Great baseball is being played in MLB this season, and that’s not a new story. That said, there’s another story being played in the stands that rarely makes headlines. Until, that is, a guy named Zack Hample almost single-handedly changed the narrative.
A relatively small but enthusiastic group, mostly youngish males, go to baseball games to snag baseballs. They’re called ballhawks.
Photo courtesy IMDb (International Movie Database)
Zack Hample is one, and he’s decidedly the best one ever to play that game.
Over three-plus decades of attending games, Zack has snagged thousands of balls. He’s best known for grabbing A-Rod’s 3,000th hit in 2015, which was a home run at Yankee Stadium. Zack held on to the historic ball for two weeks before returning it to A-Rod in exchange for the Yankees donating $150,000 to Pitch in for Baseball and Softball, an organization that helps the underprivileged enjoy the game.
Jeff Siegel’s documentary, Zack Hample vs. The World, covers this episode, and the rest of Zack’s story … well, most of it. The movie is a character study with lots of commentary from its unique subjects: his mother, Naomi; MLB all-star Heath Bell; and a few media types (Tyler Kepner, Matt Vasgersian, among others), who are overwhelmingly positive towards Zack.
Except for the overwhelmingly negative Laurence “Marlins Man” Leavey, we don’t hear much from Zack’s detractors, who are mostly anonymous X haters. That’s because Zack was and remains an easy target.
Way back, Zack was persona non grata at Shea Stadium for snagging too many balls, and there once was a petition to ban Zack from MLB ballparks. The vitriol reached a scary zenith or nadir during the A-Rod, 3,000th ball episode.
Instead of dwelling on the negative, Zack vs. The World offers insight into what drives an individual to devote his life to snagging and collecting baseballs.
It didn’t start as a wine-and-roses story. Kids taunted him, saying that his father, author-illustrator Stu Hample, was an old man. Father Hample, who collaborated on a comic strip with Woody Allen for eight years, was 51 when Zack was born. Zack’s mother owns the legendary NYC-based Argosy Book Store, which specializes in marketing vintage books.
Voilà! Collecting artifacts, you see, is in Zack’s blood, and the ballpark became his field of practice. At first, hawking was a habit, but it quickly morphed into a hobby, then an obsession, and finally an art form.
From the start, Zack religiously chronicled his hawking adventures. Now, he vlogs because every baseball has a story (e.g., Who threw the pitch?) To perfect his craft, Zack learned how to ask for a baseball in different languages.
There were plenty of routine homers, but then Zack graduated to the Big Leagues of Ball Hawking. For example, he caught Mike Trout’s first Major League dinger in Baltimore, and he also caught the last Mets home run at Shea Stadium, which was Carlos Beltran’s 263rd.
Along the way, Zack followed in his Dad’s footsteps and penned three books, yes, all about baseball, including The Baseball: Stunts, Scandals, and Secrets Beneath The Stitches. But being an author wasn’t Zack’s first career choice; it was playing baseball professionally. Unfortunately, he wasn’t good enough. So instead, he turned his hawking exploits into a career, religiously attending games all over the country and creating video stories.
By the way, being a prolific ballhawk does take athleticism. It’s not easy navigating seats and stairs, as well as other fans, while trying to catch a ball.
Now in his 40s, Zack shows no sign of retiring. He says he’d like to be married and raise a family, but he just hasn’t found the right connection. I guess that says snagging balls is an easier catch.
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Jon Hart is the author of Unfortunately, I was available, the sequel to Man versus Ball: One Ordinary Guy and His Extraordinary Sports Adventures.
