Fan Deserved Fate, Home Team Didn’t

Early voting for baseball’s Least Valuable Fan award goes to the blockhead in the peach-colored shirt who sat in the first row by the right-field foul pole Tuesday at the Dodger home opener--or at least sat there until Darryl Strawberry had the guy’s butt kicked out of the park.

Fifty-three thousand, five hundred and twenty-nine customers occupied seats at Dodger Stadium, but only one of them violated baseball etiquette and cost the home team the game, 9-7, catching a three-run pinch-homer by Gerald Perry of the St. Louis Cardinals in the seventh inning that “I had all the way,” Strawberry insisted.

“He must have been a St. Louis fan,” Dodger third baseman Tim Wallach said.

Tom Lasorda, dandling the young sons of the late Dodger pitcher Tim Crews on the sofa of his manager’s office, said: “This young man right here has more sense than to interfere with a fielder trying to catch a ball, and he’s just a child. I’ve seen this sort of thing happen to us plenty of times in somebody else’s ballpark, but you don’t expect it to happen here in your own back yard.”

Strawberry, too, said it was a new one on him. But because asking an umpire to overrule a homer because of a home park fan’s interference is simply not cricket, Strawberry’s only recourse was to request that the fan be served an eviction notice from his front-row seat, which is exactly what happened as the eighth inning began. Two ushers and a security guard escorted the man up the aisle, to the cheers of nearby fans who had been heckling him since the catch.

“They ran him out of the ballpark,” Strawberry said. “I hope they don’t let him back in.”

Now Darryl knows why they save Fan Appreciation Day for the end of the season. With a long lope from where he was positioning the lefty-swinging Perry, the Dodger outfielder took off with the crack of the bat, as did two Cardinal baserunners, when Perry propelled a 2-1 pitch by Pedro Martinez on a rainbow arc toward the right-field porch.

The rail is very low there--no higher than Strawberry’s belt buckle. Any outfielder in pursuit of a batted ball on the other side of the visitors’ bullpen would have to be closer to 7 feet 6, not Strawberry’s 6-6, to reach over the fence to stab a long poke on its way out. Nearer the foul pole, however, many an outfielder has cleared the wall like a steeplechase horse to rob somebody of a home run.

With the Dodgers sitting pretty by two runs after making a crowd-pleasing comeback, Bernard Gilkey and Tom Pagnozzi reached base for St. Louis with two gone in the seventh. Perry pinch-hit for the pitcher, Les Lancaster, and got around on a pitch, hooking it about six seats to the fair-territory side of the 330-foot marker where the blue wall meets the white lime.

Strawberry went crashing into and over the fence, like Dwight Stones over a high-jump bar. With his glove-side right arm extended across his body, Strawberry made a lunge for the ball and disappeared momentarily as most of the eyewitnesses recoiled to give him room.

Somebody else got to it before he did.

“As I went to reach for it, the guy put his glove up just ahead of mine,” Strawberry said. “I had it all the way. He cost us three runs right there. Three runs, the guy cost us. I hope he’s happy. I hope he feels pretty stupid. That ball ended up in his glove because he stuck it up there a split-second ahead of mine.

“They instruct the fans every single day, ‘Don’t interfere with a ball that may be in play.’ I think they do it in English and Spanish. Maybe this guy speaks some other language.”

Up to that point, the game had been fun in the sun. Spotting St. Louis five runs put some of the 53,529 in a grumpy mood early on, except for whichever Cardinal fans did indeed infiltrate the Dodger home opener. But things perked up during the fourth, fifth and six innings, when the Dodger bats made noise at last. Wallach donated a two-run double. Then the Eric Attack, Davis and Karros, came through with run-scoring hits.

Strawberry, too, hit the ball on the nose all day. Too bad he didn’t hit that fan on the nose.

“I’m not worried. I’m going to hit this season,” Strawberry said. “If I don’t hit this season, I’ll retire. Write that down.”

And if you see him trying to catch a baseball, let him catch it. Write that down.