The Spectrum of Modern Baseball Fans

Have you ever found yourself debating what makes a true die-hard baseball fan? Sitting at a game on the first base side, two fans are decked out head to toe in Tribe gear, obvious to the naked eye anyone can see that both parties are all in when it comes to the game. What on earth could there be to argue about? They are both on the same side right? Well, maybe not. Appearance says die-hard, but when it comes to knowing what TYPE of die-hard you are there’s more digging that needs to be done.

Some of us lean more towards the side of old school basic stats and our gut feeling. Keeping as much of the human element in the game as possible and sticking to the roots as much as possible. Others might sway the other direction of new age baseball, living their fandom more through sabrmetrics and counting the days for robot umpires to take the field. Both are extremes, leaving the fans in between to comfortably enjoy the game with a touch of ignorant bliss of varying degrees, leaving the over thinking and dramatics to the professionals in order to sit back and take it all in.

Where the traditionalists have always been there through the different eras of the game, to an extent the “new age” of stat driven baseball has been around a while also. In the mid-1940’s, Lou Boudreau came up with a shift for Ted Williams based on spray charts that showed he always pulled the ball. After the shift was implemented, he kept charts that showed it was effective over the long term even if it didn’t work in each incidence, essentially a precursor to both the shifts of today and stats like wRC+ that compare what actually happened to what was expected to happen over the long term.

Teams have always used this type of information, even down to righty/lefty splits 100 years ago, but much of this proprietary information has been kept under wraps. It was only with the advent of Baseball Prospectus, SABR, FanGraphs and Michael Lewis’ Moneyball that this type of thinking was brought to the masses. Those masses have since split with some (mostly the younger crowd, but not exclusively either way) joining the side of James and advanced metrics and others taking the hard line with Hawk Harrelson and traditional stats or the ultimate lack of stats, “the eye test.”

While in the past, I’ve tried to bring fans from one side to the other, that is not what this is about. Instead, this is about finding out where everyone stands. If you have a spare minute, please take the quiz below to see where you fit in the modern age of baseball fandom.

So, what kind of fan are you? There are five levels in that particular survey from ‘Disciple of Hawk’ and ‘Traditionalist’ on the old school side to ‘Money Balling’ and ‘Stat Head’ on the new. I’m happy to say that the Burning River Staff is all over the spectrum with Kevin Gall as our lone ‘Stat Head’, myself falling in the ‘Money Balling’ category, Cait Boron as a ‘Traditionalist’ and both John Hutchison and Mike Melaragno ‘Straight to Center.’ That variety helps us cover stories from more angles than if all of us were extremists on either side.

We already know that we all enjoy baseball (or else you are reading the wrong website), but I’m hoping this will help open up the discussion of how we enjoy it and allow baseball fans to understand each other better rather than continue on with the current trend of disrespect and discord. Please share your thoughts with us on twitter and facebook to keep the discussion going.