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Comment by logicalmind | Hacker News Reader

This type of mass shaming existed before twitter. The Steve Bartman incident[0] comes to mind. The difference appears to be that it used to only be possible for such things to snowball when the media or a celebrity pushed the issue into the spotlight. Nowadays, twitter allows for quick and easy mass shaming by anyone and everyone.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Bartman_incident

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Thank you. Sometimes the leads you get here give us gems like this:

"The loose ball was snatched up by a Chicago lawyer and sold at an auction in December 2003. Grant DePorter purchased it for $113,824.16 on behalf of Harry Caray's Restaurant Group. On February 26, 2004, it was publicly detonated by special effects expert Michael Lantieri.

In 2005, the remains of the ball were used by the restaurant in a pasta sauce."

It's worth saying that this does seem to be something distinct to twitter (maybe tumblr has some elements of it). It doesn't seem to happen in the same way on facebook or less social-oriented web fora.

(That's my impression anyway; I don't have statistics)

Well, as a sometimes Cubs fan, I have to say Steve deserved what he got.

As a fellow Cubs fan, you're dead wrong.

The play Bartman disrupted didn't advance any runners. It was a foul ball. Cubs were up 3-0, with one out. Had Moises Alou caught the ball, there would have been two outs. The Marlins proceeded to score 4 runs before the second out occurred, and another 4 before the third.

Bartman didn't throw a wild pitch, or commit a fielding error, or give up 5 hits and eight runs. The Cubs did.

Yes, but all that happened after the Bartman incident. Pre Bartman, expected runs were 0.69. If Alou makes that catch, expected runs drop by over 50% to 0.33.

http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/users/brooks/public_html/feda/datas...

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