Hawk Tuah’s first pitch to a girl at a Mets game made people really angry
Haliey “Hawk Tuah Girl” Welch joins the ranks of legendary artists Yo La Tengo, Japanese Breakfast, 50 Cent and Grimace by throwing out the first pitch at a New York Mets game.
Welch was on the mound yesterday, August 15, when the Mets faced the Oakland Athletics, and her throw was solid. Welch knew her game, didn’t try to throw 20 yards to home plate, but instead threw a strike to her friend and then chest-bumped in celebration.
It was a perfectly harmless thing, the usual trick a baseball team pulls in the dog days of August to get attention on social media, and yet people online (many of them men, of course) went crazy.
The complaints often focused on a puritanical and/or falsely highbrow attitude. “Nothing is more family friendly than the Hawk Tuah girl throwing out the first pitch at a Mets game,” one person wrote. “The Hawk Tuah girl just threw out the first pitch at the Mets game. Society is doomed,” tweeted the main account of the once great, now irrelevant sports website Deadspin.
“First pitch at Mets game… Hawk Tuah Girl. Make it make sense,” wrote the perpetually grumpy, right-leaning sports columnist Jason Whitlock. And one of the editors of a conservative election blog grumbled, “So the @Mets decided to have Hawk Tuah Girl throw out the first pitch for a summer camp day game where the vast majority of fans are 11-year-old kids at the stadium on camp trips. Seriously, what were they thinking? This better be.”
(To be fair, it was funny how the Mets – and some media outlets – had to dance around the fact that Welch’s fame is, of course, due to a blowjob joke. Before her first pitch, she was introduced to the crowd as a “viral sensation.” And Tim Healy, the Mets reporter for the Long Island newspaper, Newsdayjoked: “Update: I am not allowed to mention in Newsday who threw the first pitch for the Mets today.”)
But while the culture warriors may have grumbled, perhaps no one was more upset than Mets fans. Most notably Sal Licata, a Mets fan and commentator for New York sports radio station WFAN, who denounced the first pitch – at extremely high volume – as emblematic of the terrible state of his team.
“And then you wonder why the fans are so angry and upset,” he said. “It’s embarrassing. Is this the biggest deal in the world? No, absolutely not. Does it mean anything on the field? No. But that’s the problem. The product on the field is not good enough and you come up with these silly gimmicks that are a joke!”
It’s true that one of the Mets’ best runs this season came after Grimace (yes, the McDonald’s mascot) threw out the first pitch in June, so perhaps there was hope that Welch could help spark a similar winning streak. Unfortunately, the Mets blew a five-run lead after their first pitch against the much inferior Athletics, which is definitely the kind of game you don’t want to lose while clinging to the slim hope of a wild-card playoff spot. Oh well, it’s really annoying to be annoying. (Editor’s note: This story was written by a Phillies fan. Go Phils!)
