A father has explained why he handed over a home run baseball he was about to give to his son to an angry baseball fan.
Drew Feltwell had attempted to give his son a home run ball hit by Philadelphia Phillies' Harrison Bader during Friday’s game, which he said they were attending for their son, Lincoln's, 10th birthday, when a woman angrily confronted him.
The dad is claiming he got there first after six fans reportedly sprinted towards the ball at LoanDepot Park in Miami.
During an interview with NBC10, he insisted that he reached for the ball from the seats in left field, and as he walked away, a female fan 'in the seat behind' claimed it was hers.
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"I don’t know if she was standing up. Maybe?" he said. "But I was watching the ball from almost the bat to where it went into that seat and kind of jumbled around and I was already going in and coincidentally, as soon as I was going in, it stopped in one spot and I just picked it up."
He said as he walked back to his family to give Lincoln the ball, the woman chased him down and demanded the ball back.
Providing his version of events, he added: "I didn’t even see her walk up, and as she reached for my arm, she just yelled in my ear, ‘That’s my ball!’ like super loud.
"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.’
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"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."
The father said he didn't want to make the situation worse as he 'pretty much just wanted her to go away'.
"I don’t even remember what she said, it was, you know, a lot of eyes on us by that time and the ball was already in his glove and she just wouldn’t stop," Drew explained.
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"And I mean, I’m literally leaning back as she’s in my face yelling and yelling, and I pretty much just wanted her to go away because I had a fork in the road: either do something I was probably going to regret or be dad and show him how to de-escalate the situation, so that’s where I went."
He decided to give the ball to the woman and apologised to his son for the situation. But then, after the game, Lincoln met Bader, who gave him a signed bat.
"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 said.
The woman has yet to reveal her side of the story.
Anish Vij