Sports Geek II

If you haven't read the first section, please do so by scrolling a little down. It's a multi-part essay, so you'll benefit more by reading the first section.

(continued from below)
The Sports Geek understands players strengths, weaknesses, comings, goings, and other such qualities, and chooses to take part in sports by analyzing these things. Most Sports Geeks have hometown teams they support. They follow and love their local teams with much the same fervor as their other sports-loving friends, yet the Sports Geek is typically more critical than his counterparts. Let me share a story with you:
Back in 2005, I was at an A's-Red Sox game with my fellow Sports Geek Adam, a Red Sox fan. Both teams had in their bullpen what's known as a "Lefty One Out Guy" (or LOOGY.) LOOGYs are random left handed pitchers in the bullpen who come in to face the big left handed slugger on the other team (Like Barry Bonds or David Ortiz) and little else. For the Red Sox it was Alan Embree, and for the A's it was Ricardo Rincon. It's fun to hate on the LOOGYs because they typically come in to high pressure situations and occasionally blow up just like any other pitcher. The difference is that when the LOOGYs blow up, its usually pretty bad. Anyways, so when Embree came in, Adam jokingly handed me the game, since he figured Embree would give it up. When Rincon came in later, I jokingly did the same. Immediately I was hounded by a certain lady in the season ticket holder's section as not being a true fan. Supposedly a true fan would support their team, and not rag on Rincon as I did.
Was she right? She believed that being a fan entailed support of their team, and not picking and choosing when to support and not to support. To her, that is fandom. For the Sports Geek though, fandom is about evaluating what is and isn't successful for a team, and having fun supporting the good practices. Sports Geeks typically go deeper into the game, to try to find out exactly what seems to work, and if a team replicates those practices, the Sports Geek is happy. This most commonly takes the form of Stat Analysis such as Sabermetrics but it can also take forms such as not signing overrated players, key managerial decisions like pinch hits and sacrifice bunts, or the trading or hiring of better players. If the team doesn't reproduce these things, often times the Sports Geek criticizes the team in somewhat of an older brother fashion. As in "Oh, you silly Giants. You'll never win your division with old farts such as Ray Durham and Omar Vizquel, you need to do better!"
The heart of this particular issue is that the Sports Geek realizes that they're not involved in the game, but are capable of analyzing what makes a good team and what doesn't. There are trends to winning teams, and once those trends are realized, the Sports Geek sits on the sidelines to wait and see if their team can reproduce those traits better than other teams. Sports Geeks still root for a team, but in a slightly different way. Sports Geeks are ready to criticize and argue, and are ready to prove themselves.

That's all for today. On Friday there will be more.