There's A Petition To Get Foul Ball Guy Zack Hample Banned From All Major League Parks After He Attended The Military-Only Game At Fort Bragg
CBS Sports – Sunday night, the Marlins and Braves played in the first major league game in the state of North Carolina. The two clubs played at Fort Bragg in a new 12,500-seat park donated by MLB that will be turned into a recreational facility for servicemen and their families. The Marlins won the game 5-2. The game was supposed to be for military personnel and their families only, and yet, noted ballhawk Zack Hample was in attendance.
Hample doesn’t have much support despite his baseball catching prowess. As a result of that and the Fort Bragg incident, a petition has been posted on the Change.org website seeking to ban Hample from all major league ballparks. Here’s the petition and here’s some of the text:
Hample has a documented history of pushing children out of the way to get the baseballs he so dearly cherishes, making him a blight on our nation’s pastime and an active deterrent to the up and coming generation falling in love with our game. Given this most recent violation of MLB, Fort Bragg, and our military on the eve of our nation’s Independence Day, tonight’s game should be Mr. Hample’s last. We call on Rob Manfred, Commissioner of Major League Baseball, to issue a lifetime ban and restore the integrity of the fan experience.
The petition has received 813 signatures as of this writing. If it receives 1,000 signatures, it will presumably be sent to commissioner Rob Manfred at MLB.com’s offices in hopes of generating a response.
Yesterday’s blog about the internet rallying against Foul Ball Guy
Welp this has officially gotten completely out of hand. Absolutely preposterous that this has become as big of a story as it has. Lets get one thing crystal clear:
If you get this upset over Foul Ball Guy Zack Hample, you are the biggest loser EVER. If you take the time to draft up an official petition to the commissioner of Major League Baseball and you pretend to be this offended by him, then you are 100 times the loser that he is. You think its lame to go to the park with a baseball mitt as a grown man trying to get baseballs? Its INFINITELY worse to be crying online, writing letters to Rob Manfred about “restoring the integrity of the fan experience.”
Bottom line is that people love to be a part of internet mobs. Right now, the target of their angst is Foul Ball Guy. By next week, it will be someone else and a story that nobody actually cares about, but they’ll pretend to be deeply offended. If you think Foul Ball Guy is some conniving scumbag who blatantly was like “I dont care about the military or veterans, I’m going to steal one of their tickets!” then you’re being fucking ridiculous. In hindsight did it appear to be in poor taste? Yes, I suppose so. Even he admitted that and said so in his apology:
I also think its ridiculous that there’s this image of him that he like steps on small children and beats women in order to get to his baseballs. I’m sure there have been times when he aggressively went for a ball but this image the internet has painted of him being some unAmerican monster who beats children for baseballs is hilarious. Guys – he’s a 38 year old dude who has dedicated his life to getting baseball players to toss him balls in the crowd. He’s a dork. I dont know why a dork gets everyone so riled up but apparently it does. And now to boot, we’ve got dork on dork crime:
If there’s anyone that should be banned its that prick Marlins Man. Because every time I sit down to watch a game I gotta get 5,000 tweets from people saying “Do you see your boy Marlins Man sitting in the front row?” Yes. I see him. I see his dumb orange visor. Who cares? Thats what this ultimately boils down to – who. the fuck. cares? If you are Mad Online and writing petitions and trying to get people fired or banned from dumb ass trivial stuff, you are an absolute asshole. Plain and simple. You dont get to ban a paying customer from going to baseball games and enjoying himself/making a living just because you dont like him and think its weird that he’s obsessed with foul balls. You’re not really offended by him going to the Fort Bragg game. You dont really care about any of the people he may have pushed to get a foul ball. You just dont like this weirdo and you’re a big enough loser to cry about it on the internet. Grade A asshole.