Fan grabs Miguel Cabrera's bat out of younger fan's hand - or did he? (Video + UPDATE)

A man who attended Friday night's Texas Rangers game in Arlington appeared to forcefully pull Detroit Tigers star Miguel Cabrera's bat out of a younger fan's hand after it went flying into the stands, but maybe it wasn't how it looked.

It happened in the top of the sixth inning as Cabrera swung at the first pitch and the bat went flying into the stands on the third base side behind the Texas Rangers dugout. The bat appeared to land in the man's hands initially, but then bounced a couple of seats down to a boy who appeared to be between 10 and 12 years old.  The boy got a hand on it, but instead of letting the younger fan have it, the man appeared to grab the bat out of his hand, while a woman who sat in between them appeared to pull the younger fan's hand off the bat and push his arm away.

UPDATE: We knew there had to be more to the story than what the video showed, and now we have more background as we have been contacted by the woman in the video. We won't publish her name, but we will pass along some of her comments:

We didn't take that bat from a young child. We are not the kind of people to deprive a young person of anything such as that. The bat landed between my husband and myself. The young man did have his hand on it but quickly removed his hand....You didn't mention that we passed the bat all around us so that parents could take their children's picture with the bat. Also, several adults had their pictures taken. The young man that had his hand on the bat, the gentleman he was with took their picture along with me and the bat.

We do our best to present a story based on video evidence, but sometimes the video can be taken out of context. For what it's worth, we sincerely apologize to the couple, and we're glad they were generous enough to share their good fortune with the people around them (and wish we had video of that to pass along to give our viewers the complete picture). More importantly, we're glad that the couple was not hurt by that flying bat, as we've seen too many incidents lately in other places.



Video via MLB.com.