I'm Doing It Wrong: Sports Fan Edition

I like sports wrong. I know this because I see men on Twitter liking sports very loudly and publicly, and it’s very clear that my Sports Opinions do not meet their exacting standards.

I’ve been a San Francisco Giants fan since 2012, and in the past 10 years, I’ve gotten a pretty solid handle on how baseball works.

When I first became a Giants fan, I thought you were supposed to love your whole team. It seemed to me that being a Giants fan meant wanting the Giants to win, and that the most efficient way to accomplish that would be if every dude in a Giants uniform had a really good day on the field!

I could not have been more wrong.

Sports Men on Twitter have shown me that actually, true sports fandom requires a seething hatred of at least 3-4 players on your favorite team! You must roll your eyes at their successes! You must tweet bitterly about their contract negotiations! You must rejoice in their every error, as it proves what a Sports Genius you are for hating them so much!

Perhaps the most egregious of my errors was developing a tendency to support my team even when they don’t win. I’ve developed a reputation in my family for strategically presenting scores. For example, if the final score is Giants 6, Mariners 3, I’ll say, “Giants won 6-3”. But if the final score is Giants 0, Mariners 6, I’ll say, “The Mariners scored 6 runs and the Giants tried their very best!” And if the final score involves the Dodgers, regardless of who they were playing or whether they won, I’ll say “FUCK THE DODGERS.”

But I digress. The point is: you cannot be unequivocally supportive of your team! What are you, their mom?!? No! You HAVE to hate some of them. 

Don’t get me wrong - there have been players I STRONGLY disliked on the Giants' roster over the past decade. But I disliked them for being petulant or whiny, being too busy starting fights to play any damn baseball, talking shit about their teammates, or being rude to fans. And these, as it turns out, are not valid reasons to dislike a player!

Correct Reasons To Hate A Player On Your Team:

• He makes too much money (this is perhaps the most popular reason!)
• He’s injury-prone (please note: it’s OK for a player to get injured while showboating on the field, however stupid it was. It’s OK to pull a muscle trying to run the bases flat-out when you were clearly instructed to sac bunt. It’s NOT OK for a player to get injured by tripping over his kid’s Legos.)
• Math. Math is the MOST IMPORTANT reason to hate a player, because math is how you prove that player is not perfect. And the players only deserve your support if they are 100% perfect all the time, even though you yourself couldn’t trot from Home to First without taking a 10-minute Rest Break.

The cardinal sin of Sports Fanning According To A Certain Kind Of Man, which I commit on the regular, is liking players for reasons other than math. I have liked players for being personable, funny, kind to fans, or entertaining on the field. For showing heart when things got tough, or standing up for the little guy on Twitter. And yeah, sure: I have liked some players for being UNSPEAKABLY HOT.

Obviously these are not valid reasons to like a player. You can only like a player because one of his stats numbers is marginally higher than another player’s comparable stats number. 

Sadly, there’s really nothing I can do about the fact that I’m a dumb girl who doesn’t know how to Sports Fan. I just have to plod onward as best I can, actually liking the humans on my favorite team, taking only a passing interest in their stats numbers, bonding with my Dad and/or brother on trips we took JUST to eat ballpark food and see a game, and enjoying Twitter commentary from all the really wonderful baseball fans (of all genders). Oh well.