Stop being idiots

By now I assume most of you have heard about Marty Brenneman's anti-Cubs-fan rant during Wednesday's blowout win over the Reds - after an Adam Dunn home run (with the Cubs already ahead by a sizable amount), people in the bleachers threw about 15 baseballs onto the field. Brenneman was, well, not pleased. I won't bother reprinting the remarks since you've probably read them and because they kind of annoy me. Google them if you have to. But I will say that I don't totally disagree with him. The kind of Cubs fans he was talking about? The rest of us hate them too. I had a conversation with a guy at work today who was saying he hates going to games because of all the people who are just there to get drunk, or who show up already drunk, and in general could not care less about the actual baseball game except that it's a convenient excuse for them to be loud and bothersome. You can't escape it when you leave the bleachers, either; I was in the upper deck last time, one row from the roof, and was still sitting next to a guy pouring Captain Morgan into his Coke and asking who was up during every single at-bat.

Real fans of every team hate the bandwagoners, and because of the cachet of Wrigley Field and the amount of college students and other twenty- and thirty-somethings who flock to the biggest city between the coasts, the Cubs have a lot of them. Unfortunately, it's something that the rest of us kind of have to accept. But this kind of goes beyond the pale, don't you think?

I mean, honestly? People find that funny? More importantly, do people think that they're supporting the Cubs' acquisition of Fukudome when they wear something like that? It's like Asians are the last minority that it's still okay to make fun of. Do you think that there is a white person in the world who would be caught dead wearing that shirt if it was a black-face bear with huge lips and the caption "Holy cow, n****r"? I'm going to go ahead and say no. And I love the defense that "an Oriental guy" (nice, by the way) created it - even if true, does that mean that he speaks for how all Asian people would feel about seeing that kind of caricature, or that if one Asian guy thinks it's cool that white people no longer have to worry about it being a stereotype? It's just ridiculous. Anyone who tries to walk into Wrigley wearing that should be tossed out on their ass.

And that's the kind of fans who Marty Brenneman was talking about. And he may have gone a little over-the-top, but you know what? He wasn't really all that wrong.