Haliey “Hawk Tuah Girl” Welch joined the storied ranks of Yo La Tengo, Japanese Breakfast, 50 Cent, and Grimace by throwing out the ceremonial first pitch at a New York Mets game.
Welch took the mound Thursday as the Mets faced off against the Oakland Athletics, and her throw was solid. Welch knew her game, didn’t try to hurl 60 feet to home plate, tossed a strike to her friend instead, and then shared a celebratory chest bump.
It was totally innocuous, the usual stunt a baseball team will pull during the dog days of August to gin up some social media attention. And yet, nevertheless, people online (many of them dudes, obviously) lost their damn minds.
The complaints were frequently of a puritanical and/or phony high-brow bent. “Nothing says family friendly more than having the ‘hawk tuah‘ girl throw the first pitch at a Mets game,” one person wrote. “Hawk Tuah girl just threw out the first pitch at the Mets game. Society is doomed,” tweeted the main account of the once-great, now-irrelevant sports site Deadspin.
“First pitch at the Mets game… Hawk Tuah girl. Make it make sense,” wrote the perennially grumpy, right-leaning sports columnist Jason Whitlock. And one of the editors at a conservative elections blog grumbled, “So the @Mets decided to get the Hawk Tuah Girl to throw out the 1st pitch for a summer ‘camp day’ day game where the vast majority of fans are 11 year old kids at the ballpark on camp trips. Seriously what were they thinking? Be better than this.”
(To be mildly fair, it was funny the way the Mets — and some media outlets — had to dance around the fact that Welch’s fame, of course, stems from a blow-job joke. Ahead of her first pitch, she was introduced to the crowd as a “viral sensation.” And Tim Healy, the Mets beat writer for the Long Island newspaper Newsday, quipped, “Update: I am not allowed to mention in Newsday who threw out the first pitch for the Mets today.”)
But while the culture warriors may have grumbled, arguably, no one was more upset than Mets fans. Leading the charge was Sal Licata, a Mets fan and broadcaster on the NYC sports-radio station WFAN, who decried the first pitch — at an extremely high decibel — as emblematic of the terrible state of his team.
“And then you wonder why fans get so ticked off and upset?” he said. “It’s embarrassing. Is it the biggest deal in the world? No, absolutely not. Does it mean anything on the field? No. But that’s the problem. The product on the field isn’t good enough, and you come up with these silly gimmicks that are a laughingstock!”
It is true that one of the Mets’ best runs this season came after Grimace (yes, the McDonald’s mascot) threw out a first pitch in June. So perhaps there was some hope that Welch might help spark a similar winning streak. Alas, after her first pitch, the Mets proceeded to blow a five-run lead to the much-worse Athletics, which is definitely the kind of game you don’t want to be losing while holding on to the slim hope of securing a wild card playoff spot. Oh well, sucks to suck. [Ed. note: This story was written by a Phillies fan. Go Phils!]