SPORTS TEAMS AND PARTIAL LOYALTIES: Comments on two stray remarks picked up reading two different articles. In the opening few paragraphs of Cass Sunstein’s ssrn.com paper on “Moral Heuristics,” Sunstein wonders why we value loyalty to sports teams, when in fact they are just collections of strangers. Later on in the essay, he considers that loyalty might be a proxy for more “moral” types of loyalty, i.e., if you show dedication in this instance, you may be signaling that you’ll be more reliable generally, more prone to stick with people even when the going gets rough.

This strikes me as a reasonable enough empirical proposition. But it seems just as reasonable to say that sports loyalty may be essentially misguided, and so offers no or even a negative signal about one’s trustworthiness in other matters – it may signal that you get obsessed with minor things, and hold onto irrational attachments. Loyalty to sports teams qua collections of strangers shows lack of judgment.

So the argument about loyalty for sports teams as a proxy for other types of loyalty seems, at least conceptually, a wash. I’d be happier with an argument that showed that loyalty to sports teams was intrinsically valuable in itself, perhaps as a form of civic pride, or in return for the many happy moments the team has given you. Further, a sports team is no more a collection of strangers than, say, a university or a company. Yet we prize loyalty to these bodies – because we sense that they are more than just the individuals that constitute a given team: they contain a history, a legacy, and we want to be faithful to that (this is what sustains us even when the team is losing, and we think of switching our allegiance to a winning team). If we question why loyalty to a sports team is a good, I wonder if we open the door to questions about institutional loyalty in general – why be partial to one’s university, one’s company, one’s city, one’s nation?

This gets me to the second remark I want to comment on. In an article on the moral sentiments, Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson have a footnote where they say something to the effect of: “it’s not as if we root for our favorite sports team because we think they are somehow intrinsically good, or at least more so than the other team.” This strikes me as superficially correct, but it may disguise a deeper truth. I think maybe on reflection that we do, in some sense, think our teams are “good.” We think this because, if we spend enough time watching them, we get to know the individual stories of the team members, about the ups and downs of the team, and the challenges they’ve had to overcome to get this far – and so on. We construct a narrative about the team so that, somehow, we come to feel that they “deserve” to win.

Note that we might also apply the D’Arms and Jacobson footnote to other attachments, say, attachments to one’s nation – we could ask, for instance, whether we root for our nation because we think it intrisically better than other nations. Here it’s a little trickier, because we may feel that our nation is intrinsically better than other nations, not because it is ours, but because it embodies certain values or institutions which we think ought to prevail.

With sports teams, we are more likely to say that we are rooting for a particular team because it is “our” team. Yet it is also the case, as I argued above, that when we stick with are team, we are liable to find things that make our team worthy of winning not just because the team is “ours.” We seem to get into rooting for them for partial reasons, but then that grows into finding more objective reasons for the particular merit of the team.

Why do we love our children more than other people’s children? Because we think our children are intrinsically good, and other people’s aren’t? No. But, at the same time, I don’t think we merely love our children because they are ours. We find qualities in our children which justifies our attachment to them.

Another interesting thing about sports team loyalty. The narrative we construct about why our team deserves to win will differ with each team and set of circumstances. Recall how people were rooting for the Yankees to win the World Series after 9/11. There was some sense that the Yankees deserved to win because New York had suffered so much. The opposing narrative might have claimed that Arizona’s eventual victory was a triumph of managing and grit over money. Which narrative was superior?

I wonder if which narratives we find to be compelling depend on the sports team which we root for. The claim would be, then, that our team somehow constitutes what we think of as “deservingness to win.” With the Cubs, they might deserve to win because they haven’t won the World Series in so long. But why should this be considered valuable, as a reason for the Cubs to win? Weirdly, the loyalty seems to precede the narrative, and to give it its shape.

A final note: we might want to dismiss much of the above and say, simply, that “the best team deserves to win.” But what does “best” mean? The team with the best pitching, the best hitting, the best overall package? The team with the best sportsmanship? How do we define these notions? On any given day, a team may be better than another along any of these axes. As with other cases, “best” is too vague, too empty of content – so other values rush in and give it substance.

- posted by Chad @ Tuesday, September 16, 2003