Pot calling the kettle black
Since the San Francisco Giants moved into their new ballpark, it’s been no big secret that a large portion of their fans have tended to look down on Oakland A’s fans as unsophisticated and aggressive morons. All of this said, of course, as the Giants fans sip their $7 espressos while eating their $10 sushi at “AT&T Park” (and trying to get one of their more baseball-savvy friends to explain this new-fangled “infield fly rule” to them). Incidents like this and this certainly don’t help the reputation of A’s fans. Given the generally “family-friendly” (and heavily corporate) atmosphere of their own ballpark, Giants fans might have been justified in looking down on A’s fans. Until tonight that is, when they went crazy because some umpire had the guts to throw out Barry Bonds (oh no!) after Bonds had the stupidity to act like a spoiled child and argue balls and strikes in the middle of a crucial at-bat in the bottom of the ninth inning.
I might be biased against Giants fans simply because I can’t understand why they continue to support Barry Bonds, who has consistently demonstrated himself to be the most egomaniacal, self-absorbed, and petulant player in all of professional sports (with the possible exception of Terrell Owens). It seems almost beyond all comprehension that Giants fans would go so far in their blind loyalty to him as to throw garbage on the field when he was ejected for acting like a complete fool. As the umpire explained, he gave Bonds “a lot of rope in that situation” and ejected Bonds only after he felt that he had given him every opportunity to stay in the game. And as bad as things might seem in Oakland to Giants fans, I can’t remember a single incident at the Coliseum where an opposing team was pulled off the field for their own safety as a direct result of fan behavior. There may be a few bad apples in Oakland, but nothing resembling the mass lunacy/personality cult that surrounds Bonds in San Francisco.
With my subscription to MLB.TV, I managed to watch an archived version of the Giants broadcast of the game. The funniest/most pathetic part of the entire incident occurred when Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper (the Giants broadcasting team) were describing how fans in the upper deck were trying to chuck stuff on the field, but were failing and instead hitting people right below them. Perhaps the Giants should hold on-field arm strengthening sessions for their fans before future games. Fans could throw empty beer bottles at cardboard cutouts of umpires before the start of all future home games. The Giants could probably turn it into some sort of contest, perhaps sponsored by BALCO…