Karen Heller: Another sad episode of fans behaving badly

The Phillies are a beautiful thing, a team of considerable talent and rectitude, the latter no small achievement in the juicing-and-brawling world of professional sports.

Phillies fans? Not so much.

Philadelphia sports enthusiasts are again in the news, and not in a good way.

This time their behaving badly ended in death at a Saturday night Phillies bachelor party that went irrevocably wrong.

Brawling began at McFadden's at the ballpark, "a place to go and continue drinking once they stop selling beer in the stadium," a commenter on yelp.com proclaimed.

The fight broke out between a large bus group emanating from, I kid you not, Moe's Tavern in Fishtown and a bachelor party of eight from Lansdale.

The fracas apparently started over, and this cannot be stressed enough, a spilled beer.

In this fight, there were no winners. They are losers, all.

Once ejected from McFadden's, the marauders moved to a parking lot, where they beat to death David Sale, age 22.

Jim Groves and Charles Bowers have been charged in the death.

At age 45, Groves is old enough to know way better.

And the 35-year-old Bowers should have learned about drinking and fighting in 1993, when he was involved in a similar incident at a house party at which a fight broke out and a man was stabbed with a kitchen knife. Bowers was convicted of assault and possession of an instrument of crime in the stabbing, and in October 1995 was sentenced to 6 to 23 months in prison.

Francis Kirchner, 28, who is serving a four-year probationary sentence, surrendered to police yesterday to face the same charges. He's supposed to be undergoing anger-management counseling after pleading guilty to assault and reckless endangerment in a 2006 attack outside Moe's.

Let it be noted that more than 45,000 fans attended Saturday's game without incident. Still, this is another moment in Philadelphia's long, indelible history of sordid behavior. We are infamous for being bad, and what once seemed risible, if sometimes embarrassing, has plummeted to disgrace.

"I want the Phillies to stink and for the Iggles to be completely incompetent," says longtime fan Bob Kane, who thinks failure would alter crowd behavior. "Based on recent events, it appears that the inmates have taken over the asylum that is the Sports Complex in South Philly." Kane says he knows a thing or two about acting out: "I used to be a Teamster, for crying out loud."

I remind Kane that through seasons execrable, mediocre and, now, sublime, fans have stunk.

The 1989 Snow Ball at the Vet - behavioral disasters ought to be named like battles - resulted in Eagles patrons pelting Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson on television, establishing a national reputation as certified idiots.

At that game, the future mayor and governor, Ed Rendell, bet an inebriated mook that he couldn't hit the field with a snowball. This seemed a pretty smart wager on Rendell's part, given that the mook was part of a quartet mocking the national anthem and ridiculing fellow fans, while one of them vomited during halftime. But no. The snowball hit the feet of a ref. Rendell lost $20. The Eagles won, 20-10. The season ended 11-5. And those jerks, and by extension, you, became a league-wide joke.

The J.D. Drew Battery Debacle of 1999 created a 10-minute game delay in the eighth while fans, still smarting from Drew's not signing with the Phils two years earlier, threw D batteries and other debris at the Cardinals outfielder. The team beat St. Louis, 7-5. The Phils were 77-85 that season, third in the NL East. The fans, however, solidified their status as angry idiots.

What seems consistent is alcohol being consumed in massive quantities by jerks with a bottomless capacity for stupidity.

Instead of being a member of the wedding at his sister's nuptials, David Sale will now be the focus of a funeral.

In times like these, there may be some use in crying over spilt beer.

Around the time the guys from Fishtown and Lansdale were pummeling the living daylights out of each other, Jimmy Rollins blasted a 97 m.p.h. fastball into the right-field seats for a grand-slam homer in the sixth inning.

And while David Sale inhaled his final breaths, the Phils won over St. Louis, 14-6.