During the (almost) six years I’ve lived in the city, I’ve had numerous conversations with people about baseball allegiances. First and foremost I live and die by the Brewers, but I’ve been here long enough to pick a local favorite. Lucky for us, Major League Baseball placed two teams in the metropolis. One can learn a lot about society by observing both fan bases.

As soon as I moved here I knew it was apparent that there’s a discrepancy in perception between the two teams. The Cubs play on the north side and play baseball in this so-called Baseball Eden called Wrigley Field where you’ll always have a good time because there’s beer, baseball and hot (read: blonde) chicks. The masses pay top dollar to watch a bad baseball team while taking breaks to pee their $6 beers back into trofts. The Sox play on the southside where things are supposedly a little tough and as a former co-worker advised before I attended a game in 2002: “bring a gun.” Well, it’s 2008 and after attending many games at “The Cell,” I’m still here. After the Sox won the series in 2005, I heard my boss make a crack that the victory parade would be well attended because “Sox fans don’t have jobs.” Uh yeah…perception. Where was I?

Oh yeah, I was talking to my eldest brother and he was also duped to think you attend a Sox game if you want to get shot. I told him my experience was vastly more enjoyable on the Southside because you have more room to watch, fans are civil to each other, the bathrooms are clean, and nobody hurls racial insults as opposed to one particular game where I sat in the Wrigley Field Bleachers. It was during the season Hee Sop Choi was touted and eventually run out of town. I expected some race-related ribbing, but they took it an insulting degree by saying things like: “you don’t know the meaning of Home Run” and “hit me a big Dong” when he didn’t excel. After the game (or perhaps it was later in the season) I was walking down the street when a group of people spotted me across the street and started chanting “Hee Sop Choi!” I mean…okay, so I kind of look like a Korean, but that doesn’t mean that’s the only reason I attended that game or follow the team.

When I watched the Cubs home opener on TV and saw a group of fans in the right field bleachers wearing stereotypical Japanese headbands to welcome their famous free agent Kosuke Fukudome, I thought to myself: “oh boy, here we go again.” It turns out that profiteers (not official cubs merchandisers) took it to a whole new level by introducing the Fukudome shirt:

I consider it very insulting but I’m not the least bit surprised that a) the shirt was made and b) the shirt is a top seller. When the Sox fielded Tadahito Iguchi to at second, you’d never see anything like that and his nationality was never brought up…but I digress. There seems to be a bully mentality among a segment of the fanbase that believes it’s okay to use race as a means to mock. I feel that these Cubs fans represent a chunk of the US population who still feel that it’s okay to be ignorant (”in good fun only”) as long as they can drink their beers, watch baseball, and feel better about themselves.

Locally, this just makes it easier for me to be a Sox fan. But on a grand scale, this episode shows that there’s quite a bit of work to be done when it comes to race, perception, and knowing where to draw the line…