Is Boston a football town or a baseball town?
Baseball Town – Kevin Carpenter
As someone that is not from Massachusetts, I can tell you, Boston is a baseball town first and every other sports town comes in at a distant second. I recently conducted a study where I counted the sports clothing that I saw in a two-day period. This included all jerseys, jackets and hats. The study was conducted on campus, on the red line train, in Back Bay, and Dorchester. Over the two-day period I saw 104 pieces of Red Sox apparel, 10 Patriots jerseys, 28 Bruins outfits and five Celtics shirts. This study was conducted during football, hockey and what should be basketball season. Granted most of the Red Sox numbers were made up of hats, which are quite inexpensive compared to actual clothing.
The numbers though show that even when it is no longer baseball season and even after a disastrous season which saw one of the biggest Sept. collapses in the history of baseball, Boston still reps the Sox. As an outsider, let me tell you that the rest of the country sees Boston as a baseball town. When someone is asked, “Where are you from?” and the answer is, “I’m from Boston,” the reply is usually one of two standard replies. One is, “Oh sweet, I love the Sox, go Papi!” The second one is, “Fuck the Red Sox, they’re a bunch of scum bags. Say something dumb like cahh or yahhhd.” You very rarely hear someone say, “Oh really that’s cool, how bout that Danny Woodhead fella?”
Football Town – Jon Mael
You know, up until 2007, we’d be on the same page, but this baseball stronghold has rivaled Pittsburgh lately with its love for the NFL. The Patriots won their first Super Bowl in 2001, in a Cinderella run orchestrated by a young backup named Brady. This was Beantown’s first pro sports title in 15 years, so for a whole generation this was the first taste they had of victory.
Fast forward to 2011. Someone who was 13 when the Pats won Super Bowl 36 is 23 now. Who goes to sports bars? Who calls in to sports radio? Who buys tickets? The Pats’ top market these days is men aged 18-30, who only remember the Patriots being winners. People gravitate towards successful teams and the Patriots are the standard. 2002 is the only year of the last decade that the Pats didn’t have a realistic chance of winning it all, and results like that lead to jersey sales, ticket sales, and all other kinds of pride related purchases you can think of.
Nowadays, Boston basically stops on Sundays. Granted, every pro franchise in Boston has won a title since 2001, but the Pats broke through first, and this gave them a giant fan base. Think about it-when was the last time you had 16 of your buddies over to watch a Sunday afternoon Red Sox game, or a Saturday night Bruins game in the regular season? The answer is probably never. Boston is not as working class as other NFL towns (Detroit, Cincinnati, Baltimore), but Bostonians have always had a rugged, can-do attitude, which is a major hallmark of NFL fans.
