I came close to catching a foul ball at a Major League Baseball game once in my life. I was out on that right field porch at Oriole Park at Camden Yards and Brady Anderson hit it right to me. My Dad was standing next to me, so he reached up as much as he could to catch it. The ball fell into his glove, and before he could hit the ground somebody blindsided him from the left, knocked him to the ground and took the ball. I was heartbroken (a regular feeling for both the Orioles and Brady Anderson), but at no point did Brady Anderson stop playing baseball to console me and give me a new ball.
Unfortunately I was not a kid in 2011.
Here’s a bootlegged clip from last night’s San Francisco Giants game featuring a kid getting super upset about not catching a foul ball he didn’t even try to catch. He pouts dramatically, and after the announcers laugh at him for a few minutes (calling him everything from Will Clark to Ralphie from A Christmas Story) somebody from the Giants heads up and hands him his own foul ball.
You can watch a full, high quality version of the pouting here. My adult instincts want to say “aw, good for him”, but every bone in my human body is screaming NO, DON’T GIVE HIM A BALL, HE DIDN’T CATCH IT, HE DIDN’T EVEN TRY, HE WAS JUST JEALOUS OF SOMEBODY ELSE. IF THIS WAS THE BIBLE HE WOULD LEARN HIS LESSON. But this is not the Bible, it is San Francisco, so now he’s going to tell people he “caught a foul ball at a Giants game” for the rest of his life and bitch a fit when he doesn’t get what he wants. Life sucks for making me feel so much like Hank Hill.