When my dad coached our tee ball team we won the tee ball world series against the heavily favored team who had beaten us during regular season play. I was not the worst player on the team, which was a change. In little league I mostly struck out and sat on the bench, a routine which lasted one year before I quit. Until college when I started a beer-league softball team and while we lost the division playoffs, we were certainly the drunkenest team out there, you know, which is cool.

I never had much of a taste for team sports. I took art classes when I was a kid and I got the lead in the school play. Probably because I wasn't very good at sports I learned a certain "artistic disdain" for them. But this all happened in that wonderful period of time called The Early Nineties.

The year was 1992. Color Me Badd, Kris Kross, and Boyz II Men, had hit singles. A southern democrat named William Clinton was running for president. Nike Air Jordan sneakers were all the rage, as was pretty much anything else that had to do with sports, especially Michael Jordan and Bo Jackson. I was in eighth grade and for the first time in my life, I was not cool or popular. Half of the reason behind my sudden unpopularness had to do with a teenage hood-ornament stealing ring operating the previous summer. But the other half had to do with my utter lack of interest in things having to do with professional sports, and my inability to fake one.

So when I got to high school I was more than happy to meet other kids who had no interest in professional sports. I once again made friends and was popular and engaged in such nonprofessional sports activities as smoking pot, listening to rock music, moshing, letting my hair grow long and cursing the government. Sports became one of the idols to which I had touched my hammer and seen that it rang hollow. I equated sports with the passé, macho culture of capitalism and conformity. I was a nonconformist! I dyed my hair red and blue and purple and black. I had a wallet chain and combat boots and wore a black wool hat even in the summer. I was so much and way cooler than everyone else, but especially those kids who liked sports. Assholes.

And everything was fine until I was living in New York and decided to become a Red Sox fan.

OK, so there is nothing wrong with being a Red Sox fan. But this came on rather suddenly. I got this overwhelming feeling of Boston pride when I moved to New York. You see, I hated New York and all I wanted to do was walk around Manhattan with a Boston Red Sox hat on, to prove that I was not, in fact, one of these Manhattanites, but a Bostonian living there in involuntary exile. So by the the time I escaped from New York, I had convinced myself that I actually cared about the Red Sox, and I started watching games on TV with my dad when I lived with him, and then when I moved to Boston, I started scoring tickets and going to games and then, when I was unavailable to go to Fenway or watch on the TV, I started listening to games on the radio. Which, really, was the last step for me because I hate talk radio.

So, there I am at Game 3 of the ALCS, you remember the game where Pedro beat up Don Zimmer, and I'm wearing my Sox cap and my red "Cowboy Up" shirt and when Nomar steps up to bat, I yell, "Nomaaaah!" and really, I was dressed like everyone else and behaving like everyone else and man, was that fun.

It has always been a theory that people, especially teenagers, will act and dress the same because belonging is so desperately important to them. I can remember in 1991, when C&C Music Factory and Timmy T were topping the charts. I was popular then and at lunch the cafeteria staff had to enact a rule stating no more than seven people could sit on one bench at the lunch table. This was a reactive measure to combat the phenomena of all the popular kids cramming themselves onto not just one table, but one side of one table. So crazy were we over fitting in that we couldn't sit on the wrong side of the table, and wo unto thee who siteth at the wrong table.

My new found conformity is different than this. To be sure, it started for opposite reasons, namely, to stand out in New York, my affair with the Red Sox started to not fit in. But now, when I go to a Red Sox game, I'm not worried about fitting in. I'm not worried that the rest of the fans will judge me or shun me or cut in front of me at the line for the beer stand. Those were exactly the fears which encouraged the teenage conformity I once fell victim to.

I attended a mass demonstration against American policy in Iraq in 1999. I found myself surrounded by about 150,000 people who all, more or less, were here for the same reason. And there were chants. I had never really experienced chants like this before, outside of sporting events which I had shunned for the last seven years, and the experience was jarring. I didn't want to be chanting the exact same thing as everyone else. At the same time, I did want a large and effective demonstration. But I couldn't overcome my natural defense mechanism which was to try to be as cool as possible. And there was not much less cool than chanting some inane chant with a bunch of disorganized hippies and insane communists.

My Red Sox conformity has two aspects to it. The first is akin to dressing up for a costume party. It's just more fun to go to a costume party when you also have a costume. It's a more complete experience. And I feel this way about going to Fenway. Without the hat and the shirt and the appropriate chanting, you might as well just be at home watching the game by yourself.

The second reason is perhaps the more important of the two. Unlike being surrounded by the bottom of the barrel liberal element at a demonstration, Fenway park welcomes the coolest people in the world all summer: drunk Bostonians. These are my favorite people, from the rowdy blue-collar drunks in the bleachers with the thick accents and t-shirt tans, to the elite Boston drunks in the luxury boxes with Red Sox pins on the lapels of their suit jackets. Sure, I sat behind two fat old women in the bleachers one day who would complain every time the crowd got on its feet because they were too fat to bear standing, and sure, the almost perfunctory psuedo-celebrity appearances bother me too. But by and large, I feel surrounded by people I want to be surrounded by. These are my people.

The word, conformity suggests some kind of hegemony that I don't feel at Fenway park. This is the hegemony of cruel teenagers and republicans. My times at Fenway are more like participation than conformity. And there is nothing wrong or uncool about participating in something positive that is bigger than any one of its participants.

And also, the Yankees suck.