Quote of the Day (Roger Angell, on Pro Sports Teams and Their Fans)

“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives.” —Baseball writer and chief New Yorker fiction editor Roger Angell (1920-2022), Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (1977)

I took the image accompanying this post at a night game at Yankee Stadium in late August 2014. That season, the Bronx Bombers finished second in the American League East, with their worst record since 1992.

But fans like me came out that night because we knew this would be one of our final opportunities to see “The Captain,” Derek Jeter, in the last of his 20 seasons as a Hall of Famer with the Yankees.

Professional sports have grown even more “commercially exploitative” in the half-century since Roger Angell wrote the above. The miracle is that they still retain such a powerful hold on their fan base.

It just goes to show that, in its imperviousness to reason, rooting for one’s favorite team is a form of faith. With baseball resuming following the All-Star break, teams still in the hunt for the postseason hope to reward those fans in their staunch belief.