This is Akinori Iwamura. He came from Japan, if you couldn’t tell, and was one of the members of the Rays team that turned things around before he got injured and found his career waylaid. He was eventually let go because of these injury issues and tried to catch on with the Pirates. Unable to stay with them for the season, he ended up with the A’s in Oakland to finish out the 2010 season.
He traveled with the A’s this past weekend to Minnesota, where he played third base on Sunday’s matinee. In the 6th inning of that game, he was battling Alex Burnett, and on the 8th pitch of a long at bat, with the 3-2 count, he popped a foul ball behind the plate and right into the waiting right hand of my father.
(Fun side story… I watched the replay to see if you could see my dad snag the foul ball, but you couldn’t. He said that he considered giving the ball to a little girl sitting nearby, but noticed an Inaugural Season logo on the ball so he kept it. Two batters before, FSN cut to a guy giving a little girl a foul ball.)
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