Perhaps he’s simply trying to further ingratiate himself to Chicago Cubs fans, or draw the attention of boo birds when he heads back home.
But Pete Crow-Armstrong – an L.A. dude to his core, the son of actors and the product of one of SoCal’s preeminent baseball factories – went well out of his way to bash Los Angeles Dodgers fans this week.
Crow-Armstrong, an All-Star center fielder at 23 last season, initially defiled fans of the two-time defending World Series champions in the proverbial ‘wide-ranging interview’ with Chicago magazine, saying that Cubs fans ‘give a (expletive). They aren’t just baseball fans who go to the game like Dodgers fans to take pictures and whatever. They’re paying attention. They care.’
Given a window to blunt the edges of those remarks Wednesday, Feb. 25, Crow-Armstrong instead doubled down in an appearance on Foul Territory, apparently referencing the tragic beating of San Francisco Giants fan Bryan Stow and mildly castigating the vibes of a place that drew an MLB-high 4 million fans last season, though perhaps too many that aren’t PCA’s type.
‘I grew up going to Dodgers games when they weren’t always good,’ he told the popular vodcast. ‘When they had Mannywood pop up. But it’s like they go in phases. I remember … putting the Giants fan in the coma. That stuck with me as a kid. Just little things. Sitting in the stands, just nasty stuff goes on. I didn’t always experience that at other ballparks.’
The Mannywood-Stow era of 2008-2010 would certainly dovetail with Crow-Armstrong’s boyish fandom era – he was roughly 6 to 9 years old then. Though perhaps the ‘go in phases’ bit was lost on him – the Dodgers franchise was shortly thereafter plundered by former owner Frank McCourt, who was forced to sell the team by Major League Baseball amid a messy divorce.
Yeah, the fans didn’t like that. And perhaps the finer points of sports business were lost on a young PCA, as the Dodgers returned to the limelight only after a sale to Guggenheim investments; the team essentially hasn’t missed the playoffs since while re-setting the game’s upper salary structure.
A structure Crow-Armstrong will eventually benefit from once he, too, is a free agent. So perhaps the bad memories of traffic jams on the way from Harvard-Westlake School – where tuition now retails for $55,000 – to Chavez Ravine stuck with him. (Was it the 134, the 101 or Sunset that was the culprit?) Maybe the music’s too loud.
Or perhaps he wants to generate a faux rivalry between the Cubs and Dodgers. Either way, the Dodger lifestyle PCA seems to deride might look a little better come 2030 – when he’s eligible for free agency.