Sitemap

Member-only story

CULTURE

Philly Karen And A Lesson On Entitlement

A home run ball that set off a feeding frenzy

7 min readSep 7, 2025

--

Not a Medium member yet? Click here to read the article.

If you’re not a Philadelphia Phillies fan, or even a baseball fan, you might have missed a truly bizarre moment over the weekend. In the top of the fourth inning, with the Phillies leading the Miami Marlins 4–1 in Miami, Phillies outfielder Harrison Bader crushed a 410-foot solo homer to center field. What happened next got a bit weird.

The ball fell into the stands without anyone catching the ball, as is often the case when the stands are only half full. One man almost immediately came up with the ball. It wasn’t a struggle. There was no scrum. No one fell into a different row or was forced to wrestle the ball away from anyone else. The ball went into half-empty stands, and one man got there first.

The guy who came up with the ball was a Phillies fan, also a husband and father of two, and had been sitting in the row where the ball fell. He’d had to run over a few empty seats to retrieve the ball, which he did with ease, as there was no one else in that row. A row above him stood a woman with an ombré grey bob and sporting a white Phillies jersey. She had failed to catch the ball, which was practically hit to her, and then, when…

--

--

David Todd McCarty
David Todd McCarty

Written by David Todd McCarty

A cranky romantic searching for hope and humor. I tell stories. Most of them are true. I’m not at all interested in your outrage, but I do feel your pain.