Acpevans' BLE 4 Blog: 10 Baseball Teams With The Most Obsessive Fans

baseball fans

It was June 2008, and Jill Joaquin found herself on the pitcher's mound at AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants.

She saw her name flash across the big screen, and thought, Oh my God. That's me up there.

??Joaquin reached back and threw the game's first pitch to then-Giants catcher Steve Holm. The ball landed on the plate and bounced into Holm's mitt.

You can still see the dirt marks on the ball, which is now one of Joaquin's most-prized possessions.

??"My boss at the time advertised a lot with the AT&T Yellow Pages, so they offered him the chance to throw out the first pitch," Joaquin, a 26-year-old resident of San Francisco, explains.

"He called me into a conference room and said, 'Doing this would be just as exciting as kissing my sister, but I know that this is something that you'll remember for the rest of your life.' I started crying and called my dad. It was unreal."

If it hasn't become clear by now, Joaquin is one of the Giants' biggest fans. She was a fan long before the Giants won the World Series last year, when she attended over 40 games. Her father is a Giants fan, and so are her grandparents.

??"I remember when I was eight years old and my uncle came to live with us," Joaquin recalls. "He gave me an Atlanta Braves shirt. I wore it to my grandparents house, and they were not happy. They acted like I had disappointed them because I wore the shirt. So I thought, 'okay, you're a Giants fan, you inherited that.'"??

Where does such devotion come from? What is it about a sports team that can bring grown men to tears after a devastating loss, or turn grandparents against a grandchild who dares to wear another team's logo???

It's a $64,000 question, but what we do know is that not all fans are created equal. We'll just go ahead and say it now: The Boston Red Sox has the biggest fans in baseball (just watch Jimmy Fallon in "Fever Pitch" for a theatrical glimpse of diehard fandom).

The Giants have the second biggest fans in baseball right now—likely because of their World Series win last year.??

We're not just making this up. To figure out which baseball teams have the biggest fans, we looked at fan attendance for home games in 2010, revenue generated last year by each team, and fan obsession with Fantasy Baseball by city. We also looked at our data to see what the fans of each city were spending each month on entertainment and to dine out to possibly watch the game at a restaurant or bar.

The teams that emerged from our analysis were expected: The Red Sox has a devoted fanbase, for example, as well as the Yankees and Phillies.??

"It feels like it's kind of a sickness now, rather than just being a fan," admits Erick Aguirre, a 27-year-old Red Sox fan who lives in New York City. "Once I finally got to see a game at Fenway, it really went into overdrive."??

Aguirre isn't from Boston, which puts his loyalty to the Red Sox in a whole 'nother ballpark. His dad was an Arizona Wildcats fan, he explains, so when Arizona football star Tedy Bruschi got drafted by the New England Patriots, Aguirre found himself becoming a fan of all the Boston teams. He was 13.??

When the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004, Aguirre was at a bar in Tucson freaking out. He was supposed to be working on a film project for school, but lied to one of his partners and said that his car had broken down.

??"Winning the World Series was huge, but beating the Yankees in the American League Championship Series was unreal," Aguirre says. "Because of how we came back." For those who don't remember, the Red Sox were down three games to none in the best-of-seven series. They went on to win the next four games to clinch the pennant.??

Aguirre now lives in enemy territory, working as a DJ in New York. He wears his Red Sox cap every day. "When I go to work, a lot of club owners are like, 'Don't ever wear that in my club again.' But I still do it."

??The rivalry games are much less intense for Kate Wee, a 27-year-old Minnesota Twins fan living in Fargo, N.D.

"There isn't a lot of heckling when we play against the Chicago White Sox, or when we have an interleague game against the Milwaukee Brewers," she says. Even so, Wee has to fight her own crowd of fans just to score a ticket to a game. She paid over $200 a ticket to go to the opening game at Target Field, which originally cost $25 at face value.

??If there's one thing baseball's biggest fans are willing to do for their team, it's spend. Aguirre has been tempted to buy $1,500 game-used stadium seats from Fenway, but says he's refrained because his New York apartment is too small. He owns nearly every October edition of the Boston Globe daily leading up to the 2004 World Series. He has a 2004 World Series tractor trailer featuring the Red Sox, and and endless amount of reading material about the Red Sox.

??Joaquin says she broke the bank when the Giants won the World Series.

"I had to get the special jerseys with the World Series patch on it, and all the jerseys with the gold lettering on it," she says. "I'd estimate that I spent $750 conservatively after the World Series."

This is all on top of the shirts, sweatshirts, jackets and blankets all emblazoned with the Giants logo on them to have when she attends the cold night games. "My parents would kill me for saying this, but it's always worth it to me. It's the value of entertainment." She also dreams of the $15 crab sandwiches that are sold in select spots in AT&T Park.??

When asked what separates Giants fans from other fans, Joaquin says the Giants organization is the classiest. "They're very community-based," she says. "The city of San Francisco rallied around the team when there was talk of them moving. They realized that the fans here are what keeps the team going."??

"There's definitely an East Coast bias," she says.

"How many times can I hear about the Yankees, or Red Sox, or Phillies, or even The Mets? Walking around Boston on game day, it's unbelievable how many people wear Red Sox gear on the streets," Aguirre says.

"You won't see 75 percent of people wearing game day gear in L.A. or New York because there's so much other stuff going on. But in Boston, the whole city knows its game day, and they have the whole spirit of the city behind them."??

Aguirre also takes a jab at the Yankees when explaining why Red Sox fans are so different.

"Red Sox fans will stay until the end of the game no matter what," he says. "They can be getting blown out by 10 runs, and everyone will stay. It's because we always think we have a chance—it's the underdog nature of the team."??

"With the Yankees, if they're not winning by 2 or 3 runs in the 7th or 8th inning, a lot of people start to leave," Aguirre says. "I went to a game a month ago, and I wore Red Sox stuff to Yankee Stadium, and people were making fun of me. That's fine—it's a fun atmosphere. But then the Red Sox pulled away, and some of the Yankee fans turned against their own team, and started to trash their own players. In Boston, people say stuff, but it never gets malicious."

??Diehard fans of the Yankees would probably disagree, but it's all part of the game. Fans of different teams get into arguments, but eventually learn to coexist. Melissa Korn, a 27-year-old reporter for Dow Jones and a fan of the Mets, has learned to live with her Red Sox-loving husband. "We knew our loyalties pretty early on in the relationship," she says. "We've joked that if our kids are raised as Patriots and Celtics fans, then we can compromise and have the kids become Mets fans."

This post originally appeared at Bundle.

#10: Los Angeles Angels Of Anaheim

Home Attendance: 89.1 percent
Revenue Generated: $217
City Participation Ranking in Fantasy Baseball: 21
Average Household Monthly Spending on Entertainment: $59
Average Household Monthly Spending on Dining Out: $312

#9: Chicago White Sox

Home Attendance: 66.7 percent
Revenue Generated: $194 million
City Participation Ranking in Fantasy Baseball: 21
Average Household Monthly Spending on Entertainment: $66
Average Household Monthly Spending on Dining Out: $312

#8: New York Mets

Home Attendance: 77.1 percent
Revenue Generated: $268 million
City Participation Ranking in Fantasy Baseball: 10
Average Household Monthly Spending on Entertainment: $57
Average Household Monthly Spending on Dining Out: $290

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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