The father who handed over his son’s home run baseball to an angry Phillies fan says he gave up the prized possession because the woman harassing him for it was “so adamant and loud” and he wanted her to go away.
Drew Feltwell beat out several other fans by grabbing a home run ball hit into the stands by the Phillies’ Harrison Bader during Friday night’s matchup against the Marlins in Miami. While he hoped to catch a ball for his son, Lincoln, as an early 10th birthday gift, it ended up going home with an irate woman who insisted she was the one to catch it.
“I felt like super dad putting that ball in his glove and giving him a hug,” Feltwell told NBC10 Philadelphia.
Feltwell said the family was “trying to make this week” about his son, and was hoping he’d be put on the jumbotron with the ball in his hand.
However, seconds after scooping up the ball, an unknown woman approached the father and began shouting into his ear, “That’s my ball!”
“I thought I was doing this great thing, and putting it in his glove meant a lot, but she was just so adamant and loud and yelling and persistent, and I just didn’t want to deal with it anymore,” the dad said.
“She was, very, very, very close, and I’m dad of the family so I didn’t want to do something I regret. That was the choice I made. I handed the ball back and told her to go away,” he added.
Feltwell noted he was “just trying to set an example of how to de-escalate a situation” in front of his son.
His son also said he felt like the crazed woman was not going to back down.
“I wasn’t very happy that we had to give it to her, but we can’t win,” Lincoln said.
Footage of the incident recorded by fans shows the woman demanding the ball back, seeming to believe she was entitled to it because it was closer to her seat — even though Feltwell had chased after it and gotten it first.
Based on the footage, the woman did not appear to ever be in possession of the ball.
After the incident, fans booed the woman out of the arena. Meanwhile, a member of the Marlins’ staff gifted Lincoln a prize pack that included a signed bat from Bader, who met with the boy after the game.
“We ended up having a good night because of good people,” Feltwell said.
Following the incident, Internet sleuths began to speculate that the woman involved in the incident had been fired from her job at a New Jersey school district — but that wasn’t the case.
The Hammonton School District refuted the rumors in a joking manner online, noting that anyone who works for their district “would obviously have caught the ball bare-handed in the first place, avoiding this entire situation.”
