Simply Don’t Be A Shithead

Ketel Marte was 23 years old when his mother died in July 2017. He'd recently been summoned to the Arizona Diamondbacks from Triple-A Reno, where he'd been clobbering to smithereens the best pitching of the minor leagues. Marte had already played an accumulated season-plus of major-league games as a member of the Seattle Mariners, but following a trade to Arizona he was initially blocked at his positions of choice by veterans, and so the Diamondbacks made the unusual decision to ship a productive top prospect back to the minors for half a season. Marte's call-up came at the end of June; on July 29, in his 24th game with the big club, Marte took a mighty rip at a 2–0 pitch from Cardinals reliever Kevin Siegrist and crushed a laser of a dong over the wall in left, his fourth homer as a Diamondback. The moment carried some personal significance, as it was Marte's 10th home run at two combined levels that season, a benchmark he'd circled with a little inspiration from mom.

"When I was playing softball in the Dominican with my friend, she saw me hit a long homer," Marte told the Arizona Republic, back in 2017. "One day, before I came to spring training, she said, 'I want 10 homers this year.' Now, I’ve got 10 homers. When I hit my last homer, I called her. She had watched the game. I said, 'Now you’ve got 10 homers, how about that?' She was crying." Marte spoke again to his mother the following day, Sunday, after the rubber match in St. Louis and before boarding a plane for a short team flight to Chicago. While Marte and the Diamondbacks were in the air, a vehicle struck Marte's mother, Elpidia Valdez, as she drove a moped in the Dominican Republic. Marte learned of the accident when the team flight landed, but was given the impression that it was minor and that Elpidia would recover. That evening, at a team dinner, he received a phone call and was told that she'd died.

"It was definitely heartbreaking," said Taijuan Walker, now with the Phillies, who was Marte's teammate at the time and was on hand when Marte received the terrible news. "We were just all hanging out and he got that call and it hit me, too. It made me think, 'What if I would have got a call like that?' I probably wouldn’t want to play the rest of the season. I’d probably want to be home with my family."

Marte was devastated; the following morning he posted a photo of Elpidia to his Instagram account, along with a caption that says, among other things, "come back mommy please don't leave me alone because I love you." Marte was placed on the bereavement list and flew home to attend his mother's funeral.

Probably the White Sox fan who taunted Marte about his mother, during an at-bat Tuesday night in Chicago, wasn't contemplating with this level of detail Elpidia's death and Marte's trauma. Exactly what the man yelled down to Marte has not been reported; it strikes me as entirely possible, pending further reporting, that the offending moron was just doing Yo Mama shit and blind-fired too close to a hidden target. Whatever the case, the damage was done. Marte, who managed to resist going Dennis Santana mode, stared at the fan on his way back to the dugout, and was forced to gulp down what I'm sure were some pretty intense emotions, in full view of his teammates, the Chicago crowd, and the television cameras.

Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo, who overheard the taunt, focused his attention on his player. "He put his head down, and I could tell it had an immediate impact on him, for sure," said Lovullo, after the game. "I could see he was sobbing. It hurt." Marte was still having an awful time minutes later, when the Diamondbacks made a mid-inning pitching change. This sucked:

It's easy enough in life not to be a shithead. Most people will finish their lives with blemishes on their record, but it's a good goal for any social interaction. Whatever else happens, I am going to complete this exchange without being a huge rotten-hearted shithead. Heckling and taunting can be enjoyed without ever spilling over into true shitheel behavior: Possibly one or the other of us have told this story before, but one time years ago Albert Burneko and I spent half of a very lightly attended Wizards home game screaming "SHOOT IT" at really unbearable volumes every time that Josh Smith, then of the Atlanta Hawks, touched the basketball, anywhere on the floor. We were close enough to the court that Smith could not possibly have failed to hear us. This was mildly rude, enormously satisfying, and only very dubiously funny—we got a few charitable snorts and guffaws from the sparsely populated sections around us as people picked up on the stupidity of our act—but what it was not was personal. I think at one point Smith may even have smirked at us.

Players sometimes talk about there being a bright line separating acceptable and unacceptable fan behavior. "We can take a lot. We sign up and we are in uniform to take a lot," Lovullo said. "We’re prepared for that. But when you cross a line—and it’s a very firm, bold line—we become human beings." Geraldo Perdomo, Marte's teammate, echoed the sentiment, saying that players "are not with that bullshit" when fans cross the line. The line is often referenced but not usually defined. I think that's fine, as these things go, because I think there are no fans anywhere who sincerely require an explanation.

On the other hand, as with a lot of things, I think addressing this as a matter of fan behavior, and as particular to the relationship between performers and spectators, sort of clutters up and obscures what in fact should be an even simpler matter: Don't be a shithead. Do not seek permission to be a shithead; do not consider shithead behavior to be acceptable under given sets of circumstances; do not regard unleashing your inner shithead to be a perk of participation in a given activity; do not reserve inside of you a powerful Shithead Mode that can be engaged by a set of switches. Instead, purge from yourself all shithead impulses, so that whether you are dealing with a difficult middle-manager, or the infuriatingly smug administrator of the local wrecker service, or the star of a team you loathe, or even someone who is actively heckling you, there is no chance that you will find yourself taunting anyone about their mother, who it turns out died horribly and whose death is a lingering source of intense anguish for the complete stranger onto whom you have trained your beam of reckless shitheadedness.

Lovullo and bench coach Jeff Banister summoned stadium security and had the shithead fan ejected from the game. It would be nice to learn today that the White Sox had banned that person from their ballpark for a nice long time, possibly forever.