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    Pittsburgh Pirates fan jumps in Allegheny River to grab foul ball, is taking this no-ballpark thing pretty hard

    August 19, 2020

    If you’re a fan of catching dingers and pop ups and foul backs—if you pick your seats based on your DH’s launch angle and bring your glove to the game as a grown ass man—then this next video is going to make a lot of sense to you. In the second inning of Tuesday’s Pirates-Indians game at PNC Park, Gregory Polanco fouled a pitch into the nearby Allegheny River, a soupy urban waterway you wouldn’t want to get splashed with let alone take a dip in. But for one brave Pirates fan who has clearly never drank from a bad ‘Oregon Trail’ watering hole and died of dysentery just east of Boise, the temptation of a bobbing baseball was simply too much to resist, kicking off his shirt, shoes, and socks before taking the fateful plunge.

    If this vaguely reminds you of your dog when you pull out its slobbery old tennis ball, then we’re pretty much on the same page here. That said, you can hardly fault the man. We’re all missing ballparks right now. We’re missing drinking overpriced beers, cracking peanut shells all over the damn place, and leaping out of our seats for every routine fly-out to center. If a major-league baseball suddenly dropped in front of us right now, we’d probably take off running like Fido too.

    The best part of the video, however, has to be the two random guys who appear out of nowhere on their bikes as soon as our hero emerges from the water to give the intrepid baseball hunters their well-deserved daps. Never let anyone tell you Pittsburgh is a football town.

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