Johnny Au
Senior Member
Baseball is extremely popular in Florida. However, most baseball fans in Florida are retirees who cheer for their childhood teams (the Rays and the Marlins didn't exist even during the time the current retirees were last employed and it's very difficult (even steadfastly impossible in some cases) to convince them to cheer for the Rays or the Marlins when they grew up being fans of teams such as the Yankees or the Red Sox (or even the Jays to some degree)).I don't know if the city of Tampa even deserves a team, the fans who come out to the games are great but overall there doesn't seem like much interest in the team at all for as long as I can remember. Florida seems to have bad fan support in a lot of differnet sports but teams never leave there. If these teams were in Canada getting that attendance they'd be gone long ago. That's probably also due to the cost of running a large sports franchise up here versus the U.S.