Interesting article on Yankee fans
ctsoxfan
Posts: 6,246 ✭✭
in Sports Talk
This was from the New York Times and was written by a NY baseball writer after the recent series in NY -
Throw Out the Bums ... in the Stands
By CLYDE HABERMAN
Published: October 11, 2005
NOW that their season is over, the New York Yankees are likely to shop for new players over the winter, and may even (gasp!) seek a new manager to take over from the estimable Joseph Paul Torre.
What they really should look for are new fans.
Yankees fans cheered the announcement of the starting lineups before the start of the Opening Day game on April 3 against the Boston Red Sox.
The team could do a lot worse than to replace some of those it now has, as oafish a bunch as can be found this side of an English soccer stadium: drunken, hostile, foulmouthed, misogynistic and ready for violence.
On Friday, a long and dreary night of poor play by the home team against the Los Angeles Angels, several fights broke out in the stands. It took a squad of Yankee Stadium guards to wrestle one particularly aggressive offender into submission.
Despite a longstanding ban on smoking, fans lit up defiantly. One such smoker, a potty-mouthed yo-yo, was led away by security guards, only to return an inning later. "They don't eject you when you're a cop," he said.
If you sat, as I did, in the upper deck along the third-base line, you were in the company of scores of young men wearing the glazed, dull look of the hopelessly inebriated. Some had arrived in that condition.
Several times, men bumped accidentally into one another in the narrow aisles. Did it occur to any of them to say, "Excuse me"? No, that would have been sensible. Instead, they screamed obscenity-laced threats, or exchanged "You want a piece of me?" glares.
Late in the game, a young woman in a halter top danced to the loud music that blasts maddeningly through the stadium between innings. In unison, dozens of men yelled a vulgar chant demanding that she show her breasts.
Predictably, when things went badly for the Yankees, as they often did that night, fans shouted an all-too-familiar obscenity that you will never see printed here. You have to marvel sometimes at how many young men in this city are plagued by unresolved oedipal complexes.
About the only thing that flowed more freely than the beer was raw aggression. Sadly, there is nothing new in this. Take it from someone who has been going to Yankee Stadium since Mickey Mantle was a pup. Boorish fan behavior has been inescapable for many years.
But it has arguably grown worse over the last decade, a period of Yankees' success that may have fed an outsize sense of entitlement among the fans. "It all comes down to them being so spoiled over the last 10 years or so," the team's latest hero, the pitcher Shawn Chacon, said in a New York Post interview on Sunday.
Obviously, not everyone behaves badly. The oafs are a minority. But there are enough of them on any given night to sour the gamegoing experience. There are certainly enough to make anyone with small children think hard before plopping them down among drunks who shout at a woman to remove her top or who urge a player to commit an impossible sexual act.
The laughable part is that New York fans like to pat themselves on the collective back as being more sophisticated followers of the game than anyone anywhere. Were that self-aggrandizing silliness true, they would routinely applaud great plays by the opposing team. They rarely do, a churlish spirit that the Yankees endorse by never using the large center field television screen to show a spectacular hit or catch by a visiting player.
IF it wished, the team could do more to discourage the louts. Rules posted on its Web site make clear that fans "using foul language, making obscene gestures, smoking or appearing to be in an inebriated condition will be ejected from the ballpark." Ha! The stadium would be half empty if the ball club ever made good on that warning.
One possible remedy is to amend the present policy of stopping beer sales after the seventh inning. In a game like the one on Friday night, which dragged on and on in the rain, the seventh inning did not end until after 3 hours and 15 minutes. By then, countless fans were three sheets to the wind. Perhaps a beer cutoff after, say, two hours of play would be more realistic - and saner.
Not that it would deter all louts, like the young man who waited with a friend on a very long men's room line.
"Why not just use the sink?" he said.
"Nah," the friend replied, "it's too early for that."
At the stadium that night, his refusal made him the closest thing to a class act.
Throw Out the Bums ... in the Stands
By CLYDE HABERMAN
Published: October 11, 2005
NOW that their season is over, the New York Yankees are likely to shop for new players over the winter, and may even (gasp!) seek a new manager to take over from the estimable Joseph Paul Torre.
What they really should look for are new fans.
Yankees fans cheered the announcement of the starting lineups before the start of the Opening Day game on April 3 against the Boston Red Sox.
The team could do a lot worse than to replace some of those it now has, as oafish a bunch as can be found this side of an English soccer stadium: drunken, hostile, foulmouthed, misogynistic and ready for violence.
On Friday, a long and dreary night of poor play by the home team against the Los Angeles Angels, several fights broke out in the stands. It took a squad of Yankee Stadium guards to wrestle one particularly aggressive offender into submission.
Despite a longstanding ban on smoking, fans lit up defiantly. One such smoker, a potty-mouthed yo-yo, was led away by security guards, only to return an inning later. "They don't eject you when you're a cop," he said.
If you sat, as I did, in the upper deck along the third-base line, you were in the company of scores of young men wearing the glazed, dull look of the hopelessly inebriated. Some had arrived in that condition.
Several times, men bumped accidentally into one another in the narrow aisles. Did it occur to any of them to say, "Excuse me"? No, that would have been sensible. Instead, they screamed obscenity-laced threats, or exchanged "You want a piece of me?" glares.
Late in the game, a young woman in a halter top danced to the loud music that blasts maddeningly through the stadium between innings. In unison, dozens of men yelled a vulgar chant demanding that she show her breasts.
Predictably, when things went badly for the Yankees, as they often did that night, fans shouted an all-too-familiar obscenity that you will never see printed here. You have to marvel sometimes at how many young men in this city are plagued by unresolved oedipal complexes.
About the only thing that flowed more freely than the beer was raw aggression. Sadly, there is nothing new in this. Take it from someone who has been going to Yankee Stadium since Mickey Mantle was a pup. Boorish fan behavior has been inescapable for many years.
But it has arguably grown worse over the last decade, a period of Yankees' success that may have fed an outsize sense of entitlement among the fans. "It all comes down to them being so spoiled over the last 10 years or so," the team's latest hero, the pitcher Shawn Chacon, said in a New York Post interview on Sunday.
Obviously, not everyone behaves badly. The oafs are a minority. But there are enough of them on any given night to sour the gamegoing experience. There are certainly enough to make anyone with small children think hard before plopping them down among drunks who shout at a woman to remove her top or who urge a player to commit an impossible sexual act.
The laughable part is that New York fans like to pat themselves on the collective back as being more sophisticated followers of the game than anyone anywhere. Were that self-aggrandizing silliness true, they would routinely applaud great plays by the opposing team. They rarely do, a churlish spirit that the Yankees endorse by never using the large center field television screen to show a spectacular hit or catch by a visiting player.
IF it wished, the team could do more to discourage the louts. Rules posted on its Web site make clear that fans "using foul language, making obscene gestures, smoking or appearing to be in an inebriated condition will be ejected from the ballpark." Ha! The stadium would be half empty if the ball club ever made good on that warning.
One possible remedy is to amend the present policy of stopping beer sales after the seventh inning. In a game like the one on Friday night, which dragged on and on in the rain, the seventh inning did not end until after 3 hours and 15 minutes. By then, countless fans were three sheets to the wind. Perhaps a beer cutoff after, say, two hours of play would be more realistic - and saner.
Not that it would deter all louts, like the young man who waited with a friend on a very long men's room line.
"Why not just use the sink?" he said.
"Nah," the friend replied, "it's too early for that."
At the stadium that night, his refusal made him the closest thing to a class act.
0
Comments
The above quote saves this article. I must say however, the New York Times is the last place I go to for ANY reading, way too left wing and liberal!!! . Anyway, thanks for for stoking the anti Yankee majority present on THIS board. If anyone wants to see fans "use the sink" even pre-game, go to Philadelphia!
I was at 15 games this season and all of this stuff does not just go on out of control like this author makes it out to be. No doubt he is piecing single incidents into making the reader believe the place is a zoo. Not the case.
Also, do not forget the riots outside Fenway Park following the Red Sox / Yankees series last year where a young college student was killed, many injured, and cars set ablaze. EVERY team has idiots for fans.
ISO 1978 Topps Baseball in NM-MT High Grade Raw 3, 100, 103, 302, 347, 376, 416, 466, 481, 487, 509, 534, 540, 554, 579, 580, 622, 642, 673, 724__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ISO 1978 O-Pee-Chee in NM-MT High Grade Raw12, 21, 29, 38, 49, 65, 69, 73, 74, 81, 95, 100, 104, 110, 115, 122, 132, 133, 135, 140, 142, 151, 153, 155, 160, 161, 167, 168, 172, 179, 181, 196, 200, 204, 210, 224, 231, 240
City vows crackdown on rowdy Sox fans
By Rick Klein and Douglas Belkin, Globe Staff,
After a playoff clincher that sparked raucous celebrations and seven arrests across the city, Boston officials yesterday promised a police crackdown for the remainder of the playoffs and said security would grow tighter if the Red Sox move closer to a World Series championship.
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Nearly all the city's police officers will be in uniform tonight and during all other Red Sox playoff games this month to control rowdy fans and stop underage drinking, Police Commissioner Paul F. Evans said. After raucous fans turned over cars outside Fenway Park Monday, the city will ban all parking on the streets near the park starting four hours before games, even those that are being played in New York.
The team's series-clinching win Monday over the Oakland Athletics brought pandemonium to parts of Boston, mostly around Fenway Park, where fans streamed out of bars after the game. At least three cars were overturned, beer bottles rained down from apartments, and one person surfed the crowd on a queen-size mattress.
Two sisters were arrested for climbing a billboard and baring their breasts. Several small fires were reported, some involving Yankees flags and T-shirts. A group of fans even broke into Fenway Park near Gate B for a quick run around the field before police chased them away; locksmiths were called to fix the doors yesterday. Mayor Thomas M. Menino blasted the rowdy fans. "A few knuckleheads went too far, and things got out of hand at Fenway Park and the downtown areas," Menino said. "Their outrageous behavior was harmful and disruptive to people who live and work in the Fenway neighborhood. . . . Boston police will be vigilant and arrest any individual who threatens public safety."
Late Monday, four men were arrested near City Hall Plaza on disorderly conduct charges. One of the men, Ben Gaetani, 19, was swinging a flaming T-shirt atop a statue outside Faneuil Hall, and burning pieces fell onto a crowd of between 300 and 500 people, police said. Charges of disorderly conduct against him were dismissed yesterday, and he was ordered to pay $100 in court costs.
Three Emerson College students were arrested for allegedly trying to climb a wall on City Hall Plaza to reach a 20-foot-by-20-foot Red Sox banner. They were arrested on charges of inciting a crowd and were released on personal recognizance, police said.
Outside Fenway Park, Amanda M. Michalak, a 20-year-old waitress, and her sister Meghan, a Northeastern University student, were arrested early yesterday morning after they climbed atop a billboard at the corner of Brookline and Lansdowne streets and lifted their shirts, officials said. Arrested with them was John Swenson, 18, also a Northeastern student, who was on top of the billboard and allegedly tried to rally the crowd to get the women to expose themselves again.
All three were arraigned yesterday in Roxbury District court and released on personal recognizance. They were each ordered to stay at least three blocks away from Fenway Park.
Becca Gitlitz and her friend Cate Kinn, both sophomores at Boston University, said the noise from the streets from the celebration made it feel as if their dorm near Kenmore Square was shaking. Outside, as they made their way through the crowds on Lansdowne Street, they saw dozens of people climbing onto fire trucks, jumping on cabs, and trying to turn over cars.
"They just started rocking the cars back and forth," Gitlitz said. "They couldn't flip it over at first, but people started running up to help."
Evans conceded that police officials could have used more officers on the street Monday night, but said no level of staffing could have prevented all disturbances. He appealed to fans to exercise self-control.
"You have this cowardly mentality that takes refuge, if you will, in numbers," Evans said.
There will be a "significant deployment" of officers in riot gear for all future games, and Evans said they will be aggressive in arresting fans who are disruptive and exhibit dangerous behavior. Officers will also fan out to liquor stores and bars to make sure underage drinkers and intoxicated patrons aren't served. The police presence will increase as the games grow more important, Evans said.
Members of the Boston City Council are holding a hearing on Friday to discuss security arrangements at Red Sox home games. City Councilor Michael P. Ross, whose district includes the Fenway neighborhood, said he would like the Red Sox players to get involved in public service advertisements to urge fans to behave themselves.
While episodes involving out-of-control fans were mostly limited to Boston, rowdy students at several college campuses across the region prompted police response. Police used pepper spray to control hundreds of revelers near the University of New Hampshire campus in Durham and were called out to control a crowd of about 600 at a bonfire at Plymouth State University. Plymouth police planned to file arson and vandalism charges against several people involved in setting the bonfire.
At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the celebration was fairly muted two days after a riot broke out. Nearly 2,000 students gathered on campus after Monday's game, and some set small fires using toilet paper and T-shirts. One student jumped off a building and was taken to a hospital, where he was treated and released. Police plan to charge him with disorderly conduct.
Menino made a friendly wager yesterday with New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. If the Yankees take the Red Sox, Menino will send a lobster and clam chowder meal for four to New York. And if the Red Sox beat out the Yankees, Bloomberg will send Boston a selection of New York food, including pizza, dumplings, bagels, and a dozen Baby Ruth candy bars, with a nod to the Bambino.
Bloomberg grew up in Medford, and his mother has said that he grew up rooting for the Red Sox. Bloomberg made clear yesterday at a news conference that he's rooting for the Bronx Bombers, but his roots led Menino to joke that Bloomberg's Red Sox cap should be part of their wager.
ISO 1978 Topps Baseball in NM-MT High Grade Raw 3, 100, 103, 302, 347, 376, 416, 466, 481, 487, 509, 534, 540, 554, 579, 580, 622, 642, 673, 724__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ISO 1978 O-Pee-Chee in NM-MT High Grade Raw12, 21, 29, 38, 49, 65, 69, 73, 74, 81, 95, 100, 104, 110, 115, 122, 132, 133, 135, 140, 142, 151, 153, 155, 160, 161, 167, 168, 172, 179, 181, 196, 200, 204, 210, 224, 231, 240
<< <i>I don't disagree that all teams have fans that exhibit rowdy behavior, to some extent. The Times article was, to me, an interesting little read that had some appropriate quotes contained within, and it attempted to explain the reasons behind the atmosphere there. >>
Thats fine ct, BUT the atmosphere at Yankee Stadium is not like this writer depicts. This writer definatley tried to give the reader the impression that there is widespread chaos at Yankee Stadium. This is just not the case.
ISO 1978 Topps Baseball in NM-MT High Grade Raw 3, 100, 103, 302, 347, 376, 416, 466, 481, 487, 509, 534, 540, 554, 579, 580, 622, 642, 673, 724__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ISO 1978 O-Pee-Chee in NM-MT High Grade Raw12, 21, 29, 38, 49, 65, 69, 73, 74, 81, 95, 100, 104, 110, 115, 122, 132, 133, 135, 140, 142, 151, 153, 155, 160, 161, 167, 168, 172, 179, 181, 196, 200, 204, 210, 224, 231, 240
<< <i>The laughable part is that New York fans like to pat themselves on the collective back as being more sophisticated followers of the game than anyone anywhere. Were that self-aggrandizing silliness true, they would routinely applaud great plays by the opposing team. >>
Routinely applaud great plays by the opposing team? Who is this joker kidding? NO ONE does that. We may admire a great play made by another team, but we're not going to stand up and cheer.
Thanks for highlighting the differences! It makes the differences between the two cities even more apparent.
<< <i>
Routinely applaud great plays by the opposing team? Who is this joker kidding? NO ONE does that. We may admire a great play made by another team, but we're not going to stand up and cheer. >>
Yep, this article has no merit. No doubt his sole intention was to paint Yankee Stadium as a zoo. Not the case.
ISO 1978 Topps Baseball in NM-MT High Grade Raw 3, 100, 103, 302, 347, 376, 416, 466, 481, 487, 509, 534, 540, 554, 579, 580, 622, 642, 673, 724__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ISO 1978 O-Pee-Chee in NM-MT High Grade Raw12, 21, 29, 38, 49, 65, 69, 73, 74, 81, 95, 100, 104, 110, 115, 122, 132, 133, 135, 140, 142, 151, 153, 155, 160, 161, 167, 168, 172, 179, 181, 196, 200, 204, 210, 224, 231, 240
<< <i>No doubt his sole intention was to paint Yankee Stadium as a zoo. >>
This guy writes like no other fan base ever had too much to drink before or ever got out of hand.
ISO 1978 Topps Baseball in NM-MT High Grade Raw 3, 100, 103, 302, 347, 376, 416, 466, 481, 487, 509, 534, 540, 554, 579, 580, 622, 642, 673, 724__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ISO 1978 O-Pee-Chee in NM-MT High Grade Raw12, 21, 29, 38, 49, 65, 69, 73, 74, 81, 95, 100, 104, 110, 115, 122, 132, 133, 135, 140, 142, 151, 153, 155, 160, 161, 167, 168, 172, 179, 181, 196, 200, 204, 210, 224, 231, 240
ISO 1978 Topps Baseball in NM-MT High Grade Raw 3, 100, 103, 302, 347, 376, 416, 466, 481, 487, 509, 534, 540, 554, 579, 580, 622, 642, 673, 724__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ISO 1978 O-Pee-Chee in NM-MT High Grade Raw12, 21, 29, 38, 49, 65, 69, 73, 74, 81, 95, 100, 104, 110, 115, 122, 132, 133, 135, 140, 142, 151, 153, 155, 160, 161, 167, 168, 172, 179, 181, 196, 200, 204, 210, 224, 231, 240
SD
<< <i>Dan why bother?
SD >>
I know
ISO 1978 Topps Baseball in NM-MT High Grade Raw 3, 100, 103, 302, 347, 376, 416, 466, 481, 487, 509, 534, 540, 554, 579, 580, 622, 642, 673, 724__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ISO 1978 O-Pee-Chee in NM-MT High Grade Raw12, 21, 29, 38, 49, 65, 69, 73, 74, 81, 95, 100, 104, 110, 115, 122, 132, 133, 135, 140, 142, 151, 153, 155, 160, 161, 167, 168, 172, 179, 181, 196, 200, 204, 210, 224, 231, 240
It's simply an interesting article - and there is no comparison between the NY Times and the Post / Daily News / Newsday type of papers. It's like comparing a steak to a cheeseburger.