MLB players occasionally encounter birds during their time on the field. Fortunately, most do not end in tragedy. Unfortunately, while warming up for his team’s game against the Athletics on Wednesday, Diamondbacks pitcher Zac Gallen’s throw to a teammate killed a bird when it crossed paths with the ball in mid-flight.
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This is not the first time a Diamondbacks pitcher has had an unfortunate encounter with a bird. Twenty-two years earlier, Randy Johnson infamously killed a dove during a spring training game against the Giants.
“In the spirit of Randy Johnson — I think you know where we’re going with this — the bird is no longer with us,” the Bally Sports broadcast noted. “I know Zac Gallen took some time to recognize that.”
In both Gallen and Johnson’s cases, the bird is tough to see until being hit by the ball, based on video recordings.
Mike Swanson, the Diamondbacks PR director at the time of Johnson’s incident — which had one-in-13 million odds of occurring according to one calculation — previously told The Athletic: “I can’t say I saw the bird, but I saw this image coming from our dugout. I had that quick thought in my brain that it better be higher than it looks, and it wasn’t. He got smoked.”
Eddie Rodriguez, then-Diamondbacks first-base coach, said he saw the bird coming across, “But I didn’t think it’d get in the way because of the action that was going on. But it just kept going and going and going. All you heard was ‘poof.'”
There have been other similar incidents on baseball fields. Former Yankee outfielder Dave Winfield killed a seagull off a warmup throw in 1983 in Toronto. Winfield was arrested for causing “unnecessary suffering of an animal” but the charges were dropped the following day.
Former Tigers catcher James McCann hit a foul ball into a bird that sat behind home plate as Detroit faced the Braves in a 2015 Grapefruit League game. The hit reportedly knocked the bird into the lap of a fan sitting below it.
In a separate winged-animal incident in the NBA, Manu Ginobili swatted a bat out of the air during a 2009 Spurs game against the Kings on Halloween.
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(Photo: Jayne Kamin-Oncea / USA Today)