I realize it's opening week and all, but... damn, how can you get THAT heated at a baseball game? It's easily the laziest major sport to watch OR play.
I don't know, it's not like football or even soccer where you have a bunch of nutcases yelling and standing for the whole game. There are no cheerleaders in baseball. Everyone just kind of sits around chatting and eating peanuts and clapping when appropriate. In fact, there's so much sitting that the sport actually mandates that everyone stand up and stretch once per game! I mean, it's a pretty sedate sport.
slowest paced, requires the least amount of persistent attention, etc is probably what he means... it's just laid back in general.
Assaults happen to people wearing all sorts of jerseys, this is probably more of a 'violent drunken sociopath' problem than a LA Dodgers problem. BUT. As the father of a six year old who wears SF Giants t shirts every day, loves the sport with all of his heart, and thinks of baseball as the most pure and joyous thing in the world (esp. after the World Series last year...), this makes my stomach turn, and it is on the Giants-crazy SF Airwaves constantly out here. Sports can be such a sublime and human activity, seeing the SF / LA rivalry turn down such a coarse and violent path is really awful. Dude was a paramedic, father of two, Giants fan, who now has brain damage for nothing. Yes, there are much bigger human tragedies in the history of civilization, but this one gets me. I hate explaining it to my son. I hope there is not some preposterous retribution, but I bet there will be. Last year, I was in AT&T Park with my family when the Giants clinched over the Padres on the last day of the season. There was this retired-age looking couple wearing Padres gear on the way out, and these twenty-something guys were heckling them. Now the SF Padres battled until the last day of the season with the second-lowest payroll (or something close to that) in the major leagues. They were good sports, no animosity. What the hell were these a**hole Giants fans thinking yelling at old people? Really? I ended up going over to them and congratulating them on a good season and trying to be nice - told them those were not real Giants fans, etc. They were sad though, the heckling was mean spirited. It was just two older people rooting for an underdog team to do something wonderful, it made me so sick to see fans of our team losing perspective and being huge bags of slime to these peaceful people. So anyway. The bastards who attacked the Giants fans are clearly atypical and deranged. But there are milder versions of this BS that I find to be a really ugly underbelly of rooting for a team. When sports brings out a lack of human decency. Disgusting.
I remember a scene in Problem Child when Junior is running the bases with the bat in his hand and he's just whacking the **** out of people and when he sled to homebase, he slid with the bat and ram right into the guy's nutsack,hahahhahah!!!
+1 great post. Agree that this story has dominated our airwaves without the perspective that it's a gradual slope and every bit of angry idiocy can be criticized. I've definitely seen similar things from our allegedly lovable and cudly panda-hat-wearing giants fans. There was a pretty nice first game with the Dodgers where the players came out and talked about it. I don't know if it will make a difference, but they emphasized that "hey, idiots, we go out to eat together after the game, so just leave it on the field like we do. It's a game." Glad they've caught the lead suspect, but the victim is apparently just beyond making a comeback, medically. They don't know if the suspect is in a street gang, but he was picked up at an apartment complex known to be gang-dominated.
my brother in-law's aunt works with this guy's aunt in santa cruz...such a sad, sad story. happy they caught someone finally though.
It's not anything new. Those two teams fans have been doing this to each other for years. Although, isolated, most of it is on-going. http://articles.sfgate.com/2008-05-...o-general-hospital-san-carlos-neville-gittens http://www.ktvu.com/news/27284250/detail.html http://www.sonsofstevegarvey.com/2011/04/will-giants-fans-strike-back.html http://www.totalprosports.com/2009/04/22/giants-and-dodgers-fans-fight-outside-att-park/ http://highlandpark-ca.patch.com/ar...ormer-lapd-chief-to-overhaul-stadium-security
Sentencing handed down today for these pieces of ****. Pisses me off just reading about it. http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/nationals/2-admit-guilt-in-dodger-stadium-giants-fan-attack/2014/02/20/406f813c-9a54-11e3-9900-dd917233cf9c_story.html
