[bk400]

Football teams clearly have identities. The 1985 Bears. The 1986 Giants. The 1989 Niners. The 2000 Ravens. The Greatest Show on Turf. The Tom Brady Patriots. Any championship Steelers team. In terms of identity, you just know from watching them.

There are many who say that a baseball team is less of a team and more of a collection of individual efforts that happen to result in a victory for a group of individuals that wear the same uniform.

So can a baseball team have an identity? Aside from the 1986 Mets (the most iconic baseball team in history, in my totally biased opinion), I am hard pressed to think of a team in recent memory that had an identity that defined them. The identity of the 1986 Mets were that they were a direct, brash, play hard, party hard, team. Aside from Gary Carter, you didn't know if any given player was sober on the field...but they would still kick ass on some combination of desire, talent and grit. That's an identity.

Let's take the 2023 Texas Rangers. What is their identity?

Or how about any other World Series winner in the past 20 years? Aside from having a bunch of good individual players, what characteristics united them?