Bums: Major League Players vs. Fans

At this writing, Gary Sheffield is very uncertain as to whether to press charges against the dynamic duo who tried to do Jason Varitek an unwanted favor by conking the Yankee outfielder on the head while trying to field Varitek's triple.

But Sheffield is very certain that baseball's chief of gendarmerie was very correct in declaring discipline unnecessary against himself. Boston police, however, are said to be very certain that the Fenway floggers should be flogged with misdemeanor criminal charges. And they should get them, deserving them even as Sheffield richly deserved the three things he got from Bob Watson: jack, diddley, and squat.

You might read the statements coming from the commissioner's office and conclude that the dynamic duo should consider themselves lucky that getting thrown out of the game, the Red Sox ordering one to surrender his season tickets and barring the other from buying subsequent tickets on the season, was all they face thus far. Striking a ballplayer on the cranium while he tries to keep the home team's hit from turning into the home team's triple is not among the rules Mr. Cartwright drew up.

"Sheffield in response swung his arms in an effort to extricate himself from the situation and to avoid further abuse," the statement said, "then completed the play and returned to confront the fan. At that time, no further altercation occurred, Red Sox security stepped in promptly, and order was restored. Under the circumstances, Bob Watson concluded that discipline for Sheffield was not warranted.''

Neither, for that matter, was warranted Yankee manager Joe Torre's near-spontaneous schpritz after that game, to the effect of oh, those loutish Red Sox Nation builders, as if loutish partisanship was strictly a Fenway invention with no known concurrent license exercised ever in the House That Ruthless Rebuilt.

Should he have required amplification, Mr. Torre might well have been referred to the past performance papers of William Ligue, Sr. and Jr. Tom Gamboa, formerly a Kansas City Royals coach, could tell him well enough of what that father and son thug team delivered him blindside in Comiskey Park, one night, two seasons back, proceeding farther than even the Fenway Floggers had dared proceed.

For demonstrative purposes Mr. Gamboa could cock his good ear toward Mr. Torre, the better to understand the Yankee manager's questioning, a gesture compelled by the father and son thug team having cost Mr. Gamboa half his hearing, in an attack unanswered by either the White Sox first baseman or the first base umpire, both seeming unfettered by the host's obligation to protect and defend his honored if competitive houseguests from assault and battery by an incoming burglar.

The Fenway Floggers had crossed a line, but not the fence onto the field. Sheffield's bristling restraint did him honor enough, but his statement upon the verdict does us the honor of provoking serious reflection. "It wouldn't have been just me involved if I would have went into the stands, it would have been my teammates," Sheffield told reporters. "I would have put them at risk. I'd have put the organization at risk and also baseball."

We ought to grant baseball the honor, in turn, of our reflecting upon just how far is too far when it comes to the ballpark bums to whom the price of a ticket is a license to thuggery, thievery, or terrorism.

Is it one thing merely to boo or growl over a slipshod play or a squandered win, but something else again to spread nails and debris beneath the wheels of a player who failed to nail that big game? Laugh if you must. But in 1993, Mitch (Wild Thing) Williams and his family probably thought it as funny as an electric eel in a Jacuzzi.

Is it one thing merely to yowl like a lout because a right fielder missed coming up with the Web Gems catch, but something else again to throw a bottle toward him from the field-equal seats, perhaps knowing he knows not whether glass or plastic and caring less? Shrug if you must. But last September, Milton Bradley knew not and cared not in that instant, and it struck a few not sucked in by fraudulent outrage that the miscreants should have considered themselves lucky that all Bradley did was scream blue murder while slamming the plastic (as it turned out) projectile on the ground between the fence and the first seat row.

And let there be no further bleating about obscenely wealthy baseball players, and how taking even the worst of what a fan dishes out ought to be the least of their burdens, until the bleaters can prove that they would sustain their equilibrium, in their own daily toil, should their workplaces be open to paying audiences granted license to immediate abuse at the first observable mistake or miscue.

That the Red Sox management moved so swiftly upon the Fenway floggers was testament as well to the intellectual courage of perhaps their most sorely missed fan.

If the ambiance for the sporting event is not considered crucial by management, there is no reason to believe that fans will leave home and come out; there is no reason to believe that families will subject themselves to goons and call it fun; there is no reason to believe that in 10 years' time, the vast majority of those who care about the sport will see it anywhere but on a screen — at which point the nature of the game's transmission will have reshaped the contest in ways no one, now, wishes to see. The responsibility lies squarely with the management of publicly played sports to remember that without fans who enjoy being there, live, the whole enterprise does not exist.

What A. Bartlett Giamatti composed for the Boston Globe in 1987 took aim at the ballpark drunks and the on-field hoodlums, specifically. But he could have substituted the like of the Fenway Floggers instead and forged the same point, one his own beloved Red Sox's management punctuated with an exclamation point, by behaving as swiftly toward them as baseball government behaved in like restraint toward the appropriately restrained Yankee.