Open Letter To Squealing Teenage-Girl Sports Fans

By Ron R. Clark

A break in my schedule recently allowed me to indulge myself in one of my favorite leisure activities: attending a Minor League Baseball game. Sure, the quality of play doesn’t match that of the Majors, but parking is often free and you’re guaranteed never to be deeply depressed at the sight of 30,000 empty seats at your beloved home town Oklahoma Red Hawks or Akron Aeros games. With pastimes, you take your tradeoffs.

While in attendance, I could not help but notice a sprightly-yet-chubby, highly enthusiastic teenaged girl fan of the visiting team. I couldn’t help notice because (a) she kept bouncing around between empty seats next to, behind, and in front of me between batters and (b) her squeals of encouragement to her team’s pitcher drove my eardrums to ask for my keys in the bottom of the sixth so they could wait in the car.

Thus herein, I address you, Sprightly-Yet-Chubby Teenaged-Girl Minor League Baseball Fan, and all those of your ilk irrespective of girth or sport-of-choice. I address you not because you root for the opponent (I’ve been known to do the same while on the road), nor out of concern for your stadium mates (since it is garishly obvious you and your laconic-to-the-point-of-catatonic attending adult guardians had none). I address you out of a sense of mission – your mission – the mission to encourage your team through cheering.

Your high-pitched squeal… what? It is entirely incomprehensible. High volume I can understand and appreciate – and I know through example you were capable of doing so at pitch levels non-injurious to the human ear – but your ultra-high-pitched squeaky vocal blasts are perceptible only as caustic auditory diarrhea. They failed at every turn to encourage your pitcher to complete his shutout. Whereas I am quite certain your squeals intended to convey the message “Come on, Julio, you can do this! Two more outs!”, out on the mound, a befuddled Julio could only wonder “Will whomever it is in the third row please stop assraping that Pekingese puppy with his or her barbed-wire strap-on? I’ve got a shutout going here!”

In short: you aren’t helping. You aren’t helping Julio, you aren’t helping your team, you aren’t helping the image of visiting-team fans in general, and you most certainly aren’t helping the chances of your visiting-team-paraphernalia-festooned Chevrolet Celebrity leave the parking lot with all four tires fully inflated and/or door-handles free of urine.

(What? SOMEbody had to teach her Ritalin-saturated parents the consequences of violating stadium decorum, and it was glaringly obvious that rudeness is the only language they could understand. I… uhrm, that is, some concerned sports fan… was only trying to help.)