Our
View: No drinking in baseball?
Imagine
a sunny Saturday afternoon at the old ballpark.
Friends
and family arrive a few hours prior to game
time and gather in the parking lot to barbecue,
drink beer, talk and play catch. Sounds
great, right? Sounds as American as mom
and apple pie, right? Too bad it’s
illegal.
The
Anaheim Police Department has begun a crackdown
on drinking alcohol while tailgating at
Edison Field, the Angels’ home stadium.
In doing so, it is employing a city law
that prohibits the consumption of alcohol
on city streets and parking lots. While
the city has used the law to punish drinking
while tailgating for some time, ticketing
this year has more than tripled when compared
with the same time period last year, the
Orange County Register reported.
The
rationale seems well intentioned enough.
With crowds swelling at Angels’ games
since they claimed the World Series crown
in 2002, police and city officials have
become concerned about an increase in alcohol
induced rowdiness. In addition to potential
violence, officials say that nearly all
incidents of fans running onto the field
involve alcohol.
But
the law is nonetheless an aberration that
makes a hallmark aspect of the national
pastime illegal. First, very few people
care if someone runs onto the field. That
person may be regarded as a fool, but the
actions of that fool are almost exclusively
victimless.
There
was, of course, the high profile incident
last year when a father-son duo charged
onto the field and attacked Kansas City
Royals first base coach Tom Gamboa. But
that was an inarguably anomalous occurrence.
Two violent fans out of millions of peaceful
fans that attend Major League Baseball games
on an annual basis do not equate to a problem
that warrants a policy change.
More
important is the idea that such a law will
prevent violent disagreement between inebriated
fans of opposing sides, an idea that is
logically flawed.
Among
several reasons that the law will not have
its desired effect, the most prominent is
the misconception that prohibiting drinking
in a parking lot will prevent fans from
drinking before entering the ballpark. Those
who want to indulge will simply drink at
a bar or at home or at a friend’s
house before leaving for the game. And the
violent drinkers among us will thus still
have their tonic.
In
the event that the crackdown does in fact
lead to small reduction in drunken violence
among sports fans, it will still amount
to a burning down of one’s house in
order to kill a few cockroaches. It will
accomplish very little save crippling a
wonderful piece of America’s leisure
time.
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