Home to a Boston Team Party

By late Tuesday morning, the crowd had gathered at Sonny McLean’s, a Santa Monica tavern that is Fenway Park West, for expat Boston sports fans.

“Being inside these walls, it’s like stepping through a wormhole into Boston,” said Marty Laquidara, a 36-year-old comedian from Wilmington, Mass. “There’s not an R in the whole place.”

Millions who move west readily adopt to Southern California’s sunny, laid-back lifestyle. But they just can’t abandon the intense sports loyalties of the hometowns they left behind.

In sports, as in life, nothing matches the passion of first love.

On Tuesday, as the baseball playoffs opened, Southern California fans of the Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals cleaved to their own as their teams took the field against the Angels and the Dodgers.

On most days, many of them said, they bear their adopted home’s baseball teams no ill will.

“I want the Dodgers to win,” said Brian Merriman, 32, who moved to Los Angeles from St. Louis in 1997. “Unless they’re playing my team.”

Merriman even said he hoped the Dodgers-Cardinals series lasts the week.

“I want the Dodgers to go all the way to Game 5,” Merriman said, “and then lose.” Sports business experts have a name for guys like Merriman: “Displaced fans.”

Long-distance rooters have come to play a major role in big-league sports marketing. In a study earlier this year, the Chicago-based Migala Report newsletter found that 72% of online merchandise orders for 50 professional sports teams were shipped out of state. Technology lets fans living far from their sports roots follow their teams in a way that was impossible 15 or 20 years ago, the report’s publisher noted.

DirecTV and TiVo have allowed transplanted Angeleno Caleb Dewart, 30, a Red Sox fan, to keep the faith.

“I’ve watched every single Red Sox game, except for Saturday afternoons, [when] the games are blocked out,” Dewart said.

Expat fans often gather at sports bars and restaurants, bonding with people whom they have nothing in common with but fandom.

It may be a flimsy pretense for a group identity. Kurt Vonnegut famously, and more generally, called such groups “granfalloons.”

But Whitney Moulaison, a business instructor at the University of Oregon, said they often exhibit an inclusiveness that they might not experience at home.

“All the other differential factors about them as individuals fall away as their affinity for the same group brings them together,” said Moulaison, who specializes in sports marketing and sponsorship.

Laquidara and two friends arrived at Sonny McLean’s an hour before game time, settling into a reserved table that sits atop a replica of the old Boston Garden’s famed parquet floor.

Alongside their beverages sat their screenplay, a work in progress about two crazed Red Sox fans who trek across the country to watch their heroes take on the Dodgers in Game 7 of the World Series.

Lynn McGill, 49, said watching the Red Sox at Sonny McLean’s with other former Bostonians assuaged her homesickness.

She reluctantly moved from Beantown to Marina del Rey last year, when her husband changed jobs. In the world outside the bar, she said, everything still feels foreign.

“This feels like home,” she said. “Everyone looks familiar.”

Though Cardinal fans say they haven’t found an equivalent watering hole dedicated to their redbirds, their loyalties remain similarly immutable.

John Burnes moved to Los Angeles from St. Louis 11 years ago, but estimates he watched or listened to 140 of the Cardinals’ 162 regular-season games this year.

“It’s a birthright,” he said. “The hometown just trumps everything.”

He watched Tuesday’s game at home with friends, clad in his 1942-style Cardinal cap and Mark McGwire T-shirt.

When he cheers on his Cardinals at Dodger Stadium, he said, he chooses more low-key team drag, out of respect: a Hawaiian shirt with a subtle team logo and his blue cap, which blends with Dodger blue.

“The Dodger crowd is pretty cool. Loud, but funny,” he said. “I’ve had hot dogs thrown at me at Wrigley Field,” where the Chicago Cubs play.

Children of Red Sox and Cardinal fans often pick up their parents’ loyalties even as they grow up around the Dodgers and Angels.

Ted Haus, 40, a former Vermonter, has spent years wearing his Red Sox gear around his Oceanside home. It paid off. His two children -- despite their California roots -- were decked out Tuesday in Red Sox hats and T-shirts even though their mom was in full Angel regalia. Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez even tossed Katey, 11, a ball during batting practice.

“I feel like Dad’s brainwashed them,” their mother, Peggy Haus said.

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Times staff writer Richard Fausset contributed to this report.