AHC: Baseball Hooligans? Make Baseball Culture More Like Euro Soccer

Your challenge is to create a scenario where American Baseball Culture developed in a way similar to European Football Culture. How do we get passionate grass roots fan organizations and demonstrations. This could include fan parades through the streets before games. Tifo style displays in the crowds from Ultra supporters including streamers, flares, flags, bands, and smoke. The dark side of the culture as well including hooligans and riots. Opposing firms brawling in the streets. Fan groups with right and left wing political ideologies. You can even include subcultures like casuals. Stadiums divided into home and away fans. How, why and when does this happen? Who was the first team to embrace all of this? Who had the first firm? What two team supporters had the first brawl? Who has the most heated rivalry?
 
Have the teams develop organically around neighborhoods in big cities, and have multiple teams in every city. Picture a team in every borough in NYC (maaaaaaaybe Staten Island, certainly one in Long Island) and maybe even multiples in one city.

One example is a low-level minor league in which Minneapolis and St. Paul both have teams that are, predictably, arch-rivals. Picture if those teams became THE teams in the Twin Cities from the start and there was no uniting team like the Twins (notice how all the teams in the Twin Cities are called Minnesota rather than named after a city? Now go the other direction.) Now picture if EVERYONE in Minneapolis lived and died with the local team (the Millers OTL, with St. Paul uncreatively being called the Saints.)

The closest thing we have is probably college rivalries, and most of them don’t have the benefit of geographic proximity. I’m from Columbus, Ohio, home of the Ohio State Buckeyes, and people love and die with them. However, their closest rival is four hours’ drive away, so there’s not a lot of hooliganism and it’s largely discouraged today.

One would also have to make violence and severe pranks controversial rather than universally discouraged if not outright forbidden. A San Francisco Giants fan ended up in the hospital fighting for his life after being brutally attacked by a fan of the rival LA Dodgers - even fellow Dodgers fans condemned the attack unanimously. Less severely, an Alabama football fan poisoned several trees that were important to rival Auburn - even Bama fans were upset. One would have to have either a culture in which a sizable number of fans have a tolerance for acts like this or a set of unwritten rules for when certain otherwise unacceptable acts are allowable (sucker-punching and hospitalizing a rival fan who is not acting aggressively probably still wouldn’t be allowed, but let’s say it was a fight that got out of hand. Also, let’s say Auburn fans had made Bama’s stadium toilets explode the year before or something. That may make the events I described acceptable.)

So you would need more neighborhood teams, multiples in any decent-sized city or extended metro area, possible divisions based on other lines like religion or ethnicity (Celtic-Rangers comes to mind,) and as a bonus, more teams with a Green Bay-style ownership model.
 
In the category of more helpful ideas, it doesn't take much squinting to see the racial tensions of Chicago breaking down along White Sox/Cubs lines, and there must be some POD to push this over into Rangers/Celtic territory.
 
There would have to be more "whole" of baseball structure rather than semi-independent leagues sprawling the country. Giants vs. Dodgers was a possibility like this when both teams were in New York, but with them in separate cities across the country, that local, "beat your neighbor because you can" type attitude would recede. Cities that had multiple teams, like a Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, or even St. Louis would need them to all be playing together and regularly for the games to be meaningful rather than a novelty.
 
My family are all Red Sox fans. My father and uncles went to Yankee Stadium (the old one) many times in the past for Yankees-Red Sox games, and they all knew that if you needed to go to the restroom there (especially in the late 70s/80s) you didn't go without all the other Red Sox fans around you going with you. They'd get beer poured on them many times there. On the other hand, in Boston, you'd have Red Sox fans hanging around train/subway stations who'd start fights with Yankees fans.

And then you do have street gangs who wear the gear of local sports teams, hence why you'll occasionally see an article about how sports gear is banned in some local school system.
I feel like Philadelphia has some suggestions on this front.
(Love you, Philly, you murderous darlings)
At least the Phillies never had a courthouse in their stadium unlike the Eagles.
 
Americans do tailgating before weekly (tackle) football games; that's as close as it gets to "hooligan" parties. Baseball is played about six days a week and it would be difficult to round up that much attention for 81 home games per season.
 
Baseball in the 1890s and 1900s (first decade) was pretty notoriously rowdy. Lots of brawling. AFAIK a lot of that was cleaned up after the 1919 World Series fixing scandal. So if you avoid that maybe baseball stays rougher.

But yeah, part of it is probably too many games. Can't keep up that raging energy as well over a 150+ game season. If baseball ended up with weekly Saturday or Sunday games it might have had more hooligans.
 
x'D They're lucky they didn't get the batteries!

It's kind of amusing that some people framed the fans' behaviour as an insult to the memory of Ed Snider. Given that he was the apparently proud owner of the Flyers all through their Broad Street Bully years, complaining about thuggery at his memorial tribute is kind of like complaining about skimpy outfits at Hugh Hefner's.
 
I'm wondering if in a world like this where there are more neighborhood teams and multiple smaller leagues if there is some sort of promotion and relegation that takes place in between the different tiers of baseball. I think something like this might have negated some of the movement too. Not all of it but the Senators, A's, Braves, and Browns might have stayed in their original cities as second division teams being a cheaper alternative for a lot of fans. They're all one season away from being back in the bigs. Also fun to imagine smaller town teams like Toledo, Newark, Buffalo, or Hartford going on a tear and stealing attention from their larger neighbors creating new rivalries between teams and fans. Derby games would be intense for sure.
 
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