Might the social media world, incensed that an adult fan snagged a baseball obviously thrown to a little kid in the Wrigley Field crowd at Sunday's Cubs-Cardinals game, have gotten it wrong?
Chuck Mycoff says it absolutely did.
"The whole world is calling this guy the most evil guy in the world for being a ball thief," said Mycoff, who says he's the bystander (or by-sitter) with the folded arms and blue shirt next to the fan in question who grabbed the ball and handed it to the woman next to him in the damning video that's gone viral. "The fact of the matter is, he got balls for three kids.
"Television and social media read it the wrong way and made up a story. ... It's crazy. That guy helped that kid get a ball earlier and he got other kids balls."
What people who saw the video saw was a man taking a ball Cubs first base coach Will Venable clearly tossed to the kid in the too-big cap, and that can't look good.
Condemnation of the grown-up was swift, strong and unwavering, though neither he nor the child have been publicly identified.
Even as online outrage snowballed during the game, the Cubs sought a happy ending for the incident in a bid to restore friendliness to the Friendly Confines. It gave the youngster a ball signed by All-Star Javier Baez and posted a picture of him with two baseballs on its Twitter feed.
What the tweet didn't explain is from where the second ball came.
Some assumed the Cubs gave him two. Mycoff and others seated nearby tried to set the record straight on Twitter, but they didn't make much headway in countering the popular narrative.
"Here's what it was," Mycoff said by phone Monday. "In the first inning, somebody fouled a ball off the screen over the Cardinals dugout. The guy jumped up. I tried to catch it, too. He jumps up. It hits his hand and bounces right into where the tarp and the wall are, right in front of these people, where the kid is. So he calls to the dad: 'Hey! Hey, grab that ball real quick for your boy!' So the guy grabs it and gets ball for the boy."
Three innings later came the incident with Venable's toss into the stands everyone saw.
"It fell down under the seat, was down between my legs," Mycoff said. "The guy picked it up and the 12 seconds of video looks like he just callously gave it to his wife and ignored the kid. What it doesn't show is the mom had already said is: 'He's already got a ball. If we get any more, we'll given them to somebody else.' And the guy turned and handed it to his wife, who then in turn handed to a kid next to her that she didn't know. They didn't keep it."
Three innings later, according to Mycoff, the out-of-towner from South Carolina got another ball and gave it to yet another youth.
"So he gave two balls to the kids next to them that they didn't know, helped the kid in front of us get a ball and he's being made out to be a villain," Mycoff said. "He did the right thing. He gave the kids baseballs."
The counterpoint to the stream of invective toward the fan didn't gain much traction until David Kaplan of NBC Sports Chicago and WMVP-AM 1000 tweeted late Sunday night _ seven hours after the incident _ that Cubs sources told him the widely circulated video clip and subsequent media reports based on it didn't tell the full story.
"The man who grabbed the ball on the widely seen video had actually already helped the little boy get a ball earlier," Kaplan said on Twitter. "The young man has a game used ball and a Javy Baez ball. All is well. Guy is A-OK so let it go people."
Kaplan and Eddie Olczyk had Mycoff on their ESPN 1000 show Monday, but it has been difficult to reverse first impressions that already have cut a wide swath across the national consciousness.
"The original video looked terrible," Kaplan told the Tribune. "The amazing thing is we've reported all this now and there are still, I mean, tweet after tweet (saying) 'This guy only gave the kid a ball out of guilt.' He gave the kid the ball before the video was even taken. People refuse to admit it."
Mycoff, a ticket broker who provides corporate travel and hospitality to major events around the country, said he wound up at Sunday's Cubs game with his wife because his tickets went unsold. The man and woman got their tickets from some other online source and it was mere chance he was sitting next to them.
So too was what happened, if not what it looked like, which follows an all-too-familiar pattern of taking what one sees at face value and passing judgment without necessarily knowing what happened before, during or after.
"Well, I'm getting a lesson in what happens in social media," Mycoff said. "The only reason I got involved at all is because the story was so wrong."
