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| Digital image of a watercolor that could be said to depict Kirby Puckett. | |
The trip to Kirby Puckett's Cooperstown induction was five years in the planning, and here I was on the burg's outskirts, so intent on pinging some goofy fan in the back of the noggin that a stranger in a crowd of 23,000 had noticed my search for more ammunition.
It's a short-lived tradition to conduct the Baseball Hall of Fame induction ceremony from an ampitheatre on a few football field's worth of land near this New York town. Inductions were held on the Hall's doorsteps until the event became a mecca for autograph hounds paying aging Hall of Famers to sign their names with black Sharpie felt tip pens. The logic seems to be even famous people die, and once they die they don't sign their names anymore. Dollar signs.
Unfortunately, everyone else in America has Bob Feller's autograph, too, pal.
It's a quaint practice each August to visit the induction grounds the night before the Sunday ceremony, lawn chairs in tow. Squatters' rights, the patch of grass where you plop the chair is your vantage point the next day. Guy and Paula brought Eddie Bauer roll-up chairs and checked them as baggage. Tim, Shari, Steve and I bought $10 lawn chairs at the Cooperstown General Store. Behind us, 100 yards of grass flowed into a berm. On induction day, the panorama was dotted with tomorrow's sunburn victims. In front of us was a moronic fan who wouldn't sit down.
I had already zipped a few bottle caps at the clueless stooge 30 feet in front of us assembled perspiring folks. The fool insisted on standing during former Minnesota outfielder Puckett's induction speech under the high, sunny skies. This amoeba-brained doofus had stood in defiance earlier in the ceremony as the crowd chanted, "Sit Down, Asshole." Eventually, someone approached him and, apparently, said, "Sit Down, Asshole, or we'll kill you." But now he was standing again, and when the chant began anew he just turned around, arms still folded on his chest, and smiled.
Asshole was a thin guy in his late 20s with a vacant, Dudley Do-Right look smacked to his phiz. He was thoroughly marinated in stupidity.
Asshole was not blotting our sightline, but the afternoon had grown long. Dave Winfield, the lanky, ex-Yankee egomaniac, exceeded his prescribed speech time by at least 39 "thank you's" and a couple of tunes from "Avita." He began, oh, a few hours ago, by thanking God for delivering us all there that sunny, August afternoon.
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| Winfield's speech horrifies the assembled innoncents. |
"God is my travel agent," I thought.
So I was slightly irritable and possessed with the challenge of flinging plastic bottle caps. They don't travel straight. One side is, in essence, concave. The flight path curves to the concave side. The trick to success: Don't release at your target, aim to the cap's flat side; use a flicking wrist action with little arm movement. This lack of a finishing motion is probably why none of the five people sitting to my left knew it was me who kept zipping the bottle caps at Sit Down Asshole.
"We thought it was a lot of people," they said.
If only I'd been at the Alamo.
Thanks to the Oriental woman, I caught Mr. Do-Right in both the leg and then the neck with two of her offerings. The third I skipped off the noggin of some innocent, seated man playing the role of John Connally.
Sit Down Asshole turned around when he got it in the neck.
"Holster the smile and feel the breeze as I shoot off your buttons, pal, " I muttered to myself and, not hearing, had to ask myself to speak up.
Someone yelled another obscenity at him.