The Heckler

              I swear to the baseball gods this is a true story. It was early in the new millennium, post-9/11, but pre-Obama, and my good friend Damian and I, as we often found ourselves doing in those days, decided to attend a baseball game in downtown Buffalo, New York. Buffalo, which at one point in the 1800’s was the second largest city in the United States, hasn’t seen a major league team since 1915, when the Buffalo Blues (also known as the BufFeds) called the then prosperous city their home. On several occasions Buffalo tried to lure a Major League club to their fair city with no success, though since 1979 they have supported a thriving minor league team, the Buffalo Bisons, who at the time of this story, was the AAA affiliate to the Cleveland Indians (they have since switched affiliates, first to the New York Mets, and most recently, the Toronto Blue Jays). A quick side note of interest: though the Buffalos Blues found little success in the short lived Federal League, they did have a player named Ed Porray on their roster, who has the strange honor of being the only Major League Baseball player in history whose birthplace is not a place in a traditional sense, but rather noted as “on a ship somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.” Anyway, enough about history, back to the story…

            Dunn Tire Park (since renamed Coca-Cola Field) felt nearly empty that night, as many minor league stadiums do during weekday games. Our seats were down the third base line, past the dugout, a dozen or so rows above the left field grass. I don’t even remember who the Bisons were playing that night, and it doesn’t really matter, because this story isn’t about the game. It’s about the heckler who was sitting about thirty feet in front of us, in the row of seats closest to the field. He had to be in his late twenties, early thirties, and was wearing the Buffalo Sabers jersey of Vaclav Varada, a Czechoslavakian winger who was popular among fans in the late-90’s (not the classic jersey with the crossed swords and charging buffalo that is undeniably one of the greatest logos in the history of sports, or the yellow snail that is undeniably one of the most horrendous, but rather the severed buffalo head from when the franchise made the incomprehensible decision to not only change their design but also the teams entire color scheme). Anyway, enough about jerseys, back to the story…

            As soon as the game started Varada (the heckler, not the athlete) began laying into the left fielder. Now, it’s not out of the ordinary for fans to heckle baseball players from the visiting team, but this guy took heckling to an entirely new extreme. Ordinarily, heckles can be as simple as “You suck!,” clever, like “Hurry and get to the ball Cinderella!” slightly insulting, “You play baseball like a girl!” (Authors Note: personally, I don’t believe there is anything wrong with girls playing baseball. In fact, I encourage all females to pursue whichever athletics they desire.) or, more specific to minor league games, discouraging, “You’ll never make it to the majors playing like that!” But Varada was no ordinary heckler. He seemed to have been summoned from the depths of heckling hell for one sole reason: to make certain the visiting left fielder had a miserable evening. “You’re a child molester!” he yelled at the poor guy. “You like taking little boys into the woods and raping them!” All the other fans in listening distance began looking around at one another, thinking Is this guy for real? Mothers scurried up their children, pressing their hands over their little ears, as they led them to other parts of the stadium, to seats that were out of Varada’s shouting range. Before we knew it, all the other fans in the area were gone, leaving only Varada, a couple of his buddies, who never once attempted to quiet their friend down, and Damian and I. And since we were the only fans left in the vicinity, Varada suddenly felt that we were there to watch him and not the ball game. Every time he yelled an utterly inappropriate remark he would turn around to us and smile, as if we were granting him approval simply by not changing seats. And just when we thought the words coming out of his mouth couldn’t possibly get any more inappropriate…

            Imagine there’s a locker room, and the team inside that locker room are engaging in “locker room talk,” and that team consists of Donald Trump, Billy Bush, Bill Cosby, Bill Clinton, Andrew Dice Clay, Michael Jackson, Jared from Subway, Cartman from South Park, The Jerky Boys from the 90’s, and every other foul mouthed celebrity, rapist, child molester, and degenerate you can think of. Imagine the things that would be coming out of their mouths. That’s what Varada sounded like for a solid nine innings. Things I would never repeat in person, let alone on this page. And at the end of the game, when the Bisons won, Varada celebrated as if he was the sole reason for victory. As if his nine innings of spewing oral diarrhea was the deciding factor in the game. But I’ll tell you what, that left fielder played a hell of a game, never once letting Varada get to his psyche; no errors, and if I remember correctly, he even had a couple of solid hits. You have to give the guy credit, I mean, in what other profession would anyone have to tolerate such abuse. Could you imagine going to your job and having some douche bag accuse you of molesting children for the entirety of your work day? 

            And that was the game in which I finally understood why baseball players get paid so much money.