I was mulling the whole idea of fandom, and team affinity, and how fairly random it is — most of it being based on geography or heredity. How we can love a guy when he wears our team’s uniform and hate him when he doesn’t, meaning we ultimately are rooting for or against, as Jerry Seinfeld famously put it, “laundry.”

And from there I began thinking about … who are the teams I find appealing, and why, and maybe I will do a list of 10 of them. Because I’m not ready to go off on Manny, nor to explain why I just added Juan Pierre to my fantasy baseball team, nor why Bill Simmons has made Rick Reilly utterly irrelevant. And we can never have too many lists.

So. Yeah. Ten teams I like for no reason at all. Or at least not for the usual reasons of “cuz I live there/went to school there or my parents made me watch them on TV when I was 10.”

10. San Diego Padres. I feel bad for them. I do. Been around since 1969, never won a World Series. Got  smoked in the two they did make (1984, 1998). They’re not even the most popular team in a crappy sports town; that would be the Chargers. The Padres probably would be third if the Clippers hadn’t fled. The Pods always seem on the verge of bankruptcy, always about to sell off their stars for Double-A prospects. But they hang around, and usually give the Dodgers trouble, even when the Dodgers’ payroll is about three times as big. Plus, I like San Diego and feel some kinship with everyone down there, a bit of SoCal solidarity — even if San Diegans are really quite a different breed than are Angelenos. You want to talk about the body culture and never stressing about achievement, well that’s San Diego, not L.A.  Also, the Padres hired Paul DePodesta, the former Dodgers GM who was treated so shabbily.

9. Texas Tech football. Anyone who can beat Texas and scare the daylights out of Oklahoma (and the rest of the Big 12) despite having to recruit to Lubbock … well, that team is OK. I’m glad I don’t have to cover the Red Raiders, as a journalist, because their otherwise attractive and fun pass-pass-passing offense makes for games that last, like, four-and-a-half hours. Basic case of Little Guy tweaking the nose of Big Guys, and like most Americans, I like an underdog.

8. Valparaiso basketball. This is a little bit of a departure from my guidelines (above) because this is about heredity, mostly. Valpo is one of those Gutty Little Mid-Majors who used to do some damage in the NCAA Tournament. (Remember when one of them could be counted to make the Sweet 16? Yeah, it’s been a while now.) Valpo’s turn at the Cinderella thing was in 1998, when a team coached by Homer Drew and led on the floor by his son, guard Bryce Drew, upset Mississippi and Florida State before losing to Rhode Island. So, where is the self-interest? Valpo is a Lutheran school and that’s my religious background. So it would be like a Roman Catholic pulling for Notre Dame (which is just down the road from Valpo in Indiana), except “my” school hasn’t won a fraction of what Notre Dame has.

7. Nottingham Forest. The English soccer club. Just because of their name, which is even more fun than Crystal Palace, Sheffield Wednesday, West Ham or Arsenal. Can’t tell you one guy who plays for Forest, but if they ever get back to the premiership I may actually pay some attention to it.

6. Northwestern. I didn’t go to school there, but I know a lot of journalists who did, and I tend to pull for these guys in any sport, but especially football. Northwestern pays more lip service than most to the idea of the student-athlete, and it’s nice to see a school that isn’t a diploma mill or a pro-athlete way station win some games now and then. Northwestern has been doing that for about a decade now.

5. Michigan State football. Like Northwestern, a member of the Big Ten. Unlike Northwestern, not a good academic school and perhaps the worst in the conference. I mean, Magic Johnson went there for two years and Magic to this day can’t get through a 15-word sentence without violating a bunch of grammar laws. But I rooted for them in the middle 1960s, vs. Notre Dame, and that has never quite gone away. I like the idea of the “Spartans” (even though I pull for the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War; Athens still hasn’t won) and I like the hoplite helmet on their football helmets.

4. San Antonio Spurs. I like these guys because they play the game the right way. They play together, they play smart, they win — four NBA titles since 1999 — and they do it without breaking the bank in a market that is anything but attractive. I like the relentlessly dependable Tim Duncan, the most unsung great player of his era and a guy who has managed to avoid controversy. (He may even be a good guy; it’s so hard to be sure of that these days, but there are no felony charges on his record that I know about.)  I also like that coach Gregg Popovich coached at Pomona-Pitzer in the mid-1980s and, as I recall, almost lost a conference game to Cal Tech.

3a. The Detroit Red Wings. These guys have been very good for a while now (it’s been a long time since they were known as the “Dead Things”). And they play with flair and passion in a city that really loves its pucks.

3b. Duke basketball. Yeah. I know. Lots of people hate Duke. I’ve never quite understood it. Is it a class thing? A perceived snobbishness thing? Yes, Duke likes to call itself the Harvard of the South but, c’mon, that just means you stand tallest on a really low hill. No big deal. No need to feel defensive. I like their basketball team because, again, it wins, a lot, despite seeming to play with real college students, and Mike Krzyzewski actually coaches his team. I like their home gym, Cameron Indoor Stadium, and I like the antics of the crowd there, having once seen it all in person when UCLA played there, in the early 1990s.

2. Green Bay Packers. I find myself almost always pulling for The Pack. Great history, great fans, the only team owned by fans, the smallest city in major pro sports. So many classic games. Winners of the first two Super Bowls. All those games in horrible winter conditions. What’s not to like?

1. The Dutch soccer team. The Great Almosts of world soccer. Almost good enough to win the World Cup just about every time out, and probably should have won it with the famous Total Football/Clockwork Orange team of Johan Cruyff in 1974. Why Holland/the Netherlands/the Dutch? Because they wear orange. Because for most of the last 40 years they have played riveting football, attacking with skill and style as the rest of the world became increasingly cautious and dull. Because they have had great players like Bergkamp and Van Nistelrooy and Van Basten and Gullit and Cruyff despite a population of only 16 million. Because they are fearless; they will move forward against Brazi as readily as they will against Belize. And because the two greatest soccer games I ever saw, in person, both involved the Dutch — a 3-2 quarterfinal loss to eventual champion Brazil at Dallas in the 1994 World Cup and a shootout loss to Brazil (4-2, after 1-1 in regulation) in the 1998 semifinals at Marseille.