According to the latest Quinnipiac Poll, a total of 49 percent of Ohio adults say they are “very interested” or “somewhat interested” in Major League Baseball.
Among those fans, 42 percent say the Cleveland Indians are their favorite team, while 34 percent cheer for the Cincinnati Reds, with 4 percent for the Pittsburgh Pirates and 3 percent each for the Detroit Tigers, the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees.
Tigers and Pirates make sense because large parts of Ohio border western Pennsylvania and Michigan. Yankees and Red Sox make sense because most people are sheep/front-runners by nature.
Which also, I feel anyway, has a bit to do with the Indians besting the Reds in the poll. I realize that the Reds have been good a lot lately and the Indians come and go as contenders, but those 1990s Indians teams that won two pennants loom pretty large here.
Before the mid-90s (back when I was in college here) it seemed like the state skewed pretty strongly in favor of the Reds, with the Big Red Machine and the 1990 World Series team solidifying support. For example, when you drove around the state back then, convenience stores and bars and things outside of the Cleveland area were more likely to have Reds schedules and memorabilia on the walls. These days you see more Tribe things. That all changed during the Mike Hargrove/Jim Hart era and has basically stuck. Columbus, where I live, is split pretty much in two between Reds and Indians fans. The center point was clearly with the Reds in the early 90s. By the time I came back here after law school in 1998, the bubble had moved sharply in the Indians’ favor.
I figure this will hold unless and until the Reds go back to the World Series.