Fans, Take Control of Your Lives--and Walk

Fool fans eight times, shame on baseball; fool fans nine times, shame on fans. Eight times baseball has threatened to leave, and eight times it has. Now, with a ninth issue at the plate (this one named “Luxury Tax”) and players threatening to walk Aug. 30, it seems almost certain baseball will still be batting a thousand.

In the last three decades, baseball has given fans thrilling pennant races, exciting home-run chases and severe abandonment issues.

The fans are taking their usual firm stand as separation anxiety takes off like a Barry Bonds homer. They are writing angry e-mails and letters. They are threatening to boycott televised and even live games. But what red-faced fans are really doing about the young millionaires and aging billionaires is dusting off their best doormat outfit and preparing to splay themselves in front of the nation’s ballparks.

Since some people apparently need to be hit over the head with a bat, let’s put it another way: Fans are in an abusive relationship with the national pastime.

“The fans give the game their hearts, their loyalty and their love, and what do they get in return but the realization that everyone is in it for themselves,” said Stanley Teitelbaum, a New York City psychotherapist who specializes in intimacy issues. “They’re basically being abandoned.”

Judging from the way most fans are behaving, though, you’d think this was their first time getting their heart stepped on by big feet in big cleats. Usually, victims of abandonment develop protective mechanisms--not always healthy--to shield themselves from the hurt and pain, according to psychotherapists.

One response can be to distract yourself from the pain. Like say, with food and drink. The grief over a striking team can be temporarily relieved by jamming a pack of Dodger Dogs down your throat and chasing it with a few cold ones. Actually, that’s what happy fans do all the time, so that’s a bad example.

Another common method of self-protection is to identify with the abusers, in this case, baseball’s drama queens who could only be matched by Cher playing Vegas with RuPaul.

Instead of focusing on filling out unemployment forms or dwindling life’s savings caused not just by a crash in the market but also by rising ticket prices at the ballparks, the abused defends the abuser’s right to continue the abuse. For example: Players and owners have the right to all the money in the world for “working” half the year (playing a game) or administering their favorite game while fans endure lives of not very quiet desperation.

Of course, most baseball fans are in denial. The owners know it, and the players know it.

“Usually the abuser apologizes and begs forgiveness, and that in part keeps the abused hanging on,” said Stuart Fischoff, a professor of media psychology at Cal State Los Angeles. “But baseball isn’t even offering that.”

If you ask baseball, there’s nothing to apologize for. That’s why when reporters ask Barry Bonds whether fans would return to the stands after another strike, the future Hall of Famer answers, paraphrasing the Terminator: “They’ll be back.”

World Wrestling Entertainment has more respect for its fans than baseball. Wrestlers don’t go on strike. They wear funny costumes, scream at each other and wrestle--and, by gum, we love them for it.

If baseball were really smart and wanted to boost profits, it would cancel so-called Fan Appreciation Day, when it gives out souvenir bats or Frisbees. Instead, it would charge double on Fan Abuse Day, when the first 500 fans get a spanking (maybe from the San Diego Chicken!) and the next 2,000 fans get bad seats with direct sun in their eyes.

Why do fans put up with the abuse? A lot of reasons, say psychologists (that’s what psychologists always say) but tradition is among them. It keeps fans in the batter’s box even when baseball is throwing them curveballs, even when it is charging them more than ever for the opportunity to be duped.

There’s something more powerful than history and economics at work here, Teitelbaum says. It’s that fans crave someone to admire.

“Yes, the fans are angry and resentful now,” he said. “But they will be back even if there’s a strike. They will always come back because the fans have to have heroes.”

This could be true, though it fails to explain attendance at Chicago Cubs games.

But don’t worry, there’s still something fans can do to heal themselves and help the game they claim to love. And like all doormats, fans know what is the right thing to do but have been afraid to do it. Or afraid they can’t do it, or that they will be the only ones doing it, so it won’t matter. But it does matter.

Here’s today’s fan-empowerment tip, taken directly from baseball’s playbook: Abandon the game while you still can. It’s the only way to stop the abuse.

“In an empowered state, you walk away as opposed to crying and wailing about the problem and begging them to please play nice,” Fischoff said. “The fans have seen who these guys are, and it would be a sign of mental health to say, ‘See you later.’ That’s a powerful statement.”