Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Violent fans, pot-smoking players -- why do the sports media seem shocked by the obvious and predictable?
Sep 26, 2002 | Which one of the following baseball events had never happened before this month, and which one of them got virtually no coverage in the national media?
A) Unencumbered by security guards, fans ran out of the stands to attack a member of one of the teams.
B) One club was accused of having as many as seven marijuana smokers on its roster.
C) An American team moved toward a complicated agreement that will bring Japan's top player to the U.S. for two to four seasons, then send him back home.
The correct answer to both questions is C. Yet the media's continuing amazement in the face of the obvious and the repetitive -- especially in sports -- turned items A and B into unprecedented, unpredictable acts.
Tom Gamboa is the first-base coach of the Kansas City Royals who got poleaxed by the new poster boys for father-and-son togetherness at the old ball yard. While the attack on him was vicious, unjustifiable and resoundingly self-defeating on the part of the attackers, and while it has also resulted in what is at least temporary hearing loss for the victim, it is anything but an unusual occurrence at a major league baseball game.
Three years ago this month, a drunken fan at Milwaukee bet his neighbors in the bleachers that he could "tackle" a ballplayer. He jumped the right-field fence and blindsided Astros' right-fielder Billy Spiers. Spiers suffered whiplash. It was apparently coincidence that, as Gamboa previously worked as a coach in the city of his attack, Chicago, Spiers had previously played for Milwaukee.
In September of 1995, after Randy Myers of the Cubs surrendered a critical home run in a game against the Astros, a 27-year-old Chicago bond trader rushed the mound and took a swing at Myers. Unlike Gamboa or Spiers, Myers saw the man coming, and pummeled him. Afterward, the attacker said he had merely intended to yell at Myers, proving once again that your first idea is usually your best one.
Fans coming onto the field isn't even -- as was often suggested in coverage of the Gamboa incident -- some expression of growing frustration with multimillionaire athletes who are prone to going out on strike. Spectators involved themselves in an infamous on-field brawl between the Padres and Braves in Atlanta in 1984. Others came out of the stands in Cleveland a decade earlier -- one attacking Jeff Burroughs of the Texas Rangers with a folding metal chair -- during the most ill-advised promotion of our times: "Ten Cent Beer Night." In 1961, two fans at Yankee Stadium ran onto the field to attack outfielder Jim Piersall of Cleveland. And, if anything, the history of such incidents in baseball's first century is even more full than it has been in its last 40 years.
The difference, of course, is videotape. We don't even have film of "Ten Cent Beer Night," let alone the almost monthly fan assaults on players and umpires in the 19th century. So, we get endless replays of incidents like the attack on Gamboa instead of cogent analysis of how the safety of players, coaches and umpires depends more on luck and the goodwill of the fans than it does preventive measures.
Heaven forbid that a reporter criticize the teams themselves for making their people vulnerable. Last March, the cable television network owned by the Yankees, YES, promoted its broadcasts of the impending regular season games with a series of cutesy ads. In one, a woman joined the Yankee grounds crew rolling out the tarpaulin during a rain delay, to enable her to rush onto the diamond and ask Derek Jeter out on a date. Weeks later, during the Yankees' home opener, in two separate incidents, young women actually burst onto the field to meet Jeter. That they had hopes of only sex and not violence was sheer accident.
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