(Naturally, they were New York Yankees fans….)
The baseball season ended last night with the Los Angeles Dodgers overcoming a 5 run deficit to win the World Series over the New York Yankees four games to one. Good. It is especially good because the night before, in the only game that the Pinstripes managed to win in the short series, two jerks in Yankee jerseys interfered with the game, the Series and Dodgers star Mookie Betts as he tried to catch a foul fly ball at the Yankee Stadium wall.
In the bottom of the first inning in Game 4 with the Yankees losing 2-0, NY lead-off hitter Gleyber Torres hit a high pop-up into right field foul territory. Dodgers right fielder Betts caught the ball with his glove, but Capobianco, with the assistance of his pal John Hansen, grabbed Betts’ glove with both hands, opened it, reached inside with his right hand and knocked the ball back onto the field. This was on national television for all to see. The umpires ruled fan interference and Torres was called out.
Sportswriters were searching their memory banks to recall a more egregious example of fans deliberately trying to interfere with a player’s efforts during a game. A reporter for The Athletic ruled it the second worst ever after the infamous Steve Bartman incident in an NLCS play-off game between the Chicago Cubs and the Florida Marlins on October 14, 2003. In that game, Bartman, a headphones-wearing Cubs fan, stopped a Cubs outfielder from catching another foul pop-up by reaching over the wall. That time, interference was not called by the umpires, and the lost out triggered a Marlins rally that stopped the Cubs, then trying to break “The Billy Goat Curse,” from finally reaching the World Series.
Being a sportswriter and journalist and thus ignorant of ethics, the reporter is dead, dead wrong. The Yankee incident was far worse. Poor Bartman was simply not paying attention (stupid headphones) but he didn’t deliberately sabotage his own team. What happened afterwards was moral luck:The Athletic is blaming Bartman for consequences of his mistake that were out of his control. Capobianco and Peter were deliberately trying to take the ball away from Betts and easily could have injured his wrist. They just didn’t care. Assholes.
The Yankees organization, which has always been unethically lenient with fans who misbehave as long as the misbehavior is aimed at helping New York, banned these two fans from attending Game 5. So far, that’s the extent of their punishment. They should be banned from all MLB games for life, in my view. If not that, then for five years. If not that, then for all next season. Maybe ship them to Chicago and make them watch the White Sox ( losers of 121 games this year, a record.)
Ethics Alarms 
An ethics issue in baseball: Tommy John surgery. Pitchers get their arms surgically strengthened beyond what their arms are naturally capable of. Why is this any different than the use of performance enhancing drugs? High school kids are getting Tommy John surgery. It’s almost as if MLB teams expect their pitchers to get their arms done up. They’re more than happy to pay these guys to sit out for a year because when they come back, they’ll have super arms. Hasn’t Walker Beuhler had Tommy John surgery twice?
Somehow last night I was struck by how violently MLB pitchers’ deliveries have become. I mean, there was Bob Gibson and Sandy Kofax permanently bent his arm with his delivery, but now everybody throws with such explosive power.
That is really horrible. Predictable, but horrible.
Well, I think first off this is a similar phenomenon to home runs nowadays being massively emphasized. What people look at with pitchers these days is how fast they can throw a baseball – can he get it in at 100mph?
The emphasis on power pitching means that pitchers’ arms are more stressed than ever, leading to more injuries. The emphasis on home runs doesn’t have any comparable physical consequences, as far as i am aware, just an increase in strikeouts and decrease in batting average.
I don’t think I want to condemn Tommy John surgery per se as a cheating operation. If you do, then there are a huge range of things that are done in sports medicine nowadays that would also have to be banned. TJ surgery is just the one that has the longest recovery time, and its efficacy means that it get prescribed more and more.
Baseball players these days are more and more truly exceptional athletes and not just men who have exceptional hand-eye coordination. Just look back at Babe Ruth and all he accomplished, despite having a rotten life style for an athlete. Plus he not only started his career as a pitcher, but if I recall correctly started during the dead ball era.
Imagine what Ruth might have achieved if he had come up in today’s baseball environment? Would we be looking at 75 homes runs a year? .400 batting average? Both? 1000 career home runs? Or would he have thrown his life away in the NBA or NHL?
It does make for some fun speculation.
And yes, of course, the Bartman incident wasn’t even close to those Yankee fans.
“New York, New York! What a wonderful town.”
“The town so nice they had to name it twice.”
Amazing how many “fans” left their ridiculously expensive seats well before each of the three games there were over.
Alan Dershowitz opened his podcast yesterday with an extended series of great stories about baseball:
Interesting about John Henry. Dersch really has gotten the cold shoulder throughout the northeast. Whew!
I’ve received the same treatment from now former friends who have shunned me for committing the mortal sin of not being absolutely apoplectic about Trump’s even being able to breath the air.
As soon as I saw this on tv, I thought “I can’t wait until Jack gets around to writing about this.” This is a paradigmatic illustration of “egregious” conduct. The distinction between their actions and poor Steve Bartman’s (which, as a lifelong Cubs AND White Sox fan, are etched permanently into my neurons) presents a perfect teachable moment. Especially after these schmohawks basically bragged about it. I read that the Yankees gave their tickets to a boy who’s suffering from cancer—good for them. Who would’ve ever thought we’d need an ethics handbook for fans? Yell, hold up signs, and verbally taunt all you want—but physical interference warrants a lifetime ban.
As to the hapless White Sox, their owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, needs to sell the team. He had the chutzpah to ask the (basically broke) State of Illinois and City to fund a new stadium along the river. Thankfully our elected officials (benighted as they are on nearly every important issue) told him to go jump in Lake Michigan.
Has any team made more horrible front office and managing decisions in the last 50 years? From the Ken Harrelson debacle, to playing Carlton Fisk in left field, to the Tony LaRussa experiment, the ChiSox have seemed to have been determined to punish themselves for 1919.
And then there were the shorts….
Oh those shorts! Navy blue and white! I miss the old Comiskey Park. And Bill Veeck, who owned the team for a time in the 70’s. The current ballpark is a soulless, concrete, steep arena, but parking is generally easy, so there’s that. The ChiSox and Cubs occupy different chambers of my heart.
But those Yankee fans. It calls to mind the notion of a “condign” penalty.
Bartman gets an eternal pass for his actions.
First, there were at least three sets of hands in the stands going for that ball…his just happened to be the ones that touched it. Second, that ball was NOT in the field of play and therefore fully playable by any fans in the vicinity. The fact that Moises Alou had any play on it at all was simply moral luck. Third, Alou made a scene like a spoiled third-grade girl denied her Scoochie-bear in gym class, acting as though his catching the ball and recording the out was the guaranteed outcome of his chase. Fourth, the fact that the Chicago Cubs promptly played the remainder of the eighth inning like the Bears – the Bad News Bears – was explained away by myriads of hapless Cubs fans as the result of the “extra out” the Marlins got. That’s completely preposterous, but Bartman became the scapegoat of an epic Cubs collapse.
I was going to respond with this as well. It was not called fan interference for the simply reason of because it was not interference. It’s only interference if you reach into the field of play and do it. Betts caught the ball at the wall, then between his momentum going that way and them reaching over they pulled it into the stands. Bartman’s case the ball landed in the stands, and preventing a player from catching it there is not interference. And like you said, Gonzales butchering the double play at shortstop for an error was far worse to the Cubs then a pop fly (that might not have been caught anyway).
I would say the worst fan interference in terms of effect on play was also the Yankees. When in 1996 an 11-yo reached over the outfield wall and snatched a ball away from the outfielder hit by rookie Derek Jeter during the first game of the championshop round against Baltimore, turning it into a game tying homerun. The Yankees went on to win in extra innings and won the series 4-1. Who knows what might have happened if Orioles took that first game.
Yankees treated the kid as a hero and sent a limo to take him to the game and sit in a suite the next game.
Jeffrey Maier. The Yankees making the kid a hero was indefensible, but he was still just trying to catch the ball. Trying to pry the ball out of Betts’ glove is in a whole other category.
Oh I absolutely believe the latest one was much worse in terms of what they did. But it had no effect on the field of play. It was accurately called an out, and fortunately had no effect on the game itself. The Jeffrey Meier play turned a 4-3 Baltimore win into a Yankees win in extra innings. A major effect on the game on the field itself.
Umpire’s fault. With challenge and replay, it wouldn’t have happened.
A lifetime ban?
A 5-year ban?
If they were season ticket holders, they should be permanently banished to the nose-bleed seats in right field.
-Jut
In a proper world those two would have been immediately ejected from the stadium. Grabbed by the buttplate and stacking swivel by NYPD and physically removed for all the world to watch.
It took a while, but they were removed. To a chorus of boos from the surrounding fans. Of course, they were booing the security guys who were removing the jerks. It’s New York! If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.
At least they didn’t throw batteries. Some Phillies fans threw batteries at outfielder J.D. Drew, who they have historically hated.
I have a recollection some years ago of that happening in Yankee Stadium. Fans were throwing batteries onto the outfield against the Rangers.