Earlier today I saw a picture via The 7 Line on twitter, that speaks a lot to an aspect of baseball I don’t like.
If you can’t click the link, its a picture of a shirt being sold by Majestic Athletics for the Philies that says “My Brother is 8 Maybe He Can Pitch For The Mets”
Before we even dive into a discussion based in Sports Sociology on what this shirt represents, we should probably establish how stupid that shirt is. Yes, I’m a biased source being a Mets fan, but my High School students can think of a more entertaining insult than that shirt hurls.
It’s actually how bad that shirt is that starts off our conversation about sociology behind the shirt. The shirt isn’t funny because it isn’t genuine. The tone of the shirt looks to be a playful jab at the Phillies rival, but its without any substance so it just doesn’t feel real. In other words, since you can replace the word “Mets” and replace it with any other team, shirt just feels wrong.
Its the lack of specific reference to either team (specific meaning current topics around either team), compounded with Majestic being a major corporate supplier of baseball merchandise and apparel that makes the whole concept lose its authenticity.
Look at The 7 Line for example. The 7 Line is successful because its awesome. They are awesome because the creator, Darren Meenan, is a fan and you can sense his love of the Mets through the shirts. When he creates a clever shirt, it isn’t just a clever line but a clever line from someone that also loves the Mets. In a way, we all co-create meaning from his shirts because they are based on experiences as fans that we all have simultaneously.
When we look at the Majestic shirt and then at fan made shirts like the The 7 Line, what we really see is the difference between a fan creating a work of meaning for the team he loves vs a corporation attempting to make meaningful relationship with the fans where the relationship is purely financial.
This isn’t just restricted to the Mets. In Baltimore the version of this story is the Boh Knows Baseball and Free the Birds. The Orioles tried to create it’s own meaningful space with Eutaw Street 2110 which was (and I think is) a series of shirts and events celebrating Jones and Markakis, but it doesn’t resonate with fans the same way that Boh’s and Free the Bird does (for all the reasons mentioned above).
When I first saw The 7 Line’s tweet, I immediately thought back to my time in College at the University of Maryland. As a young, misguided Senior in High School, the first (and only shirt) I bought from the University’s bookstore was a rivalry shirt that they made. I never wore it in college. It just felt so forced. Being at the school made the shirt lose its cleverness, and looking at it made me feel like outsider trying to become an insider at my own university. I ended collecting a much better series of T-Shirts made by students that reflected the authentic feelings of the campus in shirt form.
So in conclusion, Majestic Athletics’ rivalry shirt shows the divide in communities where one is tied by shared fan experience, and the other by pure consumerism.
