TERROR ON THE FIRST BASELINE: I've been going to baseball games with my father for my entire life. We've gone everyone from Wrigley to Fenway, Yankee Stadium to Shea Stadium, and we've seen everything from no-hitters to triple-plays to World Series championships (two of 'em, by the way). But in none of those instances did my dad and I decide to run out onto the field and beat the stuffings out of the opposing team's first base coach.
Local dirtbag William Ligue, Jr., and his 15-year-old son Billy did just that Thursday night in Chicago, as they lept, shirtless, out of the stands at Comiskey Park and jumped Kansas City Royals first base coach Tom Gamboa. Ligue claimed that Gamboa had somehow provoked them by giving them the finger, though it should go without saying that no one believes them; after all, that doesn't explain why they decided to take their shirts off. What appeared at first to be something out of "Jackass" was really just a case of two guys who got drunk as a skunk and thought it might be fun to physically attack a 58-year-old man. If they hadn't been at the game that night they likely would've done the same thing at the local bowling alley, or perhaps in privacy of their own home (NOTE: no Iverson reference implied in either of those examples). But since it happened at a televised sporting event, both Ligue boys are likely headed for a long jail stint, possibly in Joliet.
PS: An e-mailer to National Review Online's "The Corner" blog refers to the above-mentioned incident as an "anti-small market hate crime," which is just about the funniest thing I've heard all week. That makes sense- a couple of big-city good ol' boys decide to protest the recently passed "affirmative action" (AKA revenue sharing) and take matters into their own hands. Happens all the time.
Posted by Stephen Silver at September 23, 2002 02:15 AM