Uni Watch News Ticker for July 19, 2023

Yes…and ditch the blue pants, too. Yellow all the time!
The market is sorta flooded with throw/fauxbacks right now (not saying that’s a bad thing), so I’m glad the Rams will stay the course for a season or 2.

Twins and Nats did this back when I lived in their respective cities and attended games on the regular.

The feigned outrage against it in Seattle bothers me quite intensely. One of the great things about American sports fans, historically, has been that we have a culture of loving sport first, team second. Like, the stereotype of an American sports fan is someone who can turn on the TV or sit down at a bar and enjoy whatever game is on, even if the team he or she roots for isn’t playing. And it’s almost a rite of passage for an American sports fan to show up at a stadium or a bar or other public gathering and find oneself the only person rooting for a team where everyone else around is actively rooting for the other team – and instead of feeling threatened, having that become an all-time favorite experience. Because as hard as we cheer to support our team, we tend not to treat opposing fans as representatives of an enemy. If you’re a fan of the sport first, your team second, you always have it in mind that if you’d lived somewhere else, you’d have come to root for that team instead.

Whereas in Europe, at least as far as soccer goes, the culture is more of being a tribal, identity-defining fan of a team first, the sport second. Or not at all. Living there, I knew people who were passionate fans of a team who didn’t seem to actually enjoy the sport of soccer all that much and would never think of watching a game their team or country wasn’t playing in. And yeah, these are both very broad oversimplified observations with lots and lots of exceptions. But there really is a different vibe between the sports fandom of the United States (and Australia) and Europe. Try showing up an a bar even on NFL gameday where you know you’ll be the only person wearing one team’s jersey – you might expect to come in for some verbal ribbing, especially when the crowd favorite scores against your team, but you wouldn’t expect to face physical threat to your limb and life.

Whereas the first time I attended a soccer game in Europe, I dressed in the home team’s colors but left the stadium by accident with the visiting team’s fans. (There were no PA announcements reminding people to wait in their seats for 20 minutes while the opposing fans cleared out, so the game ended and I just left.) The home team had defeated the visitors, and I can only think of a couple of times in my life when I’ve been as frightened for my physical safety by other people in public. If my accent and general cluelessness hadn’t been obvious to the fans who confronted me on that walk between the stadium gate and the door to the first pub that wasn’t sealed shut with locked steel panels, I think I might have been in actual danger. I’ve never felt like that in an American sporting context, ever, including when I’ve been wearing opposing-team gear and and actively rooting for the visiting team in stadiums, which I’ve done in multiple sports. I mean, just this month I attended my first game at Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati (5 stars, would recommend) wearing a Padres hat. And on the field, the Padres were just absolutely humiliating the Reds. There were a lot of Padres fans at the game, but I was the only one in my section, and yet the Reds fans around me were never hostile in the least. Big guy in the family sitting to my left even gave me his helmet nacho bowl as a souvenir, that’s how hostile and threatening the Reds fans were.

The vibe of the Seattle responses to the Blue Jays merchandise quoted in the article is much closer to European soccer hooliganism than to traditional American sports fandom, and it’s troubling to me that the team store would give into it. The correct response to complaints is, “We’re here to sell merchandise, and every dollar we earn in sales helps us pay our players and staff to make the Mariners the best team we can be.”