You can go to 100 baseball games and never catch a foul ball, or even have one hit in your direction. Which makes it almost literally unbelievable that a fan in Oakland nabbed balls on back to back pitches Sunday.
Our man was sitting along the right-field line at Oakland Alameda Coliseum when Chad Pinder stepped to the plate in the sixth inning and fouled off a pitch to the right side, directly into his waiting hands. The fan had barely finished celebrating his impressive catch when Pinder whacked another offering to the exact same spot… where he made the catch again. Here’s the video:
It’s preposterous that Pinder hit back-to-back foul balls to the exact same seat. And it’s even crazier that the fan sitting in that seat proved capable of snagging both pop ups with his bare hands. That’s not easy!
So who was this man with some of the softest hands in Northern California? His name, he told the A’s broadcast, is Bill, and he lives in Pittsburg, California.
“I caught the first one, and by the time I could get the other ball and put it in my pocket, the other one was coming at me,” Bill explained. “I reached up and grabbed the other one too.”
Bill said he goes to about 10 Athletics games a year and had never before caught a foul ball, which should give hope to all you out there waiting for that pop up to be hit in your direction. One of these days it will happen. And then it just might happen again.
