Where is your loyalty?

Team loyalty, that is.

A few years back when I customized my Yahoo start up page, one of the things I selected was The Map Room (a weblog about maps). There's usually something interesting here, though once in a while it's kind of esoteric and you'd really have to be "into" maps to appreciate it.

Yesterday there was this post, and it's one of the more fun entries I've seen lately. It's a loyalty map showing "The United Countries of Baseball" (click here to zoom in to see the map better). Not much in the way of surprises locally; I can vouch for the fact that Cardinals loyalty covers most of Missouri except for the Royals loyalty in the northwest third of the state - Kansas City and the surrounding region. And it's interesting how the largest metropolitan regions with two teams each (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco) have their loyalties divided. I can't really speak to that, but I suppose they got it right.

One thing that caught my eye was the zig-zaggy-ness (it's a word now) of the northern border between Cardinal land, and the land of "The Team That Shall Not Be Named", as Cousin Mike has it. Whoever compiled the map didn't just draw a straight line across "somewhere in there"; it looks like they took the effort to collect quite a lot of data. Hey, if you're going to make a fun map, it might as well be an accurate fun map.

Mike, make sure you click on the link, if you haven't already. I think you'll get a kick out of it.