Burning Attendance Questions

You've probably seen this story since it's making the rounds on the blogs today on a rather sloowwwww news day... but a fan got booted from the Marlins-Nats game yesterday for heckling an umpire. And the guy was a season ticketholder!! The reason he could be heard was that there were only about 400 people at the game. 400! At a major league baseball game! This is the plot to Major League, for crying out loud.

I mean, if you've only got 400 people in the park, and one of your season ticketholders showed up and wants to shout at the umpire, I think you ought to let him.

My first thought, though, was whether or not they played the stadium-favorite, "Can You Guess The Attendance?" game that is played in nearly all MLB ballparks. I can just imagine it...

Can You Guess Today's Attendance?

A) 55,123
B) 406
C) 72,154
D) 33,165

I think it woulda been fun.

Scoreboard Wrong -- Hilarity Ensues

I happened to be at Yankee Stadium last night, taking in my second consecutive game against the Mariners. After a lousy game on Monday, the Yankees rebounded yesterday to beat the Mariners 12-3, including a monstrous home run from Alex Rodriguez WAY into the upper deck in left field.

But what entertained us for a while was the possibly drunk nature of the scoreboard operator. I'm so pissed I didn't have my camera.

At Yankee Stadium, the center field scoreboard shows the lineups for each team horizontally, using their uniform number and the position abbreviation. Here's what the Yankee lineup looked like for the first three innings:

28 2 53 13 20 55 17 24 14

CF SS RF 3B C LF DH 2B CF

Upon inspection, do you see anything wrong with that? Like perhaps that nobody is playing first base? And that both Melky Cabrera and Wilson Betemit are playing center field? Are they aware that they're supposed to be sharing? As I said, this stayed this way until the third inning.

During at bats, the scoreboard shows the current batters triple crown stats -- that is, their batting average, home runs and RBIs. Later on, with Betemit up, the scoreboard showed no batting average, zero home runs and zero RBIs. It kind of seemed like they were picking on Betemit.

But then in the fifth inning, the scoreboard showed who was "due up" for the Mariners and they displayed it thusly:

5

51 Suzuki

3 Vidro

Poor Yuniesky Betancourt was worthy of a number being shown but not his name. Perhaps it's just too hard to spell.

Or maybe George, in his senility, was operating the scoreboard last night.