Castrodale: Astros fans, foul balls and the relative health of chivalry

If you look around your kitchen or rummage through your bathroom cabinets, you’ll notice that almost everything comes with a warning label, most of them heavy on exclamation points and imperative sentences that outline scenarios you hadn’t even considered. For example, you shouldn’t serve the shower gel as an appetizer or use Lysol to clean your contacts and your food processor is probably stamped with a number of red-rimmed hieroglyphics reminding you either not to let children play with it or not to julienne a preschooler.
Leaving the house isn’t any safer. If you go to a sporting event, the signs in the stadium will remind you of the many ways you may have to use your emergency room co-pay. Before a name-tagged employee shoves the torn half of your ticket into his pocket, the club assumes you’ve taken the time to read the fine print on the back that covers the dangers of foul balls or broken bats or accidental exposure to a Diamondbacks game. What they don’t tell you is that you’re responsible for saving your own denim-covered ass.

On Monday night, Twilight-worthy teen couple Sara Saco-Vertiz and her boyfriend Bo Wyble were watching the Houston-Atlanta game from a pair of Minute Maid Park seats that — admittedly — weren’t the ones they’d paid for. When Astros rookie Chris Johnson launched a foul ball into the left field stands, Wyble did what he’d seen the Houston outfielders do all season: run the other way as the ball fell to the ground. Unfortunately, it didn’t come to a stop until bouncing off Saco-Vertiz’ surprisingly durable right elbow.
Since then, the couple has become an internet sensation and — as anyone with a Roadrunner account and an hour of free time knows — nothing good comes from being labeled an internet sensation. Why? Because of the video that shows Wyble immediately leaping across the aisle to save his own scruffy chin without attempting to protect his girl from the double-stitched leather ball that fell from the sky.
You’d think the Astros fans would’ve at least appreciated the excitement, since this is one of the most exciting things to happen in Houston since the team used to dress like fast food workers. But they didn’t. Starting with an angry in-game interview from an Astros sideline reporter, every media outlet with even a passing interest in sports has used this story as an outlet to drop a thousand words about bad boyfriends, damsels in distress and how this proves that chivalry is dead.
Look, chivalry — much like Fidel Castro — actually died several decades ago. That has nothing to do with what happened in Houston, even though if you asked Wyble to define chivalry, he’d say it was that brown liquor he swiped from his dad’s special cabinet. That doesn’t make him a villain or a criminal or What’s Wrong With Our Society. It makes him a kid, a kid who had the misfortune of listening to the wrong instincts when put in a situation that was less dangerous than shopping the after-Thanksgiving sales at Walmart.
To her credit, our hyphenated heroine Ms. Saco-Vertiz was laughing immediately after the incident and didn’t seem to join the reporter in tearing Wyble apart. She’s moderately disappointing, though, for sitting there expecting him to swoop in and save her. I’m guessing that she was raised on a number of brightly colored Disney DVDs, the ones where the women were incapable of pretty much everything until a prince or a prince or, um, a prince — one with a cleft chin and an over-inflated chest — rode up, sang a song and either told her what to do or just did it for her. That’s not the way things work anymore and it has nothing to do with dropping quarters on chivalry’s eyes; it’s about being self-sufficient, regardless of which set of chromosomes you’re wearing.
And, really, Sara, why would you put your safety in the hands of a dude who apparently picked Jon Gosselin as his power animal? He can’t even wear his hat the right way; how the hell is he gonna protect you? Just because you’re a girl doesn’t mean you can’t man up sometimes. That doesn’t mean you should stop shaving your armpits or invest in a bumper sticker that equates having a boyfriend with a trout riding a ten-speed, but COME ON … your first reaction to potential danger is to curl up in your seat like a freshly-salted slug?
It’s an interesting situation because both teens have been roundly criticized, one for ignoring his traditional gender role and the other for embracing it. But they’ll grow out of it, they’ll move past the embarrassment and disappointment and will probably come out of it better prepared for any other potentially dangerous situation, the ones more gut-churning than those times when, like, they can’t get a good 3G signal.
After all of the attention focused on both of them, they’ll never do anything like this again. Saco-Vertiz won’t sit back and wait for someone to pop in and protect her. Wyble — and any young man who watched him being skewered for the past seventy-two hours — won’t fail to stand up for someone younger or smaller or, yeah, girlier. While being interviewed this morning’s CBS Early Show, he was full of yes sirs and no sirs and next time I’ll let it hit me instead, sir.
That’s a good start. Now read the fine print and take your seats. This time, you may want to sit in your own.
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Jelisa Castrodale is a writer and comedian who has learned a lot about life by making a mess of her own. She chronicles her failures at The Typing Makes Me Sound Busy, and twitters while she waits at stoplights. Castrodale was featured in the book Twitter Wit and was named one of Mashable’s 10 Funniest Twitterers. Contact her at jacastrodale@gmail.com.
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