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Monday, Oct 6, 2008
A ballplayer throws a chair into the stands, breaking a woman's nose, and outraged typists agree: Must be the fans' fault. Plus: Barry Bonds for MVP Stat of the Day.
Sep 16, 2004 | Am I just missing the sputtering moral outrage over Rangers pitcher Frank Francisco throwing a chair into the stands in Oakland and breaking a fan's nose? Is it just my imagination that there was a lot more righteous indignation over Randall Simon playfully whacking a racing sausage on its costume head with a bat last year, resulting in a skinned knee for the intern inside the get-up?
Sure, the Francisco incident Monday night has been a national story, the subject of much talk radio chatter and a little bit of late-night TV one-linering. But while everyone who's commented on the incident is careful to say there's no excuse for what Francisco did, I'm just not seeing him vilified the way Simon was. I'm not seeing him held up as an example of the moral degeneration of our country, or our athletes, or something, the way Simon was.
Shoot, he's not even being vilified the way Saints receiver Joe Horn was for pretending to talk into a cellphone after scoring a touchdown last year. It seems to me that Allen Iverson is thought worse of for shooting too much than Frank Francisco is for physically attacking the customers.
You know who's taking a lot of heat, though? Fans.
Rangers relievers say the chair incident was provoked by over-the-line heckling from A's fans near the bullpen. The fans at the center of the incident, admitted chief heckler Craig Bueno and his wife, Jennifer, who got hit in the honker by the chair that Francisco had aimed at her husband, say the heckling of the Rangers was everyday stuff. It contained no ethnic slurs or anything beyond the regular old "you're a bum!" kind of thing that goes on at every game, they say. No one has offered any evidence to the contrary.
And yet, the prevailing argument in a lot of what I'm reading and hearing is that this thing has to be the fans' fault, because players just don't attack fans without provocation. This is such an asinine idea I don't know where to start.
I wish I could throw a chair at the head of everyone who makes that argument, just so I can tell them it was their fault. Hey, man, writers don't just attack people without provocation.
MSNBC.com aimed a double-barreled attack on fans, a Mike Celizic column headlined "MLB teams encourage idiotic fan behavior" and another by JT the Brick with the headline "Classless fans ruin it for everyone else."
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