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Baffoe: It's Time To Stop Encouraging Fans To Blur, Cross The Lines

By Tim Baffoe--

(CBS) What piece of advice from your parents has stuck with you most? For me, it's a bit of wisdom that came from my dad when I was a teen and headed out the door to a Chicago White Sox game with my friends. I jokingly told him to tune into the game because he might see me streaking across the field.

"Don't," he said in his very non-joking dad voice.

He was a former security guard at Old Comiskey Park in the early 1980s, practically a regulator of Thunderdome.

"It's funny until you get tackled," he said. "You don't want to know what security will do to you once they have you out of sight."

I think about that warned hypothetical beatdown whenever an idiot spectator runs onto the field of play in a sporting event. Maybe it was images instilled by my dad of cracking the skulls of Alsip, or maybe I just never thought myself so worthy of entering into another person's office without permission. Either way, the possibility of that person being beaten severely slightly mitigates my anger at not just the delay of game but that I share the earth with someone who thinks crossing the literal and figurative lines of sport is a warranted actin. I don't encourage violence toward people in custody, but in such a case my ginger Viking DNA corrupts my logic.

I can't help but reflexively want Dylan Cressy tazed repeatedly. Cressy's the sentient jar of mayonnaise who made it onto the field and into the scrum during the celebration of Cubs ace Jake Arrieta's no-hitter two weeks ago. He managed to actually touch players, including Arrieta. Again, future employers, his name is Dylan Cressy, from South Bend, Ind., a potential decision-maker in your company.

Maybe life should come at them a little faster than it has so far.

Because the law hasn't discouraged it. Most cases of entering field of play by a spectator result in a fine and banishment from the stadium (as though Cressy had plans on returning to Cincinnati often). When alcohol exacerbates one's sense of bravery and USA Today calls the offender "a part of history now, so, I guess he had that going for him," we're not doing enough as a collective to stop this.

"I made eye contact with Kris Bryant and we shared a moment," Cressy told Fox Sports. "We shared a moment and a cheek-to-cheek grin. It was just pure joy and jumping around."

Cressy's a healthcare management and policy major at Indiana University. Bet you'd feel safe with him make decisions that affected your well being, right? This is his mugshot for good measure. Again, that's D-Y-L-A-N C-R-E-S-S-Y, future googlers.

And in true stereotypical Cubs fan fashion, Che Cressy yelled "Go Cubbies!" as police dragged him away. Viva la revolución. Fox Sports referred to him as "a folk hero," too, which is problematic and hardly acting as a deterrent to this crap.

"I was cracking the cops up," Shecky Cressy said. "Making jokes. I was pretty well-liked in the slammer."

You can add that to a GoFundMe page that has raised $390 as of this writing for any of Cressy's legal fees, plus national print coverage doing much the opposite of discouraging trespassing into a workspace and posing a danger to entertainers.

"Now, he's juggling media requests, studying and the obligatory trip to the Kilroy's patio (an essential IU watering hole for procrastinating on a fine spring day)," barfs that Fox Sports piece.  

Oh, to be a criminal and so privileged. To have help in slowing down reality for you.

But it's not just those who willfully enter the field of play. In an attempt to make the in-person experience as intimate as possible, we've granted fans with blurred lines and dangerous access to participants. Take Monday night for instance. The sports world's hottest topic of conversation entering Tuesday is the inbounds play in which the Oklahoma City Thunder's Dion Waiters clearly fouled the Spurs' Manu Ginobili but received no call.

The referees later admitted their error.

What should be more bothersome, though, than egregious human error is the spectator grabbing the arm of the Thunder's Steven Adams in the closing seconds.

Adams is visibly upset with this assumed breach of the social contract normal people make. I grant the possibility in that instance the woman may have been reaching for balance after Adams's momentum to him into the seats, but it speaks to the uncomfortable lack of a literal gap we put between athletes and fans that leads some to defy the figurative gap.

All those like the Purple Shirt Man from this past weekend -- who hasn't touched a player yet but whose odd sense of what his role is when he attends a game -- shows a whacked sense of entitlement that isn't limited to just him. Your paid ticket allows you to cheer or jeer to your heart's content, but you don't get to make yourself part of the action. Athletes should be held to a higher standard, but that goes out the window when you enter their office or personal space.

Then you get a justified reaction from Marcus Smart. You get the Los Angeles Dodgers bullpen entering your personal space after you crossed into theirs. Then life comes at you really fast. Then you get Ron Artest, who will go down in history for a momentary bout of psychosis only because our fan egos are so inflated that we absolve the instigator in some toxic mix of video game misinterpretation and "we pay your salary" nonsense.

I'm sorry you don't get to play the marquee sports on TV. That doesn't mean you get to shoehorn your way into them in a way that disrupts the experience of the rest of us and increasingly inches us toward another Monica Seles situation.

Because it's funny until you get tackled. Or worse. So maybe life needs to comes at you a bit more fast.

Tim Baffoe is a columnist for CBSChicago.com. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBaffoe. The views expressed on this page are those of the author, not CBS Local Chicago or our affiliated television and radio stations.

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