SB Nation Reacts: About those rivals

Welcome to SB Nation Reacts, a survey of fans across MLB. Each week, we send 30 polls to plugged in fans from each team. Red Sox fans, sign up HERE to join Reacts.

We have been talking about rivalries at SB Nation for the last couple of weeks, and that continues with this week’s Reacts poll question. We start off with a few overview questions about rivalries and general as well as teams everyone hates before moving on to a couple about baseball’s restart in 2020.

What do you hate most?

This seems like a pretty obvious one to me. I mean, to be fair, as a Red Sox fan I think most of us probably hate the Yankees for every reason on this list. All of them qualify at least to some extent. But if you have to narrow it down to just one, it’s clearly the fans. That’s not to say I don’t have friends that are Yankees fans because I do, but the bantering between fans is what makes rivalries fun. It’s a good time to hate on players and laundry, but it would be pretty empty if there weren’t fans to hate too.

Who is your biggest rival?

This one was legitimately shocking to me, which may be showing off my AL bias. I wouldn’t have predicted the Cardinals would be number one on this list, though it’s not terribly surprising. Not only are there a lot of Cubs fans out there, but everyone generally agrees (fairly or not) that the Cardinals fan base is pretty smug. The Dodgers being higher than the Yankees was very surprising to me. Ultimately, though, this is mostly a measure of who voted in this poll and it seems to have been dominated by Cubs and Giants fans.

Who is the most hated team?

Yeah, this is more like it. The Astros are obviously a new addition to this list, and if this poll was taken last year they surely would not have been near the top. Now, though, they are just behind the Yankees. That the Red Sox are less hated than three other teams is actually pretty surprising.

Can they really distance?

I’m having a little bit of trouble with this one. Throwing aside that some of the social distancing guidelines simply don’t apply on the field so it is literally not possible for them to always distance, the ones that aren’t on the field could feasibly happen. So I guess that makes them realistic. But when you have parts like players sitting in the stands but also owners tripping over themselves to try and get local governments to allow fans in those very same stands, it becomes less likely to me that things will work out.

Trade Deadline?

This one I’m mostly confused my the wording. I guess this means whether or not there should be trading all the way through the end of the year, to which I say no. I’m actually not really sure why I feel that way, but I definitely don’t think there should be trades down the stretch. That may just be being a man of habits and I can’t get used to something else. But honestly, I don’t think there should be trades at all. That’s partially because players flying all around the country after making a schedule to specifically avoid that seems dumb, but also because value is so thrown off right now and teams could very well use this as straight salary dumps, even more than usual. That’s not against the rules, but I’ll hate it if it happens.