As caught on the game broadcast, the ball bounces away from two fans, one of them a nondescript guy, the other a woman in a Phillies jersey with a distinctive short white-on-black hairstyle. A row or two down, a middle-aged guy picks up the ball, carries it half a row away, and hands it to a kid in his party.
I jumped out of my skin when the woman got in his face and demanded he fork over the Harrison Bader home run ball. I'm literally leaning back as she's in my face, yelling and yelling and yelling, and I pretty much just wanted her to go away. I had a fork-in-the-road, either, you know, do something I was probably going to regret, or, be dad and show him how to de-escalate the situation. So that's where I went.
Star centerfielder Harrison Bader came up to bat in the fourth and sent a long shot into the leftfield stands to put the Phils up 5 to 1, and the cameras caught a few seconds of a woman berating a man into giving up the souvenir as he clutched his son. But when more footage of the scramble emerged, a villain narrative built around the woman.