The Big Mouths of Baseball

You know who I am talking about, I am sure you have seen it yourself.  Every stadium, every team has one of these (sometimes it’s even a manager!) and they often rear their ugly head at the worst time.  I’m talking about the obnoxious, the big-mouth, the braggart and often times, the drunken team zealot.

Every fan has a story about the one they remember.  Here is mine:

It was the first (and so far only) time I had ever been to an MLB All Star Game.  It was 2008, and it was at Yankee Stadium.  It was going to be interesting.  My wife (a Met fan who will root for the Yankees) was my guest, and she was acutely aware that I am a Yankee fan (who will root for the Mets).  But on this day, we were going to be in opposing corners.  After all, the home team advantage for the World Series was on the line.

Since we were not among the handful of “lucky” fans to be able to purchase tickets directly, we had to resort to Stubhub.com to get ours.  Five hundred dollars later, we climbed to the upper deck way out in right field past the foul pole.  We were in the nosebleed seats, but we were there!

It is interesting to see who comes to an All Star Game.  There were fans from all over sporting their team’s jerseys – Cubs, Dodgers, Nationals, Tigers, etc.  Of course, the majority of fans were Yankee fans with a strong showing of Mets fans there as well.  But being at an All Star Game, nobody seemed to mind that people were wearing opposing team’s jerseys.  Except one fan.

I spotted her immediately when she stumbled through the tunnel.  Her hair was all over the place, she was a bit heavy, lots of make-up on, and she was really loud.  She was guided in by a short, skinny guy wearing a Yankee jersey.  She was in a Red Sox jersey and was headed our way.  Their seats were right behind ours.

Our section was predominantly fans sporting Yankee jerseys, in fact, we later found out that many of them were the IT employees at MLB.com in NYC.  Apparently, the Yankee contingency did not sit well with the Red Sox witch.  She immediately started in with the five rows of fans behind her.

“Derek Jeter sucks c$@k,” she kept screaming at them between gulps of Bud Light.  “Yankees suck!”

This went on throughout most of the pregame festivities.  As the players were being announced and brought onto the field for their ovations, she would come up with colorful metaphors for each of the Yankee players.  She even heckled the vendors that were selling her beer.  I began to wonder if she realized she was in the middle of the Bronx.

The Red Sox witch continued to heckle everyone, and didn’t even pause while she literally sat through the playing of the National Anthems.  While the West Point Cadets held the flag in center field, she continued to sit and scream about Jeter, A-Rod, Rivera and the Yankees.  My wife finally got fed up and asked her to shut up for the duration of the National Anthem.  The witch was not pleased and decided to turn her attention to us.

Did I mention I paid $500 for these seats?  Really, I just wanted this witch to settle down and watch the game so that the rest of the section could enjoy it.  Besides, this is the one game a year where Red Sox players and Yankee players are on the same team. 

I finally gave up on hope.  So I walked down to the NYPD officer stationed at the tunnel in our section and explained the situation.  He promised to keep an eye on it.

The witch got more and more drunk.  She was slurring, spilling beer and really making a complete fool out of herself.  By the fourth inning, the cop had enough and marched up to our section giving her a firm warning to stop harassing everyone around her.

All that did was make her more cautious about when she said stuff.  She would wait until the cop wasn’t looking and would start on all the fans around her.  Yankee fans are fat.  Dumb. Yankees suck.  NYPD sucks.  She went on and on until she realized she had spilled the contents of her purse and could no longer locate her cell phone.

We knew she had it earlier in the game, as she used it to call her boyfriend to brag that she had duped “this dumb guy at work” into taking her to the All Star Game.  She decided that she must have forgotten it in the bathroom, and, leaving her purse with “that dumb guy from work” she left the section to find it.

The next three innings were awesome!  All you could hear were the sounds of fans interested in the game.  But the witch’s escort began to worry.  He grabbed her purse and left the section to look for her.

I looked down at the cop in the tunnel.  He just smiled.  Something was up.  So I went down to find out what it was.

It seems that the witch had some choice words for the officer when she drunkenly stumbled in to him on her quest for her phone.  So, he tossed her out of the stadium.  So she is outside of the stadium (in a Red Sox jersey), drunk, with no phone and no purse.  Her escort is inside the stadium, with no idea she got tossed out, carrying a large, white woman’s purse.  You just can’t make this stuff up.

That was the last we saw of the escort.  But around the 11^th inning, we saw the witch, escorted by Yankee security at the mouth of the tunnel, talking to the cop.  He refused to let her into the section.  So, they went to the next tunnel over, and convinced that cop to let her in to find her purse and her phone.  Too bad the escort left with it an hour before.

She stood, facing the entire section, black mascara and eyeliner smudged down her cheeks.  I guess she finally sobered up.  She described her escort to security.  They called into the section, “Has anyone seen a guy in a Yankees jersey?”  We sat there in stunned silence.  Finally they escorted her out for the final time.

I don’t know what happened to the Red Sox witch.  We stayed to the end of the very exciting 15^th inning of the game, when the AL victoriously scored the winning run on a sacrifice fly.  At 4 hours and 50 minutes of game time, I guess we got our $500 worth!

My wife poses near our seats at the end of the 2008 All Star Game(1:39 AM).