the ballpark

St. Louis Cardinals Can’t Guarantee Gays Will Make The Kiss Cam, Because ‘Special Interests’ Aren’t Catered To

With the St. Louis Cardinals hosting “OUT At The Ballpark” on Saturday for some 200 gay fans, everyone wants to know: Will the team aim their Kiss Cam at the homos? Maybe! Maybe not!

The gays will be one of 40 groups at the game on Saturday, and a Cardinals spokesperson says they don’t take special requests for who appears on the cam. Oh, and this: “We have never had anyone make a request so they can use the Kiss Cam to make a social statement.”

Ah, so that’s how the Cardinals are approaching this baby. Making a “social statement.” Which, on the one hand, it kind of is: We’re here, we’re queer, we’re drinking beer, get used to it. But it’s also anything but: The Kiss Cam is something the Cardinals already use, and it regularly features opposite-sex smooching, so why not play fair? Or has all this steroids crap totally sullied baseball’s idea of good sportsmanship?

“We look for lively areas, full areas where people are in their seats, watching the video board, somewhat paying attention,” says scoreboard operations director Tony Simokaitis. “We try to get as many people in as we can in the minute and a half between innings. There’s not a lot of time to allow us to make calculated judgments in terms of demographics.”

Uh. You can be sure that when the Cardinals play the San Diego Padres tomorrow, the gay section will be “lively.”

One thing to note: The team spokesperson insists the Kiss Cam has shown at a half dozen same-sex smooches so far this season, but, reports STLToday.com, “the team has no idea whether the couples were gay.” Which makes me think some of those kisses were either two straight gals smooching for some cheers, or something which resembled the incident that started this whole mess in the first place:

The request [to be featured on the Kiss Cam at tomorrow’s game] came about after a Kiss Cam moment at the Rams game on Sunday. The roaming camera caught two men in Arizona Cardinals jerseys standing next to each other. As the camera lingered, the men tried to shoo it away to laughter and jeers from the crowd. [Harrison Roberts, a local bar owner who wants to be featured on the camera,] said some customers came in to the bar on Monday and told him they had been offended that the camera operator would choose to embarrass Arizona fans by portraying them as a gay couple.

Oh, and we still talking about the ridiculous issue of whether or not we’ll show two adults pecking each other’s lips? The real crime is what a beer costs at Busch Stadium.

[photo via]

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