Sure, people don't root for teams, as much as they root for uniforms now. The players come and go. David Justice can be a despised Atlanta Brave and Cleveland Indian for most of the Nineties and, on a few months' notice, get a Yankee Stadium curtain call as the hero of the A L Championship Series. Maybe this isn't true everywhere in America, where the NFL, NBA, and WWF have elevated as passions for the 21st Century. Yet it's still true here.
Baseball is more than just a game anymore.
Baseball fans demand to be wiser on the teams now. This is the information age. In that way, fans have never been such a part of it. They don't need Yankees and Mets to live in the neighborhood to track the movements of them. And no more does breathless reporting turn these Yankees and Mets into flawless gods, and television tells the truth on the true talents of these men made into myths long ago.