After three games, Bryce Harper already has two home runs, and each of them has a unique story.
Harper's first blast, a 465-foot shot on Saturday night, nailed a Braves fan in the chest, before being retrieved by Phillies personnel and delivered back to the slugger as his first hit as a Phillie. The fan was unharmed.
Harper's second home run also has a story, and fans on social media are up in arms about it.
Meet Zack Hample, the man who caught Harper's home run on Sunday night.
Hample is very well-known on social media with more than 36,000 followers on Twitter and a whopping 354,000+ subscribers on his YouTube page. He claims to have ‘snagged' more than 10,000 baseballs in his life, including Mike Trout's first home run and A-Rod's 3,000th hit. Harper's 186th career dinger is Hample's 67th in-game tater he has hauled in.
Some people aren't thrilled.
Some people, however, are happy for Hample.
You see, while someone might call this a once-in-a-lifetime thrill, Hample has made a living off catching baseballs and showing the stories in video on his YouTube page. He did, however, cause a massive stir when he attended a game at Fort Bragg in 2016, which was meant only for active duty military and their families, and claimed to have caught 11 baseballs at the game.
To his credit, he does actively aim to raise money for charity.
There's a few ways to look at this. Of course, a guy catching 10,000 baseballs robs the joy from 9,999 people who would have a story for a lifetime, however, being in the right place at the right time for home runs in game, as long as he's not knocking anyone over to get to it, feels like good business. It appears he caught Harper's homer legitimately.
I'm not sure how to feel about what Hample does, I just hope he's giving a lot of baseballs to a lot of youngsters. I do know that I'm excited about the Phillies, and Harper, who has already mashed two monster home runs that have each told a unique story.
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