Watch a Ball Game, Lose Your Job

Attending baseball games for a living was a dream job for three Baltimore journalists, until they received a rude wake-up call this week. While covering a game between the Orioles and Los Angeles Angels on Wednesday, the three were informed that they were being laid off.

Three Baltimore Sun journalists learned that they were losing their jobs while they were covering a baseball game for the newspaper.

(ABC News Photo Illustration)

"They got me over the phone, while I was at the Orioles-Angels game ... It's a complete bloodletting there right now," one of the journalists, sports columnist David Steele, wrote in an e-mail to colleagues, according to Journal-isms, a column published on the Web site of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.

The three were among 61 who were laid off at the Baltimore Sun this week, which is owned by the Chicago-based Tribune Co., the media giant that filed for bankruptcy protection in December.

Renee Mutchnik, a spokeswoman for the The Baltimore Sun Media Group, said the newspaper decided to call the employees at the game Wednesday while layoff announcements were being made at the paper's newsroom.

"Rather than wait for their return to our offices, we felt it was important that they hear the announcement directly from their supervisor before possibly hearing from others," Mutchnik wrote in an e-mail to ABC News. "While certainly not our intent, we do regret that we may have added to the difficulty the layoffs had on these individuals."

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The Baltimore Sun job cut spree isn't the only cringe-worthy layoff story in the headlines: the Wisconsin State Journal reported last month that a hospital manager at Dean Health System in Madison, Wisc., violated medical protocol by pulling a nurse out of a minor surgical procedure to tell her she'd lost her job.

"Clearly there was an error in judgment on the part of the manager conducting the layoff," said Dean Health spokesman Paul Pitas in a statement to ABCNews.com.

Such errors in judgment may be occurring more frequently as the recession continues to force companies to slash jobs.

"You hear these stories and you think, 'What terrible people are doing this firing?'" said Jenny Schade, the president of JRS Consulting, a management and marketing consulting firm in Chicago, recently told ABCNews.com. "I think what it comes down to is everyone feels so uncomfortable in this situation. No one wants to fire anybody -- they feel uncomfortable so they goof up."

But experts also say that sometimes, the bosses doing the firing aren't uncomfortable -- they're just plain mean. Some ABCNews.com readers, it seems, agree with that, wholeheartedly. We recently asked readers to send us their worst firing stories. Find some of their outrageous submissions on the next page. (See tips on what to do after a dramatic layoff experience.)