DO YOU HAVE A SOUL? Very quickly, a remarkably accurate flowchart that helps you select the baseball team for which you should root.* (Link is currently broken; mirrored link here, thanks to Matt B.)
*Yeah, that's right, I said "for which." And I reworded the sentence so that I didn't have to wrestle with the question mark in the title. And for what it's worth, the main sentence of the post is a sentence fragment. Grammar in revolt! My grammar is revolting!
Say "for which" again and apparently I'll be obligated to punch you in the neck.
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Complete failure? I think that means you have to root for the Pirates.
ReplyDeleteI found a mirror online and put it on imgur.com to avoid any hosting/bandwidth issues: http://imgur.com/0XgQq
ReplyDelete(To be clear, I didn't mean that in any threatening way. Just how I ended up on the flowchart.)
ReplyDeleteThanks for the mirror link, which I'm bumping up to the post. Anybody else having problems lately using block-and-copy for links? Two out of the last three links I posted, I had to type them in by hand because I couldn't do control-C on the URL.
ReplyDeleteI love that "What's in the thermos?" is a standard decision tool on this chart.
ReplyDeleteAnd I am pleasantly surprised (though, now that I've become aware of who created the chart, not quite as surprised) that no affirmative answer to "Look at me like that again and I will punch you" leads to the Phillies.
ReplyDeleteIt would have ruined the '08 joke. Otherwise, my guess is that the answer leading to the Phils would have been "in the balls."
ReplyDeleteI am a Royals fan according to this, and you know what, sure, you know, if I am going to bother with a sport and if that sport is baseball I sure will do it with a thermos full of gravy!
ReplyDeleteI do enjoy my IC Light.
ReplyDeleteWell done (and not just because I ended up at the right team)
ReplyDeleteOr, "in the minor child who accompanies you."
ReplyDeleteI understand this is just a joke, and admittedly my exposure to Mariners fans is limited, but I was surprised to see the Mariners end up in the portion of the decision tree for fans who don't care if their team wins another game. Orioles, Nationals Pirates and Royals all seem to fit, but I would have expected Mariners fans to end up in the section for fans who are just biding their time until football season.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, we do care if the team wins another game. We badly want them to win more, because we remember the days when they won more than anybody else ever. I assumed that that was just a joke about the fact that we remain fans even though the team has recently been terrible.
ReplyDeleteSecond, biding our time until football season? But for the graciousness of the New Orleans Saints, people would have remembered our football team as the worst playoff team in history, a bunch of losers who won barely a better percentage of their games than did the Mariners.
I was very surprised not to see the pro-sushi query not lead to the Mariners.
ReplyDeleteI think part of the problem is that the Mariners don't have an easy hook for writers like the Cubs (perennial losers) or Pirates (really, really losers who were great in the semi-recent past) or Yankees (evil). Hell, the Mariners beat the White Sox in the 2000 ALDS and I still don't particularly have a feeling about them like I still hate the Orioles and Cal Ripken for the loss in 1983. They're just there for the majority of baseball fans. Kind of like the Padres, really.
ReplyDelete(Hell, I had to look up who the Mariners supposed interleague rival was and it turned out to be...the Padres.)
The Mariners do not have an interleague rival. They have an interleague recurring opponent. The Mariners blogs, and especially Lookout Landing, mock MLB for calling it a rivalry instead of some kind of odd-man-out thing.
ReplyDeleteAs for the Mariners being "just there for the majority of baseball fans," they're 11th in MLB revenue (Forbes 2010 valuations), despite having been terrible or mediocre for a half-decade and being in the 18th-largest MLB market (counting the two-team markets twice; i.e., NYA and NYN, Chi-A and Chi-N, LA-A, LA-N). The Mariners may not be there for the majority of baseball fans, but the majority of baseball fans are idiots. Revealed preferences say that the Mariners have better fans than the majority of baseball teams.
As a Pirates fan, I certainly do want to win another game as well. The Buccos are one of the six or eight most storied franchises in baseball, but it will take a while to totally recover from the train wreck that was the Cam Bonifay/Dave Littlefield Era, especially working in the constraints of a small market. The remaining Pirates fans are smart enough to realize that it's going to take another couple of seasons to finish up the rebuilding process, but no team has spent more on the draft the last three years than the Pirates and once we add a shiny new Anthony Rendon or Gerrit Cole to the system this summer, things will be looking even better. We also happen to have the most beautiful park in baseball, so I got that goin' for me, which is nice.
ReplyDeleteHow much of that is Ichiro-related revenue?
ReplyDeleteIsaac, intrestingly from what I can see in terms of attendance for 2010 and 2009...the Mariners are 18th, right where they'd be predicted to be (though I'll note with a 47,116 seat capacity per game they only ran 25,749 per game attendance last year, or 54.6%; Wrigley was at 93%, Fenway at 101% (night capacity of 37,402, average attendance of 37,610) and Comiskey at a dismal 50%).
ReplyDeleteI want to say that I shouldn't wind up on the Mets, but, yeah, I probably do. The really frustrating part is that it rarely works.
ReplyDeleteHow much of the Cardinals' revenue is Pujols-related? Of the Giants' revenue is Lincecum-related? Of the Yankees' revenue is Jeter-related? Does it matter?
ReplyDeleteLove this, except I have to say that there are DBacks fans who knew about baseball before 1993. We just didn't live in AZ then -- so I ended up with the Red Sox, which is right & proper, seeing as I lived in Boston for the first 30-odd years of my life.
ReplyDeleteNext time I bring in a themos to PacBell, and they ask if it's anything other than Lemonade, I know my answer.
ReplyDeleteSt Louis has had a sustained baseball fanbase for decades regardless of winning, so do the Yankees; SF seems to be winning-dependent,
ReplyDeleteBelieve it or not, the Mariners had a fanbase before Ichiro, and a lot of the fanbase (the lunkheaded part) doesn't like Ichiro.
ReplyDelete