When One Foul Ball Meant Bullied For Life

For those who may be thinking life stinks, cheer up: you could be Steve Bartman, the Chicago Cubs fan who got in the way of a Cubs outfielder's attempt to catch a foul ball in the eighth inning of Game 6 in the 2003 National League Championship Series.

At the time, the Cubs had a three-run lead in the eighth inning and were up, three games to two, on the Florida Marlins. Cubs pitcher Mark Prior was throwing a shutout. If "The Bartman Incident," as it is known, hadn't happened and Moises Alou somehow had caught the pop foul by Luis Castillo, it would have meant the second out --- putting the Cubs four outs away from going to the World Series for the first time since 1945.

Ah, if only ifs and buts were candy and nuts. But instead, the Marlins would score eight runs in the inning. They won the next game and went on to beat the Yankees in the World Series.

As for Steve Bartman, the 26-year-old Little League coach didn't go home with a souvenir baseball, but he caught plenty of grief from his fellow fans. Still wearing his Cubs cap, Bartman had to keep his jacket up to his face as he left, escorted from the stadium for his own protection.

It was only the beginning for the unfortunate fellow who suddenly became known as the most hated man in Chicago. Meanwhile, the Cubs have not been closer to a World Series since that night and Steve Bartman remains That Guy to a lot of fans.

Of all the reasons to be hated by people you never met...whew.

I mention this because I just heard a radio interview with director Alex Gibney, whose film on "The Bartman Incident" and the fallout, titled "Catching Hell," is about to make its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival here in New York.

It sounds like a fascinating documentary. In recent years, there's been more attention paid -- finally -- to bullying and the damage it can cause to victimized kids, if adults turn a blind eye instead of taking action.

But I'm thinking that the turning of Steve Bartman into the ultimate scapegoat, simply because he did what pretty much any fan in the ballpark would -- try to catch a ball coming into the stands -- is sort of a lifetime sentence to being bullied.

Then again, the word "fan" is regarded as short for "fanatic" and it is almost expected that fanatics will find a way to leave reasonableness out of any discussion about cause and effect.

For Steve Bartman, the ugly and angry reactions of fans who blamed him for the Cubs' ignominious exit from baseball's post-season caused the need for police cars outside his home. He became the butt of cruel jokes by TV show hosts. On the Internet, the quality of mercy was strained by vengeful strangers, under the guise of Cub supporters, who could not -- would not -- get over it. Instead, they posted personal information, including Bartman's address and telephone number, for other nuts to read and maybe act on.

To this day, he avoids the spotlight and continues to turn down offers -- reportedly, involving six-figure sums -- to talk about what happened that night at the ballpark. At the very least, Bartman went into hiding as a baseball fan. He declined an invitation to take an active part in Gibney's film.

My own team in the National League is the New York Mets. So, it's not lost on me that the two players principally involved in "The "Bartman Incident" -- Castillo and Alou -- went on to play for the Mets.

By that time, Alou was often hurting and near the end of a fine career, though he would set a club record with a 30-game hitting streak in 2007, when he was 41.

While playing for the Mets, Alou recalled "The Bartman Incident" in an interview with The Associated Press and said that he felt "really bad" for Bartman. Additionally, he acknowledged that he wouldn't have made the catch of Castillo's foul ball, even if a fan had not deflected it.

The admission was quite different from Alou's immediate reaction that night -- he was described as being "livid" on television -- which did not spare Steve Bartman.

"Hopefully, he won't have to regret it for the rest of his life," Alou said, in the wake of the loss.

Luis Castillo, who had set the sequence of events in motion by sending Mark Prior's pitch towards the seats in Wrigley Field's left-field corner -- and Bartman -- became a different story of sorts, in his own way

Castillo earned a championship ring as a member of the Marlins. But his signature moment as a Met occurred during a June 2009 game against the Yankees --- when he dropped an infield pop-up with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, allowing two runs to score and turning an 8-7 victory into a 9-8 loss. The fact that it came against the Yankees made the defeat all the more bitter.

After Castillo's misadventure in the field, most Mets fans wished he'd go into hiding.

"It was a gift from God --- or Castillo," was the view of Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez, who had hit the pop fly, as quoted by the New York Daily News following the game.

Mets fans never entertained the notion of divine intervention. Radio talk shows became forums for heated campaigns demanding Castillo's banishment, which finally came with his release during spring training this year.

Now that I think of it, the Mets haven't been back to the World Series since Castillo botched that seemingly easy catch at Yankee Stadium --- or, going further back, since he hit the ball that beckoned to Steve Bartman that night at Wrigley Field.

Chicago Cubs fans might want to consider that maybe, just maybe, the wrong guy's name has been attached to the "incident" subsequently blamed for the end of their world in 2003.