Back on April 13, the New York Yankees defeated the Boston Red Sox 3-2 in a somewhat exciting game that aired on ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball. Although, if you had only caught the box score the next day and especially this clip of a fan sleeping in his seat in the top of the fourth inning, you might have thought that the game was really boring, if you’re not already one of those jerks who always says that baseball is boring. It turns out that the fan in question, Andrew Robert Rector, would prefer to be left out of this and all conversations about that night’s game, because he’s suing ESPN, Major League Baseball, the Yankees, Dan Shulman and John Kruk for $10 million because Shulman and Kruk had a little fun at his expense.
Specifically, according to the New York Post’s account of Rector’s “typo-ridden suit,” Shulman and Kruk (listed as John Kruck in parts of the lawsuit) went on an “unending verbal crusade” against Rector, and he suffered “intentional infliction of emotional distress” as a result. As for the validity of Rector’s so-called suffering, the video clip in question is still available for all the world to watch on YouTube, and we can now determine whether or not Shulman and Kruk actually called him “a fatty cow that need two seats at a time.”
Aside from the chicken finger remarks, which are as tame as they come, there’s not a word about Rector’s weight or him needing two seats in that clip, so if it happened, it was conveniently edited out. Perhaps the most absurd part of George Costanza’s lawsuit is that he’s pissed that the announcers made it seem like he “neither understands nor knows anything about history and the meaning of rivalry between Red Sox and New York Yankee.” Also, he didn’t like that when the video was available on MLB.com and other sites the next day, it was apparently near a photo of two guys kissing.
Look, if insinuating that someone doesn’t know what he’s talking about is an offense punishable by civil lawsuit, I’d start suing every last commenter on this website. They’d all win, but still, it’s the principle of the matter.
