Subway Series! ... Who Cares?

Are people sick of baseball, or are they sick of New York? The answer may be both, as a new CBS News / New York Times Poll finds that over half of Americans don't care who wins the much touted Subway Series between the New York Yankees and the New York Mets.

Fifty-eight percent of Americans admit to not caring who wins this year's World Series. But among those who do care, loyalties are divided: 20 percent choose the Yankees and 20 percent choose the Mets. Northeasterners care more than the average American - 49 percent don't care - but they are also divided, 25 percent choose the Yankees and 24 percent choose the Mets. Men care more than women - but even 50 percent of men don't care who wins.

The last time the CBS News / New York Times Poll asked the nation how it felt about a World Series - 1987 - just over a third of Americans didn't care. That year the contest involved two teams from Middle America: the St. Louis Cardinals and the Minnesota Twins.

No surprise, that year it was Midwesterners who cared the most about the outcome: 29 percent were rooting for the Cardinals, 44 percent for the Twins, and only 26 percent didn't care. But even frosty Northeasterners cared more about the outcome then than they do now: only 43 percent said they didn't care which team won the Midwestern series in 1987, now 49 percent don't care about the exclusively New York battle.

Is apathy towards baseball increasing because the Yankees have been dominating the sport of late? It seems unlikely. Way back in 1938, one of the first of many times the Yankees were on a similar roll, Gallup asked Americans whether their interest in baseball was waning because of Yankee dominance: 54 percent of Americans said no, while only 14 percent said yes. 32 percent had no opinion, or maybe they just didn't care.

(This poll was conducted October 18-21, 2000, among a nationwide random sample of 1,279 adults interviewed by telephone. The error due to sampling could be plus or minus three percentage points for results based on the sample of all adults. The error for subgroups may be larger.)