Man who fell asleep at baseball game sues Yankees, MLB, and ESPN for $10 million

Man who fell asleep at baseball game sues Yankees, MLB, and ESPN for $10 million
(Image credit: YouTube.com/MLB)

A man who who was caught on camera snoozing away during a New York Yankees/Boston Red Sox game is suing the Yankees, Major League Baseball, ESPN, and announcers Dan Shulman and John Kruk for $10 million, citing defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Andrew Rector somehow managed to do the impossible during the April 13 game: he fell asleep in the middle of it while sitting in an uncomfortable seat. Once the announcers saw Rector napping in the stands, they started to talk about him, wondering if he was alone or with the person next to him ("maybe that's his buddy and he likes him a lot better when he's asleep"). Rector claims in his lawsuit that this was just the beginning of a "verbal crusade" and "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."

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.