Baseball and football were highly regionalistic when I was a kid and on through most of 70s, until there were several waves of sales franchise moves. That period pretty much broke off my mild fan interest. But amazingly that all came back when the A's moved to Oakland. It took a few years, but the team became pretty popular and was adopted by the city in a big way. Rundown Oakland, basically a nowhere city, finally had something to brag about (along with the Raiders). These teams gave O-town that tough guy rustbelt reputation along with a certain pride. I got into that, even though I lived in queer effeminate `elite' Berkeley. I started watching baseball again when the Fourth Dynasty took off, partly because my kid was the right age and McGwire, Canseco, Henderson, Eckersley, etc were household names. Some of these guys were really stunning to watch. Canseco was a something of a joke. Canseco was in the news for carrying a automatic pistol in his car, slamming a truck into his ex-wife's car (she got the Porsche), and other trials of pauline. Some of the team were really devoted to the community, working with kids and schools. All this American homespun stuff that had been missing for a long time around here and it was nice to get some of that back. I was watching the World Series between the Giants and A's when the earthquake hit.
Then that great sort of local community feeling evaporated via the usual naked capitalist thing, squabbles over salaries, stadiums, franchise, really crushed a lot of community interest. This shit is over money and Oakland didn't have enough, so long Oakland.
I think sports have a lot of different social functions, depending on the particulars of the sport and how it is organized. What I am saying is that sports are much more complex phenomenon than most of the intelligenstia wants to admit. I should mention another social phenomenon that I am made aware of because I live across the way from a student apartment building, so I hear the tv's going, turned up loud and lots of beer and cheering, during football season. The young male bonding and competition thing. Football seems to be a guy thing, while baseball seem much more like a family thing. I never got into basketball, because I couldn't play it---too short. I preferred soccer because it seemed more equal, but most schools didn't offer it back when.
At one point while I was grumbling about the deterioration of news media into delusions of imperial war, I asked myself is there any concept of the real left in media? And it occurred to me, yes maybe sports. Even if the players are pumbed on drugs, the games are saturated with money, and the action is voiced over, there are real people actually doing something, battling it out in real time. So I think just the `reality' or `live' action factor in constrast to the mostly canned fantasy of the rest of the media is part of the attraction.
I'll bet quite a few of US commie intellectuals in the 1930s into the 1950s were serious baseball fans, especially in NYC and Chicago.
CG