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Sit down y'all. This Yankees fan is about to stand up for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays fan booted out of Tropicana Ballpark last week ... for wearing a Yankees Suck shirt. Hey, I'm a big girl. I can say it. His shirt was wrong, but Melton Little shouldn't have been hassled for it.
The way Little tells it, he was told by an usher that his shirt failed to meet the park's profanity code, because "suck" was a bad word. Apparently he could have worn "Yankees Are Losers," and that would have been fine (still wrong by the way!). Um, OK. Was this usher a newbie? Fresh-faced and all hopped on the "this is a place for families" push from Major League Baseball?
I've been to ballparks, buddy. If "suck" is the worst thing you hear, you're lucky. Foul language flies more frequently than a foul ball, and it always has. In an official Major League baseball document from 1898, players were quoted as telling one another to "go f--k" themselves, calling one another sons of b---hes, c--k-suckers, and so on.
Extreme, and not the stuff you hear on the diamond these days, but folks, this is the real world. People curse. That it kind of, well, sucks for parents that foul language is just part of the experience is beside the point ... at least as long as people are being singled out rather than being punished as a group.
You have thousands of fans in the stands, many of whom are wont to yell things like "Hey, Ump, you ... " well, you get the idea. It's impossible to eliminate cursing entirely. Look at the sheer number of ushers vs. fans. Do you want to play those odds?
Yeah, me neither. But I will take a chance and bet that there's cursing going on in Tropicana Ballpark, most of it a heckuva lot worse than "suck." Until those folks are kicked out of the ballpark to make things equal, a Yankees Suck t-shirt should be allowed in.
What do you think? Were the Rays too hard on Little?
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