The Fifth Hour: The Day an Egg McMuffin Owned Mr. Met

It was a Sunday morning in August 1998 at Shea Stadium, and the New York Mets' batting practice had become a disaster. Butch Husky stepped into the cage and whiffed, then whiffed again, then kept whiffing. The team's batting practice pitcher looked less like a coach and more like the unholy offspring of Nolan Ryan, Dwight Gooden, and Tom Seaver. The entire Mets lineup was flailing. As Ben Maller stood on the field with other media members, he watched Husky storm out of the cage, furious. The problem was not a sudden collapse of talent. It was an Egg McMuffin.

The advertising sign that usually rotated between innings had been left on during batting practice, replacing the dark batter's eye in center field with a bright white-and-yellow McDonald's advertisement. The baseball kept disappearing into the breakfast menu. "The Egg McMuffin was dealing," Maller remembers. "The Egg McMuffin was stealing. It had late life on its fastball." Husky's reaction — hopping mad, ready to chew nails, demanding that a Mets PR person get stadium ops to fix the backdrop — is the core of the story Maller tells on this episode of The Fifth Hour. The sign was eventually changed back, the hitters immediately regained their ability to see the ball, and the game went on. But Maller never forgot the moment: a major league batting order rendered helpless by a fast-food advertisement.