Blue Jays Fans Balk at Beer Ban

The typical baseball game lasts about as long as The Godfather parts I and II, with long periods of inactivity punctuated by short bursts to the bathrooms to piss out all the suds used to down all the peanuts in the gallery. In these cheap seats, especially during a "pitcher's duel" (baseball parlance for when even less than the nothing that usually happens, happens) the combination of heat stroke and freely flowing beer results in normally staid Toronto fans turning into warring savages in the upper deck.

Before the Jays moved into their cozy, retractable domed-roof confines, they occupied an outdoor stadium situated right by the lake, and on a typical opening day the "Boys of Summer" would be fielding ground balls in a snowdrift. During these lean years, it was nearly impossible to bear those temperatures without ingesting a Great Lake's worth of booze (picture the loogan in the accompanying photo clutching a stubby bottle of an aged Molson product and you'll get an idea of how 90 percent of the cheap seats looked in those days).

This season, in a bid to one-up church in the competition for the place with the fewest number of empty seats on a Sunday, the Blue Jays have started a $2 promotion for nosebleed seating. This drew the kind of crowd that is not overly interested in whether inter-league play truly was the most exciting development in baseball in the last 50 years, but rather those who enjoy punching in the head people who take opposing stands on such mundane issues. Some 100 people were ejected during the Jays' home opener, a development that president Paul Godfrey links to booze: "“It’s really unfortunate when some of them feel it’s a night club here." It should be noted that if the Rogers Dome were a nightclub, it would be the worst nightclub on the planet.

Regardless, sports fans who want to support their home team for $2 bucks, get drunk, and knee their fellow sports fans in the face hopefully got enough of that in during the home opener because the organization plans to ban beer sales in the ultra cheap $2 upper deck seats, and is even considering ending the two-buck promotion due to the drunken brawling . Violent though it was, the cheap seat punch-ups marked the first time that Jays fans have enjoyed themselves at a baseball game since the team's back-to-back World Series wins.

Since getting faced in the cheap seats was one of the few fun things remaining about baseball, expect the tumbleweed to be blowing through the upper deck of the Rogers Dome and for the unruly fans to be exhibiting their Labatt lunacy in the comfort of their own homes.