Hundred-loss Royals bring out boo-birds ... but fans should heckle with care

We asked a security guard at Kauffman Stadium what a heckler had to do to get ejected from the ballpark. He said two things would do the trick:

1) Use of profanity

2) Blocking the view of others

When the security guard was asked how often alcohol was involved with such incidents, he said 99.9 percent of the time.

If you have one too many, then decide to stand up and drop an F-bomb on a player, it probably won’t be long before someone from security shows up to take care of the problem.

Here’s another thing worth thinking about:

Most of the time, security knows there’s a problem because someone seated near a heckler has contacted an usher to ask for help. You might think everyone around you is enjoying your wit, but that’s probably not the case.

Friends and family

Every night, players leave tickets for their friends and family. Generally speaking, those people are seated together.

When you decide to yell insults at a player, know that you might be doing it in front of that player’s wife, sister, brother, mom or dad. Or worse, his kids. However poorly a player performs, do you really want to force his wife to explain to a 6-year-old why the drunk guy two rows over hates daddy?

Say it to my face

Ever met a big-league ballplayer? You might be surprised just how big those big-league ballplayers are.

Hunter Dozier is 6-foot-4 and weighs 220 pounds. Lucas Duda is 6-4 and weighs 255. Brandon Maurer is 6-5, 225.

Even Danny Duffy — who does not look that big on TV — is 6-3 and 205.

If you met those guys on the street, you probably wouldn’t insult them face-to-face. The only reason some feel free to insult them from the safety of the stands is because they think that player can’t or won’t respond.

Every once in a while, a player does get into it with a fan. It’s probably good to remember that those confrontations rarely end well for the guy who isn’t a professional athlete.

C’mon, they’re rich

A lot of people who say they love baseball seem to resent the people who play it. And if you’re jealous of someone else’s good fortune, taunting that person might feel satisfying.

But even if every big-league player wound up living on his own island with a supermodel wife, would that make it OK to berate them?

If you said yes, think about this:

Compared to much of the world, many Americans are rich. Owning a car and a TV and having enough food to eat and clean water to drink is a dream beyond many people’s reach.

If it’s OK for everyday Americans to heckle millionaire ballplayers, by the same logic it should be OK for someone from a poverty-stricken country to heckle everyday Americans.

Imagine someone sitting next to your cubicle chanting your name sing-song style — Bri-an, Bri-an, Bri-an — while you try to close that big sale over the phone.

Big-leaguers are good

A reporter who covered the NBA once said that if you took the worst player in the league and put him in a pickup game, fans who watched him play would think he was one of the greatest basketball players of all time.

To get even one minute of playing time in the NBA, a basketball player has to be pretty damn good. The same goes for big-league baseball players.

By the time a ballplayer arrives in the big leagues, he’s probably succeeded at the high school, college and minor-league levels. Being an exceptional ballplayer who only had a short big-league career isn’t the same as stinking.

Yost on Royals fans

Heckling usually gets worse when a team is losing, but Royals manager Ned Yost recently said the Kansas City fans have been terrific this season.

Yost admits he hears occasional booing, but he says that if the Royals were based in some other cities, the fan response would be brutal. (He also thinks the Royals have earned some patience.)

Yost said he understood why, before the Royals’ relatively recent run of success, fans might not have believed anything the team said. Now, though, he thinks fans should have faith that the club’s officials know what it takes to succeed and are working hard to put together another winning team.

If you’re still determined to go out to the game and heckle the ballplayers, you’ve got the right to do so, as long as you don’t cuss or block others’ view.

That still doesn’t make it right.