Yasiel Puig Accidentally Knocked a Woman's Tooth Out with a Baseball

Yasiel Puig learned that no good deed goes unpunished on Monday night when his attempt to give a Dodgers fan a souvenir baseball went awry.

After catching the final out of Los Angeles’ win over the New York Yankees, Puig flipped the ball into a pack of visiting supporters in the Bronx. The end result?

This.

“I saw it coming at me and I remember thinking, ‘I don’t have a glove to catch this ball,'” Alyssa Gerharter told the Daily News. “And I think I put my hands up in front of my face. I saw it was coming at me and registered that it was coming at me, and I felt it hit me. It wasn’t so much painful as it was shock. So I felt it hit me and I could feel immediately with my tongue there’s a hole. And I looked down at my hand and saw there’s a tooth in my hand.”

It sounds like poor coordination by the paying customers is as much to blame for the tooth-freeing incident as Puig’s toss. To her credit, Gerharter seems to have a positive attitude about the whole thing.

“Everybody was going after it. And I guess we all missed,” said Gerharter, who attended the game with a group of “30 or 40” Dodgers fans based in New York. “It was so fast that I don’t think it’s anybody’s fault for not catching it. In our whole group there was only one person who had a glove. So everybody was trying to catch it with their bare hands. I caught it with my face.”

There are two important things in the aftermath of this accident. First and foremost, that the re-inserted tooth fuses with the bone and looks okay. That’s the micro. The macro is making sure one little lost tooth doesn’t inspire more adults to wear their gloves to games. Such a consequence would be flat-out tragic.

[New York Daily News]