It wasn’t just one tossed beer that worried Baltimore Orioles centre fielder Chris Dickerson during Thursday night’s lose to the Blue Jays.

He was worried about how the crowd at the Rogers Centre might respond, calling it an “aggressive atmosphere” on Thursday.

“There’s always the potential for a complete outbreak,” Dickerson said Friday afternoon.

“It becomes a very dangerous situation for players.”

The fan threw the beer after Orioles left fielder Nate McLouth went over the wall in left field to catch a Colby Rasmus hit during the sixth inning of Thursday night’s game. Security tossed the fan from the game.

“It was not too far behind me because I heard it hit, but it didn’t hit me at all,” McLouth said Friday.

“I wasn’t particularly excited about it,” Dickerson added. “We just had a guy go over the wall and make an incredible effort and now he’s getting stuff hurled at him.”

It’s a situation venues like the Rogers Centre could avoid if the stadium stopped selling beer in cans, crowd management expert Paul Wertheimer says.

When someone tosses something on to the field, it “encourages people who are not using the best logic to do something they wouldn’t normally do,” says Wertheimer, who runs Crowd Management Strategies in Los Angeles.

“The responsible venues remove that possibility.”

Mario Coutinho, vice-president of stadium operations and security for the Jays, says the stadium decided to stick with beer in cans “to both enhance customer experience and to minimize the environmental impact of using two containers for a single beverage.”

“We will continue to review this and other policies to continue to provide a safe and enjoyable experience for all concerned,” he added.

It’s not the first time an athlete has had to dodge a flying brew in Toronto.

Most notably, a fan tossed a beer at soccer superstar David Beckham last year.

And with the price of a tallboy up at the Rogers Centre, tossing a beer is not only dangerous, but expensive too.

“I’ve never seen a Canadian waste a beer in my life,” McLouth joked. “That was the most surprising thing to me.”

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