Consider the shirtless baseball men

Easily the most important essay I'll ever write (about a large gathering of bare torsoed fellas on a Friday night in Saint Louis)

Reader, I assume that you, an engaged citizen of the world, are up to date on the most consequential news of the week.“What are your thoughts on the shirtless baseball men?” you have no doubt been asked, at the various salons, round tables and ideas festivals you frequent. “What meaning do you make of them, and the way in which they whip their previously-worn shirts around their heads?”

I trust this, but just in case you have somehow been distracted by other matters, (for instance: keeping yourself and your loved ones alive), here is what you need to know about the most important shirtless baseball men of our time.

Who are the shirtless baseball men?

In one sense, the shirtless baseball men are members of the Stephen F. Austin University club baseball team (presumably, this means that they are not as good at playing baseball then that school’s official team, but more experienced at recreational drinking). They came to St. Louis for a tournament, decided to attend a Cardinals game, and subsequently took off their shirts.

In a slightly broader sense, the shirtless baseball men are everywhere, because fans across Major League Baseball have discovered that the math checks out (empty bleachers + dudes - shirts = hell yeah, buddy).

But in a cosmic sense, we are all shirtless baseball men, for we all long for connection and belonging.

When were the baseball men shirtless?

Last Friday, and then nonstop ever since. The next time you are walking on the beach and only see one set of footprints, it is because members of the Stephen F. Austin club baseball team are carrying you, on a blanket made of their shirts.

What were the shirtless baseball men doing?

They were engaging in a storied tradition, credited first to Indiana University football fans a few seasons back. It’s called going “tarps off.” The idea is that you and some buddies make your way to the upper deck of a sports stadium, remove your shirts, and generally whoop it up. This will serve as a siren call to previously unaffiliated bros to join you in shirtlessness, thus creating a formidable bro assemblage (a murder of bros, if you will).

What was once tiny will become impossible to ignore. You will get on television. The athletes on the field will notice you, and it may encourage them to play better. The team may give you tickets to future games, and allow one of your more impressively mustachioed group members to throw out the first pitch. Everybody involved will have one hell of a time.

How were the shirtless baseball men?

They were, and are, doing great.

Why, the shirtless baseball men?

If possible, I’d like to answer this question, not with another question, but with the sound of dozens of world historically pasty gentlemen chanting the“Seven Nation Army” riff in union.

Where are the shirtless baseball men?

Look behind you, broadcast crew. They were there the whole time.

If only I could live every day like it was tarps off day. This story contains every single one of my primary interests: masculinity (is the cure for male loneliness taking your shirt off and whipping it around your head like a helicopter? Petey Pablo has been trying to tell us this for decades); whiteness (in this case, less the social construction of whiteness and more the visceral experience of publicly weaponized mass paleness); and, of course, community (how we find love in hopeless places, such as the upper deck of Busch Stadium).

In case it isn’t clear, my love is unironic and full. I am a straight man, and that means that inside me are two wolves, and even though I frequently pen earnest paeans to books about feminism and resistance to empire, if the Edison bulbed coffee shop where I’m currently writing this were to put on ACDC’s “Thunderstruck,” both of those wolves would immediately start whipping their shirts around. “Let’s gooooooo, baby!” one wolf would yell to the other. “I low key love you, man!,” the other would yell back, and then the barista would politely ask the three of us to take our business elsewhere.

So in honor of those wolves, I say: Bless these fellas, and their distaste for covering their upper bodies. But also, I don’t know actually know anything about them. Once they leave the upper deck, they may very well be pursuing lives that make me very sad, both for themselves and the people around them. Maybe they’re jerks. Or maybe not. I will not be doing any further research.¹ Fellas, if in addition to good-natured baseball shenanigans, you love bell hooks and organizing mutual aid collectives, hit me up. I’d send you a shirt, but I know what you’d probably do with it, so let’s go with a hat instead.

But the whole tarps off thing, at least in isolation? It’s basically the ideal scenario for collective male sports fan behavior. Are the fellas picking fights? Nope. It’s hard to rumble when your hands are busy doing the helicopter shirt thing. Are they getting in other people’s personal space? Absolutely not. They’re literally going off into a separate bro section, far away from the general population. It’s like a tot lot for guys.

Come to think of it: every municipality should have a designated bro-zone in their downtown entertainment districts. You know, a place where bros can do all of the things that make us happy (taking off our shirts, scream-shouting “Mr. Brightside,” remarking “hey, remember Mickey Tettleton?” and pretending that constitutes a conversation, following each other on Letterboxd, etc.). A room of one’s bro-own. The fellas get our space, and perhaps even a chance to overcome our internalized homophobia as we embrace one another without the hindrance of fabric. And the rest of the world? You all won’t have to deal with us.

But also, as somebody who literally teaches and writes about how to build community, I say this sincerely. Shirtless fellas, thank you for giving me a new visual case study. This is way better than the now-cliche “first follower” lecture with the hippie dancer. It’s a cute video, but it’s always struck me as too self-aggrandizing. Public invitations matter, not because they automatically constitute “a movement,” nor because the person making the invite is “a visionary leader.” We just really want to find each other, is all, so it’s nice to make doing so easier.

I’ve been a broken record on this lately, but the deeper I get into my current project (a relay of 50 community gatherings across the country), the clearer it gets. What distinguishes the most effective community builders isn’t an otherworldly set of leadership qualities, but their willingness to make an invitation, in public, in spite of the risk of rejection. They make it clear where people can find them, don’t take it personally if others don’t initially show up, and respond with gratitude and joy when they do.

I believe this with all my heart, but I haven’t, up to this point, had a succinct visual aid. So forgive me for a quick Zapruder-film level analysis of the bros. It’s worth it, I swear.

Here’s a view of the tarps off section from that first Friday game. It’s already the seventh inning, which is to say— this effort was NOT an immediate success.² Where are the bros? It’s hard to tell. At this point, I probably would have packed it in. Seventh inning and it’s still just the initial group? We tried, boys. Better luck next time.

But look what’s happened by the eighth inning! Momentum! Credit to this video, not only for doing the Lord’s work of breaking down the film, but also for unironically commenting “as you can see, there’s now a solid chunk of bros up there.”

By the bottom of the ninth, the parliament of bros is clearly visible from a distance (also, unrelated, but please admire that advertisement for FEET. You take FEET for granted, don’t you? Thank you, Busch Stadium, for the reminder).

Ok, it’s getting serious. This is the point where I might be asked to leave this coffee shop for screenshot-based affronts to public decency. “Sir, that’s too many pictures of bros.” Yes, it is, but check out what happens when the game goes into extra innings. It’s foggy, but if you look right above the empty red seats you can see an orderly stream of suddenly mobilized men rushing in to join the section (here’s the video).

And just as it was predicted, so to has it come to pass. The section is growing, um, exbronentially. ³

Finally, here’s how things looked when the Cardinals eventually won the game on an 11th inning walk-off single. If that isn’t a murder of bros, I don’t know what is. And, for one night at least, do you know what the bros killed?The myth that we are separate from one another.

All right, that’s going a little too far. We are literally just talking about a bunch of fellas (who, it should be noted, showed up on $5 beer/$7 margarita night) being loud and silly together. You may very well be saying, “Garrett, you sweet naive fool, I know how the world works and you shouldn’t praise a bunch of rowdy dudes merely for not doing any visible hate crimes” And you know what? Good point.

I mean, even on the face of it, there’s aspects of this that I don’t fully endorse (for instance: the affiliation with the St. Louis Cardinals, a franchise I dislike for the very principled reason that I live in a different rust belt city with a rival baseball team). And I bet, now that this trend has expanded to other stadiums, we’re just a couple days away from it jumping from cute to gross (“Let’s check in with the Tarps Off Crew… brought to you by Open AI, Zyn Tobacco, Raytheon, and somehow J.D. Vance personally”).

I don’t need you to love tarps off, nor do you have to hand it to the bros. But what I do want you to recognize is that even the rowdiest and least tanned baseball fellas are searching for something bigger than themselves. The section grew, not just because guys love being dudes, but because isolation sucks and togetherness rules and, for one night at least, the barrier to connection was pretty damn low. “Bro, look up there. See those dudes with their shirts off? Let’s goooooooo.”

When given the opportunity, the bros found their people. And if they can do it, you can too. Make the invitation that works for you. I mean, you can even keep your shirts on if you’d like. But please make it. Do it for yourself, based on what you’re seeking, and know that you’ll eventually find the people who need that space too.

That’s complicated in many ways, I suppose, but if you train your heart on the end goal— the bet that others also crave whatever form of connection you personally need for yourself— you’ll do all right, truly. To return again to the words of Petey Pablo, the man who first taught my generation to take our shirts off, twist them around our heads, and spin them like a helicopter.

“This one’s for you? Uh-uh This one’s for who? Us, us, us.”

End notes:

-This is a bonus essay, on the front end of a long weekend, but trust that I shared plenty of fun links and news in the essay I wrote on Tuesday. Also know that this continues to be a fully reader-supported project (at a time when sustaining those isn’t easy) so if you got a kick of this or any of my pieces, I’d love if you could chip in to keep this operation running.

And yes, I know that technically Petey Pablo was only singing for North Carolinians, but as I’ve learned from some very enthusiastic club baseball team members, if the message resonates, it resonates, man.

1. Although I will say, the patient zero of shirtlessness, the first bro to take his off, was very sweet when interviewed about the phenomenon, gushing “so many people are happy, and I just love to see other people happy,” which, shirtless bro, you got me blushing!

2. By all accounts, even though they went into the game planning to take their shirts off, it took well into the game before the first of the Stephen F. Austin boys built up the courage to do so. And yes that’s the kind of behind the scenes analysis of shirtless baseball men you’ve come to expect from The White Pages.

3. I’m so sorry.