ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF CHICAGO, OF COURSE, A WHITE SOX FAN BRUTALIZES KETEL MARTE
Having dealt with sick kooks in the same depressed ballpark, I understand why the Arizona second baseman would break down and cry after a fan taunted him about his mother’s death in a car accident
A newspaper deadline demanded a column, but my hands were shaking after I walked through the stands on the South Side. An ESPN pre-game program, on the field with Dan Patrick and Peter Gammons, had turned into another Chicago media farce. Ozzie Guillen, manager of the White Sox, screamed at me to leave the premises. I ignored him and kept chatting about his team. So did Patrick, who had a show to run.
Fans noticed. And when I walked up stairs to the concourse on the third-base side, I heard some of the sickest stuff imaginable from too many creeps. Was a cop available? What if one of these kooks jumped me? Years earlier, they had chanted during a game at U.S. Cellular Field, now called Rate Field: “Mariotti sucks!” They didn’t like me, though I’d say I was far ahead of my time in calling out the team’s wretched owner, who remains wretched. I wrote my column in the press box, as always. The debacle was part of my job in a city where Jerry Reinsdorf has won one World Series in 45 years and rarely has reached the postseason.
So here we are again, after an ugly Tuesday night in the same hellhole, where yet another hideous story suggests it’s time for Reinsdorf to leave town at age 89. The fans — only 13,001 were announced in a 40,615-seat ballpark, meaning the actual total was significantly less — must do something else with their sad lives than root for a team that lost 121 games last season and already has lost 55 this season. One of them stooped to such an abysmal level that he made horrible comments about a tragedy in Ketel Marte’s life. He is the second baseman of the Arizona Diamondbacks, who hit a home run and pushed his team to a 4-1 victory. In the seventh inning, a fan knew that Marte’s mother had died in a car accident in the Dominican Republic.
For some godawful reason, he shouted details at Marte in the batter’s box.
He cried, which will please some Chicagoans who don’t live in the same world as the rest of us. Marte’s manager, Torey Lovullo, saw him crying and consoled him during a pitching change. His teammates were livid. The fan was ejected after Lovullo raised hell, leading to another nationwide debate about fans and athletes. To this point, a fan can use his mouth to shout words at players. Maybe not now.
“That can’t happen,” Arizona shortstop Geraldo Perdomo said in a post-game tirade. “Everybody knows how Ketel is. He’s fun. He plays the game hard. I feel bad for him. I feel mad about it. I hope MLB can do something with that guy. I don’t know who it was, but they’ve got to do something. We can’t continue to do that s— here in MLB. He should be banned, for sure.
“Everybody knows Ketel lost his mom. She was the world to him.”
Said Lovullo: “I looked right at him when I heard. I looked right at him and he looked at the person, as well. He put his head down and I could tell it had an immediate impact on him, for sure. I just reacted as a dad would when I went out to change pitchers. I could see he was sobbing. It hurt.”
Sure, it hurt. Why would a fan be so demoralized by a 55th loss in 2025 that he had to aim his pain at Marte? Why would a Chicago fan even know about Marte’s life? He’s the second baseman for a team in Phoenix. Lovullo told him, “ ‘I love you and I’m with you and we’re all together and you’re not alone. No matter what happens, no matter what was said or what you heard, that guy is an idiot. It shouldn’t have an impact on you.’ ’’
The people who surround athletes generally behave at games. One time, it might drive a man to tears. It happened on the South Side of Chicago.
Have a good day, Jerry Reinsdorf.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.