Sunday, May 29, 2011

Arizona fans... You don't know how good you have it




















It's Memorial Day and yes, the Arizona Diamondbacks are in first place all by themselves. I've been looking up pre season predictions for the past few minutes. I couldn't find one expert who picked the D'Backs to win the west.

But here they are about 1/3 of the way through.

Is there a stranger franchise than Arizona?
They were an expansion team who won 100 games in their second year.
By year 4 they won the best World Series of the past 20 years.
3 years later they were a 100 loss team.
3 years later they were hosting the NLCS.
3 years later they nearly lost 100 games.

And now they are in first place again.

When they were reckless in their spending, they created their signature moment (the 2001 Championship.)

When they built the team responsibly, they tore it down almost instantly.

They've had four unique managers in Buck Showalter, Bob Brenly, Bob Melvin and Kirk Gibson.

And in 14 seasons they seem to average 3 or 4 different uniform combinations per year.

I took Diamondback fans to task in 2007 for not selling out their games and in 2008 for not supporting their team.

Of course I am a raging hypocrite. I am a transplant who won't root for the local team, but I am asking the good people of Phoenix to do just that.

As I understand there are a ton of Cubs fans who have somehow landed in Arizona. There could be happiness for Cub fans if they root for the local team. In the last 103 years, the Cubs have won a grand total of one post season series (the 2003 Division Series.)

The Diamondbacks have won 4 post season series, including one against the Cubs.

Seriously, I understand how hard it can be to change loyalties. But in less than 15 seasons the Diamondbacks have given their fans thrills and enough valleys to weed out the bandwagon fans.

They are 1/3 of the way to ANOTHER Division winner.
That would be the team's 5th in 14 years.

That's a 35% success rate.
For the Cubs if they made the post season 35% of the time they would have 37 Octobers as opposed to 16.

I'm just saying.

The D'Backs are fun.
Just try and keep up with the correct up to date hat.

















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