Be Like Tike

Friday, June 15th, 2007 by Adam Wagner

What Became Obvious

After plans to go see Knocked Up fell through, Matt, my brother, and I went to see the Pirates take on the Texas Rangers tonight, hopeful of seeing a sweep take place. Well, needless to say, the sweep did not occur. That is asking way too much of these Pittsburgh Pirates, as even Tom Gorzelanny became sick of the losing at some point and showed his frustration. (Quick note: if the picture of him bent over in near pain after throwing the three-run homerun pitch to Gerald Laird is not on the front page of both sports sections tomorrow, someone isn’t doing their job.) The real story of the game, at least for me, however, was not the utter failure by the team to get anything going off of Kameron Loe (who entered the game with a 7.40 ERA) or Gorzelanny’s giving up three homeruns to basically the same spot or even Masumi Kuwata’s home debut (he’s pretty cool to watch). Heck, it wasn’t even seeing my brother give the Nuttings $27 of his money in food. No, it was the behavior of the fans around me that was the story of the night.

The fans there tonight were, plain and simply, hilariously repulsive. Highlights, just from the small group of semi-tipsy people next to us after the jump.

Yelling out “make it rain on them hos!” and then laughing about it, apparently not realizing that the rest of the section was laughing at them.
Screaming, “Freddy Sanchez is my boyfriend!” and then seeing her real boyfriend get an extremely jealous look on his face.
Thinking that the comment, “You’re gay!” is original.
Somehow, someway keeping Godzilla Vs. Mothra as the champion on that movie/music thing with the fake iPod for the 6th consecutive game. Folks, if you see this clip, it is terrible. Do not vote for it. If you really want to see it, look on YouTube.
Thinking that they invented “Hatorade.”
Asking “where’s the beer?” and then getting turned down by a vendor with a goofy beard when they were unable to produce I.D.
Yelling, “We want a homerun!” when Tom Gorzelanny was at bat. And being serious about it.
Begging every outfielder for a ball and then screaming at him when he took when look at them, sized them up, and threw it on the other side of the bleachers.
Stating that, “You have a better chance of winning the lottery than you do of seeing them win. Even if you don’t play the lottery.” I almost got up and gave the guy a lesson on probability (I’m serious. If you don’t do something, there’s a 0 percent chance. The Pirates win about half of their home games. If I had a 50 percent chance of winning the lottery, I would play it every day.
Yelling “We want a bobblehead!” further affirming the Nutting family’s idea that if they give away stupid toys, people will come to the stadium.
Yelling “HOMERUN! WHEEEEEEWWWW!” when Ryan Doumit hit a double.
I just want to state, unequivocally, that if you ever (and I do mean ever) wear a customized jersey to a sporting event, you should expect to be made fun of. I don’t understand why some people don’t get this. It’s pretty simple. You’re probably a huge dork if you’re wearing it and you deserved to be made fun of, especially if you start yelling.

On a non-related note, Josh Sharpless plays about two hours of Yahtzee a night, Sean Chacon enjoys Monopoly (Somehow that’s funny. I’m not quite sure why. Maybe Chacon has a monopoly on clubhouse hot dogs or something.), and Rajai Davis really likes checkers.

Perhaps the most abhorrent act of the night, however, came when Jerry Hairston Jr. threw a ball to a little girl. The woman in the middle of the picture there, in the blue, volunteered to flash the entire crowd (how old does she look?) if the young girl gave her the ball. Click the image for a full sized version. She spent half an inning begging for this ball, with some members of the crowd even getting behind her cause. She did receive the ball, but gave it back after the entirety of sections 139 and 140 began screaming at her about how she should be ashamed of herself. Apparently she did have a soul. She did not, however, ever flash the crowd, so I did not have an opportunity to get a Bengals girl picture (see here…NSFW).Folks, the point is that yes, our team is semi-painful to watch. This is no reason to go make an ass of yourself at a baseball game and embarrass yourself and the people around you. I’m not saying that this is the majority of the crowd or even very many of you, but the few people that do make the experience much more difficult to enjoy for everybody around them. And the people who wear customized jerseys make it impossible to focus on the game simply because it is so easy to make fun of them. You, my friends, are a distraction, simply because you are way too easy to mock. BURN THE CUSTOMIZED JERSEYS!

On a more important note, the Pirates have announced that they are calling up John Van Benschoten to start Saturday. That game suddenly became much more interesting with the recall of the former number one pick (need I remind anyone that he led college baseball in homeruns the year he was drafted?). JVB certainly deserves this recall and I can’t help but wish him the best of luck. Interestingly, though, the man he was replacing was being lauded by the Post-Gazette the other day for being someone that Jim Colborn turned around. I’m not going to whine too much, however, as the Pirates seem to be doing something correct for once. Van Benschoten deserves his chance and he’s going to get it. I’m going to guess that he has a solid but not spectacular start Saturday and eventually settles in as about the number four or number five starter for the remainder of the season.

Glad you pulled the gun on this one before it became too late, Dave (see Bullington, Bryan).

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