Fans can be jerks, too

How some fans ruin it for everybody...

So here’s the Kansas City Star story that inspired this essay, rant or tirade (your call):

A teenage baseball fan went to a Kansas City Royals game and later told the Kansas City Star he tries to get every Royal’s autograph and had yet to get Zack Greinke’s and finally got to Zack before a game and asked him to sign a baseball. Zack walked over, took the ball, stared at him for about five seconds and then threw the kid’s baseball up into the stands.

When the kid asked why he would do that, Zack said:

“For my amusement.”

That’s the kid’s version of the story and it eventually went viral because we all have to share each and everything we do, think or see on social media (just like I’m doing now) and I’ve read a couple stories that accepted the kid’s version of events and ripped Greinke for his behavior, but the Kansas City Royals say there’s more to it.

They say Zack did throw the ball into the stands, but did it because he saw the teenager pushing young children out of the way to get to Greinke. The teenager says he didn’t do that. Both sides agree that Zack continued to sign baseballs for young fans after the ball-throwing incident, so it would appear Zack had nothing against the other kids who wanted autographs, just the kid who may or may not have pushed younger kids out of his way.

I wasn’t there, so I don’t know exactly what happened in this particular case, but here’s one thing I can tell you for sure:

Fans can be incredible assholes.

The autograph business

Through an unlikely series of events I became friends with former Kansas City Royal Clint Hurdle way before I ever started covering baseball for the Kansas City Star and there were times I rode with Clint to a ballpark.

At that time Clint was a manager in the minor leagues and managers have to show up not long after lunch (sometimes earlier) for a 7:05 start, but no matter how early we got to the park we’d be greeted by fans carrying binders full of baseball cards and they showed up early to get those cards signed.

They knew who Clint was – he once appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated and played 10 years in the Big Leagues for the Royals, Reds, Mets and Cardinals – but I was pretty much the mystery guest on What’s My Line?

My appearance would set off a panic because autograph seekers weren’t sure who I was or if I had a baseball card and they’d frantically flip through their binders to see if they had a card with my face on it and if they found one, they would ask me to sign it even though they’d never seen or heard of me. After a while I figured it out and would tell them to quit worrying, I wasn’t a ballplayer and didn’t have a card, so then they’d focus on Clint.

And I never once saw him refuse to sign.

But if you hear a ballplayer say “no doubles” that means they’ll sign one card for you, not 10.

When I asked about “no doubles” I was informed that a lot of the people with binders were in the business of selling signed baseball cards and they want as many signed cards as possible because even if you’re currently a nobody maybe someday you’ll get caught in a scandal with Pamela Anderson (you can only hope) or running guns to the rebels in Latin America (I’m just going to assume there are still rebels in Latin America) or trying to snort the left field foul line up your right nostril and then you’ll be news and those worthless cards will suddenly be sellable.

After hanging around professional ballplayers for three decades, here’s how I think they look at it and I’ll put it in italics to help you remember:

Ballplayers will bend over backwards for kids or anybody in the military (I’ve seen extraordinary acts of kindness and generosity that didn’t make it into the news), but players are less thrilled with helping somebody who wants to use their name to make money.

Players are on a schedule

I’ve said this before, but now seems like a pretty good time to say it again; players are on a schedule even if you don’t know what that schedule is.

If a player is running late and needs to get inside the park for early work, he’s not being a dick if he doesn’t sign. If a player is scheduled to be in the next BP hitting group and you ask him for his autograph as he walks to the batting cage, he’s not being a dick if he doesn’t sign.

You asked at the wrong time.

Players have a limited amount of time to sign autographs and then they have to be doing something else and they can’t possibly get to everyone who wants something signed and I once saw Bo Jackson signing autographs down the left field line in spring training and then someone yelled at Bo that he was needed elsewhere and when he said he had to go, some guy who was begging for Bo’s autograph seconds before, “motherfucked” Bo for leaving and I’m guessing that gets old pretty fast and you can’t  blame any player that says the hell with signing autographs.

Well you can, but you’d be wrong.

Also: on my list of people I would never want to insult, Bo Jackson isn’t number one, but he’s definitely in the top 10. A certain type of fan somehow gets the idea that he can say something shitty to a player and there’s some invisible shield that prevents the player from coming into the stands and while I don’t condone it, I also think it’s karma-in-action when a player says they don’t give a shit and goes after a fan who thought he was invulnerable, but as the Malice at the Palace proved, if players are going to start punching fans, it would be a really good idea if they punched the right fans.

And just in case you don’t know what the Malice at the Palace was, here you go:

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/sports-brawls-nba-infamous

Anyway…

I’ve heard fans yell horrible things at players and sometimes they yell those horrible things right in front of a player’s wife or kids or parents (they tend to show up at games) and if a player says that’s it, I’m coming up there, it’s sometimes understandable. Not advisable; understandable.

Plus yelling insults at someone you think can’t respond is pretty chickenshit.

Fan complaints about autographs

OK, so a player is nice enough to sign a baseball and then a fan complains that they can’t read the signature. But there’s a reason player signatures can be hard to read and a story about Mike Moustakas will explain why.

One day I come into the clubhouse and Mike’s signing baseballs and has boxes of them stacked chest-high next to his locker because players are required to sign a metric shit ton of balls to be sold in gift shops or used however the team wants to use them and I look at his signature and say:

“This does not say ‘Mike Moustakas’.”

Moose laughs and says:

“Sure it does; big M squiggle, big M squiggle.”

I ask Mike when he changed his signature and he says the very first time he signed a baseball with his old signature (M-I-K-E-M-O-U-S-T-A-K-A-S) and it took about 15 minutes.

Players have to sign so many items that they come up with simplified autographs (which is why they often add their numbers so you can tell who signed it) and if you think about it (and I have) illegible autographs are the result of so many fans wanting one, so if you can’t read a signature it’s pretty much your fault.

(Didn’t see that one coming, did you?)

The Kanekoa Texeira incident

Media members like to pretend they’re completely neutral and don’t have personal relationships or feelings about players, which is mostly bullshit.

Some players don’t like us (and after some of the stuff I’ve seen reporters pull, you can’t blame them), but some players don’t mind talking to us and if you‘re out there long enough, reporters develop relationships with players they like whether they want to or not and one of the guys I liked was Kanekoa Texeira. (You probably don’t remember him because he only played two years in the Big Leagues and was mainly used as middle reliever.)

So one day he’s leaving the field when a kid holds up a ball and a pen and Kanekoa, being a good dude, went over to sign, but the kid said:

“Could you take this up to the clubhouse and get Alex Gordon’s autograph?”

Me and Kanekoa looked at each other and burst out laughing.

He was trying to be a good dude and some 11-year-old kicked him in the nuts and let him know he wasn’t nearly famous enough to ruin a perfectly good baseball with his autograph and since Kanekoa clearly didn’t have anything better to do, could he run an errand for a rude fan who just insulted him?

Kanekoa said:

“Hey, kid, I know I’m not famous, but that’s brutal.”

Fan tricks for getting autographs

If a player is around long enough he might start recognizing the same fan asking for yet another autograph and I was on the field with a player when a grown-up man who should have something better to do asked the player to sign a baseball and the player said:

“I got you yesterday.”

When that happens an autograph-greedy fan might start asking kids to take his balls and get them signed (and if that sounds weird, it’s only because it is), but a player who’s been around a while might see through that trick and Jason Kendall once told me he would always ask the kid his name so he could personalize the ball and if a nearby adult freaked out and said Jason didn’t need to do that, Jason knew the guy was selling the ball and would make sure to personalize it and add a giant-ass:

“FOR BILLY”

Which would ruin the ball for resale.

Even worse, (I’ve also told this one before, but it’s worth telling again) I once saw some parents on the concourse who had dressed their daughter like a hooker (she looked to be about 15) because they thought she’d have a better chance of getting autographs if she looked like she had a part-time job having sex in alleys, and they were scheming about which player she should approach next and my first thought was what lesson was she was going to learn from this.

Use sex to get what you want?

Not only were those parents being shitty fans, they were being shitty parents.

Did I mention fans can be incredible assholes?

Since I was often on the field before games started, on numerous occasions fans would ask me to give them a baseball or a bat or in some extreme cases a baseball glove (which go for about $300 a pop) and I was pretty sure players wouldn’t like it if I started giving away their equipment.

Plus, where do fans get the balls to ask for an expensive glove and I knew a player who got a semi-casual acquaintance tickets and then the semi-casual acquaintance asked for a baseball, a bat, the player’s batting practice jersey and if the player hadn’t said to hell with this and walked away, the next request might have been for his car’s pink slip.

We all know players can behave badly (I’ve seen that, too) but when that happens it makes news and then the player gets ripped for being a rich, self-entitled asshole, but the media is often less interested in the bad behavior of fans because the fans aren’t famous and nobody cares if Bob Butthole from Circle Jerk, Kansas is kind of a dick.

But let Zack Greinke throw a baseball in the stands (for what may have been a very good reason) and we’re all over it. So next time you hear about some player-fan incident just remember:

Fans can be jerks, too.