Not So Tickled Pink

It seems I am going to need a new roommate. My current one has just informed me that she is in the market to buy a pink Blackhawks hat.

The only thing I hate more than pink sports apparel is overcooked zucchini and the Yankees.

I’m not talking about Breast Cancer Awareness hats. As someone who has lost family members to the disease, I would wear a pink ribbon hat in a second to support the cause. I am talking about pink baseball caps that have been mass produced by professional sports organizations in order to capitalize on the growing audience of fashion-seeking, bandwagon fans.

Pink hats, or any other type of pink sports apparel, scream “bandwagon fan.” Women who wear the stuff give off a vibe worse than a middle-aged man drinking alone in a bar dropping cheesy pick-up lines. Without saying a word, they shout “I don’t really care about this game but my boyfriend wanted me to come.” A pink hat or bedazzled jersey coupled with a pair of sky-high stilettos is a sports fan’s worst nightmare.

I can trace my disdain for blush colored baseball caps back to 2004, when the Boston Red Sox won their first World Series in 86 years and all of a sudden it was cool to be a Sox fan again. Subsequently, I stopped being able to get tickets to games and watched helplessly as pink hat fans flooded Fenway Park.

The same thing happened during the 2007-2008 basketball season when the Celtics introduced the Big Three (Boston signed Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett to complement Paul Pierce) and later won the NBA Championship. Now when I go to games my legs are cramped sitting in an overcrowded arena in scalped seats next to a girl in a pink Paul Pierce jersey texting on her phone.

In an effort to take region out of the equation—and to prove I’m not just drunk off a handle of Hater-ade— I asked my sports-loving friend Lisa from Dallas her thoughts on the issue. Thanks to Jessica Simpson—who supported her Dallas Cowboys quarterback beau Tony Romo by donning a pink jersey in 2007—Lisa also drowns in waves of pink hats at sporting events.

“It’s the only way to get some women to watch or go to sporting events,” she said. “In Dallas you can tell a woman is only going through the motions of liking sports if she is wearing a pink hat. To sum it up, pink is for posers.”

While I may hate pink hats and bandwagon fans, I loathe what they represent more (after all, someone had to think up the idea of a pink hat before women started wearing them). The pink hat may be one of the most glaring examples as to how much of a business baseball and sports in general have become. To some, it’s just a hat. To others, it’s a personification of owners and organizations sucking the purity out of America’s pastime. Teams will do anything—and sell anything— to make money.

As my soon-to-be-former roommate asked, “What’s wrong with pink hats? They’re still buying tickets and supporting the team.”

Therein lies the problem. No longer is it enough for teams to market the game and their players, but sports is now seen as much of a commodity as the pink hat itself. How else can you explain the $300 seats at the New Yankee Stadium? What blue-collared baseball fan can afford seats like that? Some games have even become giant social events (let’s hear it for 75 percent of the “fans” sitting in the bleachers at Wrigley Field).

Major league organizations might not care what they are selling or to who, as long as they are raking in the dough like autumn leaves. But real fans—like myself—have a problem with it.

The movement against pink hats may be at its largest in Boston (which explains my subtle opinion on this matter). We suffered through the losing seasons. I wore my green Celtics jersey and relaxed my legs across empty seats at games B.C. (Before Championship) and cheered on the Sox despite the alleged curse of Babe Ruth. Now that Boston teams are winning, the pink hats infiltrate the stands, soaking in the winning percentages and blissfully unaware of the heartache that used to fill their very same seats.

So I guess the real enemy is not pink, but green—the color of money and the hue of overcooked zucchini. Without this particular ‘green monster’ in modern sports, we might find ourselves pink hatless.

While I can’t control the influx of pink hats in modern sports, I can however make sure my apartment is quarantined from the epidemic. This is why my roommate will be evicted immediately should she dare follow through with her threat to purchase a pink Blackhawks cap.