The Baseball

by Zack Hample

  I LOVE LUCY—October 1, 1956

  (Season 6, Episode 1: “Lucy and Bob Hope”)

  THE PLOT Lucy disguises herself as a hot dog vendor at Yankee Stadium in order to get near Bob Hope, who she thinks has ignored her husband’s offer to join him in a commercial venture. With comedic insensitivity, she keeps trying to convince Hope to buy a hot dog and ultimately gets to talk to him when two hungry fans in his row call her over. Hope becomes so distracted by the transactions that he turns his attention away from the game and gets hit on the head by a foul ball.

  THE CRITIQUE Though the fan-getting-bonked-by-ball concept has become a cliché, I Love Lucy deserves credit for leading the way. The extras in this scene do a half-assed job of tracking the “flight” of the ball, the word “flight” being in quotes because the camera only shows a close-up of the spectators, and the ball has obviously been dropped from just outside the frame. The scene accurately portrays the commotion that typically occurs when a fan gets hit; the unrealistic aspect lies in Lucy’s ability to harass Hope without being stopped by stadium security. Of course, that’s what makes it funny.

  SESAME STREET—May 14, 1998

  (Season 29, Episode 3,784: “The Emperor’s Invisible Mishaps”)

  THE PLOT Mr. Johnson brings his glove to a baseball game and finds himself in the perfect seat to catch a foul ball. On three separate occasions, as he’s about to catch one that’s heading his way, he gets tackled by Grover the hot dog vendor, who’s trying to protect him. A fourth ball begins to fly toward Johnson, but he’s too busy scolding Grover to notice. It ends up hitting him on the head and bouncing into Grover’s hands.

  THE CRITIQUE This entire four-and-a-half-minute scene was done exclusively with puppets, so let’s forget the technical inaccuracies and focus on the stuff that works. Grover as a meddlesome vendor? Perfect casting. Most fans have encountered a vendor who thinks he’s bigger than the game, and Grover nails it. As for the fans in this scene, they’re aware that baseballs are flying into the stands, and they’re all trying to catch them—all except for one character who’s sleeping in the background. The reactions of the first three fans who catch balls are funny and realistic, ranging from surprised (“I got it!”) to elated (“Oh yeeeeah, baby!”) to uber-competitive (“In your face! Ha-ha-ha!! Woo!!!”). Perhaps the most unrealistic moment of this scene occurs at the end when Grover celebrates his snag—stadium employees are not allowed to keep balls—and then shouts, “Hot dogs on the house!” Fans should be so lucky.

  SEX AND THE CITY—June 6, 1999

  (Season 2, Episode 1: “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”)

  THE PLOT After Carrie’s recent breakup with her boyfriend, she and the other three main characters—Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte—attend a game at the old Yankee Stadium. Miranda, the only true baseball fan in the group, rattles off stats about the Yankees and drops a foul ball that is hit right to her. Carrie grabs the ball when it bounces under her seat and ponders her own relationship stats.

  THE CRITIQUE This scene is an embarrassment to the national pastime. For starters, Carrie and her friends are sitting well beyond foul ball range, so there’s no chance that a ball would’ve reached them in the first place. (Stock footage from their vantage point at Yankee Stadium indicates that they’re at the top of the upper deck behind the right-field foul pole, and Samantha backs this up by bitching about their sucky seats.) Secondly, after Carrie comes up with the ball, Miranda asks incredulously, “Do you know what the odds of catching a fly ball are?!” One word: duh. A baseball-savvy fan like Miranda should know the difference between a fly ball and a foul ball. (Outfielders catch fly balls. Fans catch foul balls, or at least they try, and Carrie didn’t “catch” hers. She picked it up off the ground. There’s a difference.) Third, the set doesn’t look anything like the old Yankee Stadium. The staircase is way too wide, the upper deck is not slanted nearly enough, and the puny stadium lights look like they belong on a high school football field. Fourth, Carrie is smoking a cigarette throughout the scene. Security guards at Yankee Stadium are militant about enforcing every single rule, including the smoking ban, even in the back rows of the upper deck. Fifth, Carrie and Samantha are both drinking out of big, red, frat-like plastic cups. At baseball games, beers are either served in plastic bottles or poured into clear plastic cups (and in the unlikely event that the ladies were drinking soda, it would’ve come in a tacky souvenir cup). Finally, there are general continuity errors, the most obvious being the changing position of the fans in the background. When Carrie reaches down to grab the ball, there are two kids standing right behind her, but when the camera angle switches, the kids are back in their seats in the last row. On a positive note, when Carrie briefly holds up her prize, it does appear to be an official American League ball.

  KING OF QUEENS—April 20, 2005

  (Season 7, Episode 20: “Catching Hell”)

  THE PLOT Doug gets taunted by a boy sitting near him at Shea Stadium, responds with juvenile threats, and gets scolded by the boy’s mother. Doug gets even by reaching out and snaring a foul ball right in front of the kid’s outstretched glove. He then laughs in the kid’s face, makes him cry, and gets booed by everyone in the section. And then he’s ejected from the stadium.

  THE CRITIQUE The set is realistic, and the extras do a good job of tracking the flight of the ball. Inexplicably, however (and to the dismay of many a ballhawk), the ball is fake. The camera zooms in on it as soon as Doug makes the bare-handed catch, and yes, it’s a cheap prop and not an official ball. Another baffling error is that the crowd noise shifts pointedly while the ball is in midair, starting with a typical “Ohhhh!!!” and changing to an unusually loud cheer. Overall, not bad, not great.

  THE SIMPSONS April 29, 2007

  (Season 18, Episode 18: “The Boys of Bummer”)

  THE PLOT Bart Simpson, playing shortstop for the Springfield Isotots, drops a pop-up that costs his team the Little League championship and turns the whole town against him. His mother secretly arranges for the game to be replayed in order to give him a shot at redemption. Unfortunately for Bart, who moves to third base for the makeup game, his subsequent attempts to catch the ball go awry. After flat-out dropping the first pop-up, he gets hit on the head by a line drive and watches helplessly as the next ball fatally strikes a bird. Bart then gets nailed by another liner, sees a fly ball get struck by lightning, and loses his chance to catch a foul pop-up when Homer reaches out from the stands—à la Steve Bartman—and robs him.

  THE CRITIQUE Bart is left-handed. Left-handers don’t play third base, at least not in the Major Leagues, but this is Springfield, and it’s a cartoon, so anything’s possible. Still, one must consider that if a left-hander were going to play third base, he’d have to be the best athlete on the team—or else, why bother? And yet Bart is the worst. There are other questionable details, but do they really matter? Who cares that the sky is blue when the lightning strikes, or that the police don’t chase Moe when he streaks onto the field, or that the mound becomes higher toward the end of the scene? The only issue, if judged by its real-life equivalent, is that Homer—unlike Bartman—actually catches the ball. At least the two guys look alike: Homer is sporting the same type of Walkman headphones that Bartman was famously wearing during the original incident.

  IT’S GARRY SHANDLING’S SHOW—October 1, 1986

  (Season 1, Episode 4: “Foul Ball”)

  THE PLOT Garry’s best friend Pete takes his Cub Scout pack to Dodger Stadium and gets hit in the face by a foul ball. As a result of his clumsiness, Pete gets teased by the kids and mocked by a local sportscaster who features the mishap on the evening news. Pete’s son Grant is so ashamed of his dad that he plans to withdraw from an upcoming father-and-son athletic competition—until Garry concocts a creative plan and saves the day.

  THE CRITIQUE Meh. This one-shot scene takes place on a generic set without any stadiumlike characteristics. The ball seems to come out of nowhere, as if tossed by the cameraman, and given Shand
ling’s earlier on-air joke about the show’s low budget, that might have been the case. While the kids do a decent job of reaching for the ball with their gloves, the other fans barely react; none of them flinch or attempt to snag it. Pete doesn’t flinch either, but only because he doesn’t see the ball—or does he? At the last second, he appears to lean a couple inches to his left in order to make the ball hit him squarely in the face. At least the scene is mildly amusing. As Pete frantically tilts his head back and holds his nose, Garry is standing beside him, absentmindedly combing his magnificent hair.

  ACCORDING TO JIM—September 20, 2005

  (Season 5, Episode 1: “Foul Ball”)

  THE PLOT Jim sneaks his son Kyle out of his first day of kindergarten and takes him to Wrigley Field for his first game ever. Kyle, sitting in the front row between his dad and his uncle Andy, gets hit in the face with a foul ball and ends up with a black eye. This leaves Jim with the difficult task of explaining the boy’s injury to his wife.

  THE CRITIQUE Why are the Wrigley Field ushers wearing red? Why doesn’t Kyle cry when he gets hit by the ball? Why does Andy wait 28 seconds to reveal that he snagged it? In spite of these puzzling elements, the scene is still pretty good. The extras react convincingly to the ball, and the set is extremely realistic, but then again, there’s a small and revealing mistake that proves that it is in fact just a set. (It’s the kind of detail that you’d only notice if you’re looking for mistakes and watch it 20 times, but still.) Jim’s cup of beer is sitting on top of the short wall that separates the field from the stands; when the Cubs player lunges into the crowd to try to make the catch, the beer sloshes around, but not because the cup itself gets hit. The cup moves because the wall is bumped, proving that it’s not the actual brick-and-concrete barrier at Wrigley, but rather a flimsy prop in a studio. The player, meanwhile, is wearing “19” on the back of his uniform, but in 2005 the Cub with that number was an outfielder named Matt Murton. Why is this a problem? Because Jim’s seats are near the dugout—not exactly an outfielder’s territory. One nice touch is that there are several Cardinals fans sitting in the packed stands. It almost makes you willing to overlook the fact that the ball doesn’t actually hit Kyle’s nose.

  ROOMMATES—1995

  THE PLOT Michael Holzcek, a newly orphaned five-year-old, moves to Pittsburgh to live with his feisty grandfather Rocky. They help each other cope with the loss of their loved one by spending lots of time together and attending a baseball game. Michael copes exceptionally well by scrambling for a foul ball—but just as he grabs the would-be souvenir, an older fan steps on his hand and snatches it. Rocky confronts the bully, and when the guy refuses to return the ball, the old man head-butts him and reclaims it for his grandson.

  THE CRITIQUE The scene takes place in 1963, when the Pirates played at Forbes Field. Unfortunately, it was filmed at a minor league ballpark in Indiana called Bush Stadium (oops), but everything else is solid. The pitcher looks up to follow the flight of the ball. The right fielder chases after it and ends up near the stands. The fans rise in unison, and there’s a man who alertly hustles up the steps to get as close to the ball as possible. It looks like real action at a real game. The one sketchy detail is that the ball rattles around in the crowded stands for six seconds before Michael gets his hand on it. Though not impossible, such a duration is highly unlikely.

  CSI: NY—May 11, 2005

  (Season 1, Episode 22: “The Closer”)

  THE PLOT On the same day that a prominent sports agent named Margo Trent is mysteriously struck and killed by a truck, a blue-collar Red Sox fan named Gilbert Novotny is found dead in his car at Yankee Stadium. As the investigators look for clues in these seemingly unrelated tragedies, they find a game-used baseball in Novotny’s car that has one of Trent’s hairs on it. Television footage from the game reveals the connection: the two were sitting near each other, and Novotny had bumped her while catching a foul ball. Meanwhile, Novotny’s autopsy proves he had died from internal injuries after being hit by a baseball, and a search of Trent’s apartment indicates there’d been a physical altercation; her bathroom door had been smashed by a baseball. After determining that the ball would’ve had to have been thrown more than 90 miles per hour in order to break the door, the investigators watch additional footage and spot a free-agent pitcher named Ruben DeRosa sitting between Trent and Novotny. They track him down at a tryout, see him topping out at 94 miles per hour on the radar gun, concoct a plan to obtain a sample of his DNA, and ultimately charge him with murder.

  THE CRITIQUE What’s with all these scenes being filmed at bogus locations? The game is supposed to take place at Yankee Stadium, but the establishing shot shows San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, and the episode was taped at the L.A. Coliseum. Director Emilio Estevez let some other dubious details slip through, but the plot is so clever and elaborate that they hardly matter. As it turns out, the foul ball is the murder weapon. (How cool is that?) In a misguided attempt to be funny, Novotny had leaned over and kissed DeRosa when their section was shown randomly on the JumboTron; after the game, DeRosa got his revenge by grabbing the ball from Novotny in the parking lot and firing it at his abdomen. Good detail: the stitches of the ball leave an imprint on Novotny’s skin. Bad detail: Trent’s hair, barely clinging to the ball in the car, would have flown off when the ball was thrown. Good detail: the investigator who finds the ball swabs it with a Q-Tip and says, “Mud. Delaware River mud, to be exact” (See this page). Bad detail: the ball doesn’t actually appear to have any mud on it. Good detail: the crowd’s reaction to the foul ball looks authentic. Bad detail: the foul ball is clearly animated—CGI at its worst. Good detail: the detective gets DeRosa’s DNA by entering the stands and catching a home run ball that the pitcher had rubbed with his saliva. Bad detail: the batter facing DeRosa’s mid-90s heat isn’t wearing a helmet. Good detail: none of the balls yield reliable fingerprints because of all the people who had touched them. Bad detail: the balls all have horrendously fake, non-official logos. Perhaps the goofs do matter after all, if only to the obsessive minority.

  (Photo Credit 5.1)

  CELEBRITY BALLHAWKS

  Over the years, there’ve been lots of fans who became famous for snagging baseballs at games. Here’s a smaller collection of fans who were already famous when they caught one—or at least tried.

  JERMAINE JACKSON

  Hall of Fame announcer Vin Scully has called some incredible moments during his legendary career. There was Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series, Hank Aaron’s 715th career home run in 1974, and Jermaine Jackson’s foul ball snag at Dodger Stadium in 2009. No, not the Jermaine Jackson who played five seasons in the NBA—the other Jermaine Jackson who shared lead vocals in The Jackson 5. The namesakes, however, were irrelevant to Scully, who simply remarked, “Nice catch by a fan directly behind the dugout.”

  The catch really was nice. Rafael Furcal had just lunged at a 1-2 changeup from Braves starter Jair Jurrjens and blooped it toward the outfield end of the third-base dugout. Jackson, wearing a glove on his left hand, stood up, leaned back, reached deep into the crowd, and made a backhanded stab high over his head (which he then celebrated with a series of fist pumps). But there was more to it. At the instant that he caught the ball, the man seated directly behind him was ducking for cover; Jackson saved that guy from getting hit on the head, but unfortunately robbed another fan—a young boy with a glove—in the process.

  RICKEY HENDERSON

  In 2007, four years after his Hall of Fame career ended, Rickey Henderson attended a Mets-Giants game in San Francisco and caught a foul ball in the stands. The story made national headlines because he kept the ball for himself instead of handing it to a young fan sitting nearby.

  Henderson was quoted as saying, “Everybody was asking me for the ball. I said, ‘You’re not getting this ball. I always wanted to get a foul ball. This one’s going on a shelf at home.’ ”

  Henderson made it up to the kid by autographing a different ball.


  CHARLIE SHEEN

  Charlie Sheen really likes baseballs. Four years after he spent $93,500 for a ball, he paid $6,537.50 just to try to catch one. It was April 19, 1996, the Detroit Tigers were in Anaheim, and Sheen bought 2,615 outfield seats at an Angels game to increase his odds of snagging a home run ball.

  “I didn’t want to crawl over the paying public,” he said afterward. “I wanted to avoid the violence.”

  Sheen accomplished one of his goals—he didn’t get hurt—but ultimately went home empty-handed. Still, for his determination to catch a ball, and for his willingness to make a fool of himself in the process, he deserves to be acknowledged as a “celebrity ballhawk.” (Perhaps “honorary ballhawk” or “wannabe ballhawk” would be more appropriate.)