Fan Conversion Day

and the dude isn’t even a Padre fan. He doesn’t even like baseball!!! That’s who you should pay a visit to with your rusty paint scraper.

Used to be a Doyer fan until ’81. Saw my first Padres game as a recruit. Back in those days, they let us in free if we wore our uniforms.

that’s a married man.

I expect a fanpost explaining things.

It seems like a relatively straightforward promotion to pull off.

Have a Padre (former current whatever) paddle my ass?

Where do I sign up?

But had a feeling that having a pile of burning trash in Petco Park would probably be against several city ordinances and possibly not highly desired by the owners/groundskeepers either.

At least I’d get to see my team every year. The Red Sox have been to SD one time in the seven years I’ve been here. It’s harder to keep up with.

Also, whereas Red Sox fans used to be the lovable loser, true-fans-of-the-game type people, ever since 2004, and especially since 2007, Red Sox “nation” has been flooded with douche bags and bandwagon riders. I secretly hope for the Red Sox to have a losing record for like five years in a row just so the jackass fans will go cling to some other team.

You’ll have to show your compadres card

I just spent about 10 minutes trying to figure out an analogy for what it’s like for a lifelong Red Sox fan but I really can’t think of one.

You can’t say you’d never participate in something like this because you don’t know what the future holds. Ten years ago I was a member of a fanbase that was passionate, knowledgable and humble. Part of the reason we loved our team was because they were so hard to love. They broke our hearts every year it seemed. And not only that, but there was a sense that we were rooting for the little guy, for the David who had to face Goliath every season.

We never quite had the talent or the payroll. We had a quirky dump of a stadium (yes, until the Sox started winning World Series, Fenway was largely regarded as an antiquated piss hole) and a front office that never seemed to get it right.

Until John Henry purchased the team in 2002, the Red Sox were the little engine that couldn’t. Always on the cusp, but never in the winner’s circle. They were never horrible, but never good enough. But part of being a fan meant you stuck by your team.

Then in 2003, I move to San Diego, and Henry takes over the team. Suddenly the stadium gets a major facelift, payroll gets a boost, big free agents start coming in and the attitiude changes — for better or worse. The team wins a World Series in 2003. I celebrate at OB Grille along with all the other Sox fans. At the time, that was the only Red Sox bar around (now there are like 20 of them). It meant something…

Then the wave of obnoxiousness never ended. Suddenly, everyone was a diehard Red Sox fan. Where I had once been part of a small minority wearing their “B” hats, there were suddenly thousands of them — and many of them pink. At first I tried to enjoy it, but it never sat right with me.

Where were all these people in the 80’s? In the 90’s? Were these people really all from Boston? The Northeast? Anywhere on the east coast?

Suddenly, something that I had held pretty dearly as part of my identity was lost… being a Red Sox fan was no longer something that made me unique. Suddenly, being a Red Sox fan was something that made me part of a group of obnoxious, bandwagon fans who had a pretty poor reputation throughout the country. This group that I’d been a part of my whole life had been hijacked and even the team itself took on a personality that was more “Evil Empire” than blue collar.

All of this coincided with my move to San Diego where I found another team of “lovable losers.” Maybe I just like an underdog. Maybe I just don’t like being lumped in with posers and douche bags. Whatever it is, I found myself much more drawn to the team that just keeps scraping by and trying to shock the world than the team that buys and sells players on a whim and considers itself the center of the baseball universe.

So, what I’m trying to say is, I understand why you wouldn’t convert to being a Nats fan just because you moved to DC. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t either. My conversion to being a Padres fan really isn’t strictly a geographical thing. It’s a matter of circumstances. The Red Sox became something I didn’t really like… at the same time, I had the Padres right in front of me representing something that I did like.

I’m still a die-hard NY Giants fan… that hasn’t faded. But that’s because the Giants are still the same old Giants they were when I moved. I like the Chargers too, but I certainly wouldn’t consider myself a Chargers fan.

No one anticipates turning their back on the team they grew up with, and I don’t really feel like I am turning my back on the Red Sox. I feel like the Red Sox turned their back on me and all the other fans who liked the team better when it felt like we were doing things the right way.