The Psychology of Sports
By Dr. Richard Lustberg and Charles Deitch

On The Couch: An Analysis of Current Topics and Issues in Sport
September 17, 2004

Frank Francisco- And Thoughts on Fan-Player Violence

As Monday’s incident involving Texas Rangers reliever Frank Francisco is discussed in the coming days, weeks and months, it will be repeatedly explained as an altercation between players and a fan or two who reportedly made derogatory comments to pitchers in the bullpen.

But at the end of the day the situation was simply a man losing control and throwing a chair into a crowd of people. Professional baseball was the setting, but neither the sport nor the player-fan dynamic are to blame here. 

Fan reactions to teams, players and sports in general are purely projections and reflections of their own psyches. Their life experiences, including inter-relationships and, most importantly, their psychological makeup, are all brought to and projected onto the arena of sport. 

This is also true for players as well, and was clearly demonstrated in Francisco’s actions. Because of our own psychological needs when it comes to sport, we too often tend to forget that players are people.

For the fans, their emotional stability and self-concept are at stake.  Therefore, wins, loses and even athletes’ behaviors are taken personally rather than objectively.

People see sports as a way to release tensions; to work out problems, angers, and frustrations; and as a means to help forget the world around them.  An objective fan, or for that matter a more stable personality, obtains this from sport.

Overreactions –including, but not limited to, throwing snowballs and beer at players, abusing family members, fighting, and interfering with games and hurling insults – are indicators that the individual is over-invested and perhaps poorly adjusted.  This has been happening with all too alarming frequency at our sports venues. 

But these kinds of reactions aren’t exclusive to fans. They apply to players as well.  

Each sporting event is a complex interaction between the emotional makeup of each individual fan and each individual player. It is in these interactions where objectivity is often overcome by subjectivity.

Take Monday’s activities. Texas reliever Doug Brocail gets into a verbal altercation with fans seated near the bullpen area during the Rangers-A’s game in Oakland . As the incident escalated, Francisco became involved and threw a plastic chair used by a ball-boy into the crowd, striking a man in the head. The chair then bounced off the man and hit a woman standing nearby, cutting her face and breaking her nose.

After the game, Texas owner Tom Hicks apologized for the behavior of some of his players. However manager Buck Showalter chose to criticize lax security at the ballpark and, according to the Associated Press fans that went “over the line.”

"It was a real break from the normal trash you hear from fans. We've had problems about every time we've come here," he said. Fans shouting, at times, vulgar obscenities at players is nothing new in baseball or any sport. The proper course of actions is to have the fans remove if they were in fact over some line.

But to condone this type of behavior by making excuses is an attempt to externalize blame and deflect the public eye from what really happened. A man, regardless of the fact he’s an athlete, got mad, picked up a chair and broke a woman’s nose.

The police certainly didn’t see it as a side effect of the game when they arrested the pitcher and charged him with felony assault. Nothing the fan might have said warranted that kind of reaction in a civilized society. And the assault surely shouldn’t be blamed on a lack of security.

To use this excuse is emotionally regressive and cognitively unsophisticated. By Showalters’ crossed up logic, it would be OK to rob a bank if the security wasn’t tight enough. We have become a country where blame is externalized and no one wants to take responsibility for their actions.

It must be kept in mind that fans and players are individuals who are walking around with psychological conditions.  They bring these conditions with them wherever they go. Even the well-adjusted bring a myriad of complexities to the ballpark that rest upon self-concept and background.

The fact that Francisco reacted the way he did to the situation suggests there may be more wrong with him than simply losing his cool. To simply blame an assault with a weapon on a sour interaction between an athlete and a fan trivializes the severity of what occurred and doesn’t leave much hope that it won’t happen again.