1. Kyle Davies
2. Brian McCann
3. Jeff Francoeur
4. Chuck James
3. Blaine Boyer
4. McKay McBride
5. Tim Hudson

Not to mention:

Michael Barrett (Cubs)
J.D. Drew (your BloSox)
Chone Figgins (Angels)
Adam Wainwright (St. Louis – remember him Mutts fans?)
Frank Thomas (Oakland A’s)
Jeremy Hermida (Florida Marlins)
Kenny Rogers (Detroit Lions)
Rondell White (Minnesota Twins)

Those are just the active players…

Now, lets try and name some from MA or New England:

Tom Glavine (Mutts – an easy one)
Mark Bellhorn (Reds – he’s still playing?!)
and um, oh yeah,
crappy Looooou Merloni (he may not be playing anymore).

Wow, that’s a bit of gap. Let me know if you can come up with some more who are active Major Leaguers (retired is another story).

I’m prepared to be unimpressed. You Bostonians talk baseball, it appears that Southerners (Georgians/Atlantans) can actually play big-boy ball.

1. If the Sox fans can boo Clemens, Braves fans can boo Glavine so you can kill that BS. Of course Glavine is about the ONLY major former Brave to get booed and his situation was just like that of Clemens. He left the Braves to go to our most hated division rival. Of course Boston has a much more illustrious record of booing former greats (Boggs, Damon, Vaugn, etc.) and I’m sure they had a word or two for Babe Ruth while he was shoving Louisville Sluggers and World Series trophies up their clam chowdered asses.

2. Check the 10 years before those five years (Boston didn’t outdraw ATL til ’03) – and your glasses – Ortiz. A few of those years ATL outdrew Boston by over a million. With the amount of money that Boston has spent on its team as opposed to Atlanta over the past five years, if they hadn’t outdrawn the Braves it would have been an embarrassment. Just like all of those years of being the Yankees’ bridesmaid bitches.

I expect the likes of you to appeal to some mystical presence that explains the people of Boston constantly throwing themselves out to be flogged in the worst imaginable ways by their baseball team for 90 years. Around here we call it masochism, and you can have it. I’ve seen baseball in the Northeast and I saw a lot of drunks acting every bit as redneck as anything I’ve ever seen at the Ted. Attendance ain’t perfect, but it’s more empirical than whatever it is that you’re trying to appeal to.

If you spent any time at Fulton Country stadium during the 90s or the early days of the Ted, you’d know that fans around here can be as passionate as any place else.

And I like NASCAR too.

At any rate, if you honestly think draw is what makes good baseball, you must have the Atlanta disease, where good is regularly confused with big. The Braves could sell out every game for the remainder of their existence, but 50,000 rednecks in Nascar shirts packing down hotdogs and leering at those silly cheerleaders doesn’t cut it.

I won’t presume to school you in what makes for good hardball, except to say you won’t find out dabbling in baseball tourism.

http://www.super70s.com/Baseball/Teams/Background/Attendance/

It’s funny how in the mid 90s the Yankees were drawing fewer people percentage-wise than the Braves are now. They drew fewer fans than we did last year in 1997 the year AFTER they won a title. They didn’t even break 3 million in their crushingly dominant season of 1998. They couldn’t reliably outdraw the choking Braves until they won their FOURTH title – in a market easily twice as big as Atlanta.

And you want to talk about terrible fans? I’ll take our terrible fans over those jackasses I saw in Yankee Stadium last year at a Yanks/Sox game that were actually fighting over a damn baseball game. Sheesh.