On Wednesday evening, San Francisco
Giants center fielder Juan Perez made one of the best defensive plays
by any baseball player this season, scaling
the wall to rob a home run from St. Louis Cardinals outfielder
Stephen Piscotty. It was a genuinely amazing catch, something that,
as the Fox Sports Midwest broadcasters mentioned, even the Cardinals
fans acknowledged with polite applause. This reaction was consistent with the
St. Louis fans' cherished distinction as “the
Best Fans in Baseball”.1
As a Giants fan, I found that pleasant, respectful behavior on the
part of Cardinals fans to be incredibly annoying. Indeed, there is
something particularly obnoxious about the falsely modest attitude
the Cardinals fanbase adopts in order to justify and propagate the
“Best Fans” designation. I am not aiming to disseminate or
undermine that designation,2
but rather to try to understand why the attitude of St. Louis fans
seems so hollow and inauthentic.
In his takedown of the Cardinals fans'
“the Best Fans in Baseball” myth, Drew Magary writes: “I
think Yankees fans are horrible people: selfish, arrogant, profane,
and miserable all at once. But at least they don't attempt to hide
their repulsiveness. At least there isn't this deliberate, 'Oh, we're
not like those OTHER fans' fakeness that OOZES from the Cardinals and
their acolytes.” Ultimately, what offends Magary—and, likely,
what offends me, as well—is the inauthenticity in the Cardinals
fans' claims of modesty and civility that lie at the heart of their
“Best Fans in Baseball” title. It reminds me a bit of this
strange, fascinating, rambling article by Marc Yearsley about Guy
Fieri and James Murphy in which he (eventually) makes the argument
that as obviously obnoxious as Guy Fieri is, his obnoxious is
preferable to James Murphy's ostensibly more acceptable cool persona
because Fieri is authentic in his awfulness while Murphy's perceived
coolness is inauthentic. For Magary and many other sports fans, the
overt, authentic offensiveness of Yankees fans (or Red Sox fans or
Dallas Cowboys fans or all Philadelphia sports fans, etc.) is
preferable to the false modesty of Cardinals fans. And I think I
agree with that assessment. While I have a number of qualms about the
contemporary obsession with authenticity, there is something
especially obnoxious to me about the “aw shucks, we're just good,
modest, Midwestern baseball fans” attitude that underlies the
Cardinals fans' claim to being “the Best Fans in Baseball”.
And yet, there must necessarily be a
fanbase that does consist of “the Best Fans in Baseball”. The
Cardinals fans really do have as much of a stake to that claim as any
other fanbase but by the simple fact of acknowledging it, they
undermine their case. There is something eerily self-defeating about
this whole spiraling, postmodern cycle of self-knowledge and
instability. To be “the Best Fans in Baseball” requires that they
do not claim to be “the Best Fans in Baseball” yet to deny the
designation of “Best Fans in Baseball” seems equally as
disingenuous, in an altogether different manner. So there are no
“Best Fans” yet there must be the “Best Fans” but the title
of “Best Fans” is inherently unstable and ceases to be applicable
once it is applied. The whole thing is dizzying.
Chris Alarie is Senior Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.
1 In fact, cheering good plays by other teams' players is number one on Will Leitch's nauseating list of “10 Reasons Why Cardinals Fans May Be The Best Fans In Baseball”.↩
2 Both Drew Magary and the excellent Baseball's Best Fans Twitter account have already thoroughly covered that.↩
Chris Alarie is Senior Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.
1 In fact, cheering good plays by other teams' players is number one on Will Leitch's nauseating list of “10 Reasons Why Cardinals Fans May Be The Best Fans In Baseball”.↩
2 Both Drew Magary and the excellent Baseball's Best Fans Twitter account have already thoroughly covered that.↩
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