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White Sox Tue May 27 2014
A Quick Defense of the Bat Guy
This video clip of a guy cowering away from a bat flung by Tyler Flowers during yesterday's White Sox game, and then a woman reaching over and calmly snagging the bat, has been everywhere on the internet since yesterday.
Everyone's laughing at the guy, snickering away because he's presumably been emasculated, and everyone's lauding the woman because she's a hero and whatnot (the catch prevented a kid behind them from getting hit, so that was good).
Let me give the quickest and most reasonable defense of the guy.
1. There's no one in front of the man I will call Bat Guy. Open space galore. And that bat is coming right for him. It's not like he's had ample time to prepare for a freaking bat whizzing at his head, thrown by what might be the physically strongest player on the Sox. The duck is natural instinct, and everyone would do just what he did.
2. The Bat Guy's body was basically shielding the woman! Even if she didn't grab the bat, the bat would have either flew past them or it would have hit Bat Guy. The woman's chances of getting hit with the bat were significantly lower than Bat Guy's were.
Let's say the bat was coming at both of them squarely, head-on. I say they both shrink away in that situation (like any person in that situation), and I'd bet every penny I could conjure up that I'd be right.
To me, this just goes back to the snarky, laugh-at-everyone culture the internet has fostered. Not that this is a new notion -- people have chortled at other people who were in a tough-but-not-life-threatening bind since the dawn of man, in a "I'm glad I'm not that guy! LULZ!" kind of way -- but the internet really gives everyone who wants to laugh at Bat Guy a platform to do so, and it publicly shames Bat Guy worse than he would have gotten a half century ago.
My heart goes out to this poor guy. I guess my two silver linings to Bat Guy are that a) he had phenomenal seats that most people couldn't regularly afford and b) he still has his health.
Matt Maldre / May 27, 2014 10:08 PM
Good point about having seats most people couldn't afford. What inning was this? Many of the seats around them are empty.