The Liberation of Being a Fair-Weather Fan

Dumping your sports team sounds blasphemous. But sometimes you have to prioritize a different kind of loyalty.

By Steven Leckart
Published March 5, 2024Updated March 7, 2024

My 4-year-old son was climbing into our station wagon when he hit me with two words that rattled me to my core: “Dodgers rule!” Next came the death blow: “Giants drool!” We had only just moved to Los Angeles from San Francisco, but somehow my kid’s allegiance to my favorite baseball team had already faltered. When I shared my dismay with a friend (a die-hard Giants fan), I expected sympathy. Instead, he expressed envy. Neither of his kids shared his love for America’s pastime. “At least you have a fan of baseball,” he said. “Be grateful for that.”

And yet, I fixated on how my son’s team was not my team. Even worse, our teams are bitter enemies. So when we attended games, the kiddo would cheer for his squad while I’d awkwardly grimace and not-so-quietly root for mine.

I had always felt that it’s sacrilegious to be a “fair-weather fan,” someone who only supports a team when it’s winning. True fans are die-hards — they experience, in equal measure, the grief of losing and the euphoria of winning. I believed that committing to a team would be forever, which meant you would remain pitted against the same foes for a lifetime. (Opposition is the yin to fandom’s yang.) But I never expected that my own flesh and blood would become a fair-weather fan — or my rival.

After seven years of a sports schism in our family, though, I started to wonder what I was holding onto. Could I somehow become a fan of both teams? If not, what would betraying my beloved Giants say about me? With whose opinion was I concerned?

I was born in Los Angeles and grew up a Dodgers fan, which made this turn of events all the more confusing. Back in 1988, my bedroom was covered with newspaper clippings of the Dodgers and the Lakers. My favorite baseball and basketball teams each won championships in the same year, and that success supersized my fandom. I always preferred basketball, because baseball seemed slow and boring. This made it easier to ditch the Dodgers when I left Los Angeles at age 25, seven years before my son was born.

When I moved to San Francisco in 2005, the Giants had just endured a steroid scandal and were middling. Choosing to root for a tarnished underdog felt almost punk rock. Adopting a new fandom also helped cement local pride and friendships, including a buddy who taught me to love baseball’s brooding pace. As we brewed beer in his kitchen, we would listen to games on the radio, and he’d school me: “Pitching is one of the most intense and repetitively stressful positions in all of sports,” he’d say, dispensing all kinds of specialized knowledge. Given years of disastrous bad luck and botched opportunities, San Franciscans had started to refer to Giants fandom as its own distinct form of torture. In time, I found myself yelling at the TV from my couch — and at the field from my seat in Oracle Park. The Giants would soon win a historic three World Series championships in five years, and that streak felt like our reward for weathering the storm.

By 2010, I had traded yet another fandom. That call wasn’t arbitrary or impulsive. Years earlier, when my favorite N.F.L. franchise, the Raiders, left Los Angeles and returned to Oakland (where they were originally based), what was I to do but hold a grudge? I went all in on the San Francisco 49ers. During the Super Bowl in 2013, I rooted for the Niners while decked out in no less than three pieces of team merch. But within two years, when the franchise pushed out the coach who had gotten them there, I sensed cracks in my loyalty. By the time that the San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick took his stand against police brutality and the owners decided to release him, prompting him to opt out of his contract, I retired my gear.

My own history as a fair-weather fan, I now realize, was liberating. I was nimble in my love, justified when my loyalty faltered. In short, it felt like my teams needed to earn, and keep, my fandom — which, in a lot of ways, is appropriate. After all, a fan’s dedication isn’t always reciprocated. Athletes now rarely spend their entire careers with one team. Owners move teams to new cities to maximize profits. If their loyalties are malleable, why should fans be held to a different standard? Given our wallets and our attention, fans hold a lot of power in this relationship. Football has challenged baseball’s standing as “America’s pastime”; it’s as if the whole country not only switched teams but sports altogether.

Despite these revelations, I still love watching baseball. My friend was right. It’s a gift when your kids appreciate anything as much as you do. But by stubbornly resisting a switch, I was robbing myself of something far more precious than fan devotion. I was depriving myself of feeling camaraderie and joy with my son. So last summer, after significant hand-wringing, I gave myself permission to root for his team. From the moment we donned matching Dodgers caps, it was magical. (And this was months before the team signed the most coveted free agent in baseball history, Shohei Ohtani.) As my son enters his teenage years, our shared fandom might save our relationship from splintering the way many do. Either way, I’ll be grateful we have something in common.

This is some bullshit and the author is a disgraziato. Fair weather or bandwagon fandom is a blight upon the world of sports and those who advocate it are beneath contempt.

Even the rationale given is pathetic. To share with his bandwagon child? How about setting the proper example? True story: I am 100% Yankees/Giants/Knicks/Rangers. When my firstborn child began watching sports with me, he announced he would be a fan of the Mets/Jets. He maintained this for a while, but in time, once realizing it was not irritating me as he had hoped, he abandoned the dark side and returned to the light. I was confident this would be the end result. Why? Because he was raised right.

Whereas this wuss of an author has demonstrated to his son that values are malleable, and it's perfectly fine to go along with the crowd, wherever that might lead. But, what else should one expect from the NYT?Yet another sign our civilization is doomed.