Lifelong Oakland Athletics fans younger than 28 years old have never seen their team make a World Series appearance. Various A’s teams have been spunky and overachieving and paradigm-altering in their strategic cheapness, but lately they have just been bad. But it makes sense that the team whose approach to numbers broke baseball would be the one to serve up some shit that you just never see happen in their home ballpark.
This man here is named Bill, and he is from Pittsburg, California. The silver-goateed lad has gone to roughly 10 A’s games a year for his whole life. We’ve already been over what that has earned him—some good times, but more recently a run of extended mediocrity interrupted by the occasional loose division title and subsequent playoff elimination. Something he’d never experienced during all those games, though, was the dorky thrill of catching a foul ball. On Sunday, during a deeply meaningless 3-2 Athletics win over the Royals, Bill caught two—on consecutive pitches fouled off by A’s utilityman Chad Pinder:
The broadcast tracked him down for an interview later in the game, and he revealed that he’d previously come close to balls fouled off by A’s legends like Jose Canseco without any success. Bill’s probably going to remember the ones from Pinder a little more. Something about that seems very Oakland Athletics, too.