An Essay on Loyalty, Betrayal, and the Greatest Con Job in Human History
There is no creature on Earth quite as magnificently delusional as the American sports fan. Not the guy who buys lottery tickets every week with rent money. Not the person who falls for the same email from the Nigerian prince a third time. No, none of them hold a candle to the red-blooded, face-painted, jersey-wearing American sports fanatic — a person who will defend to their death a billionaire’s asset portfolio as if it were their own child.
“We’re going to the playoffs this year,” they say with absolute conviction, as if they personally will be suiting up, as if their Thursday night viewing habits somehow constitute a contribution to the organization, as if the billionaire owner — sitting comfortably in his climate-controlled skybox eating shrimp cocktail — has any earthly idea they exist.
Welcome to American sports fandom. Please check your wallet, your pride, and your common sense at the door.
The Con Begins at Birth
It starts innocently enough. Your father puts a little cap on your head before you can form memories or opinions. Congratulations — you’re a fan now. You didn’t choose this. You were drafted. No one asked whether you wanted to pledge your emotional well-being to an organization that views you exclusively as a revenue stream. The team was simply geographically assigned to you, like a school district, except the school district doesn’t charge you $14 for a beer.
The genius of American sports ownership is that they’ve convinced entire cities — entire states — that a privately owned, for-profit business is somehow a civic institution. A community treasure. Your team. The Dallas Cowboys are “America’s Team.” The Green Bay Packers pretend to be community-owned while the actual community has about as much power as a houseplant at a board meeting. The New England Patriots belong to “New England” — all six states apparently — yet the profits belong exclusively to one man named Robert Kraft, who will be just fine regardless of how devastated you are in February.
The team is not yours. It has never been yours. You are, and have always been, a customer. A very, very loyal customer who inexplicably feels personally responsible for the product.
The Jersey: A $125 Monument to Your Own Naivety
Let us talk about the jersey. The sacred jersey. The garment that represents your undying commitment to a collection of strangers who will, statistically speaking, be playing for a rival franchise within three years.
You saved up. You deliberated. You went to the team store — a place designed with the psychological sophistication of a Vegas casino — and you plunked down $125, $150, maybe $200 for an officially licensed, authentically logoed piece of polyester that costs approximately $8 to manufacture. You wore it proudly. You wore it to the bar. You wore it shoveling your driveway in February because you are that kind of fan. The real kind.
And then Johnny Damon cut his hair.
If you were a Red Sox fan in the winter of 2005, you know exactly the kind of soul-evacuating betrayal we’re discussing. Johnny Damon — your Johnny Damon — with his flowing hair and his caveman beard and his two feet planted firmly in the hearts of Red Sox Nation, walked straight into Yankee Stadium, took their money, and put on the pinstripes. The pinstripes. He didn’t just leave. He defected. He crossed a border that generations of fans had treated as sacred. Benedict Arnold at least had the decency to flee to Canada. Johnny Damon moved an hour forty-five minutes down I-95.
The man had just helped Boston break an 86-year curse. He was a hero. He was beloved. He was the guy with the Jesus hair who dove face-first into outfield walls for you. And then the Yankees offered him $52 million over four years — a mere $12 million more than the Red Sox were offering — and apparently that was the number at which all loyalty evaporated like morning dew.
Somewhere in New England, a father had to explain to his seven-year-old why the man on his bedroom wall was now the enemy. There is no parenting book that prepares you for that conversation. Thousands of Red Sox fans were left holding $125 jerseys that were now essentially unwearable without triggering a PTSD episode. The team, of course, moved on and found someone else for you to love and eventually mourn.
Roger Clemens and Wade Boggs: A Masterclass in Fan Betrayal
Before Damon, there was The Rocket. Roger Clemens spent thirteen years being Boston’s golden boy. Thirteen years of strikeouts, of Cy Young Awards, of being the face of the franchise. Red Sox fans loved Roger Clemens the way you love a dog — unconditionally, irrationally, with the absolute certainty that this love would be returned.
And then he went to Toronto. And then New York. Roger Clemens put on Yankee pinstripes and continued to be excellent at baseball, which somehow made it worse. He didn’t even have the decency to collapse into mediocrity so fans could comfort themselves with “well, we didn’t really want him anyway.” He just kept being Roger Clemens, only now he was their Roger Clemens.
But even Clemens’ betrayal pales in sheer audacity next to Wade Boggs. Wade Boggs played eleven seasons for the Red Sox. Eleven. He was the quintessential Boston player — a hitting machine who made Fenway his living room. And then in 1992 he left for the Yankees. Fine. Painful, but fine. This is sports. This happens.
What happened next was not fine.
Wade Boggs — former Red Sox legend, man who had taken thousands of dollars of Boston fans’ money and goodwill — won a World Series with the Yankees in 1996 and celebrated by riding around Yankee Stadium on the back of a police horse, waving to the crowd, wearing a Yankees championship hat, grinning like a man who felt absolutely no conflict about any of this whatsoever.
Red Sox fans watched this on television with the hollow, vacant expression of people who had just witnessed something that could not be processed by a normal human brain. They had bought his jersey. They had cheered his name. They had defended Wade Boggs in arguments at bars. And there he was, on a horse, in New York, celebrating.
The horse had no comment.
The Owner: Your Silent, Uncaring Benefactor
While fans are busy having nervous breakdowns over player transactions, the owner is doing what owners do — making money. And to be fair to them, the system they’ve built is genuinely impressive in its construction.
The owner pays the players. The owner pays the coaches. The owner owns the stadium — often a stadium that was partially or entirely funded by the taxpayers of the very city he or she is supposed to be serving. The owner collects the ticket revenue, the TV revenue, the merchandise revenue, the naming rights, the parking, the $14 beer, and the $8 jersey that retails for $150. The owner also collects the emotional labor of millions of fans who will argue, stress, celebrate, and grieve on behalf of this investment vehicle as though it were a member of their family.
When a beloved player leaves, it is almost always because the owner decided he wasn’t worth the money. The owner does a calculation — cold, efficient, entirely logical from a business perspective — and determines that the fan favorite has become too expensive relative to the younger, cheaper option waiting in the minor leagues. So the fan favorite goes to a rival, the fans rage, and the owner shrugs and issues a press release about “going in a new direction” and “exciting young talent.”
Then the owner asks the city for a new stadium.
And the city, bless its heart, usually says yes.
The Fan Code: Loyalty Without Reciprocity
Here is the truly remarkable thing about all of this. Despite the jerseys that become obsolete. Despite the players who leave for rivals. Despite the owners who relocate entire franchises to cities that don’t want them — ask anyone in Seattle about the SuperSonics if you want to watch someone age ten years in real time — despite all of it, the fans remain.
Not just remain. They double down. They buy the new jersey. They rationalize the departure of the old favorite. They develop parasocial relationships with the replacement player, and the cycle begins again in glorious, beautiful, completely predictable fashion.
The fan is the only truly loyal party in this entire arrangement. The players go where the money is — as they should, they are professionals with finite careers. The owners go where the profit is — as they will, they are businesspeople with no particular obligation to your feelings. The coaches get fired. The general managers get replaced. The stadium gets renamed after a bank.
But the fan stays. The fan is loyal to a logo. To a color scheme. To a name that has, in many cases, been worn by an almost entirely different set of human beings than the ones originally responsible for making the fan care. The 2004 Boston Red Sox who broke the curse share almost no personnel with the 2024 Red Sox, and yet fans speak of them as the same entity, the same family, the same beloved institution deserving of their continued emotional and financial investment.
It is, if you step back and look at it from any kind of reasonable distance, completely insane.
Conclusion: God Bless Every Single One of Us
And yet. And yet.
There is something almost moving about the American sports fan. Something genuinely human in the willingness to believe, season after season, in the face of all available evidence, that this year will be different. That the team — your team, the one with your city’s name on the front — will deliver the thing you’ve been waiting for. The parade. The trophy. The vindication of all those Sundays sacrificed, all those jerseys purchased, all those years of faith maintained in the face of routine heartbreak.
The billionaire owner doesn’t feel that. The mercenary player who just signed a four-year deal doesn’t feel that. The corporation whose name is on the stadium definitely doesn’t feel that.
Only you feel that. Which makes you the biggest sucker in the room.
And also, somehow, the only one actually enjoying the game.
So go ahead. Buy the jersey. Just maybe wait until after the trade deadline.
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