Watch: Pirates fan jumps into river during Indians game to get foul ball

Pittsburgh Pirates fan jumps into the Allegheny River during the second inning to get a foul ball during the first game of the Cleveland Indians series.

It’s official, Pittsburgh has some weird fans. The Cleveland Indians began their series with the Pirates in Pittsburgh on Tuesday. The Indians (13-9) have three games in Pittsburgh (4-14) before moving back home for series against the Detroit Tigers and the Minnesota Twins. During the bottom portion of the second inning, Gregory Polanco came up to the plate and worked his way into a 2-1 count. Carlos Carrasco, the game’s starting pitcher, then threw one that Polanco hit along the foul line and out of PNC Park.

PNC Park resides just next to the Allegheny River.

That’s when an unnamed Pittsburgh Pirates fan jumped into the Allegheny River to grab the foul ball hit by Planco off of Carrasco. The gentlemen luckily didn’t strip down all the way before hopping in to get his free souvenir. Luckily for him, there were two other men there to help pull the man out of the river.

Once the most polluted river in the state, recent years has seen the river get cleaned up after years of illegal dumping and fracking runoff. The river was named the 2019 River of the Year for the state of Pennsylvania. So all things considered, the wet fan doesn’t have to worry about emerging from the river with a third arm or third eye.

While it’s never advisable to leap into a body of water, doing so to get a free baseball, that didn’t even count towards the outcome the of game is one of the silliest and most boneheaded things fans can do.

Fans in San Francisco at least rent canoes when they patrol McCovey’s Cove. You don’t see them swimming around in the ocean to get balls. Granted when that became a popular trend, they had Barry Bonds hitting home runs into the cove on a regular basis.

Let’s just hope people don’t make a trend of this.