"During a game in Toronto between the Blue Jays and Yankees, New York outfielder and future Hall of Famer Dave Winfield was doing the usual warm-up throws between innings. As the batter came to the plate, Winfield threw the ball toward a ballboy... but it hit a seagull instead. (The Blue Jays at the time played at Exhibition Stadium, an open-air stadium relatively close to Lake Ontario, and seagulls frequently visited the park to feast on discarded food.)
This wasn't like Randy Johnson killing a bird in mid-flight ( https://nowthisnews.com/videos/sports/remember-when-randy-johnson-killed-a-bird), this bird was a stationary target, immediately leading to speculation that Winfield had thrown at the bird on purpose.
According to the Toronto Star:
“That bird had been on the field for three innings. It was just sitting there. It kind of looked a little sickly to be honest with you. It was just moving slowly,” recalled Constable Wayne Hartery, the on-duty policeman.
Witnesses -- and there were about 37,000 of them at the ballpark -- said Winfield was between 75 and 80 feet away from the bird when he threw the ball. It bounced once and then hit the seagull in the head.
Fans booed and threw stuff at Winfield for the rest of the game; a ballboy covered the dead seagull with a towel, then carried it away. (As the incident occurred between innings, there's no film footage of it, but there is this famous picture of the bird being covered up by the ballboy: (https://media.zenfs.com/en/blogs/sptcablogs/dbird.jpegJPEG)
Meanwhile, Hartery consulted with his sergeant, and -- maybe influenced by the increasingly hostile crowd -- decided that Winfield should be arrested.
After the game ended -- the Yankees won, 3-1 -- reporters immediately surrounded Winfield and started asking questions. But they didn't ask about his two hits, his two RBIs, or his great catch during the game. Instead they asked about the dead bird.
"Sincerely, I would never hit an animal on purpose," Winfield said. "It wasn’t intentional."
The rest of the Yankees had some great quotes. "I could understand the fuss if it was a blue jay but it was just a gate-crashing seagull," Graig Nettles said.
Rich "Goose" Gossage -- both a Yankee and a bird -- stuck with Winfield. "Boy, they really hate us up here," he said when told the police were planning on arresting Winfield.
But the line of the night went to Manager Billy Martin, who was told the fans thought Winfield had targeted the bird on purpose.
"They wouldn't say that if they'd seen the throws he'd been making all year," Martin said. "It's the first time he's hit the cutoff man."
(Jeff Pinchuk, the ballboy Winfield had been throwing the ball to, said in an interview 25 years later he thought it was an accident and Winfield hadn't purposefully targeted the bird.)
Winfield was taken to a police station and charged with causing unnecessary suffering of an animal, punishable by six months in prison or a $500 fine. The Toronto Blue Jays front office paid Winfield's bail and he was released after an hour.
A week later, the charge was withdrawn.
Believe it or not, the dead bird was seized by police as evidence, then given to a professor of wildlife pathology at the University of Guelph, who performed an autopsy. Yup.
While the immediate cause of death was indeed "blunt force trauma of the baseball hitting the head," the autopsy found the bird was sick, as the constable had observed, and likely was dying anyway.
Four years later, Dave Winfield would appear on Sesame Street with Big Bird, but it wasn't to apologize about the seagull. The 6'6" Winfield talked to Big Bird about being tall.
All was forgiven between the Toronto fans and Winfield when he signed with team and led them to their first-ever World Series championship in 1992."
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