It’s hard to know who kept their cool better – Dad or the baby. Baseball fan Keith Hartley became an overnight sensation when he casually stuck his arm out and caught a flying ball at a Cubs game in Chicago, and all the while he was cradling his baby son with his other arm – and the little guy never stopped feeding.
A video of the catch – and the reaching Dodgers fielder he deprived of the ball by a whisker – promptly went viral.
“It was just floating in my direction, so I decided to reach my hand out and just catch it,” Hartley told the Guardian on Wednesday morning.
He made a clean, apparently effortless catch and held the ball up then gestured towards the baby in triumph as spectators nearby gasped, then cheered and patted him on the back, followed by much high-fiving.
Hartley, 29, a Chicago native, was at the Chicago Cubs game with his wife, Kari, also 29 and originally from Vancouver, and some friends.
“I’m pretty confident of my catching ability. It was a difficult catch, but they say when you are good at something it looks easy,” he said.
Hartley said he had been a little nervous when he found they were in the first row after they were given two tickets to the game as a last-minute gift, and he and Kari couldn’t find a babysitter so decided to take their only child, Isaac, who is seven months old, with them.
“We didn’t realize we were going to be quite that close to the field. If it’s the first row behind the netting, it’s no big deal, but first row by the first base line, you are in the zone for foul balls, so I was paying close attention for flying balls or bats the whole time,” he said.
Friends from out of town who accompanied them to the game at Wrigley Field had gone to get some food at the crucial moment, so they missed the dramatic event.
But wife Kari was sitting right next to her husband.
She is still nursing Isaac, Hartley explained, but because they were going out for the evening, they took a bottle with them.
At a certain point in the third inning, Isaac “was showing signs that he was hungry, so I got out the bottle and started feeding him”.
Cubs batsman Jason Hammel took a swing at a pitch and the ball clipped the top of his bat and spun off high in the direction of the stands where the Hartleys were sitting.
“That type of foul ball has a lot of spin, it popped up in the air and I was tracking it – I used to play baseball when I was younger – it all happened rather quickly,” he said.
Hartley, an IT manager with a financial firm in Chicago, calculates the whole sequence took two to three seconds after the ball flew off the bat.
“I thought, ‘Oh, you know, that’s cool, it’s coming in my direction,’ but I never thought it’s going to land where I sit. Then I stood up and I realized, well, it’s coming to me so I guess I should catch it. I reached my hand out – and just caught it,” he said.
Hartley claimed he was concerned the ball might ricochet off the concrete wall or rolled tarpaulin between his seat and the field, so the best idea was to grab it.
He said Isaac did not even seem to realize anything unusual was happening.
“He’s a very relaxed baby. He didn’t react. He was way more concerned about his bottle and he didn’t stop feeding the whole time, he just kept at it,” he said.
His wife apparently simply shook her head in disbelief, he said, and told him: “Of course that would happen to you,” because he is such a dedicated sports fan and has a solid athletic background, he said.
“She wasn’t worried about me or the baby,” he claimed.
The Los Angeles Dodgers were not quite so happy about it all.
As the ball was falling, Dodgers first baseman Adrian Gonzalez was running across the field also watching it. He reached over the wall towards the crowd with his right hand turning back to cup the ball in his glove.
But Hartley plucked it from the air a split second before Gonzalez got his glove to it.
“I had pretty much no idea he was going for it,” Hartley said. “I had my eyes up watching the ball as soon as it left the bat. I was no longer looking at the players. The ball was flying through the air and I saw it coming towards my hand, then at the last second I saw him coming in my direction out of the corner of my eye but at that point I was just making sure I caught it.”
The batsman was initially ruled in, based on the fan catching the ball not a player. But that was then overruled and the Cub was out.
“He [Gonzalez] probably would have made the catch,” Hartley admitted.
There is often controversy over such action, deemed “fan interference”, which can get a spectator ejected from the ground.
But Hartley escaped censure.
“I think I did the right thing,” he said, and the footage has become an internet sensation.
The irony is, he always used to be a White Sox fan, he said, but switched his loyalty to the arch-rival Cubs relatively recently.
“Some of my friends still tease me as a traitor,” he said.
With the Cubs’ lesser track record, tickets were cheap and convenient and going to a game was a favorite date night for Keith and Kari “before Isaac came along”.
Going to the game with baby in tow was a little out of the ordinary on what turned into a very memorable night.
And the Cubs won, despite Hammel being caught out.
Hartley said he is not a baseball collector or fan who goes to games aiming to catch foul balls and has never caught one before.
Now the ball is in baby Isaac’s room, an instant heirloom.
“We’re going to put it in a memento box for the baby. It’s his ball,” said Hartley.
