Think Again

HATE ME OUT AT THE BALLGAME
“Yankees suck! Yankees suck!” It was a summer night at Fenway Park, my
first and only time at a Boston Red Sox baseball game. In the seventh
inning, without warning, 37,000 people erupted into a chant. The entire
stadium was dissing the New York Yankees in perfect harmony.
I knew the two teams had a century-long rivalry, widely viewed as the
most heated in all of American professional sports. I took it for granted that
the Boston fans would root against the Yankees. I just didn’t expect it to
happen that day, because the Yankees weren’t even there.
The Red Sox were playing against the Oakland A’s. The Boston fans
were booing a team that was hundreds of miles away. It was as if Burger

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King fans were going head-to-head against Wendy’s in a taste test and
started chanting “McDonald’s sucks!”
I started to wonder if Red Sox fans hate the Yankees more than they
love their own team. Boston parents have been known to teach their kids to
flip the bird at the Yankees and detest anything in pinstripes, and 
YANKEES
SUCK
is apparently among the most popular T-shirts in Boston history. When
asked how much money it would take to get them to taunt their own team,
Red Sox fans requested an average of $503. To root for the Yankees, they
wanted even more: $560. The feelings run so deep that neuroscientists can
watch them light up people’s minds: when Red Sox fans see the Yankees
fail, they show immediate activation in brain regions linked to reward and
pleasure. Those feelings extend well beyond Boston: in a 2019 analysis of
tweets, the Yankees were the most hated baseball team in twenty-eight of
the fifty U.S. states, which may explain the popularity of this T-shirt:
I recently called a friend who’s a die-hard Red Sox fan with a simple
question: what would it take to get him to root for the Yankees? Without
pausing, he said, “If they were playing Al Qaeda . . . maybe.”
It’s one thing to love your team. It’s another to hate your rivals so much
that you’d consider rooting for terrorists to crush them. If you despise a