I have not seen any of them. I don't have a cable. But I'm curious, what was Catching Hell about?
It's about the scapegoating phenomenon in sports, and how momentous events are often pinned to single, discrete moments despite being part of a much larger whole. For example, the Red Sox 1986 World Series loss tends to be blamed on Bill Buckner's error despite numerous other misplays that inning as well as another game being played after it, which the Red Sox also lost. More centrally, it talks about the Steve Bartman incident, in which a fan interfered with a foul ball and was, at the time, blamed for the Cubs' unraveling and eventual elimination from the playoffs. Here's a video of that play.
True enough, and I like to hope that I would not only avoid a ball in play but also box out other fans. But who knows? That said, his hands were among 6 or 8 others also trying to grab for the ball, he just had the misfortune of being the one who touched it. The man who ended up actually getting the thing eventually sold it for $100,000 and laughed the incident off during the documentary, while Bartman had to be escorted home that night by a security team and have police cars parked outside his house in the weeks following it. I think one of the things that really did Bartman in, aside from the obvious, is that he was wearing those headphones. They made it look like he wasn't really paying attention or invested in the game and now here he was getting in the way of it, though he was supposedly listening to the game's radio broadcast.
I completely buy that. Radio is generally par excellence when it comes to baseball.They made it look like he wasn't really paying attention or invested in the game and now here he was getting in the way of it, though he was supposedly listening to the game's radio broadcast.