Media both in New York and across the country chastised Yankee fans over the weekend after fans at Yankee Stadium threw garbage at members of the Cleveland Guardians. On Monday morning, Gregg Giannotti said that it was part of a disturbing trend and he doesn’t know how many others in the media are connecting the dots and willing to sound the alarm.
“Not to sound like some sort of alarmist,” the WFAN morning man said Monday, “but I swear, we’re on the verge of another Malace at the Palace it feels like.”
Gio and co-host Jerry Recco, who was filling in for Boomer Esiason, recapped the scene from Saturday inside of Yankee Stadium, which included fans taunting an injured player and throwing bottles. Cleveland’s Myles Straw scaled the outfield wall as part of a verbal altercation with some fans.
“I was watching the Yankee pregame, yesterday and I don’t want to knock anyone that’s on there, but Meredith Marakovits and Jack Curry are talking,” Gio said. “There are stern words about what happened, and I feel like they were trying to go out of their way to make sure they weren’t taking the company line with the Yankees and their fans and the situation of ‘this is despicable and we’ve gotta make sure this never happens again.’ And I was thinking to myself ‘okay.’ We heard a lot of this too. ‘We’ve gotta make sure this never happens again.’ Well, how are we gonna do that?”
Gregg Giannotti pointed out several instances across multiple sports over the last few years of bad fan behavior and wondered why more people in the media don’t try to figure out why this is happening.
Recco said it is tough to make sense of why fans behave like that. He suggested that arenas and stadiums with facial recognition technology should be using it to share the faces of anyone caught being inappropriately aggressive towards players with every other team and venue. The goal should be to ban them from attending events forever.
“To me, if you find anyone who through anything, they are banned from every stadium in Major League Baseball. And if you want to go further, you find out and you get on the line with the other commissioners, and you ban them from every arena.”
