Baseball is an outdoor sport, so players are used to dealing with all sorts of conditions. But flying fish usually is not one of them.
That all changed this weekend, however. In the sixth inning of a Nippon Professional Baseball game between the Hanshin Tigers and the Tokyo Yakult Swallows in western Japan, the players were minding their own business when a half-eaten fish suddenly fell from the sky.
The fish landed near Swallows left fielder Wladimir Balentien, who unsurprisingly reported, via the Wall Street Journal, that its smell was “unbearable.”
Balentien had good reason to carp, and umpires delayed the game as a poor bat boy was sent to the outfield to clean up the odd obstacle.
Of course, the question remains how exactly a dead fish made its way into a baseball stadium. It’s possible an unruly fan hurled it onto the field, but a spokeswoman for the Tigers said “the condition of the fish made it clear that it couldn’t have been thrown in from the stands and likely was dropped by a bird that flew over the outfield.”
We’ll likely never know the real answer to this mystery, but the Swallows apparently were undeterred by the bizarre interruption. They went on to win 5-1.
