Viral Phillies tweet of ball getting stolen is deeply disturbing.
At this point, you have probably seen the viral tweet from five days ago showing an old man at the Phillies game basically stealing a ball thrown by Cody Bellinger to a young fan in the outfield. The tweet itself is nearly a week old and according to the rules of the internet, it’s now considered ancient history. However, the entire situation is still weirding me out, so let’s talk about it.
This is the viral Phillies tweet:
Crossing Broad did a breakdown of the video and why everyone in it should be ashamed of themselves. There are plenty characters at play here, but my mind keeps drifting back to the decision to post the video in the first place. Instead of actually addressing the incident in person, this father has his phone out, filming his “super fan” son getting his dream stolen from him by an older Phillies fan. It’s a nightmare situation.
Your son is humiliated publicly and then you are completely unable to defend him in any meaningful way.
So the next morning, one of the first things you do is fire off a tweet of the video of that humiliation? And you tag the Phillies and the Dodgers? Now you have hundreds, possibly thousands, of random internet trolls telling your son he needs to learn how to catch, which of course, is somewhat funny but at the same time, just ridiculous in the first place.
Or in some cases telling you this will be an important life lesson.
I can Monday morning quarterback this situation all I want. I wasn’t there so I don’t know how I would have reacted any differently. There’s a ton of people in the video doing absolutely nothing and then the father doing even less by just filming the entire thing, probably foaming at the mouth to post the video. It’s almost like he was happy his son didn’t get the ball so he could post the video online showing how awful the other guy was for taking the baseball.
Even with the social media addicted society aside, if I was in the front row of a Phillies game, and my son had a ball thrown to him by Cody Bellinger after spending all night badgering him for one, I probably would have been acting as his back stop the second I saw that ball coming. You have got to put that phone down and be ready for your kid to screw up that catch. Because that’s pretty much all kids do.
Just rewatch the video and look at the Green Shirt Jackass. He knows. He lurks behind the kid. Ready for him to screw up so he can pounce.
The kid’s dad meanwhile leaves him completely isolated. Doesn’t even react to the creeping old dude. He’s too worried about catching the image, instead of catching the moment, or in this case: baseball.
The passivity of the dad in this scenario, the way he becomes a spectator in his son’s humiliation, that’s the part that weirds me out the most.
We have a very strict policy that fighting in the stands is stupid here at The Liberty Line. So don’t get the idea that I’m saying this guy should be throwing down at a Phillies game over a baseball. I’m saying he should have been on that concrete scrambling for the loose ball, or ready to snatch it after it glanced off the glove.
Then again, this guy works for Google and can probably afford to follow Cody Bellinger around from stadium to stadium until his kid succeeds at catching one of these. Who can can say who is right?
Mandatory Credit: twitter.com/etanowitz
