Baseball: Royals coach feels hooligan heat

American Baseball fans are said to be gentle, fun-loving souls, as different as could be from the thugs who infest Europe's football arenas. That judgement may have to be revised after the astounding events at Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White Sox, on Thursday night.

The game between the Sox and the Kansas City Royals was winding down – a meaningless end-of-season encounter between two teams out of play-off contention in a stadium three-quarters empty. The tedium, however, was abruptly dispelled when two bare-chested spectators burst from the stands and attacked the Royals first base coach, Tom Gamboa.

"I felt like a football team had hit me from behind," Gamboa said after he had left the field for treatment while the Royals completed a 2-1 win. That he suffered only cuts and bruises was thanks only to his players, who charged en masse from the dug-out and piled on top of the assailants.

The reason for the assault was a mystery yesterday. "He flipped us off. He got what he deserved," was all one of the attackers would say. They were yesterday identified by Chicago police as a 34-year-old man and his 15-year-old son. Both face charges of aggravated battery and could serve jail or juvenile detention terms for the offence.

But they may consider themselves lucky to have avoided vigilante justice from the players. "No punishment could be stiff enough," Paul Konerko, the White Sox first baseman, said. "I wish they had left the players out there to beat on them for an hour."

The Chicago incident was not the only case of fan violence at a major sporting event in the US this week. On Monday night, police at the Washington Redskins/Philadelphia Eagles NFL game were forced to use pepperspray to control rampaging Eagles fans, thousands of whom had made the trip from Philadelphia. Some of the spray wafted down on to the Eagles players' bench, causing the game to be interrupted for eight minutes. The Redskins, who lost 37-7, probably wish it had been cancelled.