Northbound

At the Somerset Patriots ballpark last night. Nice seats, right down the first base line, over the home dugout. Two drunk, loud idiots were sitting behind us. “Drunk” is an inference; I really don’t know for sure except that they got louder as the game went on. “Loud” is an absolute. “Idiots” is a relative term, of course, but it fits.

If you’re going to heckle — if you just absolutely, positively, can’t help yourself — at least do so intelligently. Rules of thumb:

Heckle intelligently. The Cameron Crazies at Duke pioneered this — nicknaming Rasheed “Can’t Read” Wallace is one of the printable comments. These guys said one intelligent thing. They were heckling a Lancaster Barnstormers outfielder named Quincy Foster. “Columbo was better,” one of them said. (Of course, the player in question was just barely 20 years old and wouldn’t know Peter Falk from Peter Rabbit.) Everything else was stupid, mindless stuff. They couldn’t even heckle Ryan Minor effectively — poor Minor had to succeed Cal Ripken as shortstop for the Orioles, and has had a strange career ever since. (He was, as recently as a couple of years ago, trying to make a comeback as a left-handed reliever in the Dodger’s organization.) Anyway, it took these guys until the ninth inning to notice that Ryan Minor was in the, heh-heh-, minor leagues.

Heckle appropriately. By that, I mean, don’t heckle the home team. Don’t be an equal-opportunity heckler, making fun of your own players. Make fun of the other guys if you just absolutely have to, if you’re too drunk or stupid to keep your mouth shut, but there’s no reason to heckle your own team except in extreme circumstances. That goes double for a blue-collar minor-league team, too. (Full disclosure: I admit to yelling at Pete Incaviglia a couple of times when he was stinking up the joint for the Rangers — “Tulsa, Tulsa”, a reference to the Rangers’ AA team.)

Heckle fairly. Heckle the players. These guys were heckling the blue-haired kid selling cotton candy, and the first-base coaches, and the kids running along the concourse, and everybody that came into view. Keep the heckling within the lines.

Give it a rest every once in awhile. Self-explanatory. I specifically, in one of the late innings, flagged down an usher and asked him to tell them to do just that; give it a rest. The usher wouldn’t do it, on the grounds that the idiots weren’t cursing. So if the team won’t enforce common-sense anti-idiot measures, try to show some self-restraint.

You may have figured this out already; I expect you have, and it’s so. At least one of the hecklers was, in fact, wearing a Yankees cap. (The other looked to be wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers jacket, and I am not surprised.)