like i said over there: if any adult abused my kid's feelings this way, said adult would have to explain himself to me. and i would be skeptical.

i think picking on 10-year-olds is cowardly.

Even if it was meant poorly, the kid is going to be find, and the joke's on Duncan...but I doubt he was being mean.  Why would he go through the trouble of signing the kid's paper, on the road in hostile territory where he likely signed many other autographs as well, if he simply wanted to be an asshole to this one kid?  

Unlikely...although it speaks to how bad the Cardinals are if on September 17th we are talking about this instead of an upcoming series.  When does the hot stove start???

good freakin grief. lighten up people.

why is this even a topic?

same thing if zambrano mouths off at a cardinal batter; or if an espn commentator says a disparaging word about the cardinals; or if an announcer from san diego makes a crack about hillbillies in camaros; or if a commenter at Bleed Cubbie Blue says something bad about our team or our fans.

things of that nature make people around here very angry and offend their sensibilities. but nobody gets angry when a player, in a clumsy attempt to be funny, effectively disses a 10-year-old boy to his face? everybody thinks that's funny?

it just seems, you know, inconsistent with the reactions people have around here in other situations.

honestly i just dont see how this is an issues. but then again i'm not a parent of young kids. maybe i'd feel differently if i was, but i'm not. i thought it was funny. i get the joke shelley was trying to pull. and i dont think it was wrong for him to do it on a 10 yr old red sox fan. i'm really shocked this has gotten such a strong response from many here.

i guess thats why i dont look at it like big z taking shots at a Cards player, or bleed cubbie blue taking shots at us, or reyes dancing around like a spaz on the diamond taunting the other team. those are adults taking shots at other adults. where as i see this as an adult playing around with a kid. and there shouldn't be any problems with that. this was susposed to be a harmless prank. and i just dont understand how it's gotten blown up so much and pissed off so many here.

this was a joke people. a harmless, good natured joke.

I have personal experience with this with my daughter, who is six and was born in Berkeley. We vacationed out there earlier this year, her first time back since she was a tot, and caught an Athletics-Yankees game, which is as vicious as a baseball rivalry gets out there. A lot of transplanted New Yorkers plus the usual Oakland rowdies makes it so, and their recent playoff history and massive payroll disparity make it more so. My little girl, who is a Cardinal fan first and now an A's fan second, made it a point to yell "Let's go Oakland" at the top of her lungs, merely to outshout two boys behind us, ages eight and ten. This while three or four fights were broken up and pugilists ejected from the stands around us. It was the most engaged she's ever been at a baseball game, and I found it much easier to keep her interested in the balls and strikes than at any Cardinal game we've attended.

Rivalry brings the full spirit of the games into the stadium. It's fun for kids to be exposed to that, and to feel as though they are rooting for their own team and against the rival team. It helps them create a localized identity.

That said, Shelley Duncan has been a fan for a lot longer than he's been a professional ballplayer in the bigs, and he has no idea what the fuck he's doing. It's a hazy line, but he crossed it for sure by making it "personal" with this kid. And it's something that no one in the Yankee pantheon would ever cop to doing. Not even to a Sox fan's son.

At this age, there's little difference between the identity of the child and the jersey he or she is wearing, and to be an adult and tell a kid that age to their face that their team sucks, it's little different from telling them that they suck. Once kids get into their teens and develop a hard shell of irony, it might be different. But you can see for yourself in the kid's photo how young he is, and how much that jersey means to him.

first, one thing none of us know is, as spants says, what the interaction duncan had with the kid, in fact was there any interaction except the autograph itself?

second, duncan is someone who has been around baseball his entire life, and i am talking major league baseball here, his dad has been a big league coach since, i believe, before shelley was born, so he should know what it is like to sign autographs, he should know how to treat a kid, so unless there was more evidence that there was a reason for him to be joking like that with the kid, he just shouldnt have done it

third, as far as larry saying he would have had issue if it were his kid, i would be surprised to hear a father say different, unless there was more to the interaction, and the father witnessed it, to me that would be a good fathers reaction

fourth, this site is the domain of larry, if you dont like the site, dont come back, larry has the right to tell you to shut up if he feels you are trolling, and leave it at that

fifth, if i was a father, and a player did that to my kid, with no other interaction, we would have issues

lastly, i think something a bit like this was one of the biggest regrets of roger maris' 1961 season

The only thing I could understand getting upset about, is if the parents were against the use of the word "sucks" in a derogatory manner, as I know some parents are.

As some posters have pointed out, nobody in the public has all of the facts relating to this situation. We don't know whether the kid was smack-talking sarcastically with Duncan, or what he asked for in the autograph. Hell, he may have asked for Duncan to sign it that way. Maybe he meekly asked for an autograph and Duncan cruelly intended to be hurtful. Maybe he was like "Get out of my way, Tiny Tim, your crippled ass is cramping my style!" ('Albert Bell' said that in a spoof commercial I heard once). Maybe Duncan laughed at the kid and made him cry. We don't know.

Some people here will go to great lengths to justify something done by a Cardinals player (or in this case a relative of two Cardinals). Some of us, though we wouldn't admit it, have lingering bitterness over the '04 world series, and may tend to find humor in this story from that perspective. Others seem, in their zeal to appear objective, go to the other extreme and condemn it (I've seen that on this board sometimes on other topics as well - it's hard to mix objectivity with fanhood).

I have kids, too, and I hope that when they're 10 they like baseball enough to wear their team colors and ask for autographs. Can I tell you now whether I'd be upset with a player for signing an autograph in this manner for my children? No, I can't. Not without knowing more. I have to agree with lboros that my initial response would be skepticism, but I think that's natural. If the circumstances were right, I might laugh, with my kids, and with the player. I hope this doesn't subject me to personal attacks and having my parental sincerity or legitimacy called into question.

All I'm saying is that there appears to be little reason on this particular issue and a lot of emotional reaction, something I usually don't expect here. Let's not let a lost season turn our favorite fan forum into an emotional fracas.

I understand lb's points about kids being vulnerable, because I'm a teacher and teach kids only a few years older than this kid, and they're almost as vulnerable still as H.S. freshmen as the middle schoolers I've worked with in the past.

At the same time, just as many others have said, including lawman right before me, we don't know all the story here.  

My overall take is that this is simply something that was overblown because it is two of the largest media markets, with a huge baseball rivalry between them, and the media loves reporting on anything Sox/Yanks related to sell some extra papers.

If a person's ability to talk to their child about someone messing with them is so limited that this kid is scarred for life, then that's problematic moreso than the actual autograph itself.