A resurfaced clip of Ben 10 on Twitter has fans speculating if the polymorphic superhero was about to drop the N-word.

Twitter user @trapvjai recently tweeted an old clip of Cartoon Network’s Ben 10 in which they speculated that the titular character was about to call the opposing team’s pitcher the N-word.

The jest that Ben uses went like this, “We want a pitcher, not a hairy-“ before being cut off by grandpa Max, who yanks Ben bank from his forward stance and chastizes him with a stern look and growling his name with a gravelly tone.

While there are probably many variations of this phrase that make their way through various circuits of children’s baseball, the rendition that I remember being used while I was growing up was, “We want a pitcher, not a belly itcher!” Another one was, “We want a catcher, not a broken ladder!”

While I can’t speak to the broken rhyming schemes of children, there are not many other words that really fit with what Ben was going for.

Apparently in 2017, the Dodgers used the same phrase that Ben Tennyson was about to unleash on his opponent against the Cubs. The Dodgers used the same phrase from my childhood, “We want a pitcher, not a belly itcher!” but merely replaced “belly” with “hairy” to get “We want a pitcher, not a hairy itcher!”

Yeah, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me but apparently, it’s a thing even at the MLB level. At least with “belly itcher” the phrase is implying that the pitcher is performing poorly due to being distracted by itching their belly.

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With “hairy itcher” what does that mean? The person is hairy and likes to itch things. Or the person has an itchy body because of how hairy they are? How that would imply that they’re a bad pitcher, I don’t know. But maybe that’s diving too deep into the minds of 13-year-old kids.

“So I’m rewatching Ben 10 and why I come across this one episode where he was itching to call his opp a n**ger?”

However, one other detail that makes the whole situation kind of suspect is that directly after Ben is cut off, there is an arrow on someone’s t-shirt that points directly towards a black man in the stands.

This might be reading too far into things, but if we know anything about these early 2000’s cartoons, it’s that the animators packed them full of imagery that only adults would pick up on.

Either way, we’ll leave it up to you to decide.

“it’s the arrow pointing right after he said it”

https://twitter.com/allymugoo/status/1511678614223343617?s=20&t=VaFJCQ8RoNOGdJjf3_w2CA

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