If I have this correctly, as a Chicago-area resident I’m supposed to be mortified by the idiot who dumped a beer on Phillies center fielder Shane Victorino on Wednesday night at Wrigley Field.
Trust me, I’m wwwwwaaaaaaaay more embarrassed by the Cubs’ play.
When cameras captured Victorino being doused at Wrigley, one thing was immediately guaranteed: There would be discussions about What The Incident Says About Us As A City. And I think you already know the breathless answer: It’s another indication that the fabric of society is unraveling faster than a teenager’s homework alibi.
But there is an alternative answer: Idiots are everywhere.
We can’t have an idiot kill-off, as attractive as the idea might be. There will be no government-sponsored idiot hunt for the purpose of thinning the herd. And unless the Cubs and other sports teams decide to stop selling beer, there’s no way to stop bad behavior. There might be data that shows that beer raises idiocy levels, but it also makes teams lots of money. You tell me which carries more weight.
What happened at Wrigley on Wednesday night happens at every ballpark. Ask any veteran outfielder, and he not only will tell you how often it has happened to him but also whether the offending beers had been triple-hops brewed or krausened or both.
We don’t often see the cup dropping down along with the beer, as we did the other night with Victorino, but a beer shower is not at all unusual.
“It happens all the time,” said Comcast SportsNet baseball analyst Todd Hollandsworth, who played outfield for eight teams, including the Cubs. ” … It makes you feel almost like a caged animal, I suppose. I’ve been there before where I laughed it off. Other times, it’s very unnerving.
“Philadelphia’s a place where it happens too. There have been batteries that have flown out of the stands. And pennies and nickels and dimes. There were a couple of times there where if I had added up all the change, I’m sure I could have bought a cup of coffee.”
None of this is meant to condone Victorino’s beer baptism. Just because it occasionally happens doesn’t make it right. The Cubs should ban for life the knucklehead, Johnny Macchione, who turned himself in for allegedly dropping the brew. And it’s almost always a male knucklehead, isn’t it?
But guaranteeing it never will happen again? Forget it. There’s not much that can be done in terms of preventive measures, not with 40,000 people in the park. Punitive measures are a different story. The courts need to make examples of the idiots who throw things on the field.
“You have to make it so the person who does this thing knows it, feels it and it’s well-documented,” Hollandsworth said.
There seems to be more angst about what happened to Victorino than about the robberies and beatings that take place in the city on a regular basis. OK, I get it: this was very, very visual. And it looked really, really bad.
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But just to reiterate: It’s not just Chicago, and it’s not just baseball. The incident is not reflective of anything other than the fact the truly drunk and stupid continue to walk among us.
This reminds me of the father-son tag team from Alsip who attacked a Royals first base coach at The Cell in 2002. It led to much discussion about common decency going to hell in a handbasket, the lack of security at the ballpark and When Male Bonding Goes Very, Very Wrong.
But the saner among us realized that there are idiots in the world, there always have been idiots in the world and, barring some breakthrough in genetic engineering, there always will be idiots in the world.
The other important reminder that came out of the attack on the coach, as well as on an umpire the following year at a White Sox game, is that there’s no way to stop a few wasted fans from doing dumb things. The best security force in the world wouldn’t have been able to read the mind of the fan before he dumped the beer on Victorino.
“When I played for the Dodgers and we went up to San Francisco, I expected it,” Hollandsworth said. “Each time I ran back toward the wall, that was pretty much the second thought on my mind. But it was there. I certainly was bracing for anything to come out and potentially hit me or knock down.”
Did you notice Victorino made the catch despite the falling beer? This leads me to wonder whether flowing beer would solve Alfonso Soriano’s defensive problems in left field. I figure he can drink while the Cubs are batting.
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