California's World Series is just wrong
By John Kelso
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, October 27, 2002
I shouldn't be surprised that the Angels fans are playing with balloons in their seats during an all-California World Series.
Californians are the sort of people who are comfortable playing with balloons on national television. In a real baseball stadium environment, the fans would be squirting mustard on their shirts, using traditional vulgar ballpark language, telling that fat umpire he needs to see Jenny Craig -- that sort of acceptable, anti-social, rude baseball fan behavior.
But this is a Sunday-go-to-meeting, goody two-shoes, Pablum-pukin' all-California World Series. So in Anaheim, what you've got is a baseball stadium full of scrubbed minivan owners who have all received notices in the mail recently that say they've been pre-approved.
This differs from Yankee fans, who are more likely to receive restraining orders. So when the games are played in Anaheim, instead of a real ballpark like Yankee Stadium, what you're stuck looking at on your TV is a passel of pantywaists sitting in their seats, banging their little red baseball bat-shaped balloons together.
This is disturbing. This is the sort of cream-puff crowd who would ask Babe Ruth to change his first name because Babe sounds so darned sexist. Playing with balloons. This is not the way you are supposed to behave at a World Series. This sort of behavior should be reserved for the Splash Zone at Sea World. They ought to take every Angels fan who has a bat balloon, load them all on a bus, drive them over to Knott's Berry Farm and leave them off.
Then there's this disgusting rally monkey ritual. When the Angels fans who are banging their cutesy little balloons together want the Angels to score some runs, they exhort a primate called the rally monkey, who appears on the electronic scoreboard to rev up the fans. Some people even bring their own stuffed rally monkeys to the ballpark.
A plush toy might be all right for a 4-year-old, but grownups aren't supposed to bring stuffed animals to a major-league baseball game. Do that in Yankee Stadium, and the monkey gets mugged.
But this is what happens to the national pastime when it's taken over by a team owned by Disney, isn't it? Instead of the national anthem, I keep expecting them to play "It's a Small World After All."
Not that things improve a whole heckuva lot when these World Series games were played up the coast in San Francisco, where the hot dogs in the concession stands had better be dolphin-free or nobody would touch them.
Then there's Taco Bell, which, as a promotional stunt, placed a 15-foot-diameter floating bulls-eye in McCovey Cove, the ocean patch behind the San Francisco Giants' ballpark. Here's the deal: If a player would've hit a home run onto the floating bulls-eye, everybody in the country would've gotten a coupon for a free Taco Bell taco.
Let me restrain myself from the excitement. I could've gotten to stand in line with hundreds of strangers to wait for a free taco from Taco Bell? Get a rope.
John Kelso's humor column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Contact him at 445-3606 or jkelso@statesman.com. |
