Andrew Rector, who is suing Major League Baseball, ESPN and the Yankees for drawing unwanted attention to him while he cat-napped during a Yankees game, went on the TODAY show this morning to make sure he wouldn’t get more unwanted attention. Or something like that. It’s a funny way to stay out of the limelight, but Rector needs to make his case in the public arena if he’s going to win his $10 million suit. The Sleeping Yankees Fan, as he will long be known, has been pilloried on the Internet since his lawsuit was announced.
Rector talked with TODAY host Matt Lauer about how the game’s announcers made fun of him and his sleepy girth in front of potentially millions of viewers while he slept in the stands back on April 13. Plus they put his sleeping image on the big screen at the stadium–so that people clapped when he finally awoke. There was nothing wrong, Rector said, with his little nap and there was no reason he should have been bullied from the booth. But when Lauer said it’s not the most “well-crafted lawsuit” he’d ever seen, Rector seemed to go along with the host’s suggestion that an apology might do just as well. If so, he’d be one of the only people in the world that would trade $10 million for an apology. We’ll see.
