Report: Mets Fans Among Least Loyal
If you are reading this or any other Mets blog, chances are that you are a loyal fan; you stay faithful through hell and high water, or even worse, the collapses of 2007 and 2008 and the awful seasons since. However we all know Mets fans can certainly be of the fair weather variety, jumping on and off the bandwagon when times are good and bad, respectively. Well, a new report says there are more of them than there are of us.
A company called Brand Keys released its annual survey on MLB fan loyalty and it puts the Mets among the most disloyal in all of baseball. Mets fans rank as the 26th loyal, ahead of only fans of the lowly Mariners, Pirates, Royals and Astros. To make matters worse, the report ranks Yankees fans as the most loyal. Let’s add more injury to insult — Phillies fans are second and Braves fans are fifth (the Giants and Cardinals are three and four).
There is a very important caveat to this report. It states:
The Brand Keys Sports Fan Loyalty Index gives an apples-to-apples comparison of the intensity with which fans support the home team vs. the corresponding values for the fans of other teams in the market.
So Mets fans are being compared to those of the Yankees, Giants, Jets, Knicks, etc. Mets fans specifically might be more loyal to their team than, say, the Phillies, but compared to the other New York teams, they are less loyal.
Also, I have to take issue with the Braves being fifth. These are fans who notoriously do not sell out playoff games. How can you call fans loyal who do not even buy tickets to the playoffs? But perhaps Atlanta fans are so much more loyal to the Braves than to the Falcons and Hawks, and that is apparently the comparison being made.
Regardless of what this report says, there are millions of extremely loyal Mets fans out there. Hopefully some day soon our loyalty will be rewarded.
Whatever!!! I’m a Met fan for life.. Love them no matter how good or bad they are!!!
As someone who has written several books on the team and depends on the loyalty of Mets fans–or at least loyal book buyers–I call this survey crap. If the Yankees were run by the Wilpons, they would draw worse than the late 1970s Mets.