I float as the clouds on air do

Yes, another picture of Kyle. So there you go. Photo taken by Kelly O’Connor/sittingstill.net on May 19, 2009 and used with permission.

I don’t like to pick on other blogs but I’m making an exception today.

Yesterday a blog that shall not be named here because it makes my skin crawl (oh hell, you all know what it is….Boston Dirt Dogs) posted a whiny, ridiculous entry about the Red Sox marketing scratch and sniff, pink, baseball caps for little girls. I did about a second and a half of research and found out, unlike what BDD would have you believe, the Red Sox did not create this, MLB did and ALL the teams have them. I also found that people had been writing about these caps since FEBRUARY so the BDD site kind of missed the boat on this three months later.

But I’m not here to complain about BDD.

During my research, I found another site that had an entry (Last week. BDD got scooped even as recently as a week ago on this) about the caps. Except this site decided to use their own definition of a “pink hat” as an introduction to their rant about the caps.

If you know anything about the Red Sox, you know what a Pink Hat is. A Pink Hat is a young woman who gets free tickets from her work, shows up to the park with her pink hat, and doesn’t know a goddamn f**king thing about baseball apart from wanting to have Jacoby Ellsbury’s baby.

I’ll put it this way: If you went to either of the Red Sox parades, but you can’t tell me what channel NESN is on, you are a pink hat.

They can often be overheard saying things like “Why isn’t Clay Buckhalter pitching? He’s so hot!” and “Remember that guy Cocoa Crispies or whatever? LOL” and ask questions like “When is the game gonna be over?”

So if you show up to the park with your buddies and you find that a Pink Hat is sitting behind you, you might as well move to an obstructed view seat because you will have a better time sitting alone behind a f**king load-bearing pillar.

This person seems to have issues with women, huh? Now my initial reaction was to leave a comment on this guy’s blog and point out that his definition was wrong. I’ve made it well-known that I hate the term “pink-hat” because it singles out women and everyone who has argued against my complaint claims it is all-encompassing. So this guy (whose blog I never read before so I admit I have no idea if he’s always this eager to insult or just wrote this to get a rise out of people) creating his own definition pretty much says all there is to be said about him. Then I decided it wasn’t worth my time or anger to leave a comment there, thus giving him more traffic during the ensuing “discussion” we’d inevitably have. I’m not giving him traffic by linking to him either but if you Google “red sox scratch and sniff” and look under “blogs”, you’ll find him.

So a “pink hat” is a woman who knows nothing about baseball except how cute Jacoby Ellsbury is? What’s that say about the men in the stands who can’t name the rotation? How about the guy who sat behind me in the grandstand once trying to “teach” his date about baseball who didn’t know why the pitcher didn’t come up to bat? Or the guy who sat near me in the bleachers who kept yelling “Mark!!! Mark Timlin!!!!” every time Alan Embree came out of the bullpen? I have hundreds of stories about men at ballgames who knew absolutely nothing about baseball but pretended to (one of my favorites, such as it is, being Kelly O’Connor telling a group of men whose numbers were retired at Fenway and their not believing her – even though she was right – by their own admission, because she was a woman). Most of them were wearing Red Sox caps. Most of them were only there because it was the “in” place to be.

I’d argue that you have a better chance of randomly approaching a woman at Fenway, asking her about the Red Sox and getting the right answer than you would a guy but I know that isn’t necessarily true. There are a lot of factors to take into consideration when trying to figure out who knows about baseball and who is there just to be there and the color of the person’s hat isn’t one of them.

Hell, it isn’t even on my top ten.

He also seems to think that any woman fan who finds a player attractive doesn’t know about baseball. I’ve asked this question before and I’ll ask it again. What is the difference between knowledgeable baseball fans (who happen to be women) enjoying the attractiveness of the players and knowledgeable baseball fans (who happen to be me) enjoying the attractiveness of the sideline reporters (or, in some instances, the wives of the players)? I, admittedly, enjoy all aspects of watching baseball, including the fact that I think Bronson Arroyo is hot. I watch Kyle Snyder and wish for his success because I like his story. First-round draft pick plagued by injuries and DFA’d by one of the worst teams in baseball comes back to be on a World Championship team. I also think he has gorgeous blue eyes. Other baseball bloggers are allowed to write about what they’d like to do with an Erin Andrews or Heidi Watney…well I think women should be allowed to say “Nick Green might not be a gold glover but he sure is pretty!” without being accused of not knowing anything about the game. Hell, we shouldn’t even have to mention the Gold Glove! (I’ve yet to read a blogger comment negatively or positively on how well, say, Heidi Watney does her job. It’s always just about her looks. If I wrote an entire entry about any player and just focused on their looks, I’d be run out of blogdom by the men who would accuse me of only watching baseball for the cute guys. It’s a lousy double-standard and I plan on beating this into the ground any time I feel like it comes up.)

I hate the pink baseball caps because I hate pink in general. But there are plenty of people (mostly men) out there wearing Camo caps, green caps, black caps, sky blue caps, multi-colored caps and (good God) even Argyle caps. Do none of these people know anything about baseball? Maybe we should take them all out back and shoot them so the parks will never again be dirtied by their attendance? (Confession time: Just last week I bought a black on black Red Sox cap. I’ll have to get in line too.)

Here’s the thing. Wear whatever damn hat you want to wear. Pink, green, yellow…who cares if there are idiots in the world waiting to call you a “pink hat” or tell you that you aren’t a real fan? I have a dream that all my women friends who are baseball fans go to a game together wearing pink hats and shove it in the faces of every ass their who tries to give them grief about it by blowing them away with their baseball knowledge. (Unfortunately, most of my women friends don’t like pink either so this probably won’t ever happen. See world? All women don’t like pink. Go figure.)

Also, enjoy the game any damn way you please. You know what kept me coming back to watch game after game with my parents when I was a kid? Fred Lynn’s smile. Yep. I was impressed with the way he ran the outfield (because, come on, it was pretty cool watching him slam into the wall or do tumblesaults while trying to catch the ball) but it was the fact that I thought he was adorable that kept me watching. (For the sake of this discussion, Fred Lynn was, in a sense, the Jacoby Ellsbury of his day – with the talents of a Hall of Famer – but that, sadly, is a topic for another day.) Now I know a fair amount about the game and follow most teams, not just the Red Sox. Does my affinity for lanky, blonde, pitchers take anything away from my love of baseball or knowledge of the game? No. No it doesn’t, thank you very much.

Since I brought up Kyle, for those asking for updates, he pitched Sunday and, unfortunately, didn’t fare very well. The good news is he still seems to be healthy and, given how his other appearances went, this seems to be just a case of having a really bad day. If he’s pitching every fifth day (which seems to be the case right now) then his next appearance will be on MiLB.tv and I’ll, hopefully, get to see some of it.

Red Sox start their series in Detroit tonight with Daisuke on the mound against Rick Porcello. My friends KellyO and Beth will both be there to cheer on the boys in grey (safe and fun travels, ladies!) and I’m fairly certain neither of them will be wearing a pink hat (but I’m ABSOLUTELY certain either of them could rival any man when it came to discussing baseball).

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *