"The price you pay for being a winner," said Dave Cooper, who lived in and around Philadelphia for 52 years before moving to Phoenix a few years back.
"Dodger fans are not real baseball fans," his son said. "It's like old Raider fans who just come as an excuse to get drunk and just get rowdy."
Really rowdy
So much for the myths about fan behavior in our two cities. Dodgers fans sitting near Rob Palmer and his two buddies during Game 4 kept telling the guys that Dodgers fans don't usually act like this. Whatever they don't act like, they were doing a lot of it.
"I was wearing a Phillies T-shirt with an emblem on the back," said Palmer, who grew up in Huntingdon Valley but has lived in L.A. for nine years. "It was like a bull's-eye."
There were peanuts, pretzels and uncreative insults. But there were no beer drenchings, although Dodgers fans "would go get beer and stand in front of us and not move - stay there like a second too long," Palmer said. "They booed a very attractive Phillie fan and her company away. . . . We said, 'We're not leaving. We're Philly. We're holding our ground.' "
Things got ugly
This stuff was going on all over Dodger Stadium during the series. Three Philly guys who flew to Sunday's Eagles game in San Francisco and then drove to L.A. for Game 4 said things were just as ugly in their section.
Joe Wachter of Northeast Philadelphia said a guy came up to his buddy John Hockel and wanted to fight, suggesting they go to the parking lot right then. "They were nose-to-nose," Wachter said. "We had to pull [Hockel] away."
Vinny Fantazzia of Port Richmond was with them. They were driving back to San Francisco right after the game to catch a 7 a.m. flight home.
"These people were idiots," Fantazzia said.
They certainly weren't happy watching Chad Billingsley take the Dodgers out.
