Angels in the Outfield
By: Jeddy Goodwill
If Yankee and Red Sox devotees do one thing together, it should be deploring their common enemy—those Thunderstix thumping, Rally Monkey-wagging bandwagoneers we know as Angels “fans”. During last year’s World Series, savaging supporters of the Arizona Diamondbacks became a cottage industry for sportswriters and a catharsis for disgruntled Yankee fans. And while D-back fans were baseball know-nothings, they weren’t nearly as obnoxious as baseball’s latest strain of fair-weather fan. How do I hate fans of the Los Angeles/California/Anaheim/California Angels, let me count the ways:
(a) Gimmicks—The Rally Monkey and Thunderstix are abominations before the eyes of the baseball gods. If you still think the Rally Monkey is cute, just wait until next April, when the Devil Rays unveil the SeaWorld™ Come-From-Behind Manatee. As if that isn’t disgusting enough, Thunderstix are fast becoming The Wave of the 21st century. What makes them so insidious is that they transmute the passionate performance art of rooting for your favorite team into a bizarre, robotic ritual—when favorite team obtains desired result, show approval by bringing Thunderstix A into contact with Thunderstix B; then repeat. When you watch your favorite team in the World Series, you need your hands free to make angry fists, pull your hair out, punch stuff, clap and tackle your friends in celebration. The idea that you’d want to use them to wield inflated, elongated balloons seems counterintuitive and just plain wrong.
(b) Disnefied Gentility—Over the course of four games, I didn’t hear one “Bare-ee . . . Bare-ee” or “Sterrr-roids . . . Sterrr-roids” chant. If a player is single-handedly ruining your team’s chances of winning its first World Series, don’t you try to get in his head? Maybe they were too busy with the Thunderstix. Or, maybe they didn’t want to upset Barry’s son, or Dusty Baker’s son, or Shawon Dunston’s son. I think the Rosie O’Donnell’s son and the son of Sam were somewhere in that dugout, too.*
(c) This Year’s Model—Last time I checked, the Angles averaged about 1.25 uniform changes per year, and yet, everyone in the place seemed to be sporting the latest, incandescent red iteration? I guess nobody wanted wear their Mo Vaughn jerseys. And didn’t Major League Baseball officially institute a moratorium on that candy-apple red hue after the sartorial atrocity that was the Cleveland Indians uniform during the mid-seventies.
(d) If you go carrying pictures . . . —I have nothing against the Singing Cowboy, but there is no need to go around hoisting his portrait like he is Chairman Mao in a cowboy hat. There’s nothing like a Stalinist spin on an American icon.
(e) Plagiarism—The “Red Sea” is a visually arresting atmosphere, it is also shamelessly cribbed from the University of Nebraska’s Memorial Stadium. You can’t blame them, though—they’d have to be sports fans to know that.
(f) John Travolta—The stars-in-the-stands phenomenon is just another grating by-product of our celebrity culture, but I could not abide seeing Travolta, looking like he just swallowed L. Ron Hubbard, at Game Seven. At least he wasn’t wearing his Qantas pilot suit.
*Bud Selig is baseball’s favorite whipping boy for a reason, but we should applaud him when he uncharacteristically makes the right decision. His support of regulations that would preempt a league-wide romper room dugout fiasco is a wise move. A line must be drawn before Barry Bonds steps to the plate wearing his kid in a papoose. By the way, I blame Mark McGwire for all this nonsense (not just for the steroids, but the kids on the field thing, too).