ASG Lasting Impressions: Yankees Fans Are Annoyingly Awesome

Yeah, they can be a bit much, but they are one of kind!!!

Hi Chris -

I read your interesting "live blog’ perspective this morning after a night in the ASG center field bleachers. They inspired the following extended thoughts, but I can’t seem to post them as #66 under the blog. So here’s an attempt to make comment #2 (with a hope that those interested will go to your blog to see what prompted my reflections):

[IS THERE A CHARACTER LIMIT HERE FOR WHAT WON"T POST?…OR AM I MISSING SOMETHING IN THE THE SEEMINGLY SIMPLE POSTING PROCEDURE?]

[YES, IT SEEMS THERE IS A CHARACTER LIMIT SO I’LL DO IT A PARAGRAPH AT A TIME…]

A CENTER-FIELD BLEACHER FAN’S COMMENTS ON THE “HUMAN NATURE” DEPICTED ABOVE (THAT TURNED INTO EXTENDED THOUGHTS ON CROWD BEHAVIOR AND ITS POSSIBLE IMPLICATIONS FOR AMERICA) – I want to speak up for the 99.9% of true Yankee fans who aren’t like those depicted or described in your “live blog.” I’d also like to offer a few speculative theories on the “human behavior” evident in the videos (and my own personal observations from center field last night). I hope that someone will add to (or completely disagree) with my initial thoughts on the behavior of some “Bleacher Bums” last night, as well as similar groups in Northeast and Midwest urban stadiums in which I’ve watched baseball (Fenway, Shea and Yankee Stadium in NYC, Philly, Cleveland (new park and old), Chicago (Wrigley primarily), and the occasional behavior of fewer less frequently in my limited experience, in Cincy and Baltimore.)

[Yes, there seems to be a character limit so I’ll try posting a paragraph at a time …]

A CENTER-FIELD BLEACHER FAN’S COMMENTS ON THE “HUMAN NATURE” DEPICTED ABOVE (THAT TURNED INTO EXTENDED THOUGHTS ON CROWD BEHAVIOR AND ITS POSSIBLE IMPLICATIONS FOR AMERICA) – I want to speak up for the 99.9% of true Yankee fans who aren’t like those depicted or described in your “live blog.” I’d also like to offer a few speculative theories on the “human behavior” evident in the videos (and my own personal observations from center field last night). I hope that someone will add to (or completely disagree) with my initial thoughts on the behavior of some “Bleacher Bums” last night, as well as similar groups in Northeast and Midwest urban stadiums in which I’ve watched baseball (Fenway, Shea and Yankee Stadium in NYC, Philly, Cleveland (new park and old), Chicago (Wrigley primarily), and the occasional behavior of fewer less frequently in my limited experience, in Cincy and Baltimore.)

[Yes, there seems to be a character limit so I’ll try posting a paragraph at a time…]

First, thank you very much for a (non-Yankee) fan’s-eye blog that provided interesting perspective on where my son and I ended up sitting last night. [Before my extended comments, I should make a full disclosure of my own fan background (as complex as all other kids who moved between 3 and 18): my birth and formative years of childhood, plus my grandfather and love for RI make me a 4th-gen. member of the Red Sox Nation…when Mom re-married to guy in DC…I did definitely acquire a strong secondary loyalty to the T.-Williams-coached Senators (I still relive the glorious year of our 6th-place finish in memory now and then)…this was followed by a few years of rooting for my Baltimore cousins’ beloved O’s (when all those nights my bro and I spent in what’s now RFK Stadium didn’t add up to Bob Short’s required 1MM not to re-locate to what turned out to be Texas location that completely distanced me from them …despite my younger bro’s efforts to convert me (his family was half of the Nats spring training crowd this year), I was in Boston long enough as a kid versus him to be not a Nats (or any NL) fan yet - though my son’s a serious Mets fan too because of his own cousins through my wife) tho younger bro is already…Taught history in Bronx HS and strongly rooting for a classic (2003…2004-like) AL Finals this year with a team I’ve always respected].

[Oops…the following important sentiment was actually meant to be the topic summary and first sentence…]

[Oops…the following important sentiment was actually meant to be the topic summary and first sentence…]

[Oops…the following important sentiment was actually meant to be the topic summary and first sentence…]

That boring self-referential background piece above was not the first paragraph I tried to post…I’ll try one last time to feed it in bits and then give up…My posts may be more suitable to a website with a forward-looking macro-perspective on sports and society anyway, but here’s the beginning of the extended thoughts my attendance at the ASG and your blog inspired…A CENTER-FIELD BLEACHER FAN’S COMMENTS ON THE “HUMAN NATURE” DEPICTED ABOVE (THAT TURNED INTO EXTENDED THOUGHTS ON CROWD BEHAVIOR AND ITS POSSIBLE IMPLICATIONS FOR AMERICA) – I want to speak up for the 99.9% of true Yankee fans who aren’t like those depicted or described in your “live blog.”

Wow… this is like the blog equivalent of Mikey’s 3 a.m. phone call from Swingers

I give up…it’s not a character limit because even innocuous, bite-size sentence-by-sentence entries get rejected now…but, as I wrote twice, that boring self-referential background above was not the first paragraph…those sentences will never be seen here unless I try again to express my belief that 99.9% of Yankee fans were not represented by the video. The clips, and other crowd behavior I observed last night, do have potentially far-reaching implications for negative trends in American sports and society, however…I WISH I COULD DELETE MY ABOVE POSTS AS WELL…HALF-THOUGHTS ARE WORSE THAN NONE AND BLANKS ARE IRRITATING…Oh well, that’s life…

I totally agree with grimey.loljocks…great comment on my over-long, stupid comment (randomly selected by the posting gremlins, but who cares?)…the reference to Swingers… and most calls I’ve taken from old-time neighborhood friends at 3AM… was all it took for me to see what 1) too much thinking and 2) too little sleep post-ASG reduced me to…thanks very much, mr. grimey…seriously… I’m LOL right now at myself…and I’ll definitely rent Swingers again soon!..I’ll post my extended thoughts in another forum…

Hey Daniel,

There are some character issues. Some “special” characters blow out the comments. It is a bug that’s high on the list of things to fix and should be taken care of soon. Just curious. Are you cutting and pasting from Word?