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:
“Ethnic life in the United States has become a sort of contest like baseball in which the blacks are always the Chicago Cubs.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“Compared to football, baseball is almost an Oriental game, minimizing individual stardom, requiring a wide range of aggressive and defensive skills, and filled with long periods of inaction and irresolution. It has no time limitations. Football, on the other hand, has immediate goals, resolution on every single play, and a lot of violence—itself a highlight. It has clearly distinguishable hierarchies: heroes and drones.”
—Jerry Mander, U.S. advertising executive, author. Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, ch. 15, Morrow (1978)
“How, in one short century, has this ersatz sport so strangled the consciousness of the country in the grip of its flabby tentacles that the mention of women’s baseball gets no reaction other than blank amazement?”
—Darlene Mehrer, As quoted in Women in Baseball. Ch. 6, by Gai Ingham Berlage (1994)