The Minor League War Zone

Rickey Henderson might be plying his trade with the San Diego Surf Dawgs, but his former team, the Newark Bears, are still playing their games in one of the country's worst hellholes. The blogger Extrawack went to a Newark game this weekend and came away depressed and terrified.

As we walked past a bus stop, a small group of people who looked like extras from Escape From New York were arguing with each other, particularly two guys who probably had 12 teeth and a combined blood alcohol content of .85 between them. As I whisked Kimberly safely past them, I heard the unmistakable sounds of a fight starting, and when I turned around, sure enough, the dynamic duo were throwing full swing punches at each other in front of the other bus stop lampers. Sadly, a family of four who were on the same train as us had to perform some fancy footwork to navigate through that gauntlet of drunken brawling to get to the game which I'm sure they, as we were, lead to believe would just be a fun train ride away. I'd loved to have heard the Dad's response to his seven-year-old's question of "Why is the guy with the dirty bandana and the giant bottle of beer beating up the skinny guy with the eyepatch and gold tooth?"

The post seems to imply that the stadium is in a "bad part of town," but, sadly, it's not: It's actually in one of the "nicer" parts of Newark, which is to say, there are none. Though it's always fun to watch the second baseman dodge bullets; let's see Jeff Kent try that.

Clawing Our Way To See The Bears [Extrawack, via Baseball Musings]