Perhaps the players should be rooting for us fans, since we're the ones who transcend the seasons, the pennant races, the faces that come and go over the years. I think that's what Nick Hornby is talking about. The story is likely apocryphal, and I don't recall any longer which 60s revolutionary was involved, although I believe it was a guy in the Weather Underground. Anyway, this guy reportedly once said that he couldn't fully give himself over to the revolution until Willie Mays retired, because until then, a part of him still loved a part of Amerika. If there is something universal in this, something that reaches beyond sport fandom and into other kinds of fandom, it would seem to be obsession.
Obsessive behavior is something people of diverse interests can appreciate.
Helen Fielding, a British writer, wrote a novel, Bridget Jones's Diary , that earned a cover blurb from Nick Hornby himself, it was so Hornbyish in its chronicling of obsessions, but Bridget Jones didn't care a whit about sports. She obsessed about calories, and male fuckwittage, and alcohol units. Much of the writing about popular culture that has appeared in Bad Subjects over the years has been inspired by obsession. Writing is the methadone to the heroin of our obsessions, one addiction replacing another. And I am one king-hell obsessive when it comes to baseball.