One of those orange bottles of Banana Boat sunscreen is resting somewhere on a curb or a bench or maybe even taking a swim in the Anacostia River. Having been out and about Tuesday afternoon, Corey Horan just can’t remember where he left it.
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He has some guesses: maybe at a bar in Navy Yard, or possibly on a bench overlooking the water, where he waited for his Uber home. He also knows where it is not: with him, standing alone in Section 236 of Nationals Park at roughly 2 p.m. on a Wednesday, skipping his job as a project manager at a tech firm to go shirtless at a sparsely attended late-July MLB day game.
Early in May, he’d been scrolling X when he came across a video of a couple of St. Louis Cardinals fans who’d ventured to the upper deck of Busch Stadium during a blowout. Upon arrival, they took their shirts off and swung them through the air. You — if your social feeds like baseball or shirtless dudes — know the rest. “Tarps off,” the term coined for the trend of fans going shirtless at games, has captivated U.S. sports in recent months.
It may have originated in college football years ago. (Drunken undergrads are the best cultural innovators.) But it really took off in baseball this year, before gradually infiltrating the World Cup and the Manhattan streets around Madison Square Garden during the NBA Finals. Some teams, including the Washington Nationals, even started using videos of the shirtless brigade on social channels for ticket promos.
But as trends do, it’s waning, especially in baseball’s dog days of summer. Now, for every packed section of dad bods and farmer’s tans, there are double the number of empty seats, and moms lowering their sunglasses with an eyebrow raised, as if to ask: Really?
“We’re the lone soldiers,” Horan, 43, says as the wind slaps against his extraordinarily visible pirate chest tattoo. “I don’t want to say this is dying … but it’s at least in its downtime.”
Originally, the vision was one of simplicity: “guys being dudes,” Horan says, which he believes is a more unifying statement than its Barstool Sports roots suggest. Yes, the shirtless sickos have been predominantly White and male. And, yes, their chants at times have become vulgar, including aggressively yelling at women to lose their tops.
“But that doesn’t happen a lot. More than anything, this is a bonding activity,” he says. “A stress reliever with your bros.”
At least it was when he started showing up to games in June. Back then, there’d be a few rows of participants by the fifth inning nearly every night, a mix of ad hoc participants loosened by pricey tallboys and those who’d planned ahead on Reddit or Facebook. Happy to feel connected in a “generation of isolation,” given he works from home like so many, he kept showing up. And he keeps showing up. It just happens that he’s mostly alone here now, too.
As the Nationals are working on blowing another early lead, this time in the seventh, he’s going on five innings in the sun. Exasperation bubbling, a mulleted teenager, Jackson Robbins, joins him.
“How long have you been up here, man?” the 13-year-old asks. He sizes up Horan through his pink Pit Viper sunglasses and snickers. Even he can see what Horan has going isn’t a tan.
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“Couple hours,” he responds. “You planning to stay?”
“Nah, I honestly saw you and wanted to see what you were doing,” he says. His mom told him he could take a lap around the park.
“You okay, dude?” the kid asks before getting up.
Adia Benton is a cultural anthropologist at Northwestern University. While she researches significantly more pertinent societal issues than those that predominantly feature chest hair, she also examines social trends in the sporting industry.
“And this is just sad,” she says. “Naturally, it depends on how much teams are willing to stoke it. So, as can be the case, a trend like this will reach a slow end when teams and broadcasters become less interested.”
Horan made it on the Nationals’ jumbotron a handful of times in June. But in recent weeks, he’s felt more like a rogue than a contributor to stadium festivities.
“You’d think this might jump again in the postseason,” Benton wonders aloud. “But, truthfully, this is probably not something that escapes this year. … Which is sad because there’s probably a community of men — albeit, a small one — who actually were getting something from this.”
With the Nationals trailing by four runs in the bottom of the eighth, Horan places his battered, faded AC/DC shirt over his stomach as a shield. As Horan reclines gingerly into the navy seat that’s been cooking in the 87-degree rays, two more middle-aged men wander up the steps.
They exchange glances, and Horan once more rises as the pair discard their polos. When they learned their boss wasn’t coming into the office, they left early. (They declined to share their identities to avoid discipline from said boss.)
Tarp-less, the men discuss their work lives and the trade deadline. Yet when the Nationals only score one in the eighth, the pair gather their belongings and wander away.
Horan remains standing, looking toward a promotion across the stadium that reads “POV YOU’RE AT NATS PARK.” Underneath it, there’s a photo of the topless guys of yester-month.
“Man …”
He could use his sunscreen, he thinks as he sits. But he lost it after Tuesday’s game. Now he’s tinting his skin to match the Nats’ color scheme. And while the final batter, James Wood, grounds out, Horan is scrolling on his phone to see if the Harris Teeter a few blocks over stocks aloe vera.
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It was, in fact, out.
