throwing a folding chair into the stands during an altercation between Oakland A’s fans and the Texas bullpen. The woman who got her nose broken by the chair is married to one of the main hecklers. Officially, of course, I disagree with this action, bad move rookie, you could have killed someone, etc. Unofficially, it’s kind of thrilling and awesome. I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more. I’ve yelled some stuff into the visitor’s bullpen at Fenway myself.
Dudes were talking smack all game I guess, Francisco just gave up a homer to tie the game and got yanked; instead of hitting the showers, he went back to the pen like he knew it was gonna jump off. The Rangers are morons anyway, the Oakland fans are morons, that’s what happens when you razz the bullpen / disrespect the fanbase. Many frowns, take ’em down, pass ’em around, it’s awful on both sides, a dirty shame, a real black eye for the National Pastime.
Yet this was Oakland. They might have been saying some toxic shit. Oakland people have never gotten over being bitchslapped by Gertrude Stein all those years ago: “There’s no there there.” They hate the world, the world hates them, circle of life, move along, nothing to see here. So: it’s a push.
However, this was nowhere near the best heckling ever. That would belong to my friend Mike as we stood at the Satyricon in Portland Oregon in 1984, waiting for our buddy Jeff to come on with his crossover metal/pop band called Alloy. The band onstage: ISCARIOT, THE DARK MASTERS OF METAL. Every dude looke like “Spider” in School of Rock. They would screech and then jam and then wait…portentously…trying to milk it…and then go off into sub-Rush drum-led histrionics. Sounds okay, but it sucked and you better believe it. So during one of these pauses, Mike goes all “Take off, you knob!” right at the lead dude. Guy stared, trying to scare us with his supposedly demonically possessed eyes, but nothing happened. Now THAT is good hecklage.
But we didn’t get chaired for it. Hey, horrible things like this make the sports world go round, more for the talk shows and experts to “fight” over. I don’t really want this to happen a lot, but it’s gonna, and I guess the worst we could do is to overreact to something as pure and spontaneous as taunting the opposing team’s pitcher and then getting out of the way of the chair that player throws so that his wife catches a nose jammy.
Ain’t that America.