Everyone, Including The U.S. Military, Is Angry With MLB’s Most Famous Ball Collector

Zack Hample had his balls busted in spectacular fashion Sunday night.

Hample, who you may know as the baseball hawk willing to run through children in order to snag a piece of memorabilia he can re-sell, yet throws a fit if anyone bumps into him, let the world know that he was in attendance at the Fort Bragg game between the Braves and Marlins on Sunday night. He bragged (get it?) on Twitter about getting a ball flipped to him from Martin Prado and claimed to have hawked 11 balls in total.

The problem with this (among other things with Hample) is that the game was for military personnel and their families only. Hample did not secure his ticket this way and was instead begging for one on Twitter and through the saddest Tinder page anyone has ever swiped left.

Here are the rules to securing tickets to this game, via the MLB ticket site:

Major League Baseball’s Fort Bragg Game ticket lottery will be open 31 May 00:01 EDT through 12 June at Midnight and is open to Department of Defense ID cardholders 18 years of age and older. One entry per ID cardholder will be accepted (duplicates will be discarded). Only one winner per family will be allowed (each family member 18 and over may submit an entry). Department of Defense ID with name matching entry must be presented at the time that tickets are issued. Tickets will not be mailed, they must be picked up in person on Fort Bragg.

So Hample shouldn’t have been at this game snagging balls that could have gone to military members and had to know it, yet he did the brilliant thing of ratting himself out on Twitter.

That was just about the beginning of the end for Hample, as the backlash came from everywhere.

https://twitter.com/82ndABNDiv/status/749777155597426688

Getting the “delete your account” treatment from a verified military account stationed at the base would have been enough. Yet the response to Hample running around at this game and grabbing baseballs was negative that baseball’s other most-hated fan owned Hample on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/Marlins_Man/status/749742126662029313

Hample claimed he gained admission through a military friend, but that story rang hollow with evidence of his begging for a ticket through Tinder.

Then there were people with a real beef, those who have military ties that weren’t able to snag the ticket that Hample got via Tinder or however he got it.

https://twitter.com/OGBrianC/status/749778168349941760

But Hample, being the oblivious doofus that he is, justified his presence by saying he’s donating money to charity based on the balls he caught.

Man, if you wanted to donate $1,100, you could have done that without attending and making a spectacle of yourself. Whatever you paid for that ticket could have been put toward the donation designed to deflect attention that you couldn’t just stay away from this one game and give the people attendance the peace of mind they so richly deserve. I’d bet anything that if Prado had a chance to do it over again, he would have flipped that baseball to literally anyone else in the stadium instead of you.

But hey, it is you who should calm down.

There is even a change.org petition asking MLB commissioner Rob Manfred to ban Hample from all MLB games.

You may notice that he gave away 10 balls, but kept the 11th, presumably to re-sell it and recoup any money he donated to charity. Because hey, on this Fourth of July, we must not forget that freedom — and a ticket to a game that wasn’t for him — isn’t free.