College baseball video's real-world backlash

As of early Monday afternoon, a YouTube video titled "the worst cheap shot you'll ever see in baseball" had received 1,035,285 page views.

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See the video from the game at sports.azcentral.com.

Fifteen minutes later, the count was up to 1,218,253.

Who knew so many people cared about a baseball game between Yavapai College and Scottsdale Community College?

Eleven days earlier, on March 29, Yavapai's Austin O'Such ran in from the outfield and blindsided Scottsdale's Jake Bamrick, who was standing on second base.

Bamrick was knocked to the ground but got up after a moment and was uninjured. O'Such was suspended the rest of the season.

The story might have ended there, had it not been for a short video clip posted to YouTube. Copies of that video were soon picked up and reposted, along with a flurry of comments blasting O'Such.

On Monday, Yavapai administrators confirmed the player had left the Prescott school. He had received threats, they said, and they had encouraged him to return to California for his safety.

Put simply, O'Such ran over Bamrick and then social media ran over O'Such.

"It's been pretty remarkable, the amount of calls and e-mails he's (O'Such) gotten threatening retaliation," Yavapai College Athletic Director Scott Farnsworth said. "And this is coming from all across the country.

"Someone posted his personal information online, and he started getting threats. We had to notify campus police, and then we told him it would probably be best if he went home and laid low for a while."

That didn't surprise Dan Gillmor, founding director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Social media, Gillmor said, often is a place where emotion gets the best of reason, and anonymity fuels callousness.

"Things can get uglier in a hurry," Gillmor said. "Remember the case of the 'Dog Poop Girl' in Korea."

In that case, Internet vigilantes identified a woman who was photographed after refusing to pick up after her dog on a Korean subway and posted details about her life and relatives. The public humiliation led her to quit college.

The consequences, Gillmor said, "went way beyond any reasonable reaction to what she'd done."

No one, including Farnsworth, will dispute that O'Such's actions in the March 29 game were egregious. As the first 25 seconds of the clip shows, things got heated between the two teams around the first-base bag.

In the clip, a Scottsdale batter bunts and takes off for first base. Bamrick, a graduate of Mesquite High School in Gilbert, is on first and runs for second.

In the following moments, a fracas appears to develop at first base, though the area is offscreen. Umpires and players from both teams converge near first base, and the umpires try to separate the two teams as Bamrick watches from second.

Behind him, O'Such sprints in from left field toward second base. He slams into Bamrick from behind, knocking him to the ground, and keeps running. Bamrick's helmet flies off.

In a later clip, he is tended to by a team trainer before getting up.

Last Saturday, Yavapai officials issued a press release saying O'Such had been suspended the rest of the season.

Reached in the Bay Area late Monday evening, O'Such told The Republic he was "very remorseful."

"I have no excuses for what I did," he said. "I want to be able to say how sorry I am. I just have to deal with the conseqences. I want to be able to play baseball again at some point in my life."

O'Such said he has deleted his social-networking accounts, including Facebook and Twitter, because of threats he has received. He also said his family has received threats through social media.

"I feel horrible about what my parents have to go through," said O'Such, who added that he will not return to Yavapai to play baseball.

O'Such also said he is working on a letter of apology he plans to send Bamrick and the Scottsdale baseball team.

"It's inexplicable to me, what he (O'Such) thought," said Farnsworth. "But you're talking about an 18-year-old who got caught up in the emotions of the game."

"He was very, very remorseful as soon as it happened," Farnsworth said. "Hopefully, the young man learned a lapse of judgment has consequences, and he can be a better person down the road."

Bamrick didn't return a message to his cellphone Monday, but his parents, Robert and Sheri, said they were satisfied with Yavapai's response.

Neither parent was at the game, which was held in Prescott. They got a call from their son after the game -- he told them he got "laid out" but was OK -- but didn't appreciate the significance of the incident until they, like millions of others, saw it online.

"We have a Google alert for Jake and anything he does in sports, and the video started popping up all over," Robert said. "We had no idea how bad it was until we saw it. It's pretty appalling."

By last weekend, the Google alert was unnecessary. The video had gone viral. It was the lead story on several websites, including Yahoo.com, and on Monday, a Google search of "Austin O'Such and baseball" produced 8,130 results.

Sheri said friends called her to tell her about the video, not knowing Jake was the player attacked.

The blowback toward O'Such was immediate and, Farnsworth said, ironic. The same people mad that O'Such attacked Bamrick were now threatening to attack him.

"We don't want anything like that to happen to the kid," Robert Bamrick said. "He just made a really bad decision. He's being held accountable. That's fine."

ASU athletic director Steve Patterson is well aware of the power social media has to inflame a story. ASU officials constantly remind their student-athletes that anything they do is just a couple of clicks from public consumption.

"They're young people, and they may not be thinking about how this could look two to three years down the road," Patterson said.

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