On Monday night in Cleveland, a grown man in the Progressive Field bleachers created a ruckus by botching a home run catch and then stealing the ball from the young girl who was trying to pick it up on the rebound.
In Arlington, Texas, a brawl broke out in the stands between fans of the Texas Rangers and New York Yankees, which was caught from various angles on cellphone videos and immediately posted to social media for entertainment.
On the South Side of Chicago, White Sox fans were forced to sit through a three-hour pregame rain delay, some with their dogs on a Dog Day promotion, for a game that didn’t end until around 12:30 a.m. Only a small percentage of the announced crowd of 10,193 stuck around to see the Sox’s 8-7 comeback win over the Los Angeles Angels.
You never know what you’re going to get at a baseball game, but there’s always a chance you’ll get something you didn’t bargain for when you bought your ticket.
Baseball doesn’t have a monopoly on rude fan behavior or organizational decisions that inconvenience their fans. It just seems like it these days.
Remember “Phillies Karen,” the Philadelphia fan who badgered a father at a game in Miami last summer to force his son to give her a ball she missed? Turns out she’s not an anomaly.
While there’s little we can do to bring back fan civility or common-sense decision-making by upper management, we always can dream of a baseball Bill of Rights to guarantee a hassle-free experience at the ballpark.
Here are a few inalienable rights we’d like to see restored.
Freedom from screech
No one wants to sit near idiots who just want to scream about their love of their team and provoke fans into fights, like the one Monday between Yankees and Rangers fans at Globe Life Field.
Sometimes you have no choice because belligerence is on the rise. You can’t prevent someone from being foolish, but if a brawl breaks out, any fans sitting in the affected area should have the option of being moved to a better seating area, no questions asked. Maybe teams can reserve some empty suites for relocating inconvenienced fans.
The right to a speedy refund
No game should begin after 9 p.m. Period. But if that’s unavoidable on a getaway day — or if any game time is delayed by two or more hours, like Monday’s White Sox-Angels delay from 6:40 p.m. to a 9:40 start — fans should be able to go to a ticket booth and get an immediate refund or similar tickets to a future game.
There’s no reason anyone should have to stick around until midnight just because they already paid for their tickets and can’t afford to waste that money. Teams don’t want to inconvenience players by rescheduling games into doubleheaders, but they don’t seem to mind inconveniencing hard-working fans who need to get up early for work or school.
Protection from self-serving fans
The Cleveland ball stealer, like the notorious “Phillies Karen” last summer, apparently believed that taking a baseball from another fan because they originally muffed a chance to catch it was their God-given right.
On both occasions, an adult denied a kid a baseball and was caught on camera doing so, and both were vilified on social media for their actions. Fortunately, a Rays TV reporter got another ball Monday for the young girl who had it stolen from her, just as the Marlins rewarded the young fan victimized by Phillies Karen.
You can’t eject fans for being rude, even as most know by now it’s a bad look to steal a baseball from a kid. But you can shame them by showing the video of the incident on the scoreboard until they get the message. The Cleveland fan eventually was shamed by the internet into giving the girl the ball. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Protection against unreasonable standing
It’s fine for fans to stand near the end of an exciting game or after a big moment. But they don’t need to stand every time a pitcher has two strikes on a batter in a crucial situation.
Not everyone can see the game when someone is standing in front of them, especially kids. You can cheer just as loud sitting down. Most fans should know when it’s OK to stand. But because many don’t and it causes a ripple effect in the seats behind them, maybe an announcement before games is necessary, asking people to respect the fans sitting behind them.
Freedom from nonstop sound effects
Some ballparks are worse than others, but the trend of teams that pump up the volume and inject sound effects between pitches, similar to an NBA game, is exploding. No, not everybody needs to “CLAP YOUR HANDS” at the direction of a sound effect. Yankee Stadium is one of the worst offenders of noise pollution.
“They’ve turned it into a nightclub,” one Yankees fan told the New York Daily News. Baseball isn’t the NBA. The action is much slower, and sometimes people just want to converse during the game.
Yankees spokesman Jason Zillo told the Daily News the Yankees players like the wall of noise: “The stadium experience is constantly evolving and changing, and it’s important to evolve with it.”
No one had to be told to clap their hands for Babe Ruth or Joe DiMaggio. Kudos to the Chicago Cubs for refusing to use sound effects or scoreboard graphics to tell their fans when to get excited. That should be self-evident.
Will these measures fix everything?
Unlikely.
But a sport that has no problem changing longstanding rules to allegedly improve the game shouldn’t be shy about asking fans what’s needed to make going to the ballpark a more enjoyable experience.
