Sports photographer Christopher Horne shared two images from an Orlando baseball game on his microblog on March 7. The images showed a man preventing a youngster from being hit by a baseball bat. Over 2,000 people retweeted the images within a short period of time, while Western media sources ran news pieces with headlines like “Father saves son from baseball bat hit.”
Later it was discovered that Sean Cunningham and his son Landon were the story’s major protagonists. Sean, a firefighter by profession, used to play baseball in his younger years. He reacted quickly, shielding the boy’s face from the force of the blow. Landon, who was eight years old, was going to his first professional baseball game as a birthday present.
During the game, a member of the Pittsburgh Pirates team let go of his bat, which went in the direction of the audience. Landon was preoccupied with his phone at the time, attempting to send his mother a Facebook snapshot of the game.
Following the incident, Sean Cunningham was invited to appear on numerous television programs, and online users edited several of his photos.
It has happened before during a game when a player’s bat flew out of his or her hands and toward spectators or other athletes. These circumstances lead fresh collections of baseball-related photo alterations and regional memes to appear on occasion.
