Assemble a portfolio of teams. My attachment to the A’s stems mainly from the fact that I grew up near Oakland, but it didn’t hurt that my first years as a fan coincided with three straight World Series triumphs. When A’s owner Charlie Finley subsequently jettisoned most of the team’s stars and the A’s fell to 63-98 in 1977, I turned my attention across the bay to the San Francisco Giants, who weren’t great but were at least better than that. When the A’s started winning again in the early 1980s, I went back to focusing on them. When the two teams met in the World Series in 1989, I favored the A’s (who won in an earthquake-interrupted sweep), but I was thrilled when the Giants won their first World Series in 76 years in 2010. This is a variant of fair-weather fandom that, like Harry Markowitz’s portfolio theory, involves not picking one best team but two or more teams that will presumably be good at different times. It’s not foolproof, and to some extent I was just lucky in picking two frequently if not overwhelmingly successful franchises. But if you come to a sport without any childhood allegiances, as I did with Premier League soccer upon moving to London in 2000, you can be strategic about this. For various reasons, I chose perennially mediocre West Ham as “my team,” and I will surely be over the moon if they ever win anything significant, but I quietly adopted much-more-successful Liverpool and somewhat-more-successful Tottenham as backups.
Root for players, not just teams. Being an A’s fan has long entailed watching beloved players go on to riches and success elsewhere. In the 1970s, when Reggie Jackson, Catfish Hunter and other A’s stars left for bigger-spending teams, I was offended by this. Since then, and especially since Beane took over as general manager in 1997, I’ve gotten used to it, as have most A’s fans. When former A’s players return to the Oakland Coliseum in an opposing team’s uniform, they usually get a warm reception, not boos. I wrote a column in 2015 arguing that Beane’s frequent personnel changes had become a major source of entertainment for A’s fans during down years. The bigger entertainment value since then for me, though, has probably come from watching two of my favorite former A’s, Yoenis Cespedes of the New York Mets and Josh Reddick of the Houston Astros, during the 2015 and 2017 World Series. More generally, appreciating great athletes, and cheering them on when they’re facing any team but one of your own, seems like a reliable happiness-increaser.
You don’t have to pay attention. If the A’s were having bad season, I wouldn’t have bothered to stop in the park and check the score last Wednesday. I spend far more time on the A’s during winning seasons than losing ones. So much more that, when the successful A’s teams of recent decades have finished their seemingly inevitable playoff collapses, my disappointment has been followed within a few hours by a sense of relief and near-elation that I can stop spending so much danged time watching baseball. Maybe this is the key: I’m not a die-hard sports fan. True die-hards probably really are miserable.
Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business. He was the editorial director of Harvard Business Review and wrote for Time, Fortune and American Banker. He is the author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”