Brawl At Youth Baseball Game Sends Umpire To Hospital While Heartwarming Father & Son Among Three Arrested
A youth baseball game in Florida turned into something else entirely.
Rarely do bench-clearing brawls at youth sporting events inspire. They’re mostly an ugly part of the game that, if you're lucky, you'll never have to experience.
But there are times when the dad who takes the game way too seriously, especially at the youth level, pushes further than he ever has before and causes chaos at the field.
Before you know it, there are punches being thrown and the way too serious dad is completely out of control. There were signs and plenty of them before this.
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That's a version of what police say happened in Winter Haven, Florida on Saturday. The result was an umpire being sent to the hospital and three ending up in handcuffs.
An umpire at the Chain of Lakes Complex gave a warning to Marcos Aballi, a coach of one of the teams, reports WESH 2. That's when 38-year-old Yosmany Guzman Fernandez decided to turn the situation into a bench-clearing brawl.
His son is on the team of the coach who received the warning. He, as one does, approached the umpire's father who was sitting in the stands. There was an argument and Fernandez allegedly threw a punch.
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The umpire, who, believe it or not, this isn't his first "negative encounter" with Fernandez, left the field to break up the fight. That's when Aballi, the coach he warned, is accused of punching the umpire.
The benches cleared and, in a heartwarming twist, Fernandez's 17-year-old son (one of the players who joined the fighting) started kicking the umpire while he was on the ground, according to police.
You expect the umpire to leave the field and try to break up the fight that his dad is involved in, but you don’t expect the son of the man who started throwing punches to join the fighting side-by-side with his old man.
Okay, so maybe you do expect that. It doesn’t make it any less heartwarming. Aballi, Fernandez and his son were all placed in handcuffs.
The two older men were both charged with battery on a sports official. Fernandez faces an additional battery charge while his son earned a battery charge of his own.
Youth sports are all about family. This family is passing a legacy from one generation to another. Here's some footage of the bench-clearing brawl that brought a father and his son closer together on a Saturday evening in January.