The best fans are the unexpected fans.

Anyone can expect the Cubs fan in Chicago, the Lakers fan in LA, the Yankees fan in New York. They're good fans, I suppose--I have no cause to doubt them. But they came by their fandom the easy way.

More interesting are the ones who come by their fandom through unusual channels.

Maybe you met a famous tennis player on an airplane, or you went to high school with someone who went on to play professional sports. You don't choose that, but you were adjacent to it, so you went on that ride. I grew up as an LA Dodgers fan in central Illinois because my dad was a Dodgers fan because they had a minor league team in Danville, Illinois when General Motors had a factory there when he grew up. I didn't choose it. It just happened. (And it happened at a good time because a guy named Kirk was the World Series hero when I was seven, an especially impressionable year for things like professional sports.)

This is the one I want to talk about: This Oriole is absolutely beloved in the UK.

Read it. It's wholesome.

Imagine spawning a legion of fans like that--because those fans are living in a non-baseball location in the UK but went to a Scout Jamboree in Baltimore, and the same Scouts were sitting in left field for a baseball game where Baltimore played in the UK, and they decided to adopt him and cheer everything he did, however mundane.

Here's to the unexpected fans.