When Don Regole drove 120 miles from his Tucson home to watch his beloved Diamondbacks face the San Francisco Giants in Phoenix, he brought along nine banners directed at Barry Bonds.
The messages had a consistent theme: The Giants outfielder had cheated by using steroids, and that was bad for the game. One sign read, "Thou Shalt Not Covet Impure Gains." Another implored, "Stop inflating records," with a syringe injecting and pumping up the letters. A third, resembling a scoreboard, shouted, "... Bonds needs 756 days in jail," a reference to Bonds chasing Hank Aaron's career home-run record of 755.
But Regole never got to display his banners at Chase Field on April 27. When Diamondbacks employees at the entrance to the ballpark asked to view the signs he had stuffed in his backpack, Regole was told the posters weren't acceptable. The reason: They were in poor taste.
A month later, after Regole had written the team to complain, he got a letter from the Diamondbacks. One sentence caught his attention: "As Mr. Bonds approaches the homerun record, we have been asked by Major League Baseball to carefully screen the signs that are brought into the ballpark by our fans."
Regole's experience, as well as similar incidents occurring at ballparks across the nation, highlights the uneasiness of Major League Baseball as it tries to cope with the steroids cloud hanging over Bonds and the game. In some instances, fans have been unimpeded in their attacks on the Giants slugger. At other times, though, the image-conscious league has wielded its power to stifle some of the public dissent.
"It stinks that Major League Baseball would silence fans in hopes of A) letting revenues keep pouring into the game and B) silencing this whole steroids era and letting the controversy kind of slip by," Regole said in a recent phone interview.
Major League Baseball has issued no edicts regarding Bonds, and each team has discretion regarding signage and fan behavior, said spokesman Pat Courtney. As Bonds has closed in on the record, security officials for Major League Baseball have held conference calls with teams hosting the Giants to discuss potential problems, Courtney said, but the teams deal with cases on an individual basis.
Despite the reference to Major League Baseball in the letter to Regole, the Diamondbacks' decision was rooted in the team's own belief that the banners weren't in good taste, said team spokesman Shaun Rachau.
While home games at AT&T Park have provided a virtual sanctuary for Bonds, he has felt the wrath of fans on the road. In Boston, he was eviscerated by a chanting crowd that waved paper asterisks and held up signs that read, "Hey Barry! It's Not a Record. You Cheat," and "Call Hank Aaron and Say You're Sorry." In New York, asterisks and signs were ubiquitous, not to mention a steady stream of invective hurled his way. In Milwaukee, with baseball commissioner Bud Selig in attendance, a fan held up a sign that read, "756* Was it Worth it for An *."
At that same game, though, according to USA Today, security confiscated a banner that said, "Milwaukee Loves Hammerin' Hank, Not BALCO Barry."
In most cases, teams rely on a policy that requires banners and signs to be in good taste, or not in poor taste. On that warm April evening in Arizona, Regole, a graphic artist, thought his signs would make the cut.
He had secured a prime seat for the Diamondbacks-Giants game -- front row in the left-field bleachers, the better to attract Bonds' attention. He had crafted a distinct banner for each inning, and he had been careful to ensure that they conformed to the sign policy, avoiding obscenities or offensive language, and making them baseball-related.
In fact, when Diamondbacks employees asked to view his banners, Regole said he proudly pulled them out. He said he was stunned when told they weren't acceptable.
Coincidentally, the day after that experience in Phoenix, Regole received a letter from a friend in Los Angeles. The correspondence included a newspaper clipping about Tom Wilson, another baseball fan who felt his opinion was being stifled.
Wilson, a filmmaker, had seen the foam fingers that fans wave to signal their team is No. 1 and was struck with an idea: He would sell a foam asterisk. Wilson didn't want his product to be heavy-handed, smeared with derogatory comments about Bonds; rather, he wanted it to speak for itself, to give voice to fans troubled by Bonds' pursuit of the game's most hallowed record.
But Wilson ran into difficulties in getting the asterisk made. Among the foam companies he called was Rico Industries in Niles, Ill. Wilson said Rico turned him -- and his money -- down flat because it has a licensing agreement to make products for Major League Baseball.
Of Wilson's asterisk, sales coordinator Daniel Schack said, "We wouldn't be interested in that." Asked whether Rico's contract with Major League Baseball was a factor, Schack said, "I can't really elaborate any further."
After Wilson finally found a company to make the asterisk, he turned to sports retail stores in several major league cities, including Chicago, Cincinnati, Atlanta and San Diego. Again, they all had licensing agreements with Major League Baseball, Wilson said he was told, so they wouldn't sell his product.
"We wouldn't do that because of our connections to Major League Baseball and because we sell licensed stuff," said Luke, an employee at Chicago Sports and Novelty who refused to provide his last name and said he was not familiar with Wilson or his product.
"It's not that I think Major League Baseball intentionally is running collusion to keep me out of business," Wilson said. "But it's just the sheer weight of what they do, so that people would be so intimidated that they would not sell a product."
Baseball fan Daniel Kramer, creator of the BoycottBarry.com Web site, also has had varied experiences getting his products to the market.
He created T-shirts with a picture resembling Major League Baseball's logo of a ballplayer swinging a bat. In this case, the player was swinging a syringe, above the words "BoycottBarry.com" and "for the good of the game." Kramer, a Dodgers fan who lives in Los Angeles, also had black blindfolds made, with a lined-out hypodermic needle over each eye.
"This is not about a Dodger fan hating Barry," insisted the 25-year-old Kramer, who works in public affairs. "This is about a baseball fan loving baseball."
Kramer said he handed out shirts and blindfolds in New York, Boston, Phoenix, Denver, Houston and even San Francisco with no problems. In New York last month, Kramer said he distributed 6,000 blindfolds in 18 minutes.
But last year in Los Angeles, Kramer said he and several fans were kicked out of Dodger Stadium for wearing T-shirts and blindfolds that security deemed offensive. The group was not creating a disturbance, according to Kramer.
Camille Johnston, the Dodgers' senior vice president for communications, said the team bans all signage and works to foster a "fan-friendly environment. We don't want anybody inciting the crowd, and we think those kinds of things can cause an untenable atmosphere, so we would ask them to turn those T-shirts inside out or remove them."
Kramer said the BoycottBarry gang plans a presence at the All-Star Game in San Francisco, but he wouldn't elaborate.
"Other sports have figured it out, and baseball is still trying to hope that fans are stupid and will keep watching their teams being represented by dishonest achievements," Kramer said. "That's what all this activism is about -- this is wrong, and we're not OK with it. And if the commissioner and Congress and the players union are not doing anything about it, we will."
