In the months leading up to a long-overdue title in 2004, one could purportedly spot Red Sox fans at Boston's Fenway Park wearing shirts with messages like "Jeter Has AIDS."
Boston fans are a different sort. But winning a World Series once or twice or three times mellows a rancorous fanbase. Perusing the Boston-centric fare at Sully's Tees, you won't find any affronts to Jeter or his immune system, but you will come across clothing declaring "Lebron is a Bitch," "Crosby is a Douche," and, the ultimate in sour grapes toward the Yankees' success, "Take Your 27 Rings and Shove 'Em Up Your Ass."
Asked if Panda attire might penetrate this market now that Pablo Sandoval is heading eastward, Sully's manager Sean Quigley takes a deep breath. "I don't know the degree to which that will happen." As for the market of casual fans, women, and children perhaps not amenable to calling an opponent a bitch and more enthralled with dressing up in teddy-bear clothes: "I think they are there to be had."
And Sandoval may yet have them.
The biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote more than one lengthy academic article, complete with graphs, charts, and mentions of standard deviations, claiming the disappearance of the .400 batter actually indicates a greater amount of hitting talent in the game, not less. His claim is that, as the game has grown more standardized, bizarre outliers on both ends of the talent spectrum disappear. Extreme performances are replaced by a closer adherence to the mean; today's best players are as good as in any era, but don't benefit from competing against lower-level competitors: "Improving play eliminates the rough edges that great players can exploit ... as average play moves towards the limits of human possibility and compresses great players into an ever-decreasing space between average play and the immovable [limit of human capacity]."
We see this on the field. And we see it in the stands. Sports leagues have grown ever so much more proficient at squeezing every last dollar out of their fans. Jerry Seinfeld presciently summed up the mindset of the American sports aficionado: "You're actually rooting for the clothes ... you are standing and cheering for your clothes to beat the clothes of another city."
These days, too, you are likely to be wearing those clothes.
And, despite what the Fenway Faithful have to say on the matter, Jeter moves a lotta merch: An East Coast-based player agent tells your humble narrator that the Yanks' former captain was one of a rare group of baseball players who can bring a team a healthy eight-digit bonus on jersey sales.
Hawking paraphernalia has become a billion-dollar side-enterprise for both professional and "amateur" sports. Draft Yao Ming and an entire subcontinent wants that jersey. Talent-wise, it makes little sense to sign a 39-year-old soccer midfielder to an astronomical contract when he could arguably be outperformed by a college kid. Business-wise, David Beckham has generated more than $1.5 billion in shoe and jersey sales.
Pablo Sandoval, who last week spurned the hometown San Francisco Giants to sign with the Red Sox, is no David Beckham. That is, Sandoval's actually being paid scores of millions of dollars largely due to his ability to play ball.
Not that you'd know it from peering around AT&T Park and the city writ large, though.
Sandoval's unique combination of dexterity and corpulence in 2008 earned him the nickname "Kung Fu Panda" — and a market for cute, animal-themed headwear aimed at nonfans was spawned.
The team reports some 2,500 cute panda hats were sold at the stadium this year. But that doesn't include the panda gear sold at Giants team stores (employees at several told us that they ran out of it even before the playoffs and World Series) or the alternate panda caps sold at AT&T Park by concessionaire Centerplate, or the many independent vendors working street corners and gas stations throughout the city. And it doesn't count the panda hats Sandoval flogs on his own website.
An enterprising Boston entrepreneur could do worse than sweeping every Goodwill in town for pandaphernalia; as a brand and a jovial walking teddy bear, Sandoval serves as something of a gateway drug for baseball.
But that's not why the Red Sox threw $95 million his way.
Johnny Carson used to tell a joke about how, even in the era of computers, there is no measurable interval of time shorter than the period between the light turning green and the New York cabbie behind you laying on the horn. And that's about how long it took for the East Coast agent to say "no" when asked if Sandoval's ability to move merch made him a more attractive prospect for Boston.
Baseball, more than any other sport, pits our hearts against our minds. It's a constant battle of nostalgia ("There were giants upon the earth in those days") vs. cold analytical analysis ("Improving play eliminates the rough edges that great players can exploit"). Sandoval's departure from this city epitomizes this. You can rationalize the loss of a streaky, aging player with chronic weight problems and a lack of plate discipline. Or you can mourn the exit of the Kung Fu Panda.
Or both. Longstanding Giants fans with Candlestick memories and years of bitterness on their résumés may look down upon wide-eyed greenhorns in panda caps. But winning a World Series once or twice or three times mellows a rancorous fanbase. The promise of years of disappointment and the ability to run statistical analyses isn't what attracted us to the game. Players like Sandoval did.
In a game of averages where so much is predictable, Sandoval wasn't. He could swing at a pitch over his head or on the first bounce. He could spray a ball to every inch of the field. He moved with remarkable agility for a big man. Sandoval may never live up to his vast potential and he may never be the player fans hoped he'd be. And, truth be told, for lengthy swaths of his Giants career, he wasn't even very good. But he was always exciting to watch. And he was likable.
And, in the end, likability does matter. Sandoval received a five-year contract from the Sox while fellow baseball savant Hanley Ramirez was only inked for four years.
And why? "Because," explains the agent, "Hanley Ramirez is a prick."
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