Ballplayers rarely shout obscenities at each other they’ve got baseball to keep them busy. Mostly, heckling is just one example of the pathetic fallacy of fandom, that those of us in the seats are part of the action, essential to our team’s success-that we matter. Of course, if players were so fragile as to be defanged by shouted taunts, then they’d likely have been culled from the sports herd long before making the pros. Through the years, African-American baseball players, from Jackie Robinson to Hank Aaron to Carl Crawford, have been subjected to racist jeers from the stands, with bigots often talking tough while relying on the relative anonymity of the crowd. Later in the game, Phillips tossed the guy a baseball, on which he had inscribed a personal message: “Dear Drunk Guy, thank you 4 all the love & support!! Now take this ball and shut the phuck up!!” Not all sports heckling is so innocuous, of course. Earlier this season, during a rain delay in Pittsburgh, a loudmouthed fan passed the time by jeering the Cincinnati Reds second baseman Brandon Phillips. Mostly the insults are yelled, often drunkenly, and they are often ignored. But other players get it, too, in the bullpen and along the foul lines. Outfielders, solitary in that swathe of grass (and closer to the cheap seats), often bear the brunt of fan abuse. No one said he couldn’t play.īaseball is a good sport for hecklers, offering plenty of quiet moments that become opportunities for mouthing off to a captive audience. Pence was untroubled, with six hits and two home runs in the series. Mets fans had spread a bit of humor to the sports world with their deadpan jabs, but they still couldn’t catch a break: the Giants took three games out of four. Copycats noted that Pence “hates bacon” and “prefers baths.” Meanwhile, away from Citi Field, the hashtag #HunterPenceSigns allowed users to provide their own critiques of Hunter Pence’s various innocent foibles on Twitter. The guys were back at it for the remaining three games of the series, and, after TV cameras picked up some of their greatest hits, other people started bringing their own signs to the game. Possibly.squint your eyes.wish upon a star.The signs appeared during the first game of the series, on Friday, written in Sharpie on neon poster stock and held aloft deep in the right-field stands by a pair of young men in Mets jerseys. 590 OPS, and his iconic tenure in the City by the Bay came to an ignoble end, though he finished it with a characteristically classy farewell penned in The Players' Tribune.īack to the stats, Pence's hard-contact rate, per FanGraphs, sat at 30.3 percent in 2018 next to a career mark of 30.5 percent. Pence picked up down-ballot MVP votes as recently as 2014, but injuries and inconsistency subsequently crept in. "From a standpoint of pedigree, makeup and way he goes about the game, it's consistent with the messaging of what we want this team to be about."įair enough. " He's got a long track record of being an elite teammate a decorated, productive player on the field," Rangers general manager Jon Daniels said of Pence, per Evan Grant of the Dallas Morning News.
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