Osprey drops fish in shallow right field, charged with error

February 25, 2019 3:08 PM

An aerial scuffle between an osprey and a bald eagle above John Sessions Stadium in Jacksonville, Florida during the 8th inning of a baseball game between the Jacksonville Dolphins and the Jacksonville State Gamecocks resulted in a fish being dropped into center right field near second base. The commentator continued to call the action even as gameplay was temporarily halted.
posted by theory (33 comments total)

Happens all the time in hockey.
posted by zamboni at 3:21 PM on February 25, 2019 [8 favorites]

Happens all the time in hockey.
posted by zamboni

😾
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:25 PM on February 25, 2019 [12 favorites]

and people say baseball is boring.
posted by dubwisened at 3:31 PM on February 25, 2019 [2 favorites]

“The windup and the two-two pitch, oh, no, sir, wait a minute! The batter is calling for time. Looks like he’s going and getting himself a new bat. And now there’s a beach ball on the field. And the ballboys are discussing which one of them’s gonna go get it.”
posted by codacorolla at 3:32 PM on February 25, 2019 [3 favorites]

hey, neither the eagle or the osprey was killed, so that's good.
posted by GuyZero at 3:36 PM on February 25, 2019 [4 favorites]

Rather than a can of corn into shallow right, it was a can of mackerel...
posted by jim in austin at 3:39 PM on February 25, 2019 [3 favorites]

But was the fish tagged out?
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:41 PM on February 25, 2019

A supercut of animal interference on MLB fields.

Warning, GuyZero's link is Randy Johnson's notorious exploding-bird pitch. (Here's the latest legal update about that, from the Onion.)
posted by lisa g at 3:43 PM on February 25, 2019 [3 favorites]

“Stevens has the fish wrapped up in a towel and he makes his way back over to the home dugout.”

I tell ya, things have gone all weird ever since CERN first fired up the Large Hadron Collider.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:02 PM on February 25, 2019 [14 favorites]

"The fish was recovered by a Dolphin"

Perfect
posted by not_the_water at 4:07 PM on February 25, 2019 [17 favorites]

I happened to be out back of my house working on my car and listening to the radio broadcast of the World Series when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit. That made for a very dramatic shift in the mood of the broadcast.
posted by jamjam at 4:31 PM on February 25, 2019 [2 favorites]

jamjam, I couldn't come up with the whole game, but this Archive link (can we just call it that, Jason?) includes about 30 seconds on either side of the quake from Jack Buck, who was on the mic for CBS radio at the time.
posted by mwhybark at 4:38 PM on February 25, 2019 [2 favorites]

This just bolsters my working thesis that bald eagles are over-hyped seagulls.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 4:42 PM on February 25, 2019 [2 favorites]

Surely not the first time somebody lost their lunch eating stadium food.
posted by darkstar at 4:47 PM on February 25, 2019 [2 favorites]

Thank you, mwhybark!
posted by jamjam at 4:53 PM on February 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

Osprey vs. bald eagle battles were commonplace next to a playing field at my college. Almost always the ospreys were bringing fish back to their nests (hence their nickname, fishhawks) when an eagle (much larger, for those who don't know) would swoop in and harass them until the osprey dropped the fish.

(It's very much akin to how fast, graceful cheetahs bring down a gazelle, and then some jerk lion or hyena runs them off it.)

TL, DR: Bald eagles are dicks. (There's a metaphor about America in there somewhere.)

PS: Ospreys are gorgeous. Another nickname for them: Masked Avenger of the Skies!
posted by martin q blank at 5:02 PM on February 25, 2019 [7 favorites]

Yep, just big seagulls:

Bald Eagles swarm the bed of a pickup truck full of fish
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 5:12 PM on February 25, 2019 [3 favorites]

Bald eagles are dicks.

To be fair, they take a lot of shit from the ravens. You can understand they might be grumpy.
posted by humboldt32 at 5:15 PM on February 25, 2019 [4 favorites]

I don't know that it's accurate to say that game play was halted. It looks to me that we're witnessing an application of the infield fish rule.
posted by rdr at 5:51 PM on February 25, 2019 [13 favorites]

To be fair, they take a lot of shit from the ravens. You can understand they might be grumpy.

Wait, are we still talking about birds?
posted by Naberius at 5:59 PM on February 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

Previously in Florida baseball games interrupted by wildlife.
posted by Daily Alice at 6:31 PM on February 25, 2019

One of the greatest Red Sox games on TV ever was the 2007 pizza-toss game. The basic facts are pretty boring and stupid - guy threw a slice of pizza at another fan, but the announcers just couldn't let it go and kept showing the toss in slow motion and from different angles, like some sort of pizza Zapruder film, while one of them, Don Orsillo, whom NESN stupidly fired and who is now in SD, had trouble just keeping things together.
posted by adamg at 6:59 PM on February 25, 2019 [13 favorites]

Oh, man. That pizza game gets me every time.
posted by slkinsey at 7:51 PM on February 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

Yep, bald eagles are assholes. They’re just majestic sea gulls really.
posted by photoslob at 7:57 PM on February 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

In the halcyon days of my childhood, a favorite rite of spring was listening to Tigers radio announcers Ernie Harwell and Paul Carey liven up the team's Grapefruit League games by describing the osprey nests adorning the light towers at Joker Marchant Stadium in Lakeland. I still tend to think of ospreys as "baseball birds".
posted by non canadian guy at 8:01 PM on February 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

Eagle Steals Fish from Fisherman.
posted by Pendragon at 12:22 AM on February 26, 2019

I love how on-task the commentator is. Like, "I will tell you where the object is on the field. I will tell you who is moving towards it. I will tell you who's carrying it, what they're carrying it in, and where they're going with it. Currently the object is a fish and not a baseball, but that does not fundamentally change my mission."
posted by nebulawindphone at 4:59 AM on February 26, 2019 [10 favorites]

It's nice that the announcer didn’t flounder in the moment.
posted by nubs at 5:22 AM on February 26, 2019 [6 favorites]

As someone who grew up in Jacksonville, I can tell you that this was probably only the 100th weirdest thing to happen in town on that day.
posted by Optamystic at 6:15 AM on February 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

Can anyone help me workshop a killer 20,000 Leagues of Their Own joke here please?
posted by Molesome at 8:08 AM on February 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

Adamg, thank you so much for the pizza link, I am dying of laughter
posted by scruffy-looking nerfherder at 8:19 AM on February 26, 2019

Earthquake World Series Broadcast first 6 minutes. Featuring a James Taylor song that features prominently in my personal favorites playlist ever since I discovered it from the same video. Something about how sweet and beautiful that song is, along with the sweet innocence of baseball, and the viewer is lulled into the pregame baseball rituals of reviewing lineups and key plays from previous games. Then, suddenly, video and audio breaks up, and the last thing you hear for a while is "we are having an earthquake".

When the audio comes back, wow, that crowd noise! It sounds like cheering, and maybe it is? Were people excited to be alive even? To have shared that common experience? Among the crowd noise do I hear crying?

And then the announcers are... enthusiastic?

Wikipedia rundown of the World Series earthquake

And then the tagline of the youtube video, "So what does it take to shut Tim McCarver up? An earthquake."

I love you all so much :)
posted by joecacti at 9:43 AM on February 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

The Pepsi Fan of The Game is the guy beaned by a pizza. It reminds me of (the original) "Pizzagate" when an Arsenal player threw a pizza at Alex Ferguson. Soup was also involved, IIRC.
posted by Brocktoon at 2:37 PM on February 26, 2019