A grown man with a baseball glove reached in front of excited young sports fans in braids and ponytails earlier this month to snatch a ball thrown towards the group of children from the field.
The disappointing incident went viral after one of the kids’ mothers, Gina Hilliard, posted a clip of the man grabbing the ball as her 10-year-old daughter waited with a glove to grab it.
Ms Hilliard was at the Nationals game with her daughter’s softball team, which had won the state championships and been invited by the MLB team to its 1 September game against the Oakland Athletics.
The young team members had been sharing and passing around a glove throughout the game, taking turns at trying to catch balls; at the bottom of the ninth, Ms Hilliard’s daughter had the glove.
“I was videoing it, just trying to see if he would throw it our way - and if so, that hopefully, I’d be able to get it on video,” Ms Hilliard, of Virginia, tells The Independent.
“The girls were all sitting there and trying to holler for [Joey Meneses],” she says. “He looked over and pointed and threw it right at them.”
That’s when an adult man, who’d been sitting right behind them on the aisle, “just quickly hopped up,” put his gloved hand out and caught the ball.
The man “did not have any remorse,” Ms Hilliard says. “One of the dads went and talked to him ... and said, ‘Hey, many, why don’t you just give her the ball or oet her catch it?’”
His response, she says, was: “I bought my ticket and I paid for it, and I deserved that just as much as anybody else.”
It is generally frowned upon at MLB games for adults to not only catch balls thrown to kids but also not to give any caught balls to nearby children. (Many adults hawk the balls online as souvenirs for profit.)
Ms Hilliard’s daughter, she says, was “very upset” - but the family and team tried to focus on all of the positives of their experiences as guests of the Nationals after their all-state win.
On the night of the game, however, Ms Hilliard did tweet about the incident - asking the Nationals whether they could “get Joey Meneses to sign a baseball and send it to my daughter?”
The Washington Nationals’ Twitter account responded, asking for her to follow them to facilitate a direct message.
The team made good on their tweet, with Ms Hilliard writing on Wednesday: “Thank you @Nationals for reaching out and apologizing to hear that our experience that night was negatively impacted. They are sending something our way and hope that this can serve as a symbol of a good experience at the park rather than a bad one!”
She tells The Independent that the Nationals said “that they apologized for the mishap and [were] sad that we were disappointed.
“That want to make something right, and hopefully, with them sending her something, or the team ... it shows a gesture of their kindness,” she says, calling the Nationals a “class act” and emphasizing what a great time the children had before the man snatched a ball and a memory.
The Twitter reaction to Ms Hilliard’s original tweet was fierce.
“Grown man should have either given the little girl the opportunity to do so or taken it out of his glove & placed it into hers ... a new low that he didn’t consider doing so,” wrote one user, @gracievanowen. “He must be so proud of himself today!”
The unfortunate incident did provide a chance to teach a lesson, though, Ms Hilliard tells The Independent.
She told her daughter that “not everything in life is going to be given to you ... you’ve got to work for what you want to get, and if you want to make strides and make movements as a lady in this world, you’ve got to put yourself out there and work for it and make it happen.”
