Are Yankees fans “the best in the world?”

Not my words. They’re Lupica’s:

There aren’t fans better than this anywhere in the world. This isn’t about whether or not you love the Yankees. This is about Yankee fans.

There are other baseball fans in other cities, of course, Mets fans in this one. There are fans who come out strong for teams who haven’t won the way the Yankees won, who don’t make the playoffs just about every year the way the Yankees have since Joe Torre first came to town 13 years ago and the winning came back to the Yankees and the Bronx.

But no fans have ever supported a baseball team, the most famous team in this world, the way Yankee fans support theirs.

Saying that any team’s fans are “the best” is obviously an exercise in biases, and there’s no better chance that people are going to agree on this question than they’d agree on religion. Lupica is a New York guy who writes for a New York paper that is purchased by New York fans. I have no doubt that he sincerely believes that Yankees fans are the best. But even if he didn’t, it’s not like he’d write that, say, the fans in Minnesota or Milwaukee or (shudder) Boston were better. Assuming he was even proposing a way to measure it.

I’ll throw this out there though: wouldn’t one way to measure how great a teams’ fans are be to see how well they draw when the team isn’t winning? Whether the fan base is of the fair weather variety? If so, is it worth considering the following:

The Yankees were 1st in the American League in attendance from 1976-1981, when the team was winning a lot.

The Yankees fell out of the top spot in 1982 -- to third -- and didn’t lead the league again until 2003, finishing as low as 11th a couple of times when the team wasn’t playing well. This despite the fact that they had one of the larger seating capacities in baseball over that time.

Contrast this with the Dodgers, who have only been out of the top 5 in NL attendance once in the last 90 years. Or the Red Sox who have only been as low as 9th once in their history, despite having the smallest seating capacity in the game for almost all of that history. The Cardinals ranking has been more consistent than the Yankees too.

I’ll grant that Yankees fans are pretty darn good -- and it’s hard to find more knowledgeable fans than Yankees fans -- but they’re not necessarily diehards. Like the fans of most teams, they’ll stay home if the team isn’t winning.

I’m not saying that disqualifies them from being the best fans in the world, but if I were Mike Lupica, I’d find a way to account for that before making the claim.