In print | Published October 9, 2008

As the old saying goes, the clothes don’t make the man. But they might just make the team. Fans who tuned into the American League Central tiebreaker last Tuesday between the Chicago White Sox and the Minnesota Twins (or saw pictures of it in the New York Times the next day) were in for a dark surprise. The crowd of over 40,000 people participated in a blackout; clad in black clothes and grasping the 40,000 black towels the Chicago organization handed out: the game exhibited not only great baseball but also an awe inspiring show of fan support that helped the White Sox hold off a 1-0 victory.

Spectators have always been a large part of sports. Even in Ancient Greece, there is evidence of unruly crowds at sporting events. M.I. Finley and H.E. Pleket describe in one of their books on Ancient Greek sports how “crowds were in Ancient Greece as partisan, as volatile and as excitable as in any other time” and could play a key role in cementing victory for a favorite athlete. Today, sports fans still are attributed with playing a critical role in professional sports, besides just buying tickets. Rafa Benitez gave credit for Liverpool’s 2006 victory over Manchester United in the FA cup (which only took them around 85 years to do) to the team’s dedicated fans and their 12th man efforts.

It’s hard to deny that spectatorship is a part of sports. If you are not convinced by the Ancient Greeks, just look at the Super Bowl: according to NBC, 45.85 million homes viewed the 2006 game, making it the second most watched show ever (the Super Bowl — you know, that thing that kept interrupting the Budweiser and Ford commercials?).

So it is clear that sports teams influence fans, but can fans truly influence sports teams or is that just something athletes say to appease the masses? According to some researchers, they can. In an article published in the Journal of Sports and Recreation, researchers at Michigan State and Northern Illinois University showed that athletes were able to complete well-learned skills better in the presence of others than they were without an audience. This is considered a major part of what is known as home field advantage.

While many aspects of the home field can contribute to an athlete’s increased performance, such as a familiar field or prejudiced refereeing, when asked athletes responded that it was the positive effects of a home audience as opposed to a more hostile road one that they felt was responsible for their increased abilities to play. This has been supported by more experimental data at several colleges.

Journalists at Rensselaer Polytechnic University in New York found that their hockey team’s performance at home games was connected to the number of fans in attendance. When attendance was over 4,000 the team was 3-0 where as they were only 5-7 when the crowd was under 3,000. I don’t deny that this data could be skewed because of several other variables, but it does bring to light interesting questions about whether sports fans can influence the outcome of a game (that is to say, without prematurely rushing the field like the Stanford band or streaking across the ice).
My point in spending so much time on this seemingly mundane part of sports is twofold: first, to prove once and for all that the Sharks record breaking 11 game winning streak last year was, in fact, started because I attended their first win against the Flyers, and second, to try to convince more students to come out and support Swarthmore sports (especially the women’s soccer team, but I’m told those other fall teams are important too).

The evidence may not be overwhelming or even completely believable that fans play a role in helping teams win, but there is evidence. For those ardent Garnet fans who are at every game, you have athletes’ eternal thanks. For those who have not made it out yet, I encourage you to come at least once. You never know, you might have so much fun that you could even find yourself wanting to come back.

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