Do you mean socialism like the bailout of banks and financial institutions that got themselves into this mess we are in at our expense. Is that the kind of socialism you are referring to?

And, I think you'd better check your facts before you start calling the Democrats elite when Gov. Palin has spent 150,000 on her wardrobe in the last three months. The hockey Mom's I know pay more money for their kids skates than they do on their wardrobe. I haven't spent 150,000 on my wardrobe in my lifetime and if she really was one of us she could have found a lot less inexpensive places to buy her clothing and outfit her family. She was clearly set up to be the patsy for McCain's failing campaign and if he would have vetted her he would have known how ignorant she really is.

This is clearly the pot calling the kettle black.

You come across so angry and dare I say bitter. What is your real problem. I bet you have a few.

Being a fan is a consumer choice? Oh get out of here! Who thought that up? The Lehman Brothers? You make it sound like we all can just jump from one market to another market...because...well, the markets are there. How silly.

After 30 years when Green Bay won another Super Bowl, I was right there pulling for them as I did the one they won 30 years earlier. That's not a consumer choice. That's a commitment.

And therein lies your trouble, dude. It is a sign of character to exhibit loyalty to one's home team regardless of their season. Any schmuck can jump on a winning team's bandwagon.

When you're a fan of a particular team -- say the crazy Phillies of 1993 or the remarkable Yankees of 1996 or the never-die Red Sox of 2004 -- isn't convincing other people why these were great teams one of things you try to do is to? Don't you try to convert them? And, if they buy what you're selling, have you made them bandwagoneers?

The baseball playoffs are (for me) far and away the most entertaining playoffs out there. (I'll put the Euro or World Cups right up there too.) And i don't care who's playing -- i always watch. I love that so many have referenced 1991: That series was flat-out glorious and i had no stake in it: I'm from Philly! Oh, right, which means i must correct one sentence in this paragraph: I do care who's playing -- particularly when it's the Phillies! -- but their being in it doesn't ever prevent me from watching playoff baseball. But i don't watch as much of the regular season as i did when i was 10. I catch a couple games a year: This year i saw one Mets game, one Yankees game, and one Cubs game, but i don't think i watched a single other game start to finish all summer. But i've watched almost every single playoff game. I suppose, then, there's an argument that that too is some sort of bandwagon. The playoff bandwagon. The adrenaline bandwagon. The Fox bandwagon? (Sorry about that last one...)

Lastly, let's take a gander at those playoff ticket prices, eh? Who is it that's attending these playoff games? I'm guessing those crazy towel-waving Philly fans and cowbell-whatevering Rays fans at these games aren't exclusively made up of the "die-hard" set. In fact i'd bet quite a good number of those people -- not all, most decidedly not all -- are part of a bandwagon.

Albeit a very expensive one.

I grew up in Dallas and was a huge Cowboys fan, but moved to Denver the year I turned 16 - coincidentally the year that Elway became a Bronco. I've been a Broncos fan ever since and I also tried to maintain my enthusiasm for the Cowboys. The past few years, it's just gotten difficult to be a Cowboys fan. It was easy to ignore Jerry Jones in the 90s because there were also great players like Emmitt Smith and Troy Aikman. But now I just kind of hate them - the ownership and many of the players just don't live up to my memories of players like Roger Staubach, Robert Newhouse, and Randy White.

The other factor in changing allegiances is proximity. It's hard to really be a fan when you don't see the broadcasts regularly, don't get the media coverage, can't go to the games, and can't talk about the team with fellow fans. Soon, you lose track of the annual prospects and trades, then the changes in the organization's personality seem sudden rather than gradual. You just miss the continuity of being in constant exposure to a given team. So now I'm a Broncos fan because I've lived here my entire adult life and feel like I know the team. I can't say what would happen if I moved, but there's nothing wrong with supporting the local team in a new town. Fandom begins with community, and unless you are from a big east-coast city with large numbers of emigrants, it's hard to maintain that sense of community in a new location.

Having seen a couple of people bring this up, I'll take a crack at it.

Short answer: people follow sports for all kinds of reasons. If you can't understand how others can switch team/city loyalty when you haven't and wouldn't, then it's likely because the reasons you follow the sport differ from the reasons of those others. (And that gets at what King is saying in this article, doesn't it?)

Longer answer, partly anecdotal: when I was a kid, my team was also the 70s Phillies: Schmidt, Luzinski, Bowa, Boone, Maddox, Carlton (Rose was a Johnny-come-lately! Though obviously we welcomed his bat in the '80 WS; but to me, Rose was first a guy you hated because he played so well for the Reds.) I was obsessed with that team in the 70s. I was 12 when they won the WS, a great gift to a child who'd been loyal for years.

I realize now in retrospect that I drifted away from baseball after that year mainly because the person in my family who had most shared my interest and watched games with me was my brother; and just before the '80 WS, he married and moved away from home. I was moving on in my interests, becoming more of a diehard science-fiction/fantasy geek, fonder of reading than watching sports. It was my brother who'd played catch and hit baseballs with me, not my father. At any event, I drifted, and kept right on drifting. "My guys" were gone from the team, anyway. (Boone was my favorite player - I don't claim to have had a great deal of taste - and I admit that their trading him to the A's was another deathblow to my loyalty.)

Basically -- I was more loyal to the players than I was to "the team".

In adulthood, yes, I admit it, I'm a Red Sox fan. More casual than obsessive. But, I've lived in Boston for 17 years; I feel I've come by it honestly. I didn't just move here and say, "Well, that's it! I'm a Sox fan and a Patriots fan now!" I let it creep up on me by osmosis. And in those pre-Web days, pre-MLB network package on cable... I wouldn't have been able to follow the old hometown team meaningfully anyway, not the way you can in today's market. (But, to be clear, I wasn't interested in following the old hometown team by the time I moved away from Philly.)

The reason I'm a Red Sox fan now, not a Phillies fan, is because you can't exist in this city without being surrounded by talk about the team. You pick it up. You get to know the names and the faces, you hear about the games. You start to piece together the narrative of the team. The narrative changes year to year, but sometimes there are through-lines, sometimes motifs are repeated (although there is never a guarantee they will come out the same way again -- look at the way this year's ALCS repeated the motif of two previous ones, but the outcome wasn't the same.

So that's the second thing I discovered about myself and following sports -- I'm interested in the narratives. I'm interested in watching teams where I know who the players are, what the story is behind each, and in how the story of their dynamic together builds and plays out. Sports seasons develop into competing narratives -- the Rays' Cinderella year, versus the RSox "banged up defending champions falling behind, as they have done before - can they overcome steep odds again?"

My theory is that sports fandom is all about the narratives -- both the ones the teams create, and the ones we tell each other when we're within the same fan-base. We enjoy arguing about what the narrative *is*. Hell, we enjoy tossing in piquant but nonsensical factors, like "momentum" and "chemistry", the power of which has less to do with facts and more to do with the way they spice up the story, which is what many people enjoy consuming.

If I had stayed a Phillies fan all my life... in reality, I would still have been "switching teams". I would have had to transfer my interest and loyalty from one set of teammates, to another. Not that I'm saying that's hard to do; usually, it happens gradually. You add and subtract pieces, some harder to let go of or to add than others. (Goodbye, Manny! Hello, Jason Bay!)

Believe me -- now that the RSox are out, I'll be rooting for the Phillies in this series. A feeling of nostalgic loyalty, even though I don't know the guys. But I do know the team's overall narrative. And the thing is, even if the RSox had been in it, I would have been partly rooting for the Phillies ("it's been longer since they've had WS win" trumping even the RSox "can we do it even though we're banged up?" narrative); and because I felt replete at the RSox win last year, their loss this year didn't really sting. I was kind of happy for the Rays.

Call me crazy if you like. Just don't tell me I'm "doing it wrong". I'm doing sports fandom in the way it works for me, even if you don't understand it.