One of baseball’s most time-honored traditions came under fire this week after numerous fans were injured during the Oakland Athletics’ yearly “Every Fan Gets a Chair Day” promotion. This year’s incarnation ended in a tragic photo-op when Tuesday’s game with the Texas Rangers came to a stop after Texas reliever Frank Francisco hand-delivered one fan her chair at a high rate of speed, both breaking her nose and possibly damaging the highly-collectable folding chair.

This latest bloody melee to rock the Oakland Coliseum has caused some to question the wisdom of giving drunken fans and emotionally unstable ballplayers metal folding chairs in the first place, a conclusion that Oakland fan Steve Teehan feels is misguided.

“Don’t jump the gun and assume that Chair Day is a bad thing just because a bunch of people get the shit beaten out of them with chairs every year,” explained Teehan, bleeding profusely from a chair-shaped gash in his forehead. “This is tradition, and families love it. I still remember the first time my dad took me to a Chair Day game, and he got arrested for braining the pretzel vendor over an exact-change dispute. We don’t want to rob our kids of these memories just because the riot police are too lazy to do their job.”

“I have a chair from every season since the A’s moved from Philly,” bragged local packrat Lester Chumrow, who is constantly being bombarded with chair-borrowing requests every time someone he knows throws a wedding or opens an AA chapter.

“Hey, don’t sit on that!” Chumrow repeated, a variation on his near-constant mantra.

Though fans are nearly unanimous in their support for the popular promotion, some in the Oakland organization have tired of the yearly spectacle.

“You give these assholes free chairs and then nobody wants to sit in their assigned seat,” complained beer vendor Hershel Lucas, bitching profusely from the mouth. “Everybody’s got some bright idea about how they’re gonna sit in their new folding chair and block the whole aisle, or some princess wants to put his feet up. Then you get the wiseasses who stack their folding chair on top of their regular seat to get a better view, and inevitably the guy sitting behind him has to push the whole mess over the railing just to see some close play at the plate.”

In the aftermath of Tuesday’s melee, which included the first reversal of the usual fan-to-field flow of thrown chairs in recent memory, officials for both teams have sounded off on whether blame for the incident should lie with Oakland fans or the Texas pitcher Francisco.

“Actually, Athletics fans are really polite,” insisted A’s vice president of stadium operations Dave Rinetti, while ducking under a chair flung from the upper deck. After a shouted “Sorry!” echoed down from the nosebleed seats, Rinetti waved a dismissal “It’s cool” in response, smiling meekly. “You should try coming here during a Raiders game. Those animals will throw you at the chairs.”

While the Rangers have claimed that Francisco had little choice but to defend his honor from vicious Oakland hecklers when he let the chair fly, some have questioned what exactly was said to the Dominican-born pitcher, and whether it was even said by either the fan whose cranium first deflected the chair or the woman who ended up with the WWF-style rhinoplasty.

“All I heard was her yelling some shit about how Francisco had mountain goat balls,” testified Oakland fan Teresa Marks, who was seated nearby. “I don’t even know what that means, but maybe he’s sensitive about his balls or something.”

“Nah, man, I heard she said his mama was Eric Chavez’s bitch,” contradicted fellow fan Sam Wilkinson, heaving a promotional chair at a security guard. “That’s cold. I’ve definitely thrown chairs for less than that.”

Francisco, who was somehow singled out for arrest during the stadium-wide chair throwing melee, claims he yelled a fair warning of “Duck, bitch!” before hurling the chair. Rangers officials expect video footage of the incident to prove Francisco’s alibi once the case goes to trial.