The Phillie Phanatic’s antics, at this point in the mascot’s existence, are well-known. He’s going to give opposing fans a hard time. At some point, he’s going to come out wearing a chef hat riding a hot dog cannon and shoot frankfurters at fans at Citizens Bank Park.
It’s all in good fun, except for on Monday night when the Philadelphia Phillies mascot turned that cannon on one of the team’s own fans. The Phillies hosted the St. Louis Cardinals and, as usual, the Phanatic was out doing mascot-like things. But during the hot dog cannon portion of the program, the Phanatic accidentally hit an unsuspecting fan in the face with a launched hot dog.
According to Action News reported Sarah Bloomquist, Kathy McVay was sitting behind home plate when she was blindsided by a hot dog wrapped in duct tape.
“It just came out of nowhere. And hard,” McVay told ABC6. “And then the next thing I know he shot it in our direction, and bam! It hit me like a ton of bricks. My glasses flew.”
Bloomquist later tweeted out a photo McVay shared of the result of the hot dog incident, which is pretty brutal considering the projectile in question is a soft bun and loosely-encased meats.
Coming up at 4:30 and 6 on Action News- hear from this Phillies fan injured by a hot dog fired from the Phanatic’s hot dog cannon. The @Phillies say the mascot feels terrible about it. pic.twitter.com/2kXlPAX6V3
— sarahbloomquist (@sarahbloomquist) June 20, 2018
If that doesn’t line up with your expectations of what would happen here, check out the cannon in action. It can definitely pack a punch, which it unfortunately did for McVay on Monday.
The canon did do some serious damage to McVay, who was unable to get out of the way in time for a variety of reasons.
McVay did make it clear: there was no time to get out of the way and she was unable to stop the hot dog from hitting her because of a previous injury.
On Monday night, she ended up in the emergency room for a CAT scan to make sure she didn’t suffer a concussion. She is black and blue and very sore. Her facial injury requires ice every 20 minutes.
She explained, “I have a small hematoma in my eye. And mostly, it’s going to get worse before it gets better. It’s going to go down the side of my face.”
The station reported that the Phanatic, or perhaps more accurately the human being inside the Phanatic costume, felt “terrible” about the incident. And thankfully McVay seems to be in good spirits about the incident. The Phillies offered her free tickets to another game when she’s feeling better. Hopefully she’ll take them up on the offer and the Phanatic will only target fans who make eye contact with him before firing the hot dog cannon once more.
