A Must-Have for the Fall Season

There's a minor fashion craze catching on in Boston. It's nothing too expensive--just a $20 T-shirt, in fact. But you can't buy them in the store--they're only available at select locations on the sidewalks of Kenmore Square. Flip to the sports page right now. If the Boston Red Sox beat the New York Yankees in Game Five of the American League Championship Series last night, the shirts are still available. If not, well--wait until next year.

These shirts says "Yankees Suck," in bright red letters over the number 21, Roger Clemens' uniform number when he was with the Red Sox, and they are selling by the thousands.

This is a market that someone should have gotten into a long time ago. As one of the guys behind the Yankees Suck empire said yesterday, "There's a lot of Yankee-haters out there." And never more than this weekend, as the Sox and Yanks met at Fenway Park in the postseason for the first time ever. (I'm not even going to attempt to describe the intensity of the rivalry here. If you're curious, wear a Red Sox hat into Yankee Stadium sometime and find out for yourself.)

So who are Yankees Suck? A couple of recent college graduates and Red Sox fans who don't want their names used here. They've all got real jobs, but in their spare time they have made it their mission, as their Web site (www.yankees-suck.com) boasts, to get all of "Red Sox Nation outfitted in this shirt."

They started making shirts at the beginning of this season, but, as one of them explains to me, the inspiration goes back much further. "It's really a lifetime of hating the Yankees," he says.

The shirts aren't licensed by Major League Baseball, and the Red Sox won't sell them because, according to one of the bosses of Yankees Suck, "they won't let us say 'suck' with a major league team." The Yankees haven't signed off either, and one of the shirt vendors says he's "sure the Yankees will be calling us soon."

In the meantime, Yankees Suck has inspired its share of knock-offs. No fewer than half a dozen varieties of the shirt were on display in the bleachers at Fenway over the weekend, from the blunt white-on-red "Yankees Suck" to the effete calligraphy of "Yankees Suck," gold-on-blue.

The ringleaders of the Yankees Suck racket disdain such imitations. "There's some fake Yankee-haters out there," one sneers. "They're imposters. They're out there to make a buck. We're out there to hate the Yankees."

So are their customers. One emailed this to the Yankees Suck Web site: "Four bleacher seats, $400. Twelve beers, $40. Two Yankees Suck T-shirts, $40. Getting arrested, $200. Knocking out a Yankee fan's teeth: priceless."

Yankees Suck, though, is quick to denounce violence. "It's all in good fun," says one. "It's dumb," he says of fighting between fans of the two teams, "but it's not Yankees Suck's fault."

And they know some people, especially parents, are put off by the particular verb on the T-shirts. "We try to be sensitive to that. When I see kids coming, I fold up the shirts and try to shut up," one shirt vendor says. "It's all in good fun," he repeats.

The guys at Yankees Suck say they had a few problems at the beginning and still run into trouble occasionally. One tried to give a shirt to Boston Mayor Thomas Menino on Saturday, but "they picked me up and removed me."

He puts it as diplomatically as possible: "We've grown more mature with our handling of the police."

They've considered branching out, too. The Jets play the Patriots on Monday Night Football in November, and Yankees Suck is thinking of making its NFL debut with "Jets Suck" shirts at Foxboro. But there's a problem: "the thing is, the Jets really suck," one of the Yankees Suck guys explains.

And there you have it. "Yankees Suck," is, unfortunately, not a statement of fact. It's a state of mind. A form of identity. Whether or not the Yankees and Red Sox are bad or good, whether they win or lose, is immaterial.

Yankees Suck sells a shirt with a warranty not many cotton products can claim: "You hate the Yankees when you go to bed. When you wake up, they still suck. We guarantee this shirt for life. The Yankees will always suck."

Alan E. Wirzbicki '01 is a history and literature concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.