Randy Blaser: Baseball’s security measures foul up the game – Chicago Tribune
The security state has gone far enough.
The hand of irrational fear has reached deep into the heart of America and has removed all that is good.
It’s baseball, Ray, and I’m talking about metal detectors at Major League Baseball games.
MLB has implemented a policy this season requiring that parks greet fans of the national pastime at the door with metal detectors. I know some of the seats are high, but do we have to be treated like we’re boarding an airplane?
I encountered this new development last weekend at Milwaukee’s Miller Park, where I went to see the Cubs take on the Brewers.
I arrived in what I considered to be plenty of time – about 25 minutes before game time – to get through the turnstile and find my way to my seat. But I was wrong.
When I arrived at the park, fans were bunched up at all the gates as if they weren’t just waiting to get in, they were in line to buy tickets. It looked like a cattle call lined up, merely to get into the park. It did not appear to be safe, to say the least.
And I thought big-league baseball was pretty much unwatchable before, but MLB has managed to add humiliation to the endurance test of watching a grown man pace off the mound, rub a baseball, adjust his pants, shake off a sign or two and then throw to first.
Two innings into the ballgame, I managed to get into my seat. I wasn’t at all happy about it.
I had bought a cheap seat that put me in the upper, upper, upper deck. I was so far away from the action and so high above the field that I found myself wishing the players had numbers on top of their hats.
A general admission terrorist would need a B-17 to inflict any damage to the teams from my perch.
Needless to say, I think the new policy of metal detectors is more for show than anything else. Workers seemed more stressed at trying to get fans through the gates than at the prospect of stopping any would-be attackers.
The scariest part of the whole trip was not the time spent in the park. The real fear lived in the parking lot before the game – with all the sloshed tailgaters, or waiting in line on a hot summer day with pre-lubricated ticket holders and then leaving the park with drunken, celebrating Cubs fans.
Besides, the truest danger at baseball games doesn’t come from a fan entering the stadium. It comes from the field. My great-grandfather lost an eye at a baseball game when a foul ball hit him in the face.
At last week’s game, a player’s bat shattered and the top half went flying into the stands. It hit a woman, who had turned away from the field to talk to a friend, in the back. It looked bad from my angle in the stratosphere, but after some assistance, the lady seemed OK.
Unsuspecting fans get hit with foul balls all the time and that problem hasn’t been solved.
There has never been a terror attack at a baseball game, but apparently MLB has to do something. Too bad that something is to the 45,000 suspects a night who paid to enter.
Randy Blaser is a freelance columnist for Pioneer Press.
Copyright © 2015, Chicago Tribune
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