The young baseball fan who had his ball ‘stolen’ by a woman has shared a heartbreaking response.
With a number of similar sports events seeming to kick off recently, Lincoln Feltwell was one of the latest to go viral for missing out on a memento.
A clip from the Philadelphia Phillies vs Miami Marlins game on Friday (5 September) started doing the rounds as it showed fans scrambling for Harrison Bader’s home run ball.
Even if you’ve not been to watch baseball before, you’ll know that if the ball gets sent into the crowd, whoever catches it gets to keep it. But that wasn’t quite what happened in this case as two people attempted to claim it.
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And attending the game just before his 10th birthday, Lincoln’s dad, Drew, seemed to get there first and grabbed the ball.
However, he explained to NBC10 that the woman ‘in the seat behind’ claimed it was hers as she was filmed confronting the man.
“I jumped out of my skin, and I was like, you know, like ‘Why are you here?’ you know, ‘Go away.’ And she’s like, ‘That’s my ball! You stole out of - those are from our seats,’” Drew said.
“And I said, ‘There was nobody in that seat,’ you know. She said, ‘That’s from where we were sitting,’ and she just went on and on.”
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In the end, he decided to hand the ball over to her in order to show his son ‘how to de-escalate the situation’.
Lincoln has now admitted that he ‘wasn’t very happy’ that they had to hand over the ball.
“But we can’t win,” the young lad added. “She was gonna get it anyways.”
With fans quickly booing the woman as she claimed the ball and stuck up her fingers to swear at the crowd, she’s faced a lot of backlash on social media.
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She has not yet publicly addressed the situation or been identified.
And things didn’t exactly go too badly for Lincoln in the end anyway, as the Phillies reached out to him.
Taking to X, the team shared that the birthday boy had been presented with a goodie bag and a signed baseball bat by Bader.
“I wish I had the ball for my son to put in his room next to the bat, but if I had the ball, I probably wouldn’t have gotten the bat, so it worked out fine,” Drew added.
Jess Battison