This Minor League Baseball Player Followed the ‘South Park’ Method for Getting Out of Playing Baseball

A minor league catcher formerly in the Minnesota Twins organization lost his spot on the single-A affiliate Fort Myers Mighty Mussels after the team caught him helping opposing batters to eliminate his club from postseason contention. I guess his father wasn’t ready to fight Bat Dad. 

Right now, the baseball world is alight with debate over why 21-year-old Derek Bender destroyed his baseball career by tipping off pitches to opposing batters during Mighty Mussels games. Bender, whom the Twins drafted in the sixth round earlier this year, assisted in ending his team’s playoff push by telling his opponents which pitch was coming their way after allegedly telling his teammates that he “wanted the season to be over,” according to the ESPN story about the scandal, sparking concerns about the player’s mental health and opening the door for rampant speculation about possible betting implications at play in the ugly incident.

Surprisingly few baseball fans seem to be taking Bender’s self-professed motives at face value, choosing instead to take the conspiracy route and blame betting companies like FanDuel and DraftKings for possibly inspiring Bender to take a dive and a payday. However, South Park viewers know that Bender’s purported rationale is as simple as it is believable — maybe he was just soooo bored.

In the 2005 South Park episode “The Losing Edge,” the boys suffer through an entire season of Little League baseball before learning that they’ll have to compete in a single elimination playoff tournament to determine which Colorado team will waste the rest of their summer playing on the national circuit. The South Park team suffers a series of devastating victories, failing to eliminate themselves against teams more talented at intentional losing, and all hope seems to be lost in the final game of the season. 

Thankfully, Randy Marsh’s habit of starting fights with the other dads in the stands helps both teams in the finals earn a disqualification after he beats down the infamous, belligerent and obese Tom Nelson, better known as “Bat Dad,” in an embarrassing and hilarious brawl that is still the funniest fight in South Park history.

Bender’s father apparently doesn’t go on benders like Randy, and the Twins organization doesn’t take kindly to its players deliberately tanking games to avoid playing even more baseball in the postseason. We hope that there isn’t some darker reason behind Bender throwing games, not just because it’s so much funnier if this scandal is a literal South Park episode come to life, but because we’d feel bad about making so many South Park jokes about the whole story if it turns out Bender’s in a bad place, either in his mental health or betting-wise. 

Not that some sad turn to the story would exactly force us to stop making South Park references — after all, this is America.