I’ve been going to see Phillies games at Citizens Bank Park since I was two years old. I’ve been to multiple games every season for as long as I can remember – and that includes the years in which the Philadelphia Phillies were an absolutely abysmal team to watch. In the nineteen years I’ve been going to games, I had never had so much of a glance my way from any employee working at Citizens Bank Park, but that changed last Thursday when I was escorted out of the game along with three of my friends. I’d like to preface this by saying that we had done absolutely nothing wrong. We fell victim to one douchebag usher and a dickhead sitting in the section below us.
The Phillies were playing the Mets, and I fucking hate the Mets. Throughout the game, we as a group were loudly making it known that we were not fans of the Mets organization – except for one of my friends, a Mets fan, who had turned his Mets jersey into a Patrick Ewing jersey to shield himself from some of the embarrassment of being a New York fan in Philadelphia. Sometime around the fifth inning (I can’t tell you exactly when because, admittedly, I was drunk), we got called out by the usher of the section below us, telling us to stop booing and cheering against the Mets. We laughed it off because, well, it’s the Mets, and every self-respecting Phillies fan knows that you boo the Mets. One of my friends elected to continue in his anti-Mets vocality (completely within his rights to do so, if you ask me), by repeatedly saying, “It’s a bad day to wear gray,” every time the Phillies did anything good, and when something really good happened, he’d call out to a kid wearing a DeGrom Jersey and say, “Hey, DeGrom, how’d you like that one?”
There was a group of girls in the section below us that was mostly made up of Phillies fans, but it also included a couple Mets fans. They were not fans of our debauchery, and they were accompanied by a few older guys that I believe were their fathers. My friend, though, is convinced they were just weird older dudes scheming on girls much too young for them. At one point, one of the guys wearing a teal shirt and a brown Phillies hat stood up and called up to us, telling us to “Shut the fuck up!” My friend didn’t enjoy this, so he responded: “You’re wearing a teal shirt. Sit down.” The man had some choice words in response, and my friend clapped back with, “Those girls your daughters? If not, it’s really weird, buddy.”
That seemed to really upset teal-shirt. He walked himself up to our section, grabbed three ushers and a police officer and then tried to get the four of us to walk up to him and fight him. When the ushers and cop settled teal-shirt down and sent him on his way, the four of us were called up and told we were being kicked out, before being walked to the elevators. One douchebag usher claimed that we were underage, which none of us were, causing our IDs to be checked and us to laugh in the faces of the people that clearly had no business kicking us out. After the cop confirmed several times to the usher that our IDs were real, we were escorted out of Citizens Bank Park and told to be on our merry way.
It ended up being a blessing in disguise because the Phillies went on to blow a 7-0 lead late in the game. There were no lasting consequences because we had truly done nothing wrong, and I now have incredible beef with one specific usher in Citizens Bank Park. I think I’ll make a call to complain about it and try to get us refunded for our tickets.
