As you wish

We've been asked to provide another clue to the song title suggested by the lyrics in the previous post. And so we will.

It's a song about a young couple and the very early days of their marriage. It was written by a rock'n'roll ground-breaker and covered very well by Bob Seger.

Here's something else the young couple did:

"They bought a souped-up jitney, 'twas a cherry red '53,
They drove it down New Orleans to celebrate their anniversary"

Enjoy!

Another round of Lyrics Game

This one may not be hard and, really, I don't intend them to be terribly hard: I mean them to be fun. And these lyrics are fun -

“The coolerator was jammed with TV dinners and ginger ale”

Name the tune. Put your guess in 'Comments'.

Robert Duvall said it

After I wrote this post I went to sleep. It was the next morning, in the shower, when I remembered that the Athletics had moved from Philadelphia to Kansas City in 1955, so the Cardinals were the westernmost Major League team only until then, not when the Giants and Dodgers moved west in '58, as I had intimated. It was a small mistake, but I had plans to update my post.

But cousin was Bobby on the Spot and got it corrected yesterday. Well, he lives in KC after all.

Allow me a few more words about the placement of baseball fans. Obviously, they can be anywhere and it would be nice to have some accounting for it, but a map is probably not the solution for that.

Take Boston, for example. I recently read an article about a group of Braves fans living in Boston who are passionate and go to great lengths to display their allegiance. The Braves, as you probably know, began in Boston as one of the 'Original 8' National League teams.* The Braves were the older team in Boston compared to the Red Sox and as such, had a large following. In fact, many people were convinced the wrong team left Boston when the Braves went to Milwaukee in 1953.

Of course, this isn't necessarily universal. I cannot recall meeting anyone from St. Louis or even in the Show-Me state who is a Baltimore Orioles fan, even though the Orioles are the old St. Louis Browns. But I do hear about Browns fan clubs.

The mention I made about the Yankees having fans in Tampa has to do with a few factors, not the least of which is that they have had spring training in St. Petersburg or Tampa for decades. Also the huge number of New York transplants in Florida as well as the numerous championships and star players the Yankees have produced.

Well, I've blathered on long enough. But there is one more bit of housekeeping. In the previous post I referred to a movie quote in the title. Today's title tells you the actor who said it. The character he played was Hub McCann. He says it to his nephew, Walter. And the movie was 'Second Hand Lions'. I tried to google this scene, but I can't find it. It's a pivotal scene in a terrific movie.

*The National League began in 1876 and the cities represented then were much different than the ones I refer to as the 'Original 8'. The '8' I am referring to were the League as it was constituted in 1903 when the Western League established itself as another Major League and changed it's name to the American League. It also consisted of 8 members. That 1903 season was a signal year that ushered in more 'modern' baseball.

Re: A man needs a good map

I liked Mike's comments, his surprises about the baseball loyalties map. I too am curious about how they collected the data.

Are there really no team loyalties in the so-called Unincorporated Areas?

I wonder if this has to do with how they decided to display the data. You could interview thousands of people and end up with a map that was a smear of thousands of colored dots. Or you can generalize, showing the predominant team loyalty bounded by neat lines; much more pleasant to look at. I guess it's just too sparse in the Dakotas and inter-mountain areas farther west for the loyalties to end up looking like much.

Does interest in the Team That Shall Not Be Named really cover more area in Iowa than in Illinois?

I'm suspicious of the line across the Missouri - Iowa border. For instance, I know there are Royals fans in Iowa that come to K.C. for games. At least, in years the local team does well.

The two teams in California's Bay Area share several bridges and a body of water, BUT the Giants fans break neatly for the coast, while the A's fans are only in central California?

I thought that looked odd too.

How can that many people be interested in the Nationals after so little time?

Now that makes me wonder if they used radio and television broadcast coverage maps as part of the process. The Nationals probably don't have that much of a fan base yet, but the games already have the airplay across that area.

There are no Blue Jays fans outside of Ontario? (I think that's mostly Ontario)

Yeah, that appears to be entirely within Ontario, and that is curious.

I would have loved to see a map like this 50 years ago, before any teams moved west and before there was any expansion.

Hmmm...that could be done. Survey enough people older than say, 65, and ask them which team they were first fans of. Ask where they lived at the time, then plot the results. That would be interesting.

At that point, the Cardinals would have been the most southern and most western of any team. So imagine the Cardinal area, with the powerful help of KMOX, covering everything west of the Mississippi (except Iowa, apparently) and most of the south. It would have been them or the Yankees. Tampa would have been Yankee country, for example.

I think you'd have to go back at least 60 years, at least for the Cardinals to be the westernmost team (we did have the Athletics here in KC in the 1950's). You're probably right about the south being divided between Cardinal and Yankee loyalty - and isn't the latter ironic, considering the other meaning of the word Yankee? Anyway, I will defer to your baseball knowledge on that.

P.S. The title of this post is a movie quote - any guesses?

That's kinda sorta trying to ring a bell, but I'm resisting the urge to google it. I might know it if I were given a hint.

A man needs a good map

Thanks, Bob, for the interesting and fun post about the mapping of baseball fans. I was somewhat surprised by what I saw and would be curious to know how they collected the data.

Here are some of my surprises:

Are there really no team loyalties in the so-called Unincorporated Areas?

Does interest in the Team That Shall Not Be Named really cover more area in Iowa than in Illinois?

The Dodgers' hotbed is roughly the same size as the Pirates'?

The two teams in California's Bay Area share several bridges and a body of water, BUT the Giants fans break neatly for the coast, while the A's fans are only in central California?

How can that many people be interested in the Nationals after so little time?

There are no Blue Jays fans outside of Ontario? (I think that's mostly Ontario)

I would have loved to see a map like this 50 years ago, before any teams moved west and before there was any expansion. At that point, the Cardinals would have been the most southern and most western of any team. So imagine the Cardinal area, with the powerful help of KMOX, covering everything west of the Mississippi (except Iowa, apparently) and most of the south. It would have been them or the Yankees. Tampa would have been Yankee country, for example.

I am sure you know that aside from "location, location, location", there is another axiom that would help enlarge a team's territory and it comes from Raiders football owner Al Davis: "Just win, baby!"

Hopefully the Cards will push the "zig-zaggy-ness" a little further north this year.

P.S. The title of this post is a movie quote - any guesses?

A blessed Easter...

...to one and all, here from The Porch.

And I liked this summary of the meaning of the day. Enjoy!

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.