“Loyalty to any one sports team is pretty hard to justify. Because the players are always changing, the team could move to another city…you’re actually rooting for the clothes, when you get right down to it. You’re standing and cheering and yelling for your clothes to beat the clothes from another city. Fans will be so in love with a player, but if he goes to another team, they’ll boo him. This is the same human being in a different shirt, they hate him now! Boo! Different shirt!” –Jerry Seinfeld

I have irrationally followed several New York area sports teams for my entire life. My father enjoyed watching these teams (Mets, mostly, but also the Giants, Islanders, and Knicks), so that meant I watched it. In the days when every household had a single TV, you either watched the news or sports or whatever else your parents had on, or you found something else to do.

For nearly fifty years, I have followed these teams in good and bad years. Mostly bad, though the Mets won it all in ’86, the Giants have won it four times, and when I was very young the Islanders had their dynasty. It’s fun to debate the failures and successes of these teams with friends and family, not to mention the pure enjoyment we get when we watch athletes performing at a high level.

Since I was a boy back in the 1980s, there have always been rumblings that all was not right with these sports. There were occasional strikes, which my father held a dim view of. He earned barely enough to keep us afloat and was uninterested in hearing about millionaire players and their grievances against management, though as a union man he sided with the players.

There were corrupt owners moving their teams in the middle of the night to some new city. Luckily, New York is big enough that this didn’t apply to me, though perhaps we would have been better off if they’d abandoned us. My dad still recalled with bitterness the Dodgers leaving for LA but embraced the Mets when they arrived. He wasn’t a bettor, but legend has it that at his wedding he and his groomsmen stopped by the bar to find out the score of the Met game on June 2, 1962.

Like most, my sports interest is completely tied into these kinds of family stories. I spent countless hours watching these things with my dad and the rest of my family. It was always a special day when he brought home tickets so we could see a game in person. He’s been gone for more than a decade, but whenever I watch the Mets or any other sporting event, I think of him.

I stopped following sports for a bit in college and shortly thereafter. The baseball and hockey strikes of the early 90s disgusted me, and I lost all interest. But by the late 90s I was cheering for these teams once again. After my children were born, I had less time to watch such things, but I made sure to bring them to see the good guys in person once in a while. Today, in 2025, such excursions to see the big league teams are nonexistent for us, since prices are astronomical.

There have been some very disturbing events in every major sport over the past decade or so. Aside from strikes and lockouts, there have been plenty of allegations of game fixing in every major sport. The tarnish of the 2017 world series has still not worn off for me, nor has the scandal involving baseball’s biggest star who, he and MLB claim, was scammed by his interpreter, who stole millions from him to bet on games. No one bothered to look too hard into that one. As Pete Rose said at the time, what he didn’t realize back when he was banned for life in the 1980s was that he’d just needed an interpreter to take the fall. Baseball is big business, after all, run by billionaires who don’t want their authority, or their integrity, to be challenged. Having the biggest star on the planet banned would be bad for business. There are stadiums to build at taxpayer expense, after all.

This offseason, two pitchers have been banned and may go to jail for fixing games. The story is that they merely threw certain pitches badly to win small bets. Could be true. Might also be much more widespread than baseball admits. We know that at least two guys did this. How many more are out there? And how can a sport that did absolutely nothing to an entire team that was found to have cheated their way to a championship convince us that they are willing or able to police the cheating in their sport?

A generation ago, there was a lot of hand wringing over steroids, but the game fixing issue seems far worse to me. In my view, MLB cannot even ensure the integrity of their own game. It’s a dismal situation. Virtually every team has an agreement with a sports gambling company, a mind-boggling arrangement that was correctly shunned in past years. But now every ad for a baseball broadcast is urging you to bet on your favorite team. Not really a way to inspire confidence that we’re watching something legitimate. Perhaps MLB ought to become a league like the Savannah Bananas have, a humorous spectacle complete with players dancing and doing flips in the field.

And then there is Seinfeld’s quote, which I found enormously funny when he delivered it, but as time goes by it seems less so. He was joking, but not really. This week a fan favorite who Met fans watched grow up was sent packing to Texas, in the name of something called ‘run prevention,’ which normal humans used to call pitching and defense.

My children barely care about any of this, since it is far too expensive for us to go to any games or to even subscribe to the channels on which these games appear. My oldest son, at 13, expressed disappointment, since he loved the way Brandon Nimmo was always smiling.

Once or twice a year we go to the local single a team, which charges around $8 for a bleacher seat. My family has fun for an afternoon, and I  can pretend for a few hours that it is still just a game.