Meanwhile : Are baseball fans unhappy?

The author is a professor at Hallym University "Did they lose?" my wife asked with concern. "Huh?" "The baseball game. You looked upset." My evenings often depend on the result of the baseball team I support. On winning days, I wander through social media savoring the joy of victory. On losing days, I stay away from the internet and try to focus on other things. That evening, too, I was quietly working with a gloomy expression after another defeat. Professional baseball is enjoying enormous popularity in Korea. More than 10 million spectators attend games annually, while fan culture has expanded through a growing ecosystem of online videos, commentary and merchandise. Yet people sometimes joke that "baseball fans are unhappy." The logic is simple enough. Even the league's best team loses two out of every five games. If the team one supports spends years near the bottom of the standings, disappointment can feel endless. Some even argue that repeated defeats may harm mental health or increase emotional stress in daily life. A similar argument appears in psychology. Experiences in which people desperately hope for a result but cannot influence it may produce feelings of helplessness. Repeated often enough, such experiences can contribute to negative emotions. Fans who strongly identify themselves with a team may also internalize defeat as if it were their own failure, experiencing real psychological pain and frustration after losses. If that were entirely true, baseball fans would essentially be paying money and spending time only to damage their emotional well-being. But these negative effects generally apply only to people who excessively equate themselves with a team's identity. Overall, baseball fans — especially those who attend games in person — tend to report relatively high life satisfaction. Watching games together with fellow supporters and sharing both victory and defeat can also function as a form of social reward and emotional connection. The joy of victory is sweet and the pain of defeat bitter. Yet perhaps the sadness of losing is not entirely harmful. There is happiness in sharing triumph and disappointment with others while learning to accept the outcome in a healthy way. Recently, I read an article about elementary school sports days eliminating winners and losers altogether by declaring every event a draw. But rather than erasing defeat, perhaps schools and society should teach children how to comfort one another through disappointment and how to experience loss without humiliation. That, too, may be part of becoming a mature community. This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.