It should have been just about a perfect night for baseball.
After weeks of Southern California heat, the temperature had dropped perhaps twelve or fourteen degrees. By the time the game settled in, it was somewhere in the high 70s, with just enough of a cooling breeze to remind you why summer evenings and baseball have always belonged together.
I was at a Single-A game between the Buzzards and the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes, the Dodgers and Angels farm teams respectively. Calling it a rivalry might be overstating things. The Dodgers and Angels have the Freeway Series at the major-league level, but that's more geography and marketing than Giants-Dodgers blood feud. Still, these were two local organizations, there was a decent crowd—maybe 30 or 40 percent of the stadium—and the game itself turned out to be a good one.
My seat was four rows behind the visiting dugout.
Unfortunately, somebody else was sitting in it.
A woman was in my seat, with her husband and child beside her. I looked at my ticket. Then I looked at the section and row. Then I checked the ticket again, because my first assumption was that I had made the mistake.
I hadn't.
“I think you're in my seat,” I finally said.
Her husband explained that they had moved because there were plenty of empty seats. The game had already started, so I wasn't particularly interested in making an issue of it. I said I was going to get a hot dog anyway and would be back.
“Well, we'll move if you come back,” the woman said, rather indignantly.
If I come back?
I had apparently interrupted their enjoyment of my seat.
I went for my hot dog. When I returned, they moved. A little later they moved again because, unsurprisingly, the seats they moved into belonged to somebody else.
It wasn't a major incident. Nobody got into an argument. Nobody called security. It was simply weird, and it started an evening during which I increasingly found myself wondering what had happened to some of the little courtesies that once seemed to be understood at a baseball game.
People came and went throughout the game, which is normal. What wasn't normal—or at least shouldn't be—was stopping in the aisle and standing there having conversations while blocking the view of everyone behind them.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned about this. At the theater, you don't wander down the aisle in the middle of a musical number and then stand in front of the audience while deciding where you're going to sit. Baseball makes it even easier. Every half inning provides a natural break. That's when you get up. That's when you come back. Of course, sometimes an inning goes on forever, a kid has to use the restroom, or somebody needs another beer. Life happens.
Just don't stand in the aisle having a conversation while everyone behind you is trying to watch the game.
Speaking of beer, there was another offense against civilization.
No draft beer.
None.
Cans.
A baseball stadium without draft beer strikes me as fundamentally wrong. There are some traditions that do not require extensive analysis or historical research. Baseball stadiums ought to have draft beer. Period.
Still, the game was good.
It went back and forth and remained tied through much of the evening. There were home runs. There were good defensive plays. There were errors and missed opportunities. There were the little unexpected moments that make minor-league baseball particularly enjoyable. You are watching professionals, but you're also watching young players learning how to become better professionals. Sometimes they make a spectacular play. Sometimes they don't.
As the game went on and the crowd began thinning, however, individual voices became easier to hear.
That's when the heckling really started.
I understand heckling. It's baseball. I understand booing an umpire after a questionable call. I understand riding an opposing player a little. I understand cheering wildly when your team turns a double play and sitting quietly when the other team does it.
What I don't understand is booing good baseball simply because the other team played it.
The Quakes would make a genuinely good play—a crisp double play, for instance—and some fans would boo. Why? You don't have to applaud the opposing team, but a great play is a great play. A great catch is a great catch. If a pitcher is mowing everybody down, you may desperately want somebody to hit him, but you can still recognize that you're watching somebody pitch a hell of a game.
At some point I think being a baseball fan ought to include actually liking baseball.
Then an outfielder dropped a fly ball.
He probably should have caught it. He knew he should have caught it. Everybody in the stadium knew he should have caught it.
That's baseball.
But a couple of spectators decided that wasn't enough.
“My grandmother could have caught that!”
Then came variations on the same theme. Somebody could have caught it with his eyes closed. Somebody else could have made the play. None of it was particularly original or funny. It just kept coming.
And from four rows behind the dugout, I was close enough to see something you might not notice from farther away.
The players could hear them.
Several turned around and looked toward the stands. At one point one of the players near the railing appeared ready to pay a little more attention to the people yelling at them. Then a teammate's hand came into view and touched him on the back, redirecting him toward the field.
Don't.
Turn around.
Get back to baseball.
That moment stayed with me.
Afterward, I started looking into heckling because I wondered whether maybe I was the one who had it wrong. Maybe I had become too sensitive to something that has always been part of the game.
And, as it turns out, heckling has a long history in baseball. Minor-league baseball may actually be one of its natural habitats. Smaller crowds and intimate stadiums put spectators close enough for players to hear them. Fans talk to players. Players occasionally answer back. There have even been minor-league hecklers who became recognized characters at their home ballparks.
So the problem wasn't heckling.
It was the kind of heckling.
Good heckling requires some wit. Give the opposing left fielder a ridiculous nickname. Remind him about something funny that happened three innings earlier. Get under his skin without becoming vicious about it. Better yet, get him to turn around despite himself and smile. That's interaction. That's entertainment. That's part of the peculiar intimacy that makes minor-league baseball different from sitting among 50,000 people in a major-league stadium.
“My grandmother could have caught that” isn't exactly Oscar Wilde.
More importantly, there is a difference between bringing yourself into the game and trying to diminish somebody who is playing it.
These are Single-A players. They're professional baseball players, certainly, and professional athletes don't require protection from criticism. But Single-A is developmental baseball. These are young men trying to get better at something extraordinarily difficult. Some will eventually walk onto the field at Dodger Stadium or Angel Stadium. Many won't. The error isn't an aberration from what we've paid to see. In some respects, development is what we've paid to see.
The dropped fly ball is part of why that player is there.
He doesn't need somebody four rows behind the dugout to tell him he missed it. He knows.
And perhaps that was why the heckling bothered me more than I expected.
The woman sitting in my seat. The people standing in the aisle blocking everyone's view. The fans booing a genuinely good play because the wrong uniform made it. The people screaming at a young outfielder because he dropped a baseball.
They're different things, certainly. None is particularly serious. But by the end of the evening they seemed connected by the same small assumption: that my enjoyment of the ballpark matters more than everybody else's.
A ticket gives you quite a bit.
It gives you a seat—assuming somebody else hasn't decided it's theirs.
It gives you the right to cheer. It gives you the right to boo. It probably even gives you the right to heckle.
It doesn't give you the ballpark.
Through all of this, there was still a baseball game going on, and it was a pretty good one. It went back and forth. For much of the evening, neither team could put the other away.
In a way, my evening went back and forth with it.
Good game. Bad experience.
Home run. Somebody blocking the aisle.
Good defensive play. Booing.
Warm summer evening turning pleasantly cool. No draft beer.
Good baseball. Mean-spirited heckling.
Back and forth.
Eventually the Quakes beat the Buzzards, 8–6.
I suppose my experience followed the same trajectory. There were enough good moments to keep it close. The baseball itself certainly did its part. The weather was terrific. There were home runs, double plays, errors, kids in the stands, hot dogs and all the familiar ingredients of a summer evening at the ballpark.
But in the end, the experience went into the loss column.
Maybe there's no great lesson in that. Maybe I'm simply getting older and less tolerant of people who don't understand that they're sharing a public space with everyone around them. But I don't think the answer is to turn baseball into church. Cheer loudly. Boo the umpire. Give the opposing left fielder a hard time if you've actually got something clever to say.
And when somebody makes a great play, even wearing the wrong uniform, recognize good baseball when you see it.
Most of all, if a twenty-something kid in Single-A drops a fly ball, remember one thing before you tell him your grandmother could have caught it.
He already knows he dropped it.
And for God's sake, somebody put draft beer back in the ballpark.
That last line works for me because it prevents the essay from ending self-righteously. It returns to the humor and gives the reader a little wink after what became a fairly serious observation about courtesy.
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