In August, noted baseball collector Zack Hample tried to garner sympathy for himself by posting two videos of an interaction he had with a Coors Field usher and security staff during a Colorado Rockies game. It did not go as planned.
Hample is heard in the videos berating Coors Field ushers and security for enforcing their rules about where ticketed fans are allowed to be. The notorious ballhawk had attempted to enter a prohibited section to chase a home run ball and didn’t like the answer he received from the staff.
shout out to the Rockies ushers for putting this man child in his place. Zack Hample remains the biggest dork on the planet. pic.twitter.com/f1rQgFXosB
— Absolutely Hammered (@ah_pod) August 26, 2022
There was one interaction, in particular, involving an usher who wouldn’t let Hample go into a section where he did not have a ticket to potentially retrieve a home run ball. It seems pretty cut and dry but Hample seemed to think that this person was somehow the bad guy in the scene, an opinion very few MLB fans shared with him.
On Tuesday, Twitter user LoveTheRox caught up with that usher, whose name is John, and asked him about the incident. He ended up sharing an anecdote about something that happened before Zach turned on his phone to record things.
https://twitter.com/LoveTheRox/status/1572298751259332612
“I was working a day game against the St. Louis Cardinals,” said John. “During batting practice…Zack was down below the handicap section. There was a little boy in the row right above that. He asked one of the coaches who was walking on the field, “Hey coach, could you give me a ball?” Coach threw it up to him. Ball hits him in the glove, bounces down on the concourse here. Zach picks it up, comes walking towards me. I said, “Why didn’t you give the ball to the kid?” He said “Because it’s my ball. He dropped it so it’s my ball.”
That sounds a lot like many other stories people have shared about Hample. However, the ballhawk responded to the claim with a video of his own. The video shows a Cardinals player throwing a ball towards the fan section, where it falls short of its intended target. Hample picks up the ball and hands it to the kid who called for it.
For the record, THIS is the only baseball that I picked up at the August 11th Rockies game. pic.twitter.com/5kNbdg6QJI
— Zack Hample (@zack_hample) September 20, 2022
There’s no way to confirm the usher’s story and there’s no way to confirm Zach’s story, so we’re just going to have to fall back on reputations and what we know about the people involved. And in that sense, it doesn’t look too good for Zach.
