The Boos Swell : Roseanne in Rockets’ Red Glare

Accustomed to defending their team’s dismal play this season, San Diego Padres officials confronted an even bigger public-relations nightmare Thursday as strident criticism of TV comedian Roseanne Barr’s rendition of the national anthem at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium poured in from around the country.

The chorus of stadium boos that greeted Barr’s screechingly off-key rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” accompanied by what some perceived as an obscene gesture, at Wednesday night’s game grew louder Thursday as veterans’ groups, radio talk-show hosts, baseball players and others caustically condemned Barr for what they regard as her denigration of the anthem.

“This is a national disgrace,” said opera star Robert Merrill, who has sung the anthem in New York’s Yankee Stadium for 18 years. “It was to me like burning of the flag.”

But Barr’s husband said that, although the actress-comedian is upset over the intense negative reaction, she feels that “she doesn’t have anything to be sorry for.” Saying that his wife “sang the best she could,” Tom Arnold, the co-writer of Barr’s hit television show, angrily insisted that the fans who booed her and those who have criticized her did more to harm the anthem’s meaning than his wife’s singing did.

“People booing the national anthem? That’s about as un-American as you can get,” Arnold said. “The reason this country is so great is that people like Roseanne can sing the national anthem. . . . Not everybody is Beverly Sills.”

Meanwhile, Padres officials, having seen a promotion that they hoped would be a big hit strike out badly, issued an apology Thursday and then did what any red-blooded American in serious trouble would do: They called in the Marines for Thursday night’s game.

Barr had been invited to sing the national anthem before the second game of Wednesday night’s Padres-Cincinnati Reds doubleheader by Tom Werner, the Padres’ new general managing partner and producer of TV’s “Roseanne” show.

When the invitation was announced earlier this month, Barr said that she intended to sing the song seriously, not jokingly. Her performance, however, left that pledge open to varying interpretations--most of them unflattering.

In a rendition lasting slightly less than one minute, Barr screeched out the anthem’s lyrics in an off-key voice that many at the stadium clearly found as pleasing to the ear as a fingernail scratching a blackboard. Barr, who plugged her ears with her fingers part of the time, heard boos before she had even completed “Oh, say can you see,” drawing catcalls that reached a crescendo by song’s end.

After she finished singing, Barr--in what her husband and Padres officials insisted was intended to be a parody of ballplayers’ sometimes indelicate mannerisms--grabbed her crotch and spat on the ground as she walked off the field. That gesture, interpreted by many in the crowd as Barr’s reaction to their reaction, produced even louder boos.

Not needing to wait for an “E” to flash on the scoreboard to realize that this one would go down in the books as an error, Werner huddled with top Padres executives for about half an hour before declining comment. Other Padres officials, however, defended Barr’s performance, blaming the trouble in part on a time-delay and echo in the stadium’s sound system.

In a statement released Thursday, however, Padres President Dick Freeman was more contrite.

“While Roseanne has indicated she did her best under some very difficult circumstances, it is apparent we did not do our part because many fans were offended both by the rendition and Roseanne’s gestures,” Freeman said. “To those fans, we apologize and make the commitment that in the future we will strive to see that the anthem is presented with the dignity it is due.”

Toward that end, the U.S. Marine Corps Band’s tape-recorded rendition of the national anthem was played at Thursday night’s game with the Houston Astros.

Both baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent and the National League offices in New York City also received many complaints about the incident Thursday. Saying that league officials had discussed the matter with the Padres, National League President Bill White said: “We . . . are in agreement with their apology. We are satisfied that they will take all necessary steps to ensure that it will not happen again.”

Whether the Padres’ damage-control efforts can quickly quell the controversy, however, is as problematical as the team’s chances of overtaking the division-leading Reds, whom they trailed by 18 games going into Thursday night’s contest.

Indeed, compared to the verbal pyrotechnics ignited by Barr’s performance, the rocket’s red glare and bombs bursting in air over Ft. McHenry in 1814 that inspired Francis Scott Key to write the “Star-Spangled Banner” seem relatively tame.

Pushing aside Supreme Court nominations, budget battles and myriad other typical radio talk-show topics, the episode--that one day might well be remembered in prose as “Mighty Roseanne at the Mike”--dominated Thursday’s programs in San Diego and elsewhere. On San Diego radio station KSDO, for example, some listeners used phrases such as “obnoxious pig” and “disgusting joke” to describe Barr, and others called for a boycott of Barr’s ABC show and the Padres.

Though a few people defended Barr and accused her critics of overreacting, most who either had heard or heard of her performance vociferously attacked her, often using rhetoric reminiscent of the recent national debate over a proposed constitutional amendment to prohibit flag-burning. Disc jockeys at one station drew cheers from onlookers by having a bulldozer crush a tape player loaded with a cassette of Barr’s performance, while some callers to phone-in shows suggested that Barr should be charged with some crime or accused her of being unpatriotic. One caller even went so far as to liken the incident to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.

“This was an insult to all Americans,” said Steve VanBuskirk, a spokesman for the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “Whether it was a joke or just very bad singing, it reflected very bad judgment.”

Similarly, opera star Merrill, who has sung the anthem for nine U.S. presidents, called Barr “a disgrace” and described her performance as “a complete mockery and outlandish.”

“It was like, ‘Here I am and to hell with you,’ ” Merrill told the Associated Press. “It isn’t good for baseball. Baseball is like apple pie, Cracker Jack and peanuts. It’s the national pastime. This is a national disgrace.”

Echoing the sentiments of many other Padre players, pitcher Eric Show called Barr’s performance “a disgusting . . . insult to the club and the fans.” Noting that San Diego is “a big-time military town,” Padre Bip Roberts said: “She should have known she can’t sing like that.”

“We hear the national anthem 162 times a year, and every now and then you get someone who will forget a verse or can’t sing,” added outfielder Tony Gwynn. “That was bad, capital B-A-D.”

But catcher Mark Parent said: “So what if she can’t sing? At least she tried. What do you expect from a comedienne?”

For the Padres, the Barr incident was the latest in a series of celebrated controversies stemming not from the team’s on-field performance, but rather from what team officials or others did before or during games.

In April, 1974, the late Ray Kroc, distressed by his newly acquired team’s play, grabbed the public-address microphone during the home opener to apologize to the crowd.

“I have never seen such stupid ballplaying in my life,” Kroc told the stunned fans, so incensing some Padre players that they considered boycotting the next game.

A similar public-relations debacle occurred late in the 1988 season, when Chub Feeney resigned as the club’s president after making an obscene hand gesture at two La Jolla businessmen who paraded beneath his box with a sign reading “Scrub Chub”--a reference to the growing public criticism over his performance.

Barr is also no stranger to controversy at the ballpark. During a World Series game in Oakland last fall, she bared her bottom to reveal a tattoo of her husband’s name.

Though Barr’s husband was not her only defender in this new incident, her supporters clearly constituted a small minority of those who voiced their opinion Thursday. A Padres’ switchboard operator said that, of the hundreds of calls received Thursday, 90% were critical.

But at least a handful of the callers to KSDO agreed with one man who said: “Tell the people of San Diego to lighten up. It’s just a joke.”

Brian Zick, a commercial illustrator from Los Angeles, cited the onslaught of criticism as proof of “how this kind of thing touches off a Pavlovian patriotic response.”

“When it comes to politics, or at least to symbolism, the American public has no sense of humor,” Zick added.

In his own comments on KSDO, Arnold stressed that his wife “loves this country,” adding: “Roseanne didn’t go down there to offend anybody. She’s sorry that people are upset. . . . She’s not sorry about what she did. She tried to do kind of a fun thing. Why would she be sorry? That’s ridiculous. It’s not like she’s riding around North Vietnam in a tank.”

And what about the reaction at Ft. McHenry, where the British bombardment of Baltimore during the War of 1812 prompted Key to pen the lines that would later become the national anthem?

At least on Thursday, things were relatively quiet on the Eastern Front, as most of the fort’s visitors apparently had not yet heard of The Shout Heard ‘Round the Baseball World.

“We’ve had only one person complain, though he was pretty disgusted,” said park ranger Paul Plamann. “Maybe it’s going to take a day or so for more people to hear about it.”

When more people do learn of it, the essential question will be whether they, like the VFW’s VanBuskirk, find little humor in the episode.

“From veterans’ standpoint, you can joke about a lot of things, but the national anthem isn’t one of them,” he said. “At best, this was a very ill-conceived idea from beginning to end.”

Times staff writer Scott Miller contributed to this report.