Baseball
Along with football, baseball is one of the more popular sports in Pennsylvania. The state has both major league and minor league baseball teams.
Major league teams are: the Philadelphia Phillies, the 2008 World Series champions, and the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Phillies are by far the more popular team, compiling over 200 consecutive sellouts. They led the league in attendance, beating out other favorites such as the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. The Phillies, in addition to their home field success, travel well, as many Phillies fans go to other ballparks to watch their Phillies. In addition to the attendance success, the Phillies also have won the National League East 5 consecutive times, and have had the best record in baseball in 2010 and 2011. The Pirates, on the other hand, have experienced very little success over the past 20 years. The attendance has been in the lower third of the MLB for more than 10 years, as they have a tough time drawing people to games. The Pirates have not had a winning season in 19 years, and in doing so, many sportswriters have labeled them with the dubious distinction of being the worst sports franchise of all time.
Pennsylvania also has its share of minor league baseball teams. These are: the Lehigh Valley IronPigs and the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders in Triple-A, the Reading Phillies, the Harrisburg Senators, the Erie SeaWolves, and the Altoona Curve in Double-A, the State College Spikes and Williamsport Crosscutters in Short-Season A, and the Lancaster Barnstormers and York Revolution in the independent Atlantic League of Professional Baseball.
Read more about this topic: Sports In Pennsylvania
Famous quotes containing the word baseball:
“It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“The salary cap ... will be accepted about the time the 13 original states restore the monarchy.”
—Tom Reich, U.S. baseball agent. New York Times, p. 16B (August 11, 1994)
“I don’t like comparisons with football. Baseball is an entirely different game. You can watch a tight, well-played football game, but it isn’t exciting if half the stadium is empty. The violence on the field must bounce off a lot of people. But you can go to a ball park on a quiet Tuesday afternoon with only a few thousand people in the place and thoroughly enjoy a one-sided game. Baseball has an aesthetic, intellectual appeal found in no other team sport.”
—Bowie Kuhn (b. 1926)