Thank you for reading The Dope. For just $7 a month, you can keep us going.
Okay, yes. The kid in the stands in Miami with the Phillies gear on didn’t wind up with the home run ball that his father ran over and retrieved out of a mostly friendly scrum after Philadelphia’s Harrison Bader hit it. If you’ve not seen the video of the Sept. 6 incident until today, congratulations on, I assume, the fact of you living in some other biosphere. I sometimes envy you.
Anyway, the kid got stiffed, mostly because his father, a man named Drew Feltwell, said he wanted to de-escalate the situation in the stands with the Karen who angrily confronted him and demanded that the ball be given to her. The father gave this woman the ball — he literally took it out of his son’s baseball glove and handed it over. The woman walked away in triumph. Yada yada — you know the rest. This lady is a global villain as of our current writing.
Nasty. But here’s what else happened:
—The Marlins’ organization, having seen the video in near real-time, came into the stands later in the game to give both the boy and his sister a goodie bag filled with merchandise, including baseballs.
—The kid, a decked-out Phillies fan, got to meet Bader, the home run hitter, after the game.
—Bader gifted the boy a signed bat, with the kid’s family and a whole crew of folks looking on and smiling.
—A sports card company offered Phillies Karen, as she’s known, $5,000 for the ball so that it can give it back to the boy — but only if she signs it and inscribes, “I’m sorry.”
—Marcus Lemonis, the guy who owns Camping World, Bed Bath & Beyond and a bunch of other companies, posted to social media that he’ll send the boy and his family to the World Series this year. “Oh and you just won an RV as well,” Lemonis wrote. He added a hashtag: #DadofYearWinsThatone.
—Drew Feltwell, the father, said in an interview that he’d like for people to leave the woman alone. “Please don't do anything to that lady,’’ Feltwell told USA Today. “Leave it alone. You know, somebody knows her and can talk to her, that's different. But God, I don't want people breaking in their house and stuff like that. The internet already messed her up pretty good.’’
There are more good people than bad. We will get confused on that, because we’re bound to. It is an occupational hazard of living in 2025, or, now that I ponder it, any other era in the history of humankind. We have absolute media saturation here in ‘25, which means that a lot of the awful and not much of the good gets captured, enlarged, synthesized and mass-distributed. Hey, it’s a living.
But there are more of us than there are of them. It’s still true. We need to stand up once in a while so that we can remind each other of it, but it’s there. Trust it. And even if you don’t trust it, understand that it was just proven for you anyway.
(End of sermon. Talk soon.)
And the congregation said Amen.
Something tells me that this was not an isolated incident for this Karen. I suspect there is more baggage in her life than just this.