Drunkenness

A few Boston Red Sox fans exhibited extremely boorish behavior toward Adam Jones during Monday’s game. The ESPN article sums up the situation well. The Red Sox front office is upset, the players are upset, the politicians are upset, the commissioner’s office is upset, the union is upset. Everyone is saying the right things, and it should be clear to anyone paying attention that no one appreciates your racial slurs.

I’ve attended quite a few games at Fenway in my life, and seen this boorish behavior. I also saw the way the Red Sox handle it improve over the years. In the early 80s not much was done, but by the middle of the decade, Boston hired local college football players to be enforcers. If someone was acting inappropriately in the stands, you could go down for a snack, tell an usher what was going on, and two of these men would come up to the section and stare at the offending fan. That usually stopped it. Sometimes, however, the person didn’t stop, and the enforcers would haul the offender out. I believe now there is a number you can text, and cameras keep an eye on pretty much everyone in the stands looking for trouble. So I’m a bit surprised someone was allowed to go on like that.

It also appears the Red Sox fans have a drinking problem:

Kennedy denied a report that there were 60 ejections at Monday night’s game, saying instead there were 34, including 20 for alcohol-related incidents and two for marijuana.

Again, the Red Sox have tried to curtail this. A person drinking can only buy two beers at a time, and the suds are super expensive. Yet, that doesn’t stop some fans from buying two, drinking them in an inning, then going down for two more. For seven innings. Do the Red Sox need to install a facial recognition system to limit people to two beers every four innings? I’d really love a team to try a home stand without beer to see if fan ejections go down and if fans get a more pleasant experience.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2qCaLKB