City taps logic-lite on Sox beer policy

March 26, 2004

Bring back beer hawkers at Fenway Park? It's a good idea - better than the short shrift given it this week by City Hall - but don't expect it to happen anytime soon.

This is the administration, after all, that thinks the way to tone down rowdiness at the St. Patrick's Day Parade is to tell liquor stores not to open.

It's the same administration that blamed riots after the Super Bowl on the repeal of Sunday blue laws instead of out-of-control and undisciplined students and a shortage of police on the street.

The Red Sox got beaten up badly this week over a proposal to serve beer and wine to fans at their seats. It was a modest idea - limited to just 379 seats that cost $200 or more - but marked a reversal from a three-decade long policy of requiring fans to go and fetch their own.

Some objected to the elitism of the scheme, which was limited to those in premium seats. They're right on that. Still, it wasn't elitism that bothered Mayor Thomas Menino.

Sounding like a 21st century version of Carrie Nation, the mayor denounced the plan.

"Fenway Park is not a bar, it is not a pub and the product in question is not simply a bag of peanuts," Menino wrote in a letter to the municipal licensing board.

The evident fear was that seat-side beer sales would increase the amount of drinking at games, leading in turn to the bad old days when Fenway Park was decidedly not friendly at all.

And no question about it, Fenway Park was once a miserable place to visit.

Fans would arrive at the park already hammered and then continue drinking throughout the game. Things could easily turn ugly and they often did. It was so awful that the city and the Sox in the mid- 1970s adopted a series of policies to limit alcohol consumption, including requiring patrons to go and get their own. That, of course, solved everything.

Actually, it did not.

In fact, this is where the prohibitionist argument falls apart. Fenway didn't suddenly become family friendly after it imposed its new drinking rules. To the contrary, complaints about fan behavior continued.

The City Council held hearings in 1987 where it heard testimony that drunkenness was getting worse. Behavior in the stands became even more egregious. There was, for example, a widely reported series of incidents in the early 1990s involving fans simulating sex with inflatable dolls.

So the Red Sox took a different course. They started to get serious about fans' behavior, imposing a zero-tolerance policy on infractions. And that policy applied not only to the big stuff, such as fighting, but also to seemingly small offenses, including swearing.

To a remarkable degree, it worked. True, there are still incidents - and Yankees games in particular seem to bring out the worst in fan and (if one remembers back to last season's playoffs) player behavior. Nevertheless, the park likes to bill itself as "family friendly" and, for the most part, it now is.

Yet it wasn't the beer-buying policy that solved the park's problems. Rather, it was the Sox strategy of holding fans responsible for their own behavior.

Meanwhile, the fetch-your-own-beer policy just makes life miserable for the rest of us.

I suppose the theory underlying the fetch policy is that people will be less inclined to drink if they have to leave their seats.

That hardly seems the case, however. Instead, those who want a beer are constantly on the move, heading out every other inning or so to get a couple more brews. To do so, they push their way past seated fans; when they return, they push their way past again, spilling beer as they go.

For many fans, the constant traffic makes it almost impossible to watch the game.

Moreover, it's doubtful that the policy deters truly serious drinkers. If anything, it most affects those who might want a beer or two but, engrossed in the game, don't want to miss an inning standing in line.

Just as some argue baseball mirrors life, so too does Fenway's drinking rule mirror an ongoing debate over public policy.

There are two approaches to changing people's behavior.

One - like the beer-fetching requirement - attempts to do so by limiting access to the supply of something. That's what we try to do, for example, with gun-control laws or recently advanced suggestions that we prohibit fast-food restaurants from selling unhealthy meals.

The second approach is to give people the freedom to make their own decision but tie that with a strict requirement that holds them accountable for their actions.

I realize that it may seem a stretch to link hawking beer at a ballpark with notions of individual liberty and responsibility, but the connection is there.

Fans at a baseball park aren't children. The Red Sox proposal should be given a chance to work; even better, it should be extended to everyone.

Talk back to Tom Keane at tomkeane@tomkeane.com.