I was sitting at The Panther Paw Bar and Grill (or the PPBAG as one of my friends calls it) Tuesday night watching the Sox game and I noticed something that I hadn’t seen through out the playoffs. The PPBAG was packed.

Why would that come as a surprise to me? Well first off it wasn’t past 10:30 and they weren’t playing any dance music. Second, I hadn’t seen this many Sox fans at one place in Charleston before. Not for the AL Division Series or even for the AL Championship Series.

As I looked out across the crowd at the Paw and saw plenty or clean crisp Sox hats and shirts which had the 2005 Series logo on them it was pretty obvious that there were more than a couple Chicago fans who had amazingly just recently discovered their love for the boys from the South Side.

Funny how many people seem to discover a hidden love for a team once October comes, whether it was the Cardinals last season or the Cubs the season before that, but I digress.

One thing I’ve come to discover about sports is that there are basically two types of fans; those that want to see their team win because they love to win and those that want to see their team win because they want to talk shit to fans of other teams.

The first kind are the admirable ones. True fans of the sport who appreciate, in this case, good baseball.

The other ones simply want an upper hand on their friends and some sort of bragging rights, that, in actuality, they have no claim to.

Most of the time the second type of fans are the ones that jump on the bandwagon and they end up discrediting the first type of fans that making them all look like jackasses.

These are also the type of people who ask, “What is your team doing right now?” Since I’m a Cards fan I’ve heard that one a couple times. It’s funny though I don’t remember asking you where your team was last October or the one before that.

A true fan doesn’t really care what other teams are doing, or where they are sitting during the playoffs. They only care about what’s going on with their team.

I think one of the most humorous things is when one of the trash-talking fans claims they were always a fan of a team when their team isn’t in the playoff mix.

My roommate, for example, is a Cubs fan but suddenly in the ALCS he became an Angels fan.

“Dude, I’ve always liked the Angels.”

Funny never heard you mention that before.

Then when the World Series came it was the same thing. It turns out he had always been an Astros fan. It’s very rare to find someone who is a fan of two teams in the same league, much less in the same division.

And then a trash-talking fan will tell you they have to root for someone or the game isn’t fun to watch. Well you must not be a baseball fan in that case, and even so why would you talk trash like you had been waiting for a World Series championship for 80-plus years, not one week.

Finally there’s the person who says they have a team in each league.

I saw this one a lot last year.

“Dude, the Cubs are my NL team and the BoSox are my AL team.”

Right. That’s weird, I didn’t see you living and dying by the Red Sox during the regular season.

At any rate, it’s these fans that ruin the game for true fans, whether or not the band-wagoning trash talkers are on their side.