Rats are disgusting, so don't confuse this story as being sympathetic to the city-invading vermin. We just want to point out the double standard that exists in the rodent family when it comes to baseball and determine how far it extends.
For context: On Monday and Tuesday nights, a squirrel sprinted past the home-plate area in Minnesota and into the visiting White Sox's dugout. A Twins official told Sporting News that it's believed the same squirrel took the field both nights.
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"Not many places for it to get out," the official wrote in an e-mail, "and we couldn’t track him/her down last night."
Social media, for the most part, fawned over the little ball(s) of fur. But would it have done so for related species?
We've gotta name the squirrel at this point.
— FOX Sports North (@fsnorth) August 21, 2019
Any ideas? #MNTwins pic.twitter.com/xHmTdh7HAh
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A generic metropolis rat almost certainly would not have earned a smile from White Sox rookie Dylan Cease, nor glowing lines from prominent Twitter accounts.
Squirrels honestly have much better PR staffs than rats just imagine if a rat ran into the dugout!pic.twitter.com/gW3QJan3cw
— Sporting News MLB (@sn_mlb) August 21, 2019
But what about the other thousands of members of the greater rodent family? Could a mountain beaver (Aplodontia rufa) be considered cute if it wandered through the field? Beavers, of course, contribute to flooding in some areas due to dam destruction. What about a cape porcupine (Hystrix crassispinis) with its sharp spines, or a big pocket gopher (Orthogeomys lanius) with its lawn-eating ways?
It's unclear where the rodent cuteness ends. It is clear that squirrels have an unfair advantage.
We're going to keep talking about this issue, then, until we've ratted our last touille.