COMMENTARY : This Time, It’s Fans Who Are a Disgrace

Beach balls are one thing. Hardballs are another.

There came Thursday night a new low for Los Angeles, the city that lost both of its pro football teams. Here, where fans are best known for leaving early, if this is the way people intend to behave, then please , leave early.

Who would have thought we would ever see a day when the Dodgers, of all teams, could not be safe at home?

Clean, classy, family friendly Dodger Stadium, one of the last bastions of proper behavior in professional sport, sank to the uncivilized level of other stadiums during Thursday’s ninth-inning forfeit to the St. Louis Cardinals, as a few animals managed to shut down the entire zoo.

I wouldn’t blame Hideo Nomo if he ran back to Japan after this one.

I attended “Disco Demolition Night” at Comiskey Park in Chicago, when a disc jockey exploded hundreds of disco records and worked a crowd into a lather, causing the second game of a doubleheader between the White Sox and Detroit Tigers to be called off. But at this Dodger game, the fans didn’t even have a good cause for hatred, such as disco.

We can blame this shame of a game not only on the dozens of paying customers who flung free baseballs onto the playing field, resulting in the first forfeiture of a Dodger game since 1916, but also on an umpire with a quick thumb and on Dodger men in uniform from whom petulant fans took their cue.

Trouble is, no matter how poor the plate umpire’s eyesight might have been (and probably was) on a pitch to Raul Mondesi that he called a strike, or how wrong Eric Karros, Mondesi and Manager Tom Lasorda were for squabbling and getting themselves ejected from an important game, that’s baseball . And that’s been baseball since Doubleday invented singles.

Fans, your job is to sit in your seats, shout, eat, even say as you please. But in recent weeks, I have seen fans climb the left-field foul pole of Anaheim Stadium, slide into third base and now hurl dangerous objects at Chavez Ravine, and in this, the year many baseball fans weren’t even going to attend games any more.

Mondesi was recently hit in the skull by something thrown from the Candlestick Park stands. So far this season, a Yankee pitcher has given fans the finger and an Angel hitter has poked a fan in the face. And people say boxing should be banned. Boxers only hurt each other.

All I heard during the strike from many fans was that they wanted the players to treat them better. I’ve got news for you people. Vice versa.