I love baseball, and am very excited for this World Series. However, I have a feeling that this year’s match-up will not draw much of a following from non-die hard baseball fans. The Giants and the Tigers have good core fan bases, but not the cross-country band wagon fans of, say, the Yankees, Dodgers, or Red Sox.
Both teams have made the World Series recently, both teams spend a significant amount of money, and neither fits the classic “underdog” label. All this leads to a pretty uninteresting Series for the common baseball fan. So, I have come up with a bunch of alternative sub-plots to keep people tuned in.
Fat, black, vegetarian hitter vs. Skinny, white pitcher who eats multiple triple triple fries and milkshakes at one sitting
Prince Fielder, although no longer vegetarian was at one time not eating meat. He is terrible with the glove and is horrendously overweight. On the other side we have Big Time Timmy Jim (Lincecum), a pitcher who cannot hit at all and who is so small the security guard at At&t park wouldn’t let him into the stadium the first time he showed up. At some point these two will face off against each other, and both still have things to prove: Fielder is coming off of a down season and his transition to the AL has been hard; Lincecum has been relegated to the bullpen after being a two time Cy Young Award winner.
Auto industry’s epic collapse vs. Few visible signs of economic downturn
Detroit is the U.S. major city hit hardest by the Economic Collapse four years ago. It still hasn’t recovered and its population has decreased by almost half. There have been many documentaries about its fall from grace. San Francisco on the other hand took the economic crisis as if it were a minor speed bump. Silicon Valley is still growing and companies like Google, Yelp, and YouTube, are bringing in more money than ever. There has always been a large homeless population in San Francisco (and that population is augmented by the number of hippies living on the streets without a care), but it’s still not Detroit. It will be interesting to see who’s fans care more right now: the ones in the downtrodden city, or the ones who haven’t dealt with as much.
Down-home American food vs. Locovore and farm-to-table
There are probably very few American cities whose cuisine differs so drastically. On one hand you’ve got classic American–grown from the Midwest, meat and potatoes, fried fish on Friday, brats and cheese curds and Coney dogs. On the other side you’ve got local, organic, fresh seafood, farmers’ markets and a mentality that if the food has traveled more than 100 miles, it’s probably not very good. You won’t see it much in the stadiums, but go to American or Lafayette Coney Island and compare those with the Ferry Building on a Sunday. You’ll see what I’m talking about.
Snow vs. Fog
Finally I’m bringing Mother Nature into the equation. As we all know, Game 7 went a little crazy on the weather, but I’m here to tell you that it was not the last we’ll see of that old maid. Both stadiums are open air, and both cities are known for inclement weather–and each has some predicted for the series. However, there are some differences. Detroit will freeze you to the core and have you huddled up next to the oil drum in the street. San Francisco will blind you with that creeping fog, and make you feel naked as the wind whirls through the streets. Both cities can be warm and lovely, but by this time of year Old Man Winter will be out to play
-David Ringold
@dhringold
