Blue Jays beer thrower turns himself in… sort of

The mystery continues in the case of the phantom Toronto Blue Jays beer thrower. The man who allegedly threw a can of beer at Baltimore Orioles outfielder Hyun Soo Kim during Tuesday night’s wild-card game has turned himself in, but the story doesn’t end there. Ken Pagan, the man in the widely released photos crowd photos taken during the beer throwing incident, emailed the Canadian Press himself with more details.

“I contacted Toronto police earlier this evening, around 7 p.m., and identified myself as the person in the photo,” Ken Pagan wrote in an email to The Canadian Press on Wednesday night, adding he “cannot say much else.”  

So the mystery of the man in the photo has been solved, but one mystery remains: did Ken Pagan actually throw the can? He told the Toronto Sun that the photos show he was clearly holding a cup and not a can, which suggests that he’s not the culprit. Other theories about the incident have sprung up on the internet (of course), including one that suggests a woman sitting near Pagan is the can-thrower.

Many Orioles players had strong reactions to the incident, but Adam Jones was, as usual, incredibly eloquent. Here’s what he said to ESPN after the game:

“Someone threw a beer down at my player,” Jones said. “That’s about as pathetic as it gets between the lines. You don’t do that. I don’t care how passionate you think you are. Yell, cuss, scream, tell us we’re horrible. We get that. We’re the opposition. We completely understand that. To throw something at a player, that’s as pathetic as it gets.”

Jones also had a pretty great response to fans who use racial slurs and call him offensive names while he’s playing:

“I’ve heard that so much while playing baseball, I don’t even care,” Jones said. “Call me what you want. We hear everything — people cussing you and flipping you off. I get it. That’s fine. We’re here to play baseball, nothing more, nothing less. And to put us in harm’s way just isn’t part of the game. It’s not part of any sport.”

 

Adam Jones is really awesome, guys.

For their part, the Blue Jays organization apologized to the Orioles and to Major League Baseball. According to their news release, they’re also going to be enacting “heightened safety measures and alcohol policies” at Rogers Centre going forward. There are no details right now on what the could include, but ESPN is reporting that banning cans is a possibility. Commissioner Rob Manfred weighed in on that issue via ESPN.

“We’ve also talked to the Blue Jays about the policies with respect to the serving of alcohol,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said. “No cans, those sorts of things, to make sure that we have as positive an environment going forward as possible.”

The next game at Rogers Center is on Sunday, Oct. 9, which should give the Blue Jays and Major League Baseball more time to work through their new, as-yet-unrevealed safety measures. And with the identity of the can-thrower still very much in question, there’s clearly more to this story than we all know.