I was meeting somebody for a drink after work last week but was running a little early, so I sat down on a bench in City Hall Park in lower Manhattan, pulled out my phone and checked how my Oakland A’s were doing (if you’re drawing a blank, it’s a baseball team; “A’s” is short for Athletics).
They were beating the Toronto Blue Jays 4-0. I looked over the scoring summary and noticed that every run so far had been either scored or driven in by light-hitting catcher Jonathan Lucroy. When I texted this thrilling news to my son, he responded, “huh.” I toggled back to the game and the A’s had scored again, with Lucroy driving in the run. This news got an “lol” from my son. I got up and started walking again but stopped outside my destination to look again, at which point I learned that shortstop Marcus Semien had mucked things up by scoring the sixth run, although Lucroy did cross home plate a few seconds later to make it 7-0. This merited a “shoot.”
It was a moment of baseball bliss (not to mention father-son bonding) in a summer during which the A’s have afforded many of them. The team is doing that thing it has done every few years during the nearly 21-year tenure of general manager Billy Beane: that thing where an unheralded, mostly underpaid assortment of players starts winning game after game after game. But I’m not here to write about “Moneyball,” the book and movie that put Beane on the business-conference speaking circuit (I have in the past). I’m here to write about sports and happiness.
In a working paper released this spring, University of Sussex economists Peter Dolton and George MacKerron make the case that the two are not compatible. Soccer fans in the U.K., they found, report much bigger declines in happiness after their team loses a game than gains in happiness after their team wins. As the Washington Post's Wonkblog put it in the headline of a post that summarized the study, "British economists prove it: Sports destroy happiness."
The study is a testament to the inventiveness of modern empirical economics. Dolton and MacKerron used data from the Mappiness iPhone app created by MacKerron and Susana Mourato of the London School of Economics, which pings users a couple of times a day, asks them how they’re feeling, who they’re with, where they are and what they’re doing, and also figures out their approximate location from the iPhone’s global positioning system and a noise-level measure. They sifted the Mappiness data to identify soccer fans and figure out which teams they probably supported, then scraped the internet for game times, scores and betting data (to indicate which team was expected to win). Really, it is all quite impressive.
I nonetheless find it hard to believe that sports truly does destroy happiness, at least for most fans. This is partly for the list of possible reasons that Dolton and MacKerron include at the end of their paper, such as mismeasurement and the pleasure derived from “being in a tribe.” But it’s also because I would guess that most people who follow sports are smart enough to do it in ways that don’t leave them utterly bereft when a particular team loses.
The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson outlined one approach in May, that of rooting for teams that, you know, win:
Rooting for winners is more than acceptable—it’s commendable. Fans shouldn’t put up with awfully managed teams for decades just because their parents liked those teams, as if sports were governed by the same rules and customs as medieval inheritance. Fans should feel free to shop for teams the way they do for any other product.
Thompson to some extent inherited his fair-weather fandom from an uncle who indoctrinated him at an early age as a supporter of the incomparably successful New York Yankees. But while I don’t think he’s wrong about the merits of rooting for winners, there are diminishing returns. Dolton and MacKerron found that the happiness boost from a win is smaller and the happiness decrease from a loss greater if your team is expected to win. I can attest from personal experience that the mood at home football games at the University of Alabama, which is expected to win pretty much every time, is weirdly tense and dour.
There is a way, though, to get mostly good vibes out of sports without forgoing underdog victories and abandoning childhood loyalties. Let’s call it nonbinary fandom. In my (Oakland A’s-centric) experience, it consists of three main elements: