BASEBALL

Eat Me, Dwayne!

"Outside Baseball" columnist Tim Morris mourns the invective lost when he left New York City.

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by Tim Morris

I moved from New York to Dallas ten years ago. On the whole, this has been OK. I haven't had decent falafel in the last decade, and what passes for sushi in Texas would be considered bait on Long Island. But we have a Sunbelt climate and our own American League baseball team. I can't complain too much.

One thing I do miss is good ballgame invective. Fans in the Ballpark at Arlington are pleasant and Texas-friendly, but they have no idea how to rag enemy players.

In New York, I always sat in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium. I did this because if you sit in the "family" section at Yankee Stadium, you are in for it. In the mid-1980s, whenever the game got dull, the bleacher fans would chant at the family-section fans: "YOU PAID TEN! WE PAID THREE! ASS-HOLES! ASS-HOLES!" Much better to be on the giving than the receiving end.

Naturally, though, the visitors came in for most of the heckling. Dwayne Murphy of the Athletics, a superb outfielder, was a favorite target. There was one fan who would get on Murphy – not constantly, but at odd times, when Murphy was least expecting it.

"Dwayne," he would start when things got slow. "DWA-ayne." Then silence for fifteen seconds. Then, almost quietly, "Eat me." A minute of nothing. "Dway-ayne." Silence. Then: "EAT ME, DWAYNE!" There was a real art to that kind of thing.

There was teamwork and camaraderie in the bleachers. When the Red Sox came to town, things got organized. Fans would carry large posters, each with a single letter: an F, a U, a C, a K, a Y, an O, another U, a B, another O, two G's, and an S. They would sit in that order and raise their letters when Wade Boggs came to bat.

It was a stroke of genius. Who could throw them out, or even take their signs away? If you threw out everyone who carried a big letter K to the ballpark, there'd be nobody left.

But in Arlington, Texas, nobody has the slightest idea how to rag on the opposition. I've sat for years in the tidy and pacified Home Run Porch in the Ballpark longing for really good vituperation. Most of the time the fans don't even know who the other guys are. They're vaguely aware of the Rangers scoring, and when this happens they rise and cheer, "We got a point!" or something equally clever.

It's mostly a lack of the killer instinct. Once, a few years ago, Roberto Kelly – playing for one of the countless teams he was on before the Rangers signed him – was chasing a fly ball. He caught it, but ran out from under his cap. The guy next to me stood up. I sensed that he was about to let Kelly have it.

"Kelly!" he began. Nice start, I thought. "KEL-ly!" So far, so good. "Hey, Kelly! Get some glue for your hat!" Then, terribly pleased with his wit: "Get some glue for your hat, Kelly. Get some glue."

I'll bet that really got on Kelly's nerves. It certainly got on mine.

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