For a few seconds at a San Francisco Giants game, Erika’s hands told a story.
She was carrying her baby in a carrier, balancing containers of food and making her way back to her seat. Beside her, her husband, Ramses, sat down and began eating.
The Giants broadcast cameras lingered.
Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper, the team’s veteran announcers, began narrating the scene. They dubbed Erika “mom of the year” and joked that Ramses was sitting back while she did all the work, even imagining an exchange in which he asked her for ketchup and she wanted to smack him.
Online, the moment quickly acquired a narrative of its own: Here was an overburdened mother doing everything while her husband sat back and ate.
Then the clip escaped the ballpark.
Millions of people watched. Commenters called Ramses an awful husband. Some described Erika as a “single married mom,” a phrase used online to describe women who feel they are raising children while their husbands contribute little. Others urged her to leave him, told her she deserved better and said they could see, from those few seconds, exactly what her marriage must be like.
Some strangers went further. Erika says people found her family’s names and phone numbers. Some sent Ramses messages telling him to kill himself.
There was just one problem with the story being told about the couple: Erika says it wasn’t their story.
‘Mom of the Year’ Speaks Out
In a Substack post published Sept. 25, Erika identified herself, her husband and their baby, Anastasia, and asked people to reconsider what they thought they had seen. TODAY.com has reached out to Erika and Ramses for comment.
“Before you decide what our marriage looks like, I would like you to hear from the woman you’re defending,” she wrote.
Erika said Ramses is “an amazing husband and an even better father.” The couple has been together for nine years and is raising two children under 2, she said.
The scene that viewers interpreted as evidence of an unequal marriage, she explained, began when she went to the restroom during the fifth inning.
Ramses offered to take their daughter, but Erika wanted to keep the baby with her. She also planned to change Anastasia’s diaper. While she was away, she texted Ramses a photograph of the food menu and offered to pick something up for them.
He told her to get whatever had the shortest line.
She returned with brisket sandwiches and loaded fries, her daughter still in her carrier and her hands full.
According to Erika, Ramses moved her jacket to make room for her, greeted their daughter and asked whether she wanted to eat first. She told him to go ahead. She had eaten before the game and knew he had not had a full meal that day.
He offered to take the food containers from her lap. She declined, she said, because she was comfortable holding them and wanted to keep the food off the dirty stadium floor.
Before eating, she said, he also offered to feed her and share his sandwich. She told him to enjoy his meal.
“Then he ate, as I had told him to,” she wrote.
The broadcast, however, supplied its own dialogue.
Erika said there was no argument over ketchup. She was not telling the woman sitting beside her that she wanted to hit her husband.
“I understand how it looked on television,” Erika wrote. “But we could hear each other. The announcers and audience couldn’t.”
There was also a part of the evening that no camera could have captured.
Ramses had recently lost one of his oldest friends, a talented baseball player he had known since childhood. Erika said the death had been difficult for him. There had been no formal funeral or memorial service, so she suggested that the Giants game might give him a chance to remember his friend.
She watched him texting a group chat throughout the game about their loss.
“The camera showed what I was carrying in my hands,” she wrote. “It couldn’t show what he was carrying that night.”
At first, Erika and Ramses laughed about the broadcast.
Friends and relatives began calling and texting them, and the couple found the announcers’ narration amusing because, Erika said, anyone who knew their family would recognize how far it was from reality.
Internet Reaction Goes Too Far
But as the video spread, the joke changed.
People began treating the announcers’ imaginary narration as evidence of a marriage they knew nothing about. Erika watched strangers urge her to divorce her husband, call him a deadbeat and explain to her what her relationship supposedly looked like.
The irony, she wrote, was that the man strangers were attacking was the person comforting her as the comments began to hurt.
“While strangers described how little he must care about me, he was helping me through the hurt their words have caused,” she wrote.
Erika also described a marriage in which the labor and sacrifices are not always visible.
She said there have been many times when she needed time to herself and Ramses took care of their children. They divide bedtime, change diapers, attend medical appointments, read and play with their children.
They regularly bring their children to baseball games, including Giants Opening Day, and travel each year to at least one away game with the 49er Faithful.
She said getting two young children to a game requires cooperation, patience and humor.
“That teamwork was there that night, too, even if the clip didn’t show it,” she wrote.
The experience has left Erika thinking about how quickly strangers can turn a fragment of someone’s life into a complete narrative.
She acknowledged that some people who criticized Ramses may have seen something in the video that reminded them of relationships in which they felt alone or unsupported.
But, she said, that was not her experience.
“You could see that my hands were full,” she wrote. “You couldn’t hear my husband offer to help or hear me tell him to eat. You couldn’t know that he was grieving or that I wanted to take care of him that evening.”
She directed a portion of her post toward Krukow, Kuiper and the Giants production team. Erika said she believed they meant no harm and that her husband had long listened to and admired the announcers.
In fact, she said, Ramses had been excited to email them and thank them for including his family in the broadcast.
But Erika wished they had known more about what the night meant to him before making him the punchline.
“What was a few moments of amusement on your broadcast became days of real pain for our family,” she wrote.
TODAY.com reached out to a Giants spokesperson for comment but did not receive a response.
