Welcome to Grim Yelp Reviews, a new regular feature where we share people’s worst experiences at the worst places. This week: sportsball.
Earlier this week, the White Sox played the Orioles in an empty stadium, with Camden Yards closed to the public due to protests in Baltimore over the murder of Freddie Gray by police. The stadium was silent, broken only by the crack of the bat, the hock of the players spitting everywhere, and the choatic swirl of our own dark thoughts about the failed experiment of a just and egalitarian American society.
But even without the news peg of a horrifying extrajudicial police killing, stadiums are still quite often the site of truly depressing encounters. Think about it: you’re cramming thousands of strangers, many of them very inebriated, into the world’s tiniest seats, rooting for opposing teams, marinating in their own resentment, getting up only to wait in hours-long bathroom lines, only to give up, piss in a cup and then punch each other in the head.
It should be no surprise, then, that Grim Yelp Reviews of stadiums are really, really grim. We can divide them into two beautifully simple categories: complaints about the stadium itself (vomit, parking, more vomit), and complaints about fellow stadium-goers. (After reading several dozen reviews as research, I have just one question: Is it really that hard to sit in public for a few hours and watch sports without lobbing a racial slur at the person next to you? Is it?)
As always, to protect the names of the innocent and not-so-innocent alike, we’ve redacted the names of the businesses, as well as the identities of the Yelpers who wrote the reviews. We realize you can probably find out all of that information by employing five seconds of Google magic.
The Stadium
The cheerleaders are obviously just subtly telegraphing their discontent:
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