Rob Dibble Spews Offensive Drivel About Female Baseball Fans

Washington Nationals broadcaster Rob Dibble saw something at Wednesday’s Nats-Marlins matchup that must have stunned him. Two women were sitting in the stands, in the best seats in the house, at a baseball game. Imagine that!

Here’s what Dibble first said about the women (transcript courtesy of Dan Steinberg’s DC Sports Bog):

“Those ladies right behind there, they haven’t stopped talking the whole game,” Rob Dibble said in the sixth inning of Wednesday night’s Nats broadcast. “They have some conversation going on. Right here,” he said, circling the offenders. “There must be a sale tomorrow going on here or something….Their husbands are going man, don’t bring your wife next time.”

Funny thing is that Dibble, who was so sure that the women must have been talking about shopping, went on and on about these female fans so much, instead of talking about the game itself. As Dan Steinberg noted, Dibble brought them up again and again, noting that — OMG — they were “eating ice cream and talking at the same time.” Right, unlike ballplayers, who chew gum or sunflower seeds, and, um, talk at the same time.

Finally, fellow broadcaster Bob Carpenter said something to Dibble about the potential offensiveness of his yakking about the female fans:

“I just got an e-mail that said there’s a lot of women who come to the games — while their husbands are the ones at home — because they love this game,” Carpenter noted, briefly touching base with the 21st century. “Tread carefully, Mr. Dibble.”

“My wife loves to come to the game, but they’re right there, still talking,” Dibble countered.

“Well, better there than the two seats behind you on an airplane on a five-hour flight,” Carpenter said.

“Yeah, that’s true,” Dibble agreed.

I’d rather sit in front of these women on a plane than hear those two yak about nothing, but that’s me.

Of course, Dibble didn’t get the hint from his cohort about his comments being over the top. He finally settled on a theory as to why these women were in the ballpark, telling Carpenter in the eighth inning:

“I was just thinking, those women, there’s a new series Real Housewives of D.C. that just came out, he said. “Maybe they’re filming an episode?”

Or maybe they’re filming an episode of “The Real Moronic Ex-Pitchers of the National League,” and Dibble was just trying to come up with something memorable for his spot in the series.

Look, I don’t know what these women were talking about, but neither does Dibble.

I also know that there have been a lot of fans acting badly at ballgames this year, doing a lot worse things than being caught on camera talking. Like the Phillies fan throwing up on a kid, the Orioles fan who ran around the field disrupting the game, the Red Sox fan who got ejected for interfering with a play, and the Astros fan who ran away from a foul ball instead of protecting a date. And they have something in common — they’re all male.

But their gender should matter as much as the gender of the fans behind home plate talking to each other and eating some ice cream. And in the Nats’ fans case, the women didn’t set out to make spectacles of themselves. No, that job went to Dibble.

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