Famed Ballhawk Ejected for “Selling Baseballs”

Zack Hample is a good friend of The Hall, and to say that the guy has been ballhawking for a while (he snared his first souvenir in 1990) would be an understatement.

Matter of fact, dude is currently riding a 863-game streak where he has snagged at least one ball…388 consecutive with at least two.

But, last week, an seemingly overzealous Nationals Park stadium cop tried to single-handedly end Hample’s ballhawkery.  You see, for just the fifth time in his career (career?), Hample was kicked out of a game.

As he says “way back in the day, the security goons of Shea Stadium kicked me out four times for catching too many baseballs and refusing to hand them over and for refusing to obey the special set of unfair rules that they invented just for me.”

Hample has since taken to his blog and laid out his case…and it’s a pretty good one (complete with some great pictures!).

Here’s the condensed version of what happened that “The Baseball Collector” told Deadspin immediately following his ejection last week.

I was approached by a police officer. He told me he’d gotten a call from someone who reported that I was selling baseballs. I was like, WTF, and told him very calmly that it simply wasn’t true and that there must’ve been a mistake. Then more cops showed up. Then the head of stadium security showed up, along with his assistant and other stadium personnel. There were seven of them, and they insisted that I’d sold a baseball, which they told me is illegal to do on their private property.

I told them that I’d snagged more than 6,300 baseballs in my life and never sold one — that I was proud of never having sold one . . . that I once turned down a $10,000 offer for a Barry Bonds home run that I caught, that I’d turned down a $500 offer last year after catching the Mike Trout homer, that I give away baseballs to kids at just about every game I attend, that I’ve raised all that money for charity, and so on. I even offered to take a lie-detector test, but they didn’t want to hear any of it. They simply insisted that I’d sold a baseball, and they ejected me from the stadium

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Alright…all this aside (and more on this soon), Hample did get a pretty cool snapshot out of the whole ordeal.