Last night as I was working on the outline for the big digital media law project I have due at the end of the semester (the outline itself is due today), the TV was playing idly in the background. Jay Leno was on, and one of his guests caught my attention so much that I stopped working and went over to the couch to watch the segment.
It was this guy, Zack Hample, who has collected more than 3,000 baseballs. He says he’s caught a baseball — “caught” meaning in batting practice, tossed by a fielder, or a homerun itself — at every single game he’s been to since 1993. (I think he’s about 30 years old now, so he started catching ’em young.) That is a crapload of baseballs!
He always goes to batting practice, and while there, he’s got all sorts of tricks that he uses when trying to convince players to toss him a ball (since, as he said, he’s at a disadvantage because he’s not 1) a kid or 2) a hot girl). He wears two hats so that he can put on the hat of the player he’s trying to talk to. He’s learned how to say “toss me a ball” in like 25 languages — Spanish, Japanese, etc.
Once the game starts, he’s got an uncanny ability to predict where the balls will go based on who’s hitting and who’s pitching. He goes to that spot and waits for it. They had clips on the show last night of him catching balls in back-to-back games at Yankee Stadium last month and the announcers noticed that it was the same guy — thanks to his standard ball-catching victory dance.
He keeps a list of all the balls he’s caught each season, with gameballs noted in parenthesis. In 2008 alone, he caught 13 gameballs — and I’m pretty sure that means 13 home runs. Across the major leagues, the average number of home runs per game hovers pretty close to 1, so the fact that this guy is able to catch home runs with any sort of consistency is amazing to me.
Crazy.
Tracy says
What a ball hog…