Deadspin Gives us Baseball Heckling Stories

This here is Bubba Trammell. He had a forgettable career, and he’s been long forgotten by you. He headlines this post because we spent one day in right field in Cincinnati getting the better of Bubba Trammell.

Heckling was such an adolescent thing to do. And the insults were so immature, I wonder now as an adult why Trammell paid an idiot like me (then 16 years old) any mind at all.

There were other times when heckling had it’s place (Jose Mesa, Brian Jordan) but we’ve long grown out of it thankfully.

But we still enjoy a good heckling story. And Deadspin has provided us with a wealth of baseball heckling stories to enjoy. This one involves Barry Bonds.

The Brewers strike early and are stomping SF after a few innings, and with each run, we taunt Bonds a little more (nothing quite “bad,” since we were simple small-town WI kids, but may be some steroid stuff, etc), but we get louder and a little more direct as the game goes on. In the bottom of the 4th, Ron Belliard (RON BELLIARD) hits a home run just over the wall in right, and one of the brothers in our group yells at Bonds something like (very liberal paraphrasing), “Top that, Bonds.”

I kid you not, and swear on any family member’s life, this is what happened:

Bonds looks directly at us, gives a slight nod, shrugs, and then shakes his non-glove hand to gesture, “eh, that HR was so-so.” The very next half-inning he comes up with 2 runners on, and destroys a pitch for a 3-run homer. The ball traveled the EXACT SAME path as Belliard’s an inning before, but must have traveled 100 feet farther. Immediately we all start jumping around like 8-year-olds on Christmas: “OH MY GOD, HE CALLED THAT!”

When the half-inning ended, Bonds made his way out to left field. When he caught our attention, he pointed at the spot and shrugged again, as if gesturing, “That better?” We gave him a golf clap, did a short “We’re not worthy” bow and he laughed. We didn’t heckle him the rest of the night.

We tried to heckle Bonds, once. He was on the Giants team bus. No matter what we did – Bonds did not break character. He was on his cell phone and ignored the hundreds of fans just outside the window of the bus who were giving him all he could have handled if he hadn’t heard it thousands of times before.