Posted by Bill Baer on Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 12:41 pm

Recently, I debated some fellow Phillies fans on what makes a rivalry. My contention was that, despite the NLCS last season between the Phillies and Dodgers and their NLCS match-ups 30 years ago, the two teams were not rivals. Of course, I was in the minority with my feelings on the matter, but it made me consider the more important facets of a rivalry.

There is no formula to creating or even recognizing a rivalry; it’s rather subjective. However, I thought I’d run down a list of common elements people consider when describing one. How important they are is up to you. The factors aren’t necessarily separate, either; a lot of them are interrelated.

1. History

The Cincinnati Reds and Tampa Bay Rays are not rivals. No one will argue that. They’ve played each other a grand total of six times since the Rays have existed (11 years). The Rays lost all six, and as you may expect, nothing of interest ever came about from those games.

The Mets and Phillies, however, play each other 18 times a season, and considering the way the two teams have been down each other’s throat the past two seasons, this is unarguably a bona fide rivalry.

Would it be a rivalry if the Mets and Phillies had finished the 2007 and ‘08 seasons exactly the same, but the Mets didn’t choke it away in September? Maybe, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as interesting.

The next question to ask is, “Is a game from 2008 more, less, or exactly the same as a game from 1978?” This was where I and my debate partners, mentioned above, diverged. They felt that the Phillies’ match-ups with the Dodgers in the 1977-78, and ‘83 NLCS counted a lot towards a Dodgers-Phillies rivalry. However, according to this logic, if the Yankees and Royals somehow both made the playoffs either and matched up against each other, they would be considered rivals given their match-ups in the ’70’s in the ALCS.

We can’t just ignore older match-ups, so there has to be either a gradual scale of importance, or an arbitrary cut-off point. This is where the subjection comes in: you’ll just have to decide for yourself.

2. Player Personalities

Even if two teams full of David Eckstein-esque players matched up against each other ten years in a row in the NLCS, they wouldn’t be considered rivals like the Red Sox and Yankees or Mets and Phillies because none of the players are interesting.

For instance, the Phillies had shortstop Jimmy Rollins spouting off before the past two seasons, declaring the ‘07 Phillies “the team to beat” and then that the ‘08 squad would win 100 games (they did, if you include the post-season). Cole Hamels called the Mets choke artists. On the Mets’ side, both Carlos Beltran and Francisco Rodriguez had taken Rollins’ words, spun them around and declared the Mets “the team to beat.”

The Yankees and Red Sox have personalities up and down the 25-man roster and have had their fair share of brawls. How about Varitek-Rodriguez? Or Martinez-Zimmer?

There is no rivalry unless the players truly despise the other team. No one will argue that the Red Sox and Yankees and the Phils and Mets hate each other.

3. Proximity

The closer two teams are, the more likely they are to be rivals. Usually, this is coupled with the two teams being in the same division unless it’s an interleague match-up.

Cardinals-Phillies is unlikely to ever be a rivalry because the teams’ cities are so far apart — nearly 900 miles. The Cardinals’ rival, the Cubs, is less than 300 miles away. The Phillies are just over 100 miles away from the Mets; the Dodgers less than 400 miles from the Giants; the Red Sox about 200 miles from the Yankees.*

*Distances are according to Google maps.

Proximity goes hand-in-hand with history because teams that are closer to each other are more likely to play each other, even if they’re not in the same league. For instance, the Phillies will have played the Toronto Blue Jays six times this season compared to the usual three as with most interleague series. Divisions rivals in five-team divisions play each other around 18 times per season, which accounts for nearly half of a team’s schedule, with the remaining 25-30% apiece to be divvied up between the other two divisions.

Obviously, the more you play a team, the more familiar you become with them, and the more likely you are to offend your opponent (like K-Rod’s post-save antics; Jose Reyes’ celebratory antics) or otherwise do something interesting that sparks some emotion (pitching up and in).

4. The Fans

The fans have to really buy into it — just like the players — for the rivalry to grow any legs. If the Phillies and Mets had the Blue Jays’ and Marlins’ fan bases instead, the rivalry would never have been suggested. However, the two teams have and have always had rabid fan bases the majority of which passionately care about their team’s fortune.

That goes for any conflict. Are Americans concerned about people from Djibouti? No, not at all. On the other hand, Americans are very preoccupied about what people from the Middle East say and do, and vice versa. That, along with American imperialism, has contributed greatly to the unfriendliness between the U.S. and Middle Eastern nations.

Besides words, there has to be action as well. That’s why you have stunts like this and this.

With the ubiquity of the Internet, fan rivalries are taken to a whole new level. Fan forums (such as the Phillies forum Back She Goes and the Mets forum Mets Refugees) are constantly quoting each other, sending vitriol back and forth. With video editing software, fans can make the other team’s players look like idiots.

5. The Media

It’s no surprise that baseball’s most widely-regarded rivalries involve teams from mostly large media markets, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia. Since team officials and players don’t get much of an opportunity to speak directly to the fans, the media plays a big role in firing up the fans in a brewing rivalry.

If you remember the Bill Conlin incident from 2007, even he was emotional about the Phillies-Mets rivalry. Mistaking me for a Mets fan (because I felt David Wright was a better choice for the 2007 NL MVP award than Jimmy Rollins), Conlin wrote to me in an e-mail, “Your team choked big time, an epic gagaroo.”

Rich Hoffman of the Philadelphia Daily News wrote recently, “Everybody knows what happened, about how the Mets gagged away their chances as the Phillies caught fire at the end in both 2007 and 2008. Faced with the need to win, a desperate need, the Phillies responded and the Mets wilted.”

That, believe it or not, reverberates throughout both Philadelphia and New York, as I’m sure it’s been linked to many times by Mets fans who point to it and call the author an idiot, which Philly fans do for Mets writers as well.

When SportsCenter shows, over and over, the Varitek-Rodriguez incident, or talks about the epic comeback by the Sox over the Yankees, they are feeding the rivalry as well.

. . .

Those are just a few of the big factors that play a role in the creation and duration of a rivalry. Feel free to chime in with your thoughts on what makes a rivalry, as well as if you can think of any other factors that play a role as well.