Jul 8, 2014 2 min read

If you’ve attended a Major League Baseball game any time in the last couple of years, you’re aware of the announcement beforehand urging spectators to pay attention to what’s happening on the field in case any bats get loose or liners tear into the stands.

Poor Andrew Rector. He didn’t take that announcement to heart.

In a game between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox in April, ESPN cameras caught the man in a slumber apparently so blissful that hurtling lumber or a ball landing in his lap wouldn’t have been sufficient to interrupt it. But rather than curse the fact that he ponied up for a pricey ticket to see a game at the House That Ruth Built and snoozed through a portion of it, Rector is instead suing the Yankees, ESPN and Major League Baseball for $10 million, claiming that the televised images of him with his eyes closed and his head tilted to one side have grievously damaged his reputation and inflicted emotional distress.

The complaint states, according to the Courthouse News Service, that the nationally broadcast images sparked an “unending verbal crusade against the napping plaintiff.” The suit’s writing style is “idiosyncratic,” the news service stated, which is a tactful way of saying that it reads like one of those email messages you get from the exiled nephew of the Sultan of Gunung Tabur who has $8 million he wants to deposit in your checking account. To wit, one of the passages states that “the plaintiff briefly slept off while watching the great game something or circumstance any one can easily found them self.”

A suit this frivolous is again making Rector an object of ridicule. This time, deservedly so.