Mets Fan Knocked Out By T-Shirt Missile Sues Team

QUEENS, NY — A devoted Mets fan has sued his beloved team after a T-shirt missile knocked him out of the park.

A shirt shot out of a cannon hit Alexander Swanson in the face as he stood in the Citi Field stands during the Mets' June 5 face-off with the San Francisco Giants, according to his lawyer, Dustin Levine.

The textile projectile knocked the Long Island dad unconscious and left him with possible permanent eye damage, said Levine, who filed a lawsuit on Swanson's behalf in Queens Supreme Court last week.

"He loves the Mets, but he hasn’t been back," Levine said in a phone interview. "I don’t know if he’s afraid of being at the stadium, but he’s definitely got a type of anxiety about what happened to him and he doesn’t want to be in those circumstances again."

The Mets did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Sept. 25 lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages.

Swanson was sitting in the right-field stands with his three adult children when Mets staffers came out to shower the crowd with T-shirts, Levine said. Some were tossing shirts with their hands while others were launching them into the Corona stadium's upper decks, the lawyer said.

Swanson was in the front row of his section trying to catch a souvenir when a cannon "either misfired or malfunctioned," sending a shirt straight into his right eye from about 20 feet away, Levine said.

The impact knocked Swanson unconscious and his head struck the stands' concrete steps, giving him a concussion, Levine said. His eye has a semi-detached retina that a doctor described as "hanging by a thread" that will require surgery if it fully separates, the lawyer said. He also has "floaters" in his eye and an extreme sensitivity to light, Levine said.

"Every time he opens his eye he feels like he’s under a flashlight or a lamp directly in his eyeball," Levine said.

Research has documented the dangers of air cannons like those used to fire T-shirts at sports games. They can cause "significant" injuries to the eyes, face, throat and extremities at "point blank" range, according to a 2016 West Point Military Academy study.

Swanson and other fans shouldn't have to worry about being smacked by a flying T-shirt when they go see the Mets play, Levine said.

"Most of the time you’re assuming the risk of getting hit by a baseball or a thrown bat," he said. "But you don’t assume the risk of getting hit with a projectile going at half (the speed of) a speeding bullet."