Where Are They Now? Setting Wesleyan Records For Hits!

Sadly, anecdotes confirming your assumption that Red Sox fans are the biggest yobbos around are plentiful:

The pitch was a fastball on the outside part of the plate, exactly what Jeffrey Maier was looking for on Wednesday afternoon as Wesleyan University took on Bates College in a relaxed baseball setting that bore no resemblance to Yankee Stadium.

Maier took a left-handed swing and drove the ball into the outfield for a run-scoring double. His Wesleyan teammates cheered, and so did several dozen fans, including his parents and sister. As the umpire tossed the souvenir ball to the bench, Maier stood on second base and tried to keep the smile off his bearded face. For the second time in his life, Maier had made baseball history.

Does the name sound familiar? It might. Ten years ago, when the Yankees met the Baltimore Orioles in the first game of the American League Championship Series, Maier was the 12-year-old boy who reached over the right-field wall for Derek Jeter’s fly ball in the Bronx.

. . .

For years, Maier avoided interviews about the incident, but he was a national story after it occurred. He was from Old Tappan, N.J., and the ticket to the game had been a present at his bar mitzvah, held a week earlier with a World Series theme.

“I didn’t mean to do anything bad,” Maier explained at the time. “I’m just a 12-year-old kid trying to catch a ball.” But other fans were not so understanding. In a game at Williams College in Massachusetts in his sophomore year, he played center field. Fans threw snow and ice.

They were Red Sox fans and, to them, Maier represented Yankee success. If Maier had not interfered with Jeter’s fly ball, it might have been caught by Orioles right-fielder Tony Tarasco, and it certainly would have stayed in play. So the Williams fans pelted him.

“It got a little bit dangerous; it kind of crossed the line,” Maier said. “I ran in. They stopped the game to remove the, quote-unquote, unruly fans. They knew who I was. That’s sort of why they were doing it.”