Early this month, a cat found its way onto the baseball diamond toward the end of a Yankees-Orioles game. This is a thing cats do, apparently. In April, a scruffy gray one ran onto Coors Field during a Dodgers-Rockies game. In 2017, a feral kitten darted onto the field at Busch Stadium during a game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Kansas City Royals, just before a grand slam gave the Cardinals a victory; it was dubbed Rally Cat and later embroiled in a custody battle. In 2016, a big yellow cat crashed a game between the Cardinals and the Angels. There was the infamous Attack of the Killer Kitten in 1984, in which a gate-crashing cat bit the finger of the Seattle Kingdome groundskeeper who caught it, and, before that, the legendary Cubs-Mets Black Cat Incident of 1969, in which a black cat paced in front of the Cubs’ dugout, leading (according to some) to the Cubs’ continuing their losing streak.
But none of that detracts from this month’s drama. In the television broadcast of the game, the cat is initially just a minor distraction. The camera spots it on the field, and eventually Kevin Brown, one of the announcers, gives it an off-the-cuff, “Ah, it is New York.” When the camera returns to the pitcher, though, there is confusion: They’re just going to keep playing?
The cat is an incredible athlete. Watching it is like watching an Olympic event.
Sometimes, in a crisis, the brain can’t believe what it’s seeing and proceeds as if everything is normal. This is called “the incredulity response.” It takes a moment after the cat is spotted for attention to shift away from the manufactured stakes of the game and toward the primal stakes for the animal. As the cat tries to get its bearings, the crowd begins to cheer. When the cat jumps up onto the outfield wall, the crowd roars. In just a few moments, the cat has commanded the attention of the fans in the stands, the fans at home, the camera operators, the groundskeepers, the players, the announcers. It darts past the Orioles bullpen to a door and waits to be let out, but the man sitting behind the door does nothing, and the cat walks away in frustration. It trots along as the crowd chants: “Go, cat, go!” Groundskeepers jog impotently alongside the animal, which jumps up onto the wall again, then propels itself into the air in great vertical leaps. The crowd goes wild.

Source: New York Times

Powered by NewsAPI.org