Hum you, beer chucker.
Some guy throws a beer can – half-full or half-empty, depending on your perspective – and the world of condemnatory opinion runs riot. ‘He oughta be pilloried in the public square!’ the mob demands.
Meanwhile, the American presidential election is a freak-show. There’s an ongoing refugee crisis around the globe, wars and rumours of wars, and racial tension most everywhere.
Why do we care about some half-wasted baseball fan who clouded the decorum part of his brain with beer? There are more vitally important issues in our messed up world to focus our concern on than a single thrown can of beer at a baseball game.
But there’s another way to look at the beer can incident, other than on a hierarchical scale of important and less important current affairs. Symbolically, the incident drives to the heart of civility and the potential loss of it.
The game of baseball – the stadium in which it is played, the demarcation line between player and fan, the written and unwritten code of conduct around it – is, like so many other institutions in society, a metaphor.
Baseball is deeply rooted in the act of civility, a gentlemanly and gentle-womanly game, freed from the constraints of time, free (for the most part) from violence. It’s symbolic of an ideal of good conduct. It’s a notion consciously or unconsciously understood to be integral to the game.
I’ve never had a beer at the ballpark. I don’t drink. I don’t much like what’s happened to baseball culture at the Skydome/Rogers Centre over the years. In the 20 or so years I’ve been going there to watch ball, it has become more of a collective drunkfest.
I suppose if you get a few beers in you and your head is spinning, along with your guts, during an intense play-off situation, you just might be tempted to do something rash – especially if you’re a few bales short of a load of sound judgement to begin with. Run naked on the field. Punch some fan from the visiting team. Obnoxiously yell out the name of an opposing player repeatedly until everyone in your section wants to strangle you, or at the very least stuff a bobble-head in your loud mouth.
But this peculiar beer-chucking incident suggests that people, even those partaking in the collective beer-haze, remain deeply concerned about civility. Civilization, and its requisite politeness and common decency are valued.
That is why Mr. Beer Chucker has become the scourge of the civilized world. He violated the code of baseball civility and is being vilified for his vile act.
Baseball is not one of the violent, warring games, not a metaphor for war like hockey or football. It’s a metaphor for civilization.
Yes, players occasionally get punched in the jaw by a diminutive but wiry second baseman. Occasionally, a flame-throwing pitcher will fire some heat up around the chin. And, yes, the average dugout floor is a cesspool of tobacco juice, sunflower seeds, and bubble gum wrappers.
But in the roots, culture, and psychology of it, baseball is a gracious game with a code of good conduct, for both players and fans. The beer chucker broke the code in a very public manner, and he is getting the full measure of public shaming that comes with such a heinous act.
In the code of baseball, the fan never interferes with the play. When they do, they are escorted off the premises.
A fan never, ever throws a beer can at an opposing player while the action is live. Never. It is an affront to civilization itself, a wanton contravention of morality and good sense.
Professional sports can be barbaric these days. But baseball clings to the ideal of civilization, with many glaring exceptions, including steroids, corked bats, and Pete Rose.
But if a fan is going to hurl a projectile at a player they are going to be reviled for it.
It is simply not done in a civilization.