My Week as a Phillies Fan

This week, I did something that would be unfathomable to many of my brethren: I wore a Phillies hat, and I liked it.

I had some work meetings in Philadelphia, so I went down a day early to go to the Sunday afternoon Phillies game with my friend Kate and her family. The plan was to meet at the seats, so I got there early to walk around and take in the atmosphere. Walking wasn’t easy. Even with a strong chill in the air, the concourses were packed with Phillies fans. It turns out it was the Phillie Phanatic’s birthday, and there was a substantial pre-game celebration. 

I shouldered my way past the parents hoisting their children up to watch the mascots cause mayhem on the field. I had one thing in mind as I wound my way through these happy Philadelphians: I needed a cap.

Those of you who follow me on TikTok know I’ve become an avid baseball cap collector in recent months. I typically look for caps with unusual color schemes, and MLB is happy to oblige. In recent years, the league has worked with New Era and other cap companies to produce a seemingly endless barrage of products for collectors like me to spend our hard-earned money on. I try to be judicious with my purchases, but I don’t always succeed. Sometimes I see a hat, and I just have to have it. Like this gorgeous Washington Nationals cap with the cherry blossoms theme. I have two of them, just in case I ruin one.

My desire to purchase a Phillies hat came from a bit of a different place. The hat I bought was traditional. There was nothing new or unusual about its color scheme, except for the fact that no other team uses burgundy as its primary color. The cap is classic, it’s stylish, and it looked great on my head (that’s not always the case). The only problem, at least according to some of my friends and followers, was that it is the uniform of the enemy.

So in case you don’t know, the Mets and the Phillies are rivals. They have been in the same division since divisions were created in 1969. They are the closest teams to each other, geographically. They have been involved in heated division races, all-out brawls, and trash-talk wars. They’re not necessarily the most hated team by Mets fans—I’d still put the Yankees and the Braves above them—but it’s close. To be honest, fans don’t need an excuse to hate another team. They just need a reason.

Most Mets fans wouldn’t be caught dead in a Phillies cap. They probably wouldn’t go to a game at the Phillies’ Citizens Bank Park, unless they were playing the Mets and wanted to stir up trouble. They definitely wouldn’t defend the team or their cap, as I found myself doing on Sunday afternoon and evening to my friends and readers. I perceived in their response a revulsion to the very idea of associating with the Phillies, as if it went against the fundamental nature of their fandom. As if they cannot root for their team without denigrating their rivals. As if love cannot exist without hate.

I think they’re missing out. Walking into a foreign stadium to root for your rivals is one of the healthiest things you can do in sports. I wore the Phillies hat that day to purge myself of my remaining tribalism, one of the most pervasively toxic traits of our era. For many of us, it starts in sports, but now everything is sports: movies, history, politics. Especially politics. I’ve tried to be less tribalistic in politics, but that’s much more difficult. Wearing a Phillies hat is relatively easy.

I wear a Phillies hat to strike a small blow against the division that plagues our society, because it’s all that I can do, and because I wanted to show that loving one team doesn’t necessitate hating your rivals. Rooting for the Phillies on Sunday against the Chicago White Sox didn’t make me any less invested in the Mets. I still stood up and cheered when I watched Francisco Lindor hit two home runs on TV on Wednesday afternoon. I still read every article that came out on the Mets this week. I still checked Pete Alonso’s career stat line, as I do every week, to see how many homers he’ll need to average the rest of his career to make it to the vaunted number of 500, which will guarantee him entry to the Hall of Fame. Nothing has changed, except my heart has less poison in it.

It has taken me a couple of years to get here. This phase of my journey started two summers ago when, after a particularly bad Mets loss, I decided to burn all my Mets gear. I needed a purge. I needed to stop identifying so closely with a group of players I didn’t really know. I needed to end the parasocial element of our relationship. Anger was becoming a problem in my life, and I was looking to cut things out of my existence that made me mad. The Mets were near the top of the list. I didn’t want to stop watching them—I love baseball too much for that—but refusing to drape myself in their colors seemed like a good start. My wife wisely dissuaded me from the bonfire, but I did donate all the clothes, save for one shirt, to Goodwill. 

I think it helped. I continued working on my anger, and while I’m not sure if wearing any Mets gear would have halted my progress, rejecting it was an important symbolic step. Starting my cap collection also helped. I don’t collect Mets hats. I collect pretty much every other kind. I appreciate these caps for their aesthetics, not the loyalty their logos and colors typically engender. It whisks me back to childhood, when every team was amazing, every color was bright, and every team was exciting because they were filled with great players I hadn’t yet learned about. 

There’s a great and terrible thing about sports fandom: You can do it however you want. You can use it as a vessel for all of life’s frustration and hatred, or see it as an opportunity to become a better, more responsible human being. Some people say you shouldn’t tell other people how to fan. I get it, but I don’t agree.  Not when everything has become sports. I think we should be having hard conversations about what it means to be a good fan, and how different kinds of fandom lead to different outcomes, for the individual, the community, and maybe even for the team they claim to support.

I wrote this essay to make a small contribution to that conversation. So hear this: I wore a Phillies hat to be a better Mets fan. I wore it to be a better person. I don’t want to feed the tribalism, blind loyalty, or unnecessary rage that lies dormant inside me. We’ve got enough of that in the world already, and I don’t want any of it in my life.

When the Mets play the Phillies, I root for the Mets.

The rest of the time there’s no harm in wearing a Phillies hat.