For the record

Anyone that gets worked up over bandwagon fans or the color of someone's team hat is really misappropriating their time and energy.

As you no doubt know, Major League Baseball and professional sports in general sell a lot of team hats, jerseys and other logo stuff. They make lots of money. But a while back, they realized that if they didn't limit themselves to the actual colors and patterns that the teams wear while in play, they can multiply sales.

I think it started with "throwbacks." Rather than just getting the home or road jersey for the Red Sox, you could buy the version of the jersey and hat the team wore in 1975.

Then came the idea of the "alternate" jersey. On very limited, special days, the team might wear a different pattern uniform. The most obvious of these is the Red jersey the Sox wear now on occasion.

Then it moved onto hats. You can buy a Red Sox hat with the well-known "B" on the front in about 3,492 different colors. All yellow. All black. All green. All pink.

It's this last one that has become an issue. People associate the pink hat with "bandwagon fans." The kind that only started following the team when it became fashionable. Their "fandom" isn't worth as much, because they didn't suffer through the heartbreaking loses and near misses.

"Pink hats" has actually become slang for a subpar fan.

Really it's about girls. Men think girls couldn't possibly be "real" fans, which is ridiculous. But there it is. Read the article. Silly, really. They all act as if the problem they have with pink hats is just that they represent "new" fans. Suuuuure.

But the story links to an interesting site called Girl Sox Nation. Do girl Sox fans need their own site? I dunno. The story says the site disproves the notion that girl fans can't be good, expert fans. Judge for yourself.

Do you really care if someone is a "new" fan or a fan that just doesn't have the depty of knowledge and interest that you do? Are you really bothered by someone that wears a different color hat? Does that ruin your enjoyment of the sport in some way?