Wiley Ballard didn’t go down swinging during Monday night’s game between the Toronto Blue Jays and Atlanta Braves.
However, the game he was involved in didn’t take place on the field at Rogers Centre, but rather up in the Corona Rooftop Patio.
Ballard, a Braves reporter for FanDuel Sports Network, was in the crowd interviewing two female fans when an interesting exchange occurred.
After introductions between Ballard and the two fans, Lauren and Kayla, the reporter asked if they came to the Patio often – Kayla said she visits once a year — and if they were Braves fans — to which she replied “not quite.”
Then, from the broadcast booth, one of the Braves announcers said: “OK, Wiley. You got five innings, four innings, to get the numbers.”
“I’m on it,” Ballard replied before pulling out his phone.
That’s when the Braves reporter got brave and asked for Kayla’s number without hesitation.
“Alright, so they want me to get your number,” Ballard said as the two men in the broadcast booth laughed.
After the fan asked, “They wanted you to get my number?” Ballard replied: “I’m dead serious, they’re saying in my ear right now. She doesn’t believe me because she thinks you guys are making this up.”
Ballard then joked that he may have found a new pick-up line.
“I might use that in the future, that’s actually a pretty good move,” he said.
Back in the booth, the announcers chimed in.
“This is unbelievable,” one said.
“The best part of this right now is that Wiley could totally be faking this,” the other joked. “This might be the new move. Just walk around with a FanDuel microphone and an ear piece in and convince fans they are actually on TV.”
When the camera cut back to Ballard and the fans from the action on the field, the woman appeared to be inserting her number into his phone.
“I should have thought of this years ago,” Ballard joked as his fellow broadcasters had a laugh.
“I got the number, we’re good,” Ballard said after being handed back his phone.
The moment went viral on social media after Miles Garrett, a reporter for Fox 5 Atlanta, posted the clip on X.
“Shoutout to my guy @wileyballard_ setting the standard for sports reporters getting a phone number out in the wild,” Garrett wrote. “10/10 work.”
As of Tuesday afternoon, the clip had been viewed almost 8 million times.
Ballard had some fun with the situation later in the evening, posting a picture from the iconic scene in Good Will Hunting in which Matt Damon’s character brags about getting a woman’s phone number.
Of course, not everyone was amused by the segment, with several people pointing out the double standard involved.
“If a woman covering a game started hitting on fans & asking for their numbers on TV they would be crucified on the internet & fired,” Kylen Mills, a broadcaster with the Big Ten Network, posted on X.
“But here you see this inappropriate behaviour being celebrated as ‘the standard’ by a slew of men in the comments. Misogyny is alive & well!”
“For the record, it’s unprofessional for anyone to do this. You’re there to report on a baseball game, sure you want to have fun, but you can’t come up with any other reports than wandering around asking women for numbers?” Mills continued in a reply to her post.
“If a female sideline/dugout reporter did this, she’d be called horrible names and probably be run out of town,” Evan Grant of the Dallas Morning News posted on X.
“On the other side, here’s a fellow TV anchor basically saying to dude who asked for phone numbers: ‘My man.’ It’s not the same for both sexes. It’s just not. And that’s inherently wrong.”