Stupid + baseball = tonight

Tonight the Wahi and I attended the first of a four-game set between the visiting Omaha Royals and the hometown Albuquerque Isotopes. I was pretty excited about this series because I grew up watching the Royals play back when I lived in a suburb of Omaha. The Royals represent a lot to me in terms of my childhood, as does their stadium, Rosenblatt. Even though I don't like the major league Royals, I will always root for Omaha.
The game started at 7:05, so Arun headed over after work and we drove down to the UNM area to eat at Saggios, an Albuquerque pizza institution. It's tasty, as long as you get some extra toppings on your pizza; the plain cheese is a bit cardboardy.
After that we headed to the game and got our seats out on the berm ($5 each, can't beat it). At this time of year, for a standard 7:05 start, the sun is annoying for a little while, but after that it gets just beautiful. Sitting on the grass can wear on you after a few hours, especially if you have a boney butt.
The game started out real slow, with a total of 10 runs scoring in the first two innings; these two innings lasted just a few minutes under an hour. After that the game moved on more quickly, and included a nice, although not stunning sunset.
Now, being a fan of the visiting team, I cheered when the Royals did good things. I would clap when they scored a run, and I raised my voice twice through the 10-inning game to say "Let's go Royals!" I would classify my rooting as wholly unintrusive. And if the Royals had blown out the Isotopes, I would certainly not have rubbed it in, as I have known others to do at games. I try to be fair and nice, things that I know, I know, are not really part of being a sports fan. Apparently my low-level cheering rankled at least one person on the berm.
Toward the end of the game (the bottom of the seventh, to be exact), one of the Isotopes players hit a home run out to left field. This guy sitting near me, who was there with his wife (I presume) and their two young sons (I presume) jumped up, started going crazy with cheering. Nothing too weird there, except that it put them up from 7-5 to 8-5, rather than being, for example, a game-winning home run. However, after that (and this seemed to happen in slow-motion), this guy ran over toward Arun and myself, and actually hustled a circuit around us, ran out from right to left in front of us, then left to right behind us. He then ran back over to his spot with his family (I presume), sat down, and said "Take THAT, Nebraska fans!" I mentioned quietly to Arun that maybe I should disabuse this guy of the idea that they are the Nebraska Royals rather than the Omaha Royals, but decided that would not really accomplish anything. He didn't say anything else to us before or after that throughout the game.
After this point it started sprinkling a little (monsoon season IS upon us), and I must say that it was the single most pleasant and refreshing rain I have ever sat in. So gentle that you don't get wet because the drops that have hit you evaporate away. Cool enough that it is refreshing, but not so cold that it is uncomfortable. Not intense enough to create runoff on the hillside upon which we were sitting. It was so nice, and so beautiful. Of course, this being the Southwest, this gentle rain also caused a mass exodus of a great majority of the 6,700+ people who attended the game.
Now, the Royals scored three runs to tie up the game in the top of the ninth inning to introduce some tension into the contest, and it went into extra innings. Of course, most everybody had left, so not a lot of people got to see the excitement. I was hoping for a home run in extra innings, since nobody else was out there to retrieve it. But alas, no such luck. Instead, the Isotopes won it in the bottom of the 10th by hitting a gapper with a man on 2nd and no outs (or one, I don't remember). The Omaha center fielder did something strange that I don't think I have ever seen in a baseball game before: he didn't bother getting the ball, and instead left it sitting on the warning track where it stopped. No reason to pick it up and throw it in, since the run was in easily.
So as the players all left the field, a fan from a group that had stayed up on the berm decided that, ooh, ball left unprotected, me want. This guy went up to the fence (the right field fence is surely at least 10 feet high, including the chain link fence above the berm), removed his flip-flops, and jumped down into the field. Now, I have seen a number of people enter the field during a baseball game, but never one afterward. This guy jumped down and started running toward the ball. If you've never seen this, you should know that stadium security gets really upset when anybody enters the field of play who is not allowed. So there was a security guard running an intercept course for this guy, and another staffer standing down at the berm fence. The runner got to the ball, picked it up, and started sprinting back toward us. I guess he realized he was in trouble (or maybe he planned this out with his likely-just-as-inebriated friend beforehand), because he skipped climbing the wall to get back to where he had started, and instead chucked the ball up onto the berm, somewhat near us. We didn't at all want to get involved, so we stayed put as the friend and the staffer both ran toward the ball. The friend fell down, and the staffer sort of then slide-tackled the ball, which was a very strange thing to do. The friend recovered the baseball, and the staffer tried to take it back from him, but the friend just kind of ignored him; I guess staffers have no power.
Meanwhile, the first guy had been tackled by security, handcuffed, and turned over to the police. I don't approve of people running onto the field and the encouragement they get from the crowd, but I do like how excited people get when security tackles these guys. And they always pretty much overreact in terms of physicality, but in this case I really, really don't mind. The staffer, still up on the berm, picked up the first guy's flip-flops, and asked us if they belonged to him; I confirmed that they were, indeed, the runner's, my own little "up yours" to that guy. The staffer took them, and I genuinely hope he tossed them in the trash; if you leave something sitting around the stadium, I think it fair to consider it garbage.
Now, this extended family (I assume) was pretty upset, aside from the guy who got the ball, since their kinsman was being hauled off the field in police custody. One lady was throwing up her hands, although to be fair she could have been pissed off at the guy who ran onto the field; somehow I doubt it. Another guy was trying to get into a confrontation with the staffer, basically asking him why it was necessary for security to take down the runner.
I don't like to tell people that they are stupid, because who am I to say? But these folks were stupid. As if it needed to, the team reminds the crowd that they are, in fact, not allowed on the field unless told so. If you break the rules for something as stupid as retrieving a baseball, you deserve to be punished, and I have zero sympathy for you, even if you are hauled to jail. I don't think he was, since I think that I observed the police uncuffing the guy on the field. Doing something that is so likely to end in your being under a pile of law enforcement officers in front of your kids, when you are supposed to be your children's moral educator, is just plain dumb. Next time, think, don't drink.