Hey Parents: Civility, Please

The man was dressed in a business suit and it looked to be an expensive one. He was sitting on a set of aluminum bleachers along the third base line. This was a few weeks ago, before our weather started to come straight out of Noah’s playbook.

The man was watching a local high school softball game. It doesn’t matter which one. We know this guy. This guy is in Enfield and Manchester and Vernon and Mansfield. He’s everywhere.

“What are you looking at?” was his first comment directed at the home plate umpire. How this man was able to have such a firm grasp of the strike zone from the third-base line was unclear but his ability to detect erroneous calls was apparently flawless because he kept at it.

Some of them were from a greatest hits compilation of catcalls. The always popular, “Both ways, ump,” was followed by that chestnut “You’re missing a good game.” Then he suggested there was a vision center in a nearby strip mall, which at least was a wrinkle on a old theme.

When he wasn’t working the umpires he was working the opponents.

He urged the home pitcher to “go right after,” an opponent because, “she can’t handle your stuff.” After a temporary streak of wildness by the opposing pitcher, he suggested a hitter, “make her prove she can get it over.” And when a tag play at third ended with a hard slide he, incredibly enough, accused a teenage girl of “having no class.”

The man was not alone in his disdain for the umpires, merely the most vocal. And his comments directed at the opposition were merely the loudest, not the nastiest. A nearby group of parents even talked about members of their own team as if discussing flawed movie stars.

“She’d be faster if she lost a few,” was one of those quieter comments.

At this point, I had a strong temptation to hand out literature about the prevalence of anorexia in female athletes but I didn’t. My bad.

Still the man in the suit was the loudest and most frequent voice from the crowd and so when the game was over I identified myself and asked if he would mind chatting. He saw the notebook and shrugged and seemed to wonder what this could possibly be about.

My first question was polite, “Do you think more should be done to protect umpires and players from abusive fans?” He said he thought that was a good idea.

My second question was obnoxious. “Do you think the umpire really had vision problems?”

He walked away and was unwilling to give his name or continue the interview. You can’t blame him for that. The whole thing had a Mike Wallace era “60 Minutes” feel to it and, truth be told, ambushing a guy who is taking a moment out of the office to watch his daughter’s softball game is not as much fun as it seems in the movies.

But there were other people involved in this little afternoon drama, people who were swept up into his wake, people whose days were made a little worse by his presence.

“Yes,” the umpire said, “you can hear the crowd.”

Some offices have take your daughter to work day. Imagine having a job where there was simply no way you could bring your kid. What kid wants to hear people yelling vile and abusive things at their father? What father would want their child to hear it?

The umpire, poorly paid as he is, at least has an idea that his or her work will not be appreciated. The saying “kill the umpire” goes back more than a century and while there is no evidence that any group of fans actually did kill an umpire, back then, they sure did try.

So compared with the history of the craft, an hour or two of abusive taunts from a crowd of supposed adults is a walk on the shore.

Players are another matter.

“You would be amazed at the things people say to high school kids,” the opposing coach said. “Today wasn’t even that bad.”

Here is an obvious truth: A full grown adult should not be shouting demeaning things at anyone during a high school sporting event. Can we agree on this much?

Perhaps the problem is that abusing officials is, for some reason, often seen as part of the fun. When I was in college, thinking up inventive ways to insult the referee at soccer games was considered an art form. I was happy to take part. Of course, I was in college, which may be old enough to know better but usually isn’t. I got better.

The man in the suit hadn’t been in college since a-ha was on the charts.

There is an apocryphal story about fans chanting, “We want a new ump,” at a youth baseball game until the umpire turns around and starts chanting, “I want new parents.”

Our kids don’t get the option of new parents. The only thing we can do is try to be worthy of them. Keeping our rude comments to ourselves at their games might be a good way to start.