Baltimore Fans Are Chirping : Turnaround Season Has Given Die-Hard Supporters a Lift

BALTIMORE —  In the eyes of the Rev. James Hainley was a trace of mist, in his voice the hint of a catch, as he talked about his favorite sports team.

“I remember the last game of the season with the (Milwaukee) Brewers in 1982,” said Hainley, pastor of the Chesaco Avenue United Methodist Church and dedicated Baltimore Orioles fan.

Hainley can be found at Memorial Stadium at least 20 times during the season.

“We were playing for the division title”--an unnecessary bit of explanation for most Oriole’s fans who well remember the team’s climb that fell one game short of overtaking the Brewers--”and we lost it miserably. After the game, the players didn’t believe that we cheered so long and loud, until they finally came out of the clubhouse and acknowledged us.”

“To me,” concluded Mr. Hainley, his voice heavy with emotion, “that was one of the most precious memories of this ballpark.”

There has not been much systematic study of the psychological impact of sports on fans, but take a look around Baltimore this summer--a summer that has seen the Orioles unexpectedly in or near first place for most of the season--and the phenomenon is clearly evident.

The days of Rod Macklin, for example, are focused on one thing. The 26-year-old stock analyst at Legg Mason arranges his time so that at 7:35 each evening and 1:35 Sunday afternoons--or whatever other time the Orioles are scheduled to play--he will be following the game, either in the ballpark, or watching on TV, or listening on the radio.

“The only time I miss them,” he said, “is when I’m out of town. And then I catch up with CNN or ESPN. Or I call my father--he’s listening.”

“I’ve always been a huge fan,” added Macklin, who counts among his personal friends Oriole Jim Traber, “but I don’t think I’ve ever organized my day around watching or listening to every game, like I do this year. This year, coming off last year, the turnaround has been so incredible. Every game means so much. You want to know every amazing thing that’s going to happen.”

“It isn’t important to me, yet it’s the most important thing in my life.”

Larry King, Washington talk-show host and Oriole fan extraordinaire, has given a lot of thought to this powerful hold that the team has on his emotions and psyche. “You’d better believe he’s up when they win and down when they lose,” his producer Judy Thomas confirmed.

“Why should a team that lives 50 miles from where I live, with players, some that I know, some that I don’t know, who work for their own money, none of which I will get, why should this affect me so much?” King has wondered time and time again. “Yet it does.”

He has tried to analyze the pull. “It has nothing to do with my success in my career, with my love life, with my children, with my health, with how my car works. It has nothing to do with any of these things, but everything to do with all of them. If they win the pennant and my car doesn’t start, I don’t care.”

It is not for nothing, King reminds us, that the word “fan” is short for “fanatical.”

Although the psychology of rooting has yet to make much of an impact in medical literature, a small (and unscientific) sampling of several mental-health professionals in the Baltimore area found that it is definitely a subject to which they have given thought. Especially in 1989, when the Orioles have been in, or near, first place, for most of the season. But their thoughts are as likely to be prompted by their own personal emotional reactions as by their patients’ needs.

“If the Orioles have won, it just gives me a little extra cushion,” said J. Raymond DePaulo Jr., a Johns Hopkins psychiatrist who specializes in depression. “If they lost, I just feel a little low.”

Dr. DePaulo said he cannot remember treating a patient who was referred because of depression just because his team lost. But, he added, “clinically, almost anything can precipitate a depressive episode in someone who has those tendencies.”

Larry Fishel, an area psychologist and fervent Orioles fan, said that in 1979--the year the Orioles blew a 3-1 World Series lead over the Pittsburgh Pirates--he treated at least five cases of depression that turned out to be partly rooted in the team’s disappointing performance.

“They came in for other reasons,” he said, “but as soon as we got into therapy, we got into baseball. The Orioles blowing the Series had a whole lot to do with how these people were feeling.”

Dr. Fishel proposed several reasons why a team’s performance can have such a personal impact on a fan’s life. “It’s identification with your city,” he explained. “And some people live vicariously through their sports teams.”

Psychologist Lee McCabe agreed that vicarious identification is a key concept in understanding the fan’s mentality. “The word ‘identification’ doesn’t begin to do justice to the depths to which someone equates the team with himself,” he said. “It’s not just the team losing, it really is you. And when the team wins it’s a major source of self-esteem and self-worth.”

And Dr. McCabe brought up another issue that frequently rears its ugly head when discussing Baltimore sports fans.

“Very few individuals have diminished the quality of so many people’s lives as Bob Irsay did when he moved the Colts from Baltimore,” Dr. McCabe said. “It isn’t just losing a team, it’s losing a major means of gratification. I think this is something that has been minimized by everyone but Baltimore Colts fans.”

The idea of rooting for a team, identifying with it and internalizing its ups and downs, is not unique to Baltimore or to baseball or football, Larry King pointed out. “This is a universal concept,” he said. “Karl Marx was wrong--religion isn’t the opiate of the masses. Sports is the opiate of the masses. The Soviet fan who cheers his soccer team, the Dodger fan in Chavez Ravine, have the same emotions and same reactions as the O’s fan on 33rd Street.”

As explanation, King proposed, “It’s an escape from the humdrum. It’s the unknowing of it. I know what time I’ll have dinner tonight, I know when I’ll leave the office, but I have no idea who will win the Orioles game tonight. No one in the world knows who will win that game.”

Columnist and TV commentator George Will, another Oriole fan of national stature, sees the instinct to root for your team as an integral part of human nature. “There is a certain unanalyzeable atavism in all of us,” he said. “Some people invade Poland, some go to baseball games.”

And any talk about cheering for a team, about experiencing emotional highs and lows along with your team’s wins and losses, eventually--in this city--gets back to the way the 1989 Orioles have astounded their fans and the baseball-watching public at large.

“The thing about this year is the way the team has done such an incredible job of hooking everyone’s emotions,” said Mark Cohen, a senior writer for Baltimore Magazine who characterizes himself as “always and forever” an Orioles fan. “It was so unexpected. Then this blush of wonderful things happening would fade, then it would surge again. It has played a fan’s emotions so much. There have just been so many moments during the season that have solidified the bond between the fans and the team.”

After the Orioles registered one of the most dismal seasons in baseball last year, Cohen said: “Our expectations were reduced to nothing. Whatever they did was a plus. Everything was gravy, and the gravy kept coming and coming. It makes the fan euphoric. I’ve been a fan my whole life, but I’ve never been so involved in my fanmanship as I am this year.”