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Boy engrossed in phone saved from flying baseball bat by dad

Technically Incorrect: A boy isn't paying attention at a spring training game between the Pirates and the Braves.. Luckily for him, his dad is.

Chris Matyszczyk
2 min read

Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives.


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Look up. Look out.

Christopher Horner/Twitter

Bats fly.

Especially at baseball games when hitters sometimes swing too hard and hold on too softly.

That's the moment when you should be really paying attention.

It's the moment when one young boy at Saturday's spring training game between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Atlanta Braves in Bradenton, Florida, had his nose buried in his phone.

Extraordinary images captured by Pittsburgh Tribune-Review sports photographer Christopher Horner and posted to Twitter show a bat, which had slipped out of the Pirates' Danny Ortiz's hands, flying toward the boy's head.

They also show the adult next to him reaching out while the boy is still clutching his phone with both hands and oblivious.

The adult blocks the bat, which appears in one photo right in front of the boy's head and in another immediately behind him, having apparently spun right around him after being deflected.

Fox 4 in Florida is now reporting that the adult is the boy's dad and a local firefighter. Both will be appearing on various news programs on Monday evening and Tuesday morning.

Ortiz told the Tribune-Review that he didn't know what had happened. "I went home and my wife said to me, 'You almost killed that kid!'," he said.

Sometimes, we can laugh about what happens when people are engrossed in their phones.

They fall into mall fountains. They fall off cliffs. They plunge into Lake Michigan.

Inattention can, however, lead to serious injury and even death -- as witnesses said happened to a man who was distracted by his phone and fell off a cliff in San Diego.

Phones have become umbilically attached to their phones in modern times. In a recent Gallup poll, 41 percent of people admitted that they checked their phones a few times an hour. A translation: It's probably nearer 81 percent.

One little boy will surely be grateful that his dad's reflexes prevented his phone from becoming his least favorite object. Other than a baseball bat, that is.