This is not 'Nam, this is Fandom; There are Rules

You know how people say "the clothes make the man?" Well, in a certain way (and if I'm permitted a shameless rhyme), you can amend it to say "the clothes make the fan." Those of us who call ourselves devoted sports fans end up dedicating a significant portion of our wardrobes to attire of our favorite teams. Just like anything else when it comes to fandom, there are rules to be followed when wearing fan attire. I've touched on this before, but at this point it seems something more along the lines of a manifesto is warranted. (And for the record, that is a picture of Brady Quinn's sister Laura, now married to AJ Hawk, at the Fiesta Bowl 5 years ago when she wore the half-Brady Quinn, half-AJ Hawk jersey you see there and became an overnight celebrity thanks to ABC's camera crew. I just wanted to include that picture because I find it funny that she and AJ Hawk probably pretend not to be home these days when Brady calls or wants to stop by. You can imagine it.)

-No cross-pollination, aka wearing two different teams' gear at the same time, unless extreme circumstances call for it. This especially goes out to people who wear an NFL jersey with the hat of the favorite MLB team. Focus on one at a time.
-If attending a game, positively do not wear something that depicts a team from a different sport from the one you are witnessing. No Eagles shirts at Phillies games, no Mark Sanchez or Eli Manning jerseys at Yankees games, etc. One exception would be if attending a college game and wearing apparel of a different program at the same school, i.e. an "XYZ University Basketball" hoodie at an XYZ University football game.
-Avoid wearing multiple articles of the same team's clothing on non-game days. The "decked out" look works for a kid, not an adult. Once again, this is only on non-game days.
-Keep things as authentic as possible, within budget of course. I'm not telling you to drop $175-$200 on an authentic baseball jersey that is so nice that you feel obligated to carry it around in a garment bag (although if you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up), but let's stay away from the Wal-Mart jerseys that make you look stupid. And if you happen to root for a pro team who goes NNOB (no name on back, in uniform speak), then you shall not wear a jersey with a player's name on the back. Obviously with NCAA jerseys it's a different story because you can't buy those jerseys with player names on the back. Since the other three major leagues mandate names on the backs of jerseys, baseball is the only sport where this really comes into play. Mainly, this is a memo to fellow Yankee fans out there: if Derek Jeter simply wears the #2 on his back, then all you should be wearing is the #2 on your back. I'll gladly make an exception for the player t-shirts with a name and number on the back - those are fine. But a jersey with an unwarranted name on the back? Not fine.
-Another big issue while we're on the topic of authenticity: no hats, jerseys, shirts, or anything else that is not in team colors. I can't stress this enough. It's fine if you're a girl and you like Shane Victorino and want to get his jersey or t-shirt; just make sure it's not pink, green, black, or any other color that Victorino himself does not wear out on the field. And do not get me started on the 67,000 different colors you can buy New Era baseball hats in now. I don't care if you want a jet-black Phillies hat because it looks better with most of the clothes you wear. The team chooses their colors, not you. You choose to root for that team, then you commit to those colors. End of story.
-I shouldn't have to say it, but personalized jerseys with your own name on the back are a no-no once you pass age 10.
-Since that last item was definitely the least original in this post, I'll now offer my most original. Say you own the jersey of a player who no longer plays for your team. As long as he is still active and playing for another team, you have to mothball the jersey. You give off an air of indirectly rooting for another team if you continue to wear the jersey. Once that player retires, you can go back to wearing that jersey if the player was worthy enough. As much as I loved my Jason Giambi Yankees t-shirt, it's just best for everyone if that thing stays at the bottom of the drawer while he's still playing elsewhere. Once he retires, the shirt can go back into the gym rotation. A major exception would be if you choose to wear the jersey as a silent protest of your team letting that player go. An example of this would be if you were a 49ers fan and kept wearing your Jerry Rice jersey during his "oh, I guess he wasn't washed up after all" productive few years in Oakland immediately following the end of his 49er days.
-On the matter of throwbacks: toe the line carefully. One time in college, I spotted a kid on campus with a sweet powder blue #19 Lance Alworth Chargers throwback. I stopped him to compliment him on the jersey, but more importantly to ask him what, if anything, he knew about Lance Alworth. I don't even need to tell you how underwhelmed I was by the response. If you are going to wear a throwback, then come prepared with a respectable level of knowledge about whichever player you're wearing. Can't guess within 20 of how many home runs Mike Schmidt hit in his career (548)? Don't know which Super Bowl Roger Staubach was named MVP of (VI)? Then don't wear the jersey. Because I'll find you.

I'm sure there are things that I've left off the list or that you may disagree with, so have at it below if you are so inclined.

Fan Foul: Wearing Neutral-Team Attire to a Game

So I'm watching the Yankees/Angels game yesterday afternoon, and something peculiar catches my eye. A ball was popped foul into the stands just off first base, and I spotted a guy sitting in the 2nd or 3rd row, decked out in authentic Padres attire, hat and jersey both. I guess he took a wrong turn on the way to San Diego, wound up in Anaheim, and figured he might as well still go to a ballgame. That's got to be the only explanation, right?

Unfortunately, no. There's an inordinate number of people out there who, when attending a sporting event, find it OK to rock the gear of a team who isn't even involved in the game. If it's just a hat, that's no big deal, since a hat is everyday attire that you can pretty much wear anyplace. I'm talking about being fully garbed - hat, jacket, jersey, etc.- in team apparel, wearing your undying support for a team other than the two that are playing right in front of you. I see, I get it, we are all now aware that you are a fan of Team X even though you've somehow procured tickets to witness a game between Team Y and Team Z. On the scale of annoying fan habits, this is very high, right above kids who wear their Little League uniform to a game, and right below anyone who tries to start a wave.

I remember being at a Cowboys/Eagles game back in '94 or so and standing in the bathroom line next to some whiskey tango-looking dude decked out in Steelers gear from head to toe, and that includes those "so terrible they were awesome" Zubaz pants that were all the rage 20 years ago. The thought that immediately crossed my mind was "if this guy is such a huge Steelers fan that he feels it necessary to dress like this, then why is he here for Cowboys/Eagles at the Vet when he could be watching his own team play as we speak?" And remember, this was way before you could follow an out of town game on your phone, the only way you could find out what was going on around the league was the score updates in the Jumbotron during timeouts and between quarters. I think that's what gets me the most - wearing a neutral team's apparel has an undertone of "this isn't the place I really want to be right now."

Can someone please explain to me why people do this? Is it some form of quiet protest to the fact that you're watching teams besides your own? Is it a way to disassociate yourself from the fans that you sit among? Is it some feeling of pressing obligation to wear fan apparel whenever setting foot in a stadium or arena, like it's some exclusive club that won't let you in if you don't fit the dress code? (By the way, if you answered "yes" to that last one, then you probably wore your NFL team's jersey last Thursday night for the first round of the draft, didn't you?)

It just looks stupid, like you're trying to force your allegiances on an indifferent group of people, or you're clamoring for attention because you're being different. Oh, so you're from St. Louis, taking a summer ballpark tour up the Eastern seaboard? That's great, hope you have fun, but that doesn't entitle you to wear a Pujols jersey to a Phillies/Braves game or an Ozzie Smith throwback to a Yankees/Royals game. No one cares that you're not from around here or that you're a Cardinals fan. They didn't buy tickets in hopes of meeting a Midwesterner, they came here to see a sporting event. I know you may feel a bit left out if your team isn't one of the two in the building, but it won't kill you to just wear normal clothes.

Take Me Out to the Mallgame

Now that Target Field in Minneapolis has opened its doors as the new home of the Twins, it now stands that an even 2/3 of major league ballparks have been in existence for 18 years or less. That's right, 20 out of the 30 current MLB stadiums were either nonexistent or not completed before 1992. Why do I go back to 1992? Because that is when the mold-breaker of stadiums that everyone now tries to emulate, Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, made its entrance into society. Camden Yards signaled the ushering out of the 1970s "cookie cutter" era of multipurpose stadiums and the ushering in of the new, "modern-retro" era. Many of these new places are big improvements over the parks they replaced, and are much more comfortable and navigable for fans.

The interesting thing that has developed as these new stadiums have popped up all over the country is that there seem to be a great deal of similarities between all of them - wide concourses, comfortable seats, luxury suites, an attempt a nice city view where possible. Ironically, so many franchises have tried to copy the uniqueness of Camden Yards that all these gorgeous new stadiums now seem to comprise a nouveau cookie cutter era. What's more is that every stadium now goes over the top with the amenities designed to enhance the fan experience, but end up directing peoples' attention everywhere but toward the field. Once everyone is inside the stadium's gates, it seems more and more that the objective is not for them to enjoy the game, but to get them to spend as many dollars as possible - hence the term "mallpark."

It's great that we now have more food choices, beer choices, and a much easier time getting from our seats to the concession stand or bathroom and back. No one will take issue with that. I am not the biggest fan of the new Yankee Stadium for a variety of reasons, but I'd be nuts not to take the new concourse over the old one. But my problem is with all the other stuff, like the Phanatic Build-a-Bear Factory at Citizens Bank Park, the aptly named "Kiddie Field" pictured above at Citi Field, the lame ass Peter Max art gallery that thankfully didn't last the whole season at Yankee Stadium last year, or the "it stopped being cool 8 years ago" pool in right-center at the airplane hangar that the Diamondbacks call home. It's almost as if these teams are now saying, "OK, thanks for coming to our stadium, you now have the option to watch a professional sporting event up close, or if that doesn't sound like fun, you can go check out all these other gimmicky things in here for 3 hours instead."

Like many who hail from South Jersey, I grew up going to games at Veterans Stadium. Anyone who has followed sports even moderately in the past 10-15 years knows how much of a dump that place was. Cold, cavernous, dirty, and unpleasing to the eye, the Vet did, however, ensure that you weren't preoccupied with unnecessary goings-on around you and simply (gasp!) paid attention to the game taking place. I'm not trying to muse like an old codger about "how we had it in my day," because I'm 24, not 84. And I do know that teams don't put all this stuff into their ballparks without research showing that enough people will enjoy it. Hell, if it gets people into the building who may otherwise not be interested in going, then it's a success. However, I don't want to see a generation of kids have to be tricked into liking baseball by all the peripheral stadium attractions. It's fine if they originally want to go for the mascot races or the stuffed animals at the team store, but I hope to goodness that they want to come back because of the 450-foot homer or the nifty 4-6-3 double play they saw. This is our concern, dude.

Towel Off

I have been a Yankee fan since 1993, the first year that I was old enough to follow baseball day-in and day-out. Living in South Jersey, I still go to 4-5 Phillies games a year, and I've gone on the record multiple times to say I have the utmost respect for the Phillies organization and their ballclub. My sister and most of my friends are Phillies fans. I'd only root against them in the case of a series like this one, or even better, this one. But I must take one issue with the Fightins: the rally towels.

I thought the rally towel was a great touch back in 2007 when the team made the playoffs for the first time in 14 years, as well as in 2008 when they won their first World Series since 1980. I was at a game during the last weekend of the '07 regular season when the towels were first handed out at the gates, and I made it to a Phillies playoff game in both '08 and '09 as well - so I can say from experience that a rally-towel waving Citizens Bank Park was a great sight to behold in those days. To appease the pro-Phillies faction that may be cursing me already, enjoy this example of what I'm talking about.

But those days are over with. October is not a novelty to this team anymore, and it should not ask its fans to treat it as a novelty. Rally towels scream "thrilled to be here!" like a married guy who's allowed a night out with his single male friends without his wife. I thought it was especially curious that the rally towels were brought back out for the division-clinching game last year - even though the NL East had been pretty much a formality since the end of August (they won the division by a healthy 6 games).

Here's the deal. The Phillies are far and away the best team in the National League. It's very very hard to imagine them missing the playoffs this coming year as long as they stay healthy. Once you reach the point that they have now reached, the fans' "rooting aides" have to be left out. You don't see rally towels in New York or in Boston. You didn't see them in Cleveland when the Indians were in the playoffs every year in the Thome/Manny era, and that team had sucked for decades prior to that.

You know where you did see them? You saw them in San Diego in 1998, where the Padres were one of the most "just thrilled to be here!" teams in World Series history. You see a stupid Rally Monkey in Anaheim that has to tell fans when it's time to put their iPhones down and slap together their Thunderstix, because they're still largely oblivious to the baseball nuances and have to make noise with inflatable sticks so they can pretend to know what's going on in front of them. And in Tampa in '08, you had cowbells. Cowbells. Let that stew for a minute or so.

And all of that crap is great if you're a team or city that is new to seeing a modicum of success in baseball, or any sport for that matter. But franchises and fan bases should outgrow that phase after a certain amount of time. It's like when you first get your driver's license and you'll volunteer to do every monotonous errand imaginable just because the idea of driving a car by yourself is so new and cool. This is why sports fans in the Northeast have little respect for sports fans on the West Coast - because the West Coast fans never surpassed that "Oh, we need milk? I'll go! I'll run out and get milk! I don't even care that it's 11:30 on a Wednesday night and I just shut my light out to go to bed. I'll go get the milk!" phase.

So, I leave the Phillies and their fans tonight with this. You're already a hard nosed East Coast sports town with some edge. You want Philadelphia to become an honest-to-goodness baseball town? Show us you can make the place rock without the rally towels. Show us all you need on a chilly October evening is your two hands, your voice, 3 or 4 domestics in the parking lot, and your passion. That, and cease with the damn E-A-G-L-E-S chants when you're at a baseball game. But that is a topic for another day.