mindset within this continuum...
Well, to be a Braves fan is to expect to win, not in a psychotic victory-at-any-cost way like the Yankees fan, but rather... having faith that in the end you'll manage to pull it off somehow. You won't necessarily dominate, but over the course of 162 games everything will fall into place, with the your own place being at the top, sometimes above other teams that are theoretically better than you. It's a much less useful mentality to have in the playoffs, granted, and most of the time you won't come away with the ultimate prize, but you always have at least a fairly decent shot at it. You know failure enough for the successes to be really meaningful, but at the same time you never resign yourself to losing.
I just read over that and realized that it probably sounds horribly arrogant, but what I'm really trying to describe here is more a sense of healthy optimism. On any given day, in any given season, you
know you have a legitimate chance of being the Best, that you can set your sights that high without the gut feeling that you're just deluding yourself. Oftentimes you'll fall short, but even then it's not because you Blew It. It's just the icy, impersonal hand of statistics. You never stop hoping for the best.
As for the Braves-Mets rivalry... I actually kind of like the Mets. I just always, always want them to lose. During the Bobby Valentine Era they were a great team of "bad guys" to root against, with their black uniforms and their designer stubble, and Mike Piazza with his sinister mustache and goatee. I have a genuine distaste for the Yankees, but playing against the Mets was always a bit like playing against Elmer Fudd. I'm sure it helped a lot that we always got the last laugh, but even after last season I can't truthfully say that I hate the Mets. In fact, as crazy as it may sound, my favorite player as a kid was Turk Wendell. That guy was just plain nuts. I loved him. Fortunately he was a middle reliever, so I could root for him to have a good outing and then for the next guy blow it.
They can't sell out LCS games, for fuck's sake. That says it all.
I'm not even going to try to defend this. I am in complete agreement with you about this. It's sickening. However, I will point out that the in spite of their performance on the field last season, the Braves had their highest attendance in four years and set a new single-game attendance record. That's got to at least count for something.
Atlanta isn't a true Baseball Town in the mold of a New York or a St. Louis or a Baltimore, in fact it's only really a decent baseball town because all the other teams that play there suck. I am willing to admit this. But that doesn't mean there are no real die-hard Braves fans, or that the team isn't deserving of a better fan base than they actually have, and in any case that has no bearing on why they are
my team. That I became a Braves fan is primarily an accident of geography, but that I have remained one has a lot more to do with the collective team psyche that I've described above. Besides, who else am I going to root for out here in the desert? The Diamondbacks sucked before and now they suck in even uglier uniforms.
Well, they have a bunch of redneck announcers, and perhaps that is what made me dislike them more. (I know some Careys worked there, but they also have the southern redneck always).
Skip Carey is the
man! Two of my favorite calls:
"...and as we go to the bottom of the sixth, it's Braves 4, Evildoers 1." (I don't remember the actual score, or the inning, or anything else about the game now. I think it was against the Rockies)
and during a game in Montreal, after an Expos player hit a mammoth home run:
"Deep fly ball into left field... maybe it'll hit a speaker."
TBS has moved him onto just radio broadcasts now, much to my sadness. They're not even covering Braves games exclusively anymore after this season, which for an out-of-state fan sucks ass. The good news is that if I sign up for MLB.TV I will have no remaining incentive to pay for cable and could actually save money.
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Topic: The Legend of the Octopus (Read 10278 times)