It’s been a while since I last went to a baseball match, but things sure have changed. During a match between the San Diego Padres and the Tampa Bay Rays recently, a spectator in the crowd managed to lose their shoe in all the commotion. In a peculiar incident caught on camera, however, folks in the crowd began passing the shoe around to drink beer from it in a sort of ritualistic manner, spurned on by chants from the throng of onlookers. The footage has since sparked disgust online from viewers due to the unsanitary nature of the strange deed.
The 35-second clip, captured by a witness in the crowd, takes place in Petco Park, the home of the San Diego Padres. In it, we see hundreds of people sat in the terraces happily enjoying watching the baseball match. Moments into the footage, however, you can see some of the spectators turning their eyes away from the match that’s in progress, and instead, staring over their shoulder behind them.
The camera then pans in to focus on a woman in a brown top and blue jeans who is stood up on her seat holding a blue running shoe in her hand. Around her, a crowd chants increasingly louder as she begins filling the show with beer from a can in her other hand. Bizarrely, the woman takes the shoe filled with beer and begins chugging it — to the merriment of the crowd of onlookers.
But it doesn’t end there, though. After she’s done downing the shoe-flavored beer, the woman throws the shoe into the crowd behind her, which another spectator — a man in a brown hoodie — catches in mid-air. Like a case of weird de ja vous, the man does the exact same thing, and fills the shoe with some beer, before downing it, sending the crowd into elated jubilation.
Social media users weren’t as impressed as the San Diego crowd, however. Instead, netizens took to the comments to air their disgust at the stomach-churning footage. One Redditor summed things up bluntly, writing, “Wtf you people are nasty af“, with another adding, “They’re all out there among us. These ones have the fungus.” A third commenter even joked, “How the infection from The Last of Us starts lol“
Hopefully, no-one became sick from the unhygienic ritual, though it’s worth noting that this is not the first time it’s happened in San Diego. In fact, one Padres fan went viral for doing a similar thing last month. According to Sandiegoville, the Padres Shoey Queen “electrified the crowd by chugging a beer from her Adidas Samba sneaker on the Jumbotron.” Here’s hoping those sneakers were clean though, right?
