PITTSBURGH -- A fan threw a battery at Pittsburgh Pirates right-fielder Dave Parker Sunday, and a visibly angered manager Chuck Tanner said the incident took the spirit from his team, which lost 5-3 to the Philadelphia Phillies after rallying to tie the game.
The loss dropped Pittsburgh to fourth place in the National League East, two games behind first-place Montreal.
'All the excitement and everything just went spppppttt!' Tanner said, making the sound commonly known as 'the raspberry.'
'It just wiped me right out. Same thing with the guys on the bench...
'There we are fighting for a pennant, playing our butts off and some jerk has to pull crap like that.'
Parker has been the target of such missiles before. During the 1979 and 1980 seasons, after he had signed a five-year, multimillion-dollar contract, spectators threw at various times a bat, a steel valve and a five-pound sack of nuts and bolts at him.
The latest incident occured in the top of the eighth inning Sunday. In the seventh, Parker had made a fielding error that helped give Philadelphia a run.
Parker brought the battery, which missed him, into the dugout but declined Tanner's offer to remove him from the game.
'If he didn't want to stay out there, I'm going to get him out of there,' Tanner said. 'But he told me, 'I'm not going to let them chase me out of this game.'
'I think it's bothering me more than it is Parker.'
Parker still gets booed occasionally, but said he had not had any problems with people throwing objects at him since mid-1980, when another battery was hurled his way.
'That's right; he hasn't had much trouble,' Tanner said. 'Some jerk had to go and start it off. Just one guy had to make trouble...
'I'll tell you something. Today's loss doesn't mean crap to me. I'm not kidding. After that crap? If we'd won, it wouldn't have meant crap either. It's enough that we're fighting for a pennant. Then we have to fight a guy like that.
'But we're still gonna win it (the National League East) in spite of all this ...'