A few days ago, there was an excellent conversation in the comments section of Joe Posnanski’s “Hall of Fame Outsiders” article on Fred McGriff in The Athletic. Numerous people who weren’t fans of the various teams on which McGriff played noted that he was their favorite player on a rival team.
I grew up in small-town southwestern Ontario, and came of baseball-age in the 1980s when the Jays-Tigers rivalry was white-hot — both teams were great, they were geographically close to each other, and a lot of us remember that stretch drive in 1987.