Exercising our rights

By Troy Foster

Daren and I have seen a lot of baseball games this summer. And as each game goes by, our list of grievances grows.

It just so happened that game 23 of our baseball road trip brought us to the nation’s capitol. We realized this was the perfect place to exercise our rights as Americans, so after watching the hometown Nationals get piss-pounded by Houston, Daren and I decided to take our message to the streets. 

We’re not going to take this sitting down.

Our first stop was the U.S. Supreme Court. I’ve been witness to many protests over the years, but I’ve never participated in one, and neither has Daren.

We were both very nervous, but felt morally obligated to speak out.

Daren was the first to go. He walked up to the base of the steps of our hightest court, opened his bag and raised his protest sign. 

“Save the Apple!“

Apparently protesting comes with a few guidelines, because the Homeland Security goons were all over Daren like Larry Craig on a guy in a bathroom.

I heard a loud voice shout an order behind me. Daren kept his sign up, but whispered: “Here they come.”

Two officers confronted us. One ordered Daren to put away his sign and walk away from the court building. I thought about showing him the First Amendment, but he was tall, buff and intimidating. And I didn’t want to get thrown in GITMO for seven years.

Instead I asked him a simple question: “Why?”

“Because it’s not allowed,” he retorted.

I could tell this conversation had been repeated hundreds of times, and the officer was tired of explaining this stuff … kind of like the way I felt when Sage asked me to explain football. 

After he was done posturing — and maybe after he saw the message on Daren’s sign — he eased up a little. He told us we could say anything we wanted. We just had to move back to the sidewalk to exercise our rights.

We followed these instructions without further incident.

Daren pulled out another sign: “Stealing Second is Illegal.”

Then I pulled out the message I have been saying since the beginning of our basecrawl: “Bring back the Kingdome.”

The only thing more ridiculous than the signs we were holding were the reactions on people’s faces. As Daren reintroduced his “Save the Apple!” sign, a nervous anxiety washed over many of the tourists around us.

People gasped and pointed. 

“Oh my God, look!” 

“There’s a guy protesting!” 

“What does he want?”

“What’s the apple?”

We also took our protest to the front steps of Congress. We didn’t want a repeat of our confrontation with the armed lawmen, so instead of busting out the signs we approached a Capitol Police officer to tell him what we were about to do. We also wanted to know whether exercising our rights would be considered a threat to national security.

He looked at Daren’s hat. “If you’re going to pull out a ‘Go Mets’ sign you can’t be anywhere near here.” 

This guy was Homeland Security by day, Phillies fan by night. And Daren had the perfect response: “Say Yes to Contraction,” which included anti-Philadelphia epithet.   

I also delivered this message to our congressman: “Impeach the DH.” I mean, seriously, pitchers are such babies. Batter up, you wussies! 

I’ve always felt that if pitchers don’t have to hit, then “Batters deserve at least four strikes,” and I made as much clear at the Washington Monument. I say this because I batted around .100 during my last year of competitive baseball. This was sometime in the early 1990s, and if I just had one more swing available I think I could have boosted it to .250.

OK, so we were being Major League A-holes at the nation’s capitol. 

Daren and I even felt a tinge of guilt as we held our signs near some pro-life demonstrators at the high court. They were much more serious about their cause.

One tourist who was watching Daren with a confused look turned to me and asked: “What are you guys protesting?”

“We’re just having fun with democracy,” I told him, “because we can.”

As we toured all of D.C.’s memorials, we were reminded of this and all the sacrifices that have been made so Daren and I could march around and make fools of ourselves. We also were reminded of the wrong choices our leaders have made, and as I looked at the thousands of names etched into the Vietnam Memorial, I told Daren: “It’s amazing that we keep repeating the same mistakes.”

All of our “protest” signs were attempts at humor, except for one. I was somewhat reluctant to hold this one up at first, because it veered from the light-hearted nature of our video pod.

But as the sun was setting on this chapter of BaseCrawl, I decided to pull it out (and rather than explain it, you can view it here). The first person who saw my sign was a jogger, but he breezed on by. I knew this sign wasn’t going to change the world.

A moment later, however, the jogger turned around and headed back toward me. I wasn’t sure what he wanted, but when he reached me he extended a sweaty arm and asked if I would shake his hand.

(There’s more on this and our other adventures at BaseCrawl.com).