Bird 'explodes' after flying in path of fastball

March 29, 2001 6:34 PM

Bird 'explodes' after flying in path of fastball FOOOMF! Don't miss the video (avi looks best) which is pretty amazing. Poor wittle birdie.
posted by amanda (21 comments total)

Ouch. Yahoo posted a photo of a smiling Giants player holding up the bird.
posted by rcade at 6:54 PM on March 29, 2001

Well... it is kinda funny.
posted by amanda at 7:16 PM on March 29, 2001

The probability of this is amazing :)
posted by pnevares at 7:17 PM on March 29, 2001

Here are two much better videos of the incident in question, in Quicktime. Both of these are direct links to Quicktime .mov files:

The whole thing, with play-by-play. 3.2 MB.

Isolated video of the explosion without sound that you can put on endless loop when your friends visit. 1.3 MB.
posted by toddshot at 7:28 PM on March 29, 2001

Oh, man. "When doves cry." That's sooo bad.

Thanks, Toddshot.
posted by amanda at 7:34 PM on March 29, 2001

So was it a ball or a strike?
posted by acridrabbit at 8:02 PM on March 29, 2001

Imagine if that ball had hit a person...a tiny, feathered, flying person. Pretty horrible.
posted by Doug at 8:09 PM on March 29, 2001

A tiny, feathered, flying person would frighten me. I would do everything in my power to hit him with a fastball.
posted by fusinski at 8:13 PM on March 29, 2001

acidrabbit: a fly ball?
posted by pnevares at 8:13 PM on March 29, 2001

Heh... Dangit, wish this was golf. The puns I could make about a birdie...
posted by SpecialK at 8:22 PM on March 29, 2001

Imagine if that tiny, feathered flying person was a scientist who had just figured out the cure for cancer but hadn't shared it with anyone.
posted by rcade at 8:35 PM on March 29, 2001

When my wife saw that on the news last night, at first she was like, Awwww. Ten seconds later she was rolling on the floor. I'm still wondering when they're going to stick strategic croquet wickets in the outfield just to make baseball a little more interesting.
posted by netbros at 8:35 PM on March 29, 2001

If he hadn't shared it with anyone, I'd wonder about his motives. Good thing he'd be dead. ;)
posted by fusinski at 8:58 PM on March 29, 2001

On the local news, they showed the clip of that poor bird getting pummeled on a loop with a voiceover that must have run 30-45 seconds. It was just "POW! [feathers] POW! [feathers] POW! [feathers]" over and over.

It reminded me of the repeated video showings on the news when the Challenger exploded or of Saturday Night Live when Buckwheat was shot. It was horrifying and magnified by the repetition -- but I just couldn't look away.
posted by bradlands at 9:04 PM on March 29, 2001

Heh. Doug and Fusinski remind me of one of my favorite Bloom County strips.

Steve Dallas, Republican realist extraordinaire, is drunk. He is confronted on the bar counter by his conscience, a six-inch-tall Steve with four wings like a dragonfly. His conscience tries to lecture him about his drinking. Steve looks around, grabs an ashtray, and crushes his conscience.

And asks for a highball.
posted by dhartung at 9:41 PM on March 29, 2001

Imagine if that ball had hit a person...a tiny, feathered, flying person. Pretty horrible.

Thank God it was just a bird.
posted by kindall at 10:03 PM on March 29, 2001

As I recall, when a batter hits a bird with a hit ball, the rulebook says he's automatically out. What happens in this case -- does the runner advance? Is it a wild pitch?
posted by dfowler at 11:34 PM on March 29, 2001

AFAIK, the batter's not immediately out on a struck bird. According to the definitions in the Rules of Baseball:

IN FLIGHT describes a batted, thrown, or pitched ball which has not yet touched the ground or some object other than a fielder.

A CATCH is the act of a fielder in getting secure possession in his hand or glove of a ball in flight and firmly holding it...

So when the ball hits the bird, it's no longer "in flight", so the fielder can't even "catch" it on the carom or the like. And there's nothing about the bird that qualifies as "interference" or otherwise make it a dead ball. So the ball should be in play off of the impact. Similarly:

A BALL is a pitch which does not enter the strike zone in flight and is not struck at by the batter...

So technically, the ball stopped being "in flight" when it hit the bird, and it never touched the strike zone "in flight", so I suppose it's at very least a ball, and should still be in play, allowing runners to advance, etc.
posted by youhas at 1:51 AM on March 30, 2001

It reminded me of the repeated video showings on the news when the Challenger exploded or of Saturday Night Live when Buckwheat was shot. It was horrifying and magnified by the repetition -- but I just couldn't look away.

Seinfeld: "Back, and to the right. Back, and to the right ..."
posted by darren at 6:37 AM on March 30, 2001

What makes it so hard to look away is that it almost doesn't look real - we're so used to video-editing and animation, I think many of us are trying to determine the "live" and the "Memorex" portion of it, even as our brain understands that it really is "real." And something about seeing the feathers blow is really...well, just weird. If one of us got hit with a ball like that, we'd drop like the proverbial rock, with no accompanying loss of fur/feathers/hair, but who knew that hitting a bird thusly would create a feather-ific explosion? Bizarre.
posted by davidmsc at 9:49 PM on March 30, 2001

Bizarre? Not really. I would imagine that the baseball is about the same size as the bird and may be a bit heavier. If you got hit that fast and that hard by something your size, you can bet that stuff might fly off of you.

By the way, Doug and Fusinski, that "little, feathered, flying person" stuff made me laugh so hard I cried.
posted by amanda at 11:21 AM on March 31, 2001