Personally, I’m glad to be getting out of the bloated 6-team division. Also – it’s been explained several times over. Some people just don’t want to hear the answer. Instead, they continually push some sort of convoluted conspiracy theory.

And since when has Berkman been the spokesperson for baseball – or the team he no longer plays for?

For the record, I’ve seen plenty of drunken, mean, or obnoxious Astros fans. We’re not as innocent as people may want to believe.

My seats are just behind third base, so I see tons of visiting fans every year. Yes, Cubs fans are the worst, with Braves fans running a close second. The rest sort of fall into a tie for third. That said, at the recent Brewers series, I was pleasantly surprised by how civil and respectful the visiting folks from Milwaukee were. They were dug-in fans who had traveled far to support their team, wearing their replica uniforms and hats, but they were there for the baseball. It was a welcome change.

Any Houston fan who could meet you or a number of other people I know from Chicago would have to back off the totality of their issue with Cub fans as loose cannons. Unfortunately, that would not stop the harm to Chicago’s image that is caused by too large a number of the drunken idiots who throw on Cub Jerseys and come to the games in Houston. Those are the folks causing the stereotyping.

John Q. Public isn’t going to spend this much time sorting out the good from the bad, the acceptable from the unacceptable.

I do totally agree that the Cubs have the worst fans in the NL. But I think there are several things that belie the notion that the Cubs are “lovable losers”. For decades, the Cubs have drawn a yuppie, party crowd to their park while the White Sox drew much more of a blue collar baseball crowd. Going to Wrigley was just as much about picking up opposite sex fans at Cubby Bears as it was about the game. They expect losing, but not in the way that longtime Red Sox fans epected losing. Those BoSox fans (me included) expected not just to lose, but to have your hopes raised high just before your stomach was kicked and your eyes were gouged out. Cubs fans might want to win, but they are perfectly happy losing as long as there’s enough Old Style. Though most of those “losers” prefer Bud these days. And there is a certain Chicagoan misplaced bravado on top of that, one which once prompted a guy from there to rant at some length one summer that it gets just as hot, if not hotter, in Chicago as it does in Houston.

You want to see it turned up a notch, though, go to the yankee games. It’s all the loud but without the knowledge of baseball that you get with the Red Sox. Yes, I agree with Bob that those two teams believe that they are in a class by themselves, with “class” being quite the misnomer on many occasions. However, don’t equate the two when it comes to knowing and loving the game of baseball. There are only two cities in America where the number one sport discussed on sports talk radio is baseball: Boston and St Louis. And only one where every game of the season has been sold out for many years. Boston. Yeah, loud and relentless, but also passionate for baseball, not just the party scene that comes with it.

Bottom line goes to Bill here- As Astros fans, it’s our job to show up and step up.

That’s not to be confused with a Cub fan who are the antithesis of the bandwagoner because they are always backing a loser if they root for the Cubs.

I think we will soon see that Yankee and Red Sox fans are the worst to endure because a) they have all the class and manners of that region of the country and b) they really do believe Major League Baseball is all about them. In their minds, the other 28 clubs are like the stooge teams that played the Harlem Globetrotters. To them, MLB is the Yankees and Red Sox which is why Fox/ESPN feed that mentality to the rest of the country.