Disappointing Teams Blame Hecklers, Internet 

Derek Zumsteg

With the historic 1998 season over, many cities are still looking for an answer to a basic question: what the hell happened to my team?

In Baltimore, Los Angeles, and Seattle, there is a surprising new answer: hecklers and trollers.

"No one is more to blame for this year's failures than the so-called 'trollers'," Oriole owner Peter Angelos told Strikethree.com. "We spent more money than anyone else in baseball to assemble a team of veterans, hard-nosed players. And we got off to a great start. It looked like we might go wire-to-wire again, and that's important. But on the Internet, these people, these nay-sayers, they kept attacking Mike Bordick and Cal Ripken, two of the toughest gamers you'll ever meet, and they went after all our new acquisitions, saying we were trying to reassemble the 1987 Blue Jays. That hurt."

The Orioles, picked by many in the mainstream media to win their division and even the AL title, quickly fell apart. Trollers, particularly from rival cities like New York, never let up, and were reinforced by baseball intelligentsia, known as 'statheads'.

"After they tore into Joe Carter, my team was never the same," Angelos said. "If it weren't for the Internet and those damn trollers, I'd have another trophy in my office instead of a bill for a record payroll. Thank goodness for our hometown fans, who came to all the games and kept our revenue up, cheering all the while."

In Seattle, attacks came from both sides.

"I think fans may be getting a little restless with all the losing we've done," Mariner President Chuck Armstrong told us. "I don't think that gives them a right to be so harsh. Coming into this season we had a strong, veteran staff. But if you boo the bullpen all the time, that has an effect on them -- you can't say it doesn't. And they tried to work through it, but it's hard.

"I saw the collapse coming, I have to admit. I was watching a game from our booth, and Lou had just pulled some reliever who was getting lit up for another reliever who got lit up, and everyone booed as Lou pulled the guy, and as Ayala walked off I could swear I saw a tear in his eye. It was terrible. And you know what else? While Lou was waiting for Slocumb to come in, I swore there were people yelling 'booo' instead of 'Lou'. You think he doesn't hear that? I know he does."

Armstrong also felt that the harsh fan reaction forced the team to trade former fan favorite Joey Cora. "Let's say Joey fields a routine ground ball, and he makes an error, throws it into the second deck, say, and people start booing Joey. If not enough fans clap to drown out the boos and encourage him... he's an emotional little guy, and if he doesn't fell loved, he's more likely to botch the next catch and then throw the ball into the third deck. And then what? More booing? It's a vicious, vicious cycle.

"What's worse, my kid was showing me the Mariners newsgroup and there's a whole mob of people calling Woody Woodward an idiot, saying Lou's got the brains of a boiled cucumber," Armstrong continued. "Hey, I don't understand why people could even think that. Those two are veteran baseball people, they give everything they can to this team. Is it their fault that the bullpen is terrible, year after year, that we can't develop players, that this talent-laden team fails over and over to be anything but mediocre? Of course not. Baseball's a game of chemistry and luck, and people -- people are so unfair sometimes."

Lou Piniella, often called one of the best managers of his time, had no comment. A spokesman, probably his wife, said he was too sad to do any interviews from his Florida residence. Newsgroup posters have already predicted the total collapse of the franchise and are taking early shots at both.

In Los Angeles, a FOX executive blamed everyone.

"The problem from the start of the season was that we just had some bad mojo," he said. "What happened was that we had to fire some people, bring some new people in before we could bring in some more people more to our liking. And the guy we fired had had some success, but we had to make a change because we were under a lot of pressure, ratings-wise, and industry word-wise. So Tommy made a couple of deals, they cost us a ton of money, but we wanted to turn around the juju. And that's what we did, only by this time we were still taking a lot of heat for this whole O'Malley mess, and we got some crossed mojo, and look what happened. Third in the division."

"What's to be done? If I understood anything about the whole mojo-juju thing, this synergy, assembling a lineup, I'd be working in our programming department, wouldn't I?"

 

about the author

Derek Zumsteg couldn't get an interview to save his life, and his legal defense fund consists of change scraped up from late-night runs to Jack-In-The-Box for 99-cent chicken sandwitches. Let him know he's in deep, deep trouble at dmz@strikethree.com.