The Joy of Foul Balls: The Inside Story of Baseball’s Holy Grail

“Even at my age, I’d still like to catch a foul ball, if only to give it to Miguel,” said a random fan one day as I was walking into Yankee Stadium. The sentiment is universal; every true baseball fan daydreams about the ball they will one day catch, perfecting the link between that fan and the game that he or she loves. The foul ball is our connection to the players on the field, and it is a thrill unique to baseball. Having a basketball land in one’s lap is not only extremely rare, but somehow not as exciting as catching a baseball. Plus, you would probably have to return it.

The foul ball is baseball’s trickster, leaving the perfect geometry and symmetry of the baseball field and taking off into the great masses of fans, where it can bring joy or wreak havoc, often on the same play. The foul ball truly makes the fans part of the game, if only for a brief moment.

While the vast majority of fouls bring a thrill for one or two folks who may touch them fleetingly before they careen off into another pair of waiting hands, some foul balls leave a mark of humor or coincidence that gets written into the annals of baseball forever.

Consider the case of Norm Zauchin, a first baseman for the Red Sox and the Senators in the 1950s. One hot summer afternoon in 1950, the year before he made the show, Zauchin went tearing toward the stands in pursuit of a foul pop-up. Diving over the front railing, he snared the foul backhanded and tumbled into the stands. When he got his bearings, he found he’d fallen head over heels into the lap of pretty young Janet Mooney, attending the game with her parents. “Hi” was all he could manage to say, but that led to a dinner invitation from the family after the game, and the following season, after he’d gotten the call from the Red Sox, Norm and Janet were married. Talk about a great catch.

Not all foul balls are so romantic. Some are just plain crazy. On August 11, 1903, the A’s were visiting the Red Sox, then playing in the old Huntington Avenue Grounds. At the plate in the seventh inning was Rube Waddell, the colorful southpaw pitcher for the A’s, who was known to run off the mound to chase after passing fire trucks, and to be mesmerized whenever an opposing team brought a puppy onto their bench to distract him. Waddell lifted a foul ball over the right field bleachers that landed on the roof of a baked bean cannery next door.

The ball came to rest in the steam whistle of the factory, which began to go off. As it was not quitting time, workers thought there was an emergency and abandoned their posts. A short while later, a giant caldron containing a ton of beans boiled over and exploded, showering the Boston ballpark with scalding beans. It is probably safe to say that this was the most dramatic foul of all time.

Still, a foul ball hit by the aptly named George Burns of the Tigers in 1915 is worth mentioning in the same breath. His “scorching” foul liner struck an unlucky fan in the area of his chest pocket, where he was carrying a box of matches. The ball ignited the matches, and a soda vendor had to come to the rescue, dousing the flaming fan with bubbly to put out the fire.

One of baseball’s most ironic foul ball incidents happened on Mother’s Day, 1939, when Lena Feller traveled from Iowa to see her son Bob pitch against the White Sox in Comiskey Park. In the third inning, Feller delivered a pitch which Marv Owen fouled into the stands, striking Mrs. Feller above her right eye and breaking her glasses. Young Bob ran into the stands to assist his mom, but watched helplessly as she was led off to the hospital, where stitches were required. “There wasn’t anything I could do,” Feller said, “so I went on pitching.” The incident shook him up, but after settling down, he won the game en route to leading the league with 24 victories that season.

Richie Ashburn figures in many of the best foul ball stories in baseball lore. A contact hitter, Ashburn had the ability to foul off many consecutive pitches till he found one he liked. On one occasion, he fouled off fourteen consecutive pitches against Corky Valentine of the Reds. Another time, he victimized Sal “The Barber” Maglie for “18 or 19″ fouls in one at-bat. ”After a while,” said Ashburn, “he just started laughing. That was the only time I ever saw Maglie laugh on a baseball field.” Ashburn’s bat control was such that one day he asked teammates to pinpoint a particularly offensive heckler seated five or six rows back. The next time up, Ashburn nailed the fan in the chest.

On another occasion, Ashburn unintentionally injured a female fan who was the wife of a Philadelphia newspaper sports editor. Play stopped as she was given medical aid. Action resumed as the stretcher wheeled her down the main concourse, and, unbelievably, Ashburn’s next foul hit her again. Thankfully, she escaped with minor injuries.

Another notable foul ball hitter was Luke Appling, the Hall of Fame shortstop with a career batting average of .310. As the story goes, Appling once asked White Sox management for a couple of dozen baseballs, so he could autograph them and donate them to charity. Management balked, citing a cost of several dollars per baseball. Appling bought the balls from his team, then went out that day and fouled off a couple dozen balls, after which he tipped his hat toward the owner’s box. He never had to pay for charity balls again, the legend goes.

Another great foul ball story involves Pepper Martin and Joe Medwick of the St. Louis Cardinals famous Gas House Gang teams of the mid 1930s. With Martin at bat, Medwick took off from first base, intending to take third on the hit-and-run. Martin fouled the ball into the stands, and Reds catcher Gilly Campbell reflexively reached back to home plate umpire Ziggy Sears for a new ball. Then, just for fun, Campbell launched the ball down to third, where Sears, forgetting that a foul had just been hit and that he had given Campbell a new ball, called Medwick out. The Cardinals were furious, but not wanting to admit his error, Sears refused to reverse his call, and Medwick was thrown out-on a foul ball!

The great Cal Ripken Jr. made life imitate art with a foul ball in 1998. In the movie The Natural, Roy Hobbs lofts a foul ball at sportswriter Max Mercy, as Mercy sits in the stands drawing a critical cartoon of the slumping Hobbs. Baltimore Sun columnist Ken Rosenthal faced a similar wrath of the baseball gods after he wrote a column in 1998 suggesting that it might be time for Ripken to voluntarily end his streak—at that point several hundred games beyond Lou Gehrig’s old record—for the good of the team. Ripken responded by hitting a foul ball into the press box which smashed Rosenthal’s laptop computer, ending its career. When told of his foul ball’s trajectory, Ripken responded with one word: “Sweet.”

Another sweet story involves a father and son combination. In 1999, Bill Donovan was watching his son Todd play center field for the Idaho Falls Braves of the Pioneer League. Todd made a nice diving catch and threw the ball back into the second baseman, who returned it to the pitcher. On the next pitch, a foul ball sailed into the outstretched hands of the elder Donovan. “I was like a kid when I caught it,” said the proud papa. “It made me wonder when was the last time that a father and son caught the same ball on consecutive pitches.”

Had he made his catch a few generations earlier, Mr. Donovan might not have been allowed to keep his treasured souvenir. In the game’s early years, balls were comparatively very expensive, and fans were encouraged, even occasionally forced, to throw them back. In 1901, in fact, the National League rules committee suggested disciplining batsmen who fouled off good pitches, as a way of cutting costs. In 1904, a rule change allowed the teams to post special employees in the stands to retrieve the fouls caught by the fans.

However, fans already had a sense of magic and luck concerning fouls, and they wanted to keep them. They would often hide them from the “goons” sent to retrieve them, or engage in games of keep-away from the same hapless employees.

A solitary voice among the owners, however, was Charles Weeghman of the Chicago Cubs, who saw the public relations value in a free, but rare, souvenir. In 1916, Weeghman went against the grain and announced that Cub fans would be allowed to keep foul balls. He was immediately supported in an editorial in the influential Baseball Magazine, which said, “The love of souvenirs is firmly implanted in the blood,” and also chastised the other owners by saying “it isn’t always good business to be penny wise.” The other owners failed to follow suit immediately, however.

About the same time, a 1915 article in The Sporting Life, a major baseball newspaper of the day, complained of the excessive cost of foul balls, saying, “… some fans are indignant and abusive when special police make attempts to recover balls hit into the crowd. The practice of concealing balls fouled into grandstand or bleachers has reached disgusting proportions in New York, where it is far more common than anywhere else.”

There was a short truce in this developing war between the fans and the owners over fouls in the late teens, as both sides agreed to donate all fouls hit into the stands to servicemen, who would need the balls for on-base recreation during World War One. After the war ended, though, the foul ball dispute was rekindled.

One day in 1921, New York Giants fan Reuben Berman had the good fortune to catch a foul ball, or so he thought. When the ushers arrived moments later to retrieve the ball, Reuben refused to give it up, instead tossing it several rows back to another group of fans. The angered usher removed Berman from his seat, took him to the Giants offices, and verbally chastised him, before depositing him in the street outside the Polo Grounds.

An angry and humiliated Berman sued the Giants for mental and physical distress and won, leading the Giants, and eventually other teams, to change their policy of demanding foul balls be returned. The decision has come to be known as “Reuben’s Rule.”

While Berman’s case was influential, the influence had not spread as far as Philadelphia by 1922, when 11-year-old fan Robert Cotter was nabbed by security guards after refusing to return a foul ball at a Phillies game. The guards turned him over to police, who put the little tyke in jail overnight. When he faced a judge the next day, young Cotter was granted his freedom, the judge ruling, “Such an act on the part of a boy is merely proof that he is following his most natural impulses. It is a thing I would do myself.”

The tide eventually changed for good, and the practice of fans keeping foul balls became entrenched. World War II was another time when patriotic fans and owners worked together to funnel the fouls off to servicemen. A ball in the Hall of Fame’s collection is even stamped “From a Polo Grounds Baseball Fan,” one of the more than 80,000 pieces of baseball equipment donated to the war effort by baseball by June 1942.

One of those baseballs may well have been involved in one of the strangest of all foul ball stories. In a military communique datelined “somewhere in the South Pacific,” the story is told of a foul ball hit by Marine Private First Class George Benson Jr. which eventually traveled 15 miles. Benson’s batting practice foul looped up about 40 feet in the air, where it smashed through the windshield of a landing plane. The ball hit the pilot in the face, fracturing his jaw and knocking him unconscious.

A passenger, Marine Corporal Robert J. Holm, muttering a prayer, pulled back on the throttle and prevented the plane from crashing, though he had never flown before. The pilot recovered momentarily, and brought the plane to a landing at the next airstrip, 15 miles away.

In 1996, at the age of 71, former President Jimmy Carter made a barehanded catch of a foul ball hit by San Diego’s Ken Caminiti, while attending a Braves game. “He showed good hands,” said Braves catcher Javy Lopez.

With foul balls by this time an undeniable right for fans at the ballpark, what are your actual chances of catching a foul ball at a game? Well, to start with, the average baseball is in play for six pitches these days, which makes it sound as though there will be many chances to catch a foul ball in each game. While comprehensive statistics are not available, various newspapers have sponsored studies which, uncannily, seem quite often to come down to 22 or 23 fouls into the stands per game.

That seems like a healthy number until you look at average major league attendance at games. In the year 2000, the average game was attended by 29,938 fans. With 23 fouls per game, that works out to a 1 in 1,302 chance of catching a foul ball. With numbers like that, no wonder it feels so special to catch a foul ball.

Nevertheless, those who yearn to catch a foul ball can improve their chances. I have listed some tips to help you bring home that elusive foul ball. Good luck!

TIM WILES has been director of research at the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library since 1995. He is co-editor of Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems (Southern Illinois University Press, 2002).

 

TIPS FOR CATCHING FOUL BALLS

1. Wear a glove. Catching balls is a lot easier—and far less painful—with a glove.
2. Watch for ricochets—most fouls are caught after their initial impact.
3. However, don’t try to play them on the bounce. A ballpark is not a baseball field, and there is a great chance a bouncing ball will careen off at a crazy angle. If you have a chance to catch it on the fly, do so.
4. Sit in the lower decks, along the baselines. In the upper deck, try to sit in the front row. As they say in the real estate business, there are three important things, location, location, and location.
5. Arrive early for batting practice. This more than doubles your chances.
6. Pay attention. Fastball pitchers generate more fouls than finesse guys. Two-strike counts produce more fouls as hitters swing more often to protect the plate.
7. Remember that lefties are likely to hit more fouls down the third base line, and righties more likely to hit fouls toward first. As there are more righties than lefties, consider sitting on the first base line more valuable than the third base line.
8. Don’t eat or drink during game action. You could be caught flat-footed.
9. Sit on an aisle when possible. You’ll have far more room in which to operate.