scoreboard message 

Everyone has been to a sporting event where they put messages up on the giant screen. Lately most stadiums and arenas have been taking those messages via text messages from cell phones.  I’ve been in the Hartford Civic Center and Gampel Pavilion and seen them solict for the messages.  In most cases they range from Happy Birthday to Will You Marry Me. 

Well apparently at Busch Stadium in St. Louis they took the message a little too far.  During a Cardinals-Royals game in May of 2006 a female student in a group of high school students on school field trip* decided to send a scoreboard message about one of her classmates.  The message said “(A.B.) has an STD!!  Ewww!!!”

In a lawsuit filed by the mother of the girl, only identified as “C.B.”, it says that the workers or agents of the Cardinals “approved the message to go on the board,” and it was posted during the game that drew a turnout of more than 48,000.

The suit says the teen, only identified as “A.B.”, has never had a sexually transmitted disease and that the Cardinals “published the text consciously disregarding whether the text was true or not”. 

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in St. Louis Circuit Court, claims the 17-year-old girl was so traumatized by the message last year that she stayed out of school the rest of the semester and took her finals in a school office to avoid ridicule. Not to mention the fact it will be a hell of a long time before she gets laid. 

The lawsuit seeks at least $25,000 in damages from the Cardinals, alleging the ballclub negligently failed to properly screen the messages, which fans may submit for a small fee to display on Busch Stadium’s electronic message board.

—————————————————————————————————————————

* – Since when do students get to take field trips to see major league baseball games and why didn’t they do this when I was in high school??