Not doing New York Yankees fans any favors reputation-wise, this guy thinks he deserves $10 million in damages from the team, Major League Baseball, ESPN, and its announcers. For falling asleep.
According to a lawsuit filed in actual court, Andrew Robert Rector, the gentleman pictured, is claiming defamation. “In the course of watching the game plaintiff napped and this opened unending verbal crusade against the napping plaintiff,” says the complaint, as reported by Courthouse News. “The defendant MLB.Com continued the onslaught to a point of comparing the plaintiff to someone of a confused state of mind, disgusted disgruntled and unintelligent and probably intellectually bankrupt individual.”
A video of the April 13 incident from MLB.com is actually pretty gentle — “Is he here alone? What’s the deal with this guy?” says the announcer. “Did he sleep through the Beltran homer?” — although the YouTube comments are more predictably vile. (Whoever wrote this thing seems to be referring to the comments … ) Of the overall sloppiness and excessive typos, Courthouse News notes, generously, “The writing style of the lawsuit is idiosyncratic.” That is one way to put it.
The false statements include but are not limited to:
“Plaintiff is unintelligent and stupid individual.
“Plaintiff is not worthy to be fan of the New York Yankee.
“Plaintiff is a fatty cow that need two seats at all time and represent symbol of failure.
“Plaintiff is a confused disgusted and socially bankrupt individual.
“Plaintiff is confused individual that neither understands nor knows anything about history and the meaning of rivalry between Red Sox and New York Yankee.
“Plaintiff is so stupid that he cannot differentiate between his house and public place by snoozing throughout the fourth inning of the Yankee game.”
“Plaintiff is so stupid that he cannot differentiate between his house and public place by snoozing throughout the fourth inning of the Yankee game.”
Legal merit aside, obviously this man’s feelings were hurt. Unfortunately, no one told him the quickest way to start another “unending verbal crusade” — according to YouTube’s stats, views on the video had all but died until today — was to file a lawsuit.
