Police may have wrong man in beer-can throwing incident

Hyun Soo Kim #25 of the Baltimore Orioles and Adam Jones #10 react in the seventh inning after a fan threw a beverage onto the field during the American League Wild Card game against the Toronto Blue Jays at Rogers Centre on October 4, 2016 in Toronto, Canada.  (Photo by Tom Szczerbowski/Getty Images)

It was a shocking moment the other night when someone threw a can of beer at an outfielder for the Baltimore Orioles, just as he was about to make a catch on a deep fly in the wild card play-in game.

It was sadly typical of the fans of the Toronto Blue Jays, who have a history of throwing cans of beer on the field and each other, particularly in the postseason.

Who did it? Deadspin pulled out all the stops in its search — because none of the fans surrounding the ne’er-do-well would point him out (you knew it had to be a guy). It came up empty.

But Toronto police, having also scoured all the videos, say they’ve got their man.

This guy.

Photo: Toronto Police Service.

The police asked the public to help ID him and The Canadian Press says Ken Pagan e-mailed the news service and said it’s him.

Pagan is a sports journalist for the Toronto Sun, which had offered $1,000 for the beer-thrower’s capture. Embarrassing.

But Pagan, who is to turn himself in today, says he didn’t do it. He’s got some evidence, Huffington Post Canada says. He was shown earlier drinking beer out of a cup, not a can.

Others suggest it was a woman.

You can see Pagan in this tweet from photographer Frank Gunn. He was discounted from suspicion in the Deadspin Zapruder-like analysis of the evidence.

It seems clear the person who threw it, is ducking down.

It also seems clear that if Pagan didn’t throw the can of beer, he — like the rest of the people in the photo above — could’ve pointed out who did.

Meanwhile, a group of Toronto fans — we’ll just refer to them as “real baseball fans”, thank you very much — bought an ad on Facebook to apologize to their counterparts in Baltimore.

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