My Uncle Dave was at the game with his friend Donald. The Phillies were losing. Dave and Donald were walking around a lower-level concourse in the Veterans Stadium outfield. Bullpens at the Vet were behind the outfield wall in left and right. Fans were pretty high up, but they could lean over from the walkway above and get an overhead view of warmup tosses. Or do other things.
Dave and Donald were at a game in the early 2000s when they began doing one of the most popular of those other things, which was bugging Phillies pitchers. Donald wanted a ball or two for his kids, D.J. and Jack. I have attended dozens of baseball games with my uncle; I am sure the pair was annoying the heck out of Phillies relievers after a while. Right from the start, probably.
Eventually Donald was loud and persistent enough to get a response. Ricky Bottalico, a Phillies reliever for parts of five seasons in the ’90s who was back with the club in ’01 and ’02, turned to them after Donald asked for a ball. Here is how my uncle tells it: Bottalico turned his head around, looked up, and faked a toss to the kids.
“That’s OK,” Donald yelled down to Bottalico. “I’ll get one when you go out to pitch.”
This story is a classic in the Hall family, and in its combination of entitlement and persistence it’s also something like the apotheosis of Phillies fan behavior. Philadelphia fans are boorish. Donald and Dave didn’t take anything too far that day, as far as I know, but many other Philadelphia fans do cross the line. Even then, though, they can also be pretty funny.
Since the move to a new stadium in 2004, Phillies fans no longer have the opportunity to heckle their own team. Bullpens at the Bank—this is what fans call the new stadium, and what I will call it here to avoid giving free clout to its name sponsor—are stacked in center field, and the Phils have the lower one. This means that visiting relief pitchers and visiting relief pitchers alone get the opportunity to interact with Philadelphia’s baseball fans, in ways that are either playful or less so. Ashburn Alley, the outfield concourse, also puts fans much closer to the ’pen than they were at the Vet. “They’re like three feet away,” Reds reliever Danny Graves, who retired with 5 ⅓ scoreless career innings at the stadium, said after the very first series. “They were screaming at us the whole game. It’s cool as long as they don’t get too personal.” Todd Jones, who allowed 18 hits in 12 ⅔ innings at the Bank, was more succinct: “We felt like monkeys in the zoo.”
It wasn’t meant to be this way. When the Phillies opened the park with a pair of exhibition games against Cleveland, the Phillies had the upper-level bullpen. Pitchers quickly assessed the problem that presented and got the team to fix it. “Fans can lean over the railing above and, say, offer helpful suggestions on correcting any mechanical flaws they might have spotted,” the Philadelphia Daily News’ Paul Hagen wrote.
For some pitchers, in some cases, the move actually helped the team. “I don’t care what the fans say to me, but you need to be able to concentrate,” newly-acquired closer Billy Wagner said in 2004. He had a 1.93 ERA in 88 ⅔ innings at the stadium with the Phillies, Mets, and Braves. “You could see the problem if you’re struggling,” Wagner added. “Let the visiting team deal with that. Let them get heckled and ridiculed and all that stuff.”
Two weeks after the stadium opened, opposing teams were already concerned. “I think the way they designed this, they crossed the line a little bit,” Expos manager Frank Robinson said. “All you’re asking for is trouble.” Reliever Chad Bentz was more disappointed with the quality of the repetitive insults. “This guy was just booing,” he said. “‘Boooooo! Boooooo!’ For 13 minutes. We timed him. He booed for 13 consecutive minutes. That got old real quick.” Bentz had a 13.50 ERA in two-thirds of an innings at the Bank, courtesy of a solo homer to Bobby Abreu.
“I’ve never been cursed at so much in my life,” said Arizona’s Matt Mantei, whose 4.91 career ERA at the park included a ninth-inning, game-tying homer by Pat Burrell. “The language was unbelievable,” the Marlins’ Chad Fox (6.75 ERA at the Bank with a blown save) told South Jersey’s Courier-Post. Detroit Tigers bullpen catcher Todd Maulding offered to pose as bullpen coach Lance Parrish, who spent two underwhelming seasons with the Phillies in the 1980s. Parrish turned down the offer, but still hid from fans. “I boxed that right away,” Parrish said. “We heard all the stories—you won’t believe it in Philly, they really hammer you. But there’s a little overhang out there, and if you stay under it you can stay out of sight. And I stayed right under it.”
Expos pitchers said that they had pointed out fans who said things they deemed out of line, and that those fans were subsequently kicked out of the stadium. The Phillies, for their part, certainly seemed concerned about An Incident happening. Then-Phillies exec Ed Wade compared the bullpen setup to similar ones in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Seattle, but added that the team had security stationed in the concourse.
This season, there will be a bit more security for opposing pitchers in the 22nd season at the Bank. Bullpen benches are now protected by “accordion-style doors.” The upgrade was not really done to stifle hecklers; the doors allow players to keep warm on cold days and cool on hot ones. Phillies radio announcers yesterday said that there’s air conditioning in the sheltered bullpen space. “I think from a performance standpoint, and just overall, the feel of the bullpen will be a lot better,” Phillies reliever Tanner Banks (15 hits in 11 innings with a 5.73 ERA at the Bank) told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “It’s hard to get warm when it’s 35, 40, even 45 degrees and windy, so that’ll be huge.”
But the old days are not entirely gone. Phillies fans are absolutely Still Like That, and pitchers still have to step outside when they’re throwing warm-up tosses. With less time to heckle, fans will have time to come up with better insults than simply booing for 13 straight minutes this season. Let’s hope, at least.
