The Loudmouth Brigade, Silenced!

Dartmouth baseball fans, notorious as the boil on the Ivy League sporting world's ass, have apparently been silenced.

The concerns stem from several incidents at Dartmouth baseball games this Saturday and Sunday against Brown. Safety and Security officers approached several students in attendance who were heckling members of the Brown baseball team from the bleachers.

Although College Proctor Harry Kinne confirmed that no students were ultimately removed from the game or asked to provide identification, several hecklers claim that they were threatened with ejection if they continued to yell at the players.

A bit of background. Every year, the season comes down to Harvard-Dartmouth. And every year, drunk, classless idiots from Hanover rain down insults about players' families, anything they can think of, in order to cheer their team to victory. Here's one example from the Dartmouth article:

[Associate Athletic Director] Austin also pointed out an incident from several years ago in which Dartmouth baseball hecklers found out that a player on an opposing team had a drug problem and made a number of references to his substance abuse over the course of the game.

"That's mean and it's targeted and it has nothing to do with the game," Austin said. Although that particular example is a clear-cut case of behavior that would not be tolerated, there are many times when there is a greater deal of ambiguity with regard to the appropriateness of the hecklers' material.

In 2002, our own Brian Fallon wrote this:

“There’s a reason why us and Princeton end up in the championship every year,” said Wahlberg, who pitched the final 5.2 innings of the series finale to clinch Harvard’s second straight Red Rolfe Division title. “We’re the better team.”

After seeing their team come within one win of playing for an Ivy title, Dartmouth’s fans might beg to differ. But they weren’t available for comment yesterday—Harvard (19-21, 11-9 Ivy) had shut them up.

With 19 hits on Sunday, the sound of the Crimson’s hitting parade drowned out the Big Green’s loudmouth brigade, whose merciless taunting of Harvard’s players had helped lift Dartmouth (17-19, 10-10) to a sweep of Saturday’s doubleheader in Hanover, N.H. Harvard coach Joe Walsh admitted that Dartmouth’s rude behavior on Saturday made yesterday’s victories all the more satisfying.

“After [Saturday’s] fiasco—we took a lot of grief from their fans—I thought the guys really wanted to win,” he said.

Apparently, Brian's writing there and in his columninadvertently gave the Dartmouth idiots a name:

The Loudmouth Brigade, a band of self-described "professional hecklers" composed largely of Dartmouth seniors, had been preparing all week, and in fact all season, for Saturday's match-up against the Princeton Tigers...

"It's not baseball when you're talking about people's mothers out there," the Harvard Crimson wrote of the hecklers in May 2003. Ironically, it was this article that gave the hecklers a name: "The Loudmouth Brigade."

Last year, the Brigade was strong even on the road,coming to O'Donnell with a new Loudmouth Brigade theme song and being generally obnoxious. But Dartmouth appears to have finally stepped in to stop the madness.

Many of the hecklers also said they fear Dartmouth will lose home-field advantage without their support, and point to Dartmouth baseball's four losses this weekend against Brown as an example of how the team can lose that advantage.

"I've even had members of the team come up to me after this weekend and ask why we weren't out there yelling," Edmonson said. "I had to tell them the answer, we were stifled by the administration in fear of getting kicked out of the game."

"I really can't begin to comprehend why the school's administration would use Safety and Security to stifle and suppress the voices of fans during baseball games," Bertran said. "Red Rolfe Field is the hardest place for opposing teams to play at because of the dedication of our fans."

So it's been figured out. Dartmouth Baseball: Absolutely ordinary when not fueled by idiot power.