Soon helmet giveaways at the ballpark won’t just be novelty promotions, but mandatory equipment given out before every game to protect lunatics from accidentally murdering themselves diving from rafters for collectible garbage.
I don’t know if you’ve heard the news, but there’s a hot new trend at the nation’s basedballing sport complexes: face diving onto cement from heights unsurvivable!
Last week at a Texas Rangers game, nearly seventy-five percent of the fans in attendance fell to its death from the upper deck. I’m sorry, I read that wrong, one man at a Texas Rangers game last week fell from the upper deck to his death. I apologize, that’s closer to 50%. Then, yesterday, during the Homed Running Derby of Hitting Competitions in someplace called “Phoenix” another idiot tried to hurl himself at a $5 souvenir laughably out of his reach and was only saved by the mistaken instinctive actions of those around him trying to protect him from his own unbridled stupidity as if his life were worth preserving.
Sports memorabilia is a very big, very dumb obsession, I know; I still have the bandana full of bottle openers that Charlie Hough hit me with at a Scottsdale Rite Aid back in ’98, and I cherish it as if it shattered my very own ocular bone: which it did. But these aren’t a home run ball that Mark McGwire kept his used steroid needles in after he’d already filled up the cat litter bucket he used to dispose of them in but before he had a new empty to fill, or the ball that Babe Ruth choked to death on when he mistook it for a heroin caked cheeseburger. The guy at the Rangers game was diving for a foul ball that Rangers outfieldman Josh Hamilton was throwing into the crowd and the idiot that tried to kill himself yesterday was at least ten rows away from a meaningless homerun derby dinger. Both of which, on the open market would fetch just about as much as any slightly used baseball listed on craigslist right now: “free, you pick up”.
Naturally, people hurtling themselves over railings, thirty or more feet above anything at all, is causing Major League baseball to look into the safety and security of their ball parks. Rather than simply, say, holding up these cases of the dip shitity of launching yourself from your insanely priced seats and understanding that the ball that the player that time will never remember just leisurely lobbed in your direction is the exact same one as those in the souvenir stand and probably isn’t worth a shattered face and traumatic, nationally televised orphanism.
And think of the players; won’t you? A quote from an actual article reporting the Rangers fan’s death:
There is also concern for Josh Hamilton, the player who tossed the ball. He’s battled his way back from addiction, and now has to deal with potential feelings of guilt over what happened.
Now please, don’t get me wrong, I understand that a professional atheletist must naturally feel some level of personal guilt that comes from shorting a throw, but I think the main thrust of the story is that a man just threw himself to his death in front of his six year old son in pursuit of a sports sphere of zero importance. Yes, it’s sad that the man DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE for this otherwise perfectly dexterous and well reasoned bat bases swing ball enthusiast’s untimely spine compression might want to have a drink after witnessing, someone so willing to put their life at risk, trusting completely in his ability to competently do what he is paid millions of dollars to do just a single time in a way that the recipient would not have to put himself in mortal danger, be so terribly wrong; but the story is about this suddenly shorter ex-father and his inability to see the ball into his glove like a four year old t-ball player. Focus up news story. If anything, this experience should certainly make Mr. Hamilton an infinitely better fielder as from now until he exhales his final dying breath he will envision every recipient of his throw as potentially falling to their untimely, comical death directly in front of their barely comprehending toddler as a direct result of his precision or lack thereof. That’s gonna make him throw all the way through from here on out I think.
I don’t blame Josh Hamilton for one Texas man’s lack of a self preservation instinct, that’s dumb. I also don’t blame baseball stadiums. I, as usual, blame idiots. They come in all shapes and sizes and they’ll accidentally assassinate themselves no matter how impossible the world tries to make it. Admittedly, a thigh high railing over a 30 foot fall is not the BEST tool to fight tools, but what WILL keep the stupid from jumping after the pretty approaching orb? As we have continued to moron proof the world, I don’t doubt at all that in the near future all baseball stadiums will be built with chain link enclosed bleachers, locking the crowd in like the animals they are for their own good. And of course, it still won’t be enough, because as any Giants fan at Dodger Stadium will tell you once they’ve regained the ability to speak, not all of the danger is on the field.
So over react as quickly as you can baseball. Encase the stands in memory foam and packing peanuts double time, because before you can say “problem solved” some forehead is going to choke to death on a hunk of NASA technology that his buddies bet him a beer he couldn’t snort.