A father gave a home run ball he caught for his son to a woman who confronted him at a baseball game.
The father chose to de-escalate the situation as a teaching moment for his children who were watching.
The incident went viral, leading to online harassment and misidentification of the woman involved.
The event serves as a reminder for parents that their actions, especially at sporting events, are always being observed by their children.
Just over two weeks ago, Drew Feltwell took his family to a baseball game in Miami to see their beloved Phillies.
They sat in seats beyond the left field wall at Loan Depot Park, hoping to get a home run ball for 10-year-old Lincoln. It was his birthday week.
All of a sudden, a shot off the bat of Philadelphia’s Harrison Bader was coming for them. You might have experienced this anticipation and exhilaration yourself. Almost in a blur, Feltwell walked quickly down the row to his right. He saw the ball bobble between two armrests and grabbed it.
As he was pulling away, he says, he saw two hands come in, late to the party.
‘I didn’t really care at that point,’ he would tell NBC 10 Philadelphia. ‘I just walked away and held the ball up high.’
He put it in Lincoln’s glove. Father and son had a few seconds to share the moment before they were interrupted by a woman in a Phillies jersey who got in Drew’s face. He hadn’t seen her walk over to them.
‘That’s my ball!’ he recalled her yelling.
Startled, he says, ‘I jumped out of my skin.’ He leaned back from her.
‘I had a fork in the road,’ Feltwell told NBC 10 while looking at his son. ‘Either do something I was probably gonna regret or be dad and show him how to de-escalate a situation.’
He handed the woman the ball. She stalked away and into a social media cauldron from which she hasn’t escaped. To a much lesser degree, Feltwell was trolled for conceding to her.
It begs a question: What would you do if you were in either of their shoes?
Or more appropriately, if you are an aspiring young athlete or the parent of one: What wouldn’t you do?
Pondering those questions can be a teaching moment for all of us.
As parents, we are always on camera for our kids
It wasn’t just everyone in Feltwell’s ballpark section who saw the incident. People were making memes about it within 10 minutes, he says.
In the ensuing days, they demanded to know who this ‘Phillies Karen’ was. Some put her picture within the frame of a ‘wanted’ sign. At least one I saw called for her arrest.
Jabs and swipes at her continue. It’s a stark reminder of today’s social media landscape, where people who don’t even know you begin to make judgments and assumptions about you. They insult your looks. They trace you to a school district where you don’t work. They mistakenly circulate that you have been fired. They even misidentify you as someone else.
A Facebook account under the name Cheryl Richardson-Wagner had this statement: ‘Ok everyone…I’m NOT the crazy Philly Mom (but I sure would love to be as thin as she is and move as fast) … and I’m a Red Sox fan.’
Look at the video footage of Feltwell and the woman again. Notice how his son’s eyes are on him. While our actions often can be captured electronically, we are always on camera for our children.
‘Every moment around my kids is a potential teaching moment,’ he said to NBC 10, ‘so I try to keep that mentality.’
Through Feltwell’s actions to defuse the situation, psychotherapist Stephanie Sarkis told USA TODAY in the aftermath of the confrontation, he was ensuring there was no collateral damage.
‘When you have someone that’s so bold to do something like this, you don’t know how much further they’re going to escalate their behavior,’ Sarkis said.
Think of yourself sitting in the bleachers and watching your son or daughter play. That situation works the same way.
‘We’ve all been at games where we’ve seen parents that are going crazy on the sideline,’ says Jason Sacks, CEO of the Positive Coaching Alliance. ‘And if you watch that parent go crazy and then watch what their child is doing, the child is often putting their head down, looking at them, like raising their hand like, ‘Why are you doing this?’ And so it’s taking them out of the game.’
Instead, Feltwell’s son was rewarded for his dad’s restraint.
Take a pause before you act, at games and in life
We don’t always get credit for doing the right thing. But we can always be called out when we slip.
Things unravel in an instant. We tear off after an umpire or referee when we disagree with a call. We fire back an angry email to a co-worker when we’re upset with them.
Even if we know we are right, we might not think about how our knee-jerk reactions will be perceived. Or we forget anyone could be watching, or listening.
‘When you talk to the parents in the recruiting process, are they constantly complaining about the coaches after a bad game or are they sending you a text or are you having a conversation where their son has gotta do more, he’s gotta play harder, he’s gotta work on his skill,’ Connecticut men’s basketball coach Dan Hurley said during a 2024 interview with CBS. ‘They tell on themselves. They drop hints, and (if) you’ve got the wrong type of people in that inner circle around your players, they’ll sink your program.’
Before you make a spectacle of yourself at a high school or college game, or to a coach, take a pause.
‘Sports parenting is a lot like driving, at least in the emotion it gives rise to,’ author Michael Lewis writes in ‘Playing to Win,’ his 2020 audiobook that attempts to make sense of his daughters’ travel sports experience. ‘Your child boots a ground ball, for example, and instead of being given a second chance, she winds up on the bench. At that moment, you want to go over and scream at the coach who benched her for tearing your child down rather than building her up. And never mind that building your child up in a more robust way is exactly what the coach might be doing.
‘The next day you have trouble even remembering why you got so upset in the same way you can’t honestly recall the feeling yesterday that led you to holler and give the finger to the little old lady who cheated at the four-way stop sign.’
While you’re driving to the game, go over scenarios in your head that would upset you and how you could handle them. Talk about them with your kids, like you would before a school dance.
Reflect on how something might look. Even if your child isn’t drinking alcohol at the party, or at beach week, think about how it would appear in social media posts around others who are.
High school and college teams have their own reputations to protect. Assume their coaches are ‘checking up’ on their players and recruits.
Be remembered for interactions that tell people who you are.
If you slip, it’s never too late to redeem yourself
Put yourself in the shoes of the woman in the Phillies jersey. It can be hard to quell our anger while our kids are playing, or amid the pursuit of a foul ball at the major-league game.
If you are pointing fingers at her for how she acted the instant after Feltwell got the ball, hopefully you’re doing so because you’ve never gotten caught up in the heat of a moment.
She could have corrected herself, but instead slipped further into infamy. Video clips emerged showing her walking down the aisle to confront a man who had called her out, and to turn and give the middle finger to everyone behind her after they did the same. She held up the baseball for all to see.
Feltwell said in his interview with NBC 10 Philadelphia that after she retreated up the aisle, essentially booed out of the ballpark, he received a post of her continuing to clutch the baseball on the concourse.
We all know you’re not supposed to take a ball from a kid. But what if, a few minutes later, she had walked back over and given the ball back to Feltwell or his son? Would this all be forgotten? Would she be remembered without the bile?
Few feel sorry for her, I believe, because she had an opportunity to change the narrative after something unfortunate happened and she didn’t.
Sure, we can think of our lives in terms of what they would be like if one instant in time had or had not occurred: we caught ourselves before we stepped in front of car in traffic, or we mustered the courage to speak to our future spouse.
But life is full of moments that are correctable after they occur. The kid who talks back to the coach, or the parent who overreacts to his decision, can always apologize. It’s part of who we are, or at least strive to be, not defined by one moment in time, but by a full picture.
We don’t know the full picture of the woman in the Phillies jersey everyone has rushed to label. Her fear over the outcry of what she did has likely kept her out of the public eye since the encounter. But she has shown us only a view of herself as someone who unapologetically took a ball from a dad and his kid at a game.
If she comes out and expresses a sincere apology, maybe folks will giver her a break.
‘Please don’t do anything to that lady,’ Feltwell told USA TODAY Sports on Sept. 8. ‘Leave it alone. You know, somebody knows her and can talk to her, that’s different. But God, I don’t want people breaking in their house and stuff like that. The internet already messed her up pretty good.’
The best part about mistakes, in sports or otherwise, is we can learn from them and correct them. We can’t stop the trolls, but we can always make headway with the folks in our lives who really matter.
Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for two high schoolers. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.