The young Phillies fan made to give up his home run baseball to a furious female supporter has spoken of his heartbreak — saying he was left to feel like he could never “win” against the bully.
Lincoln Feltwell inadvertently landed in a wildly viral firestorm after the furious fan screamed at his family to hand her the ball they got at Friday’s game against the Marlins in Miami — just before his 10th birthday.
“Um, I wasn’t very happy that we had to give it to her, but we can’t win,” Lincoln told NBC10 Philadelphia of being made to feel defeated and forced to hand over the prized possession.
“She was gonna get it anyways,” said the youngster, whose dad admitted he quickly gave in to the bully.
The heated ordeal unfolded when the youngster’s father, Drew Feltwell, was among a group of fans who scrambled towards the home run ball that Phillies outfielder Harrison Bader had just smacked during the game.
Feltwell was then filmed walking back to his family and presenting the ball to his ecstatic son.
Seconds later, a gray-haired Phillies fan was filmed grabbing the father’s shoulder and yelling for him to hand it over.
“She was in the seat behind,” Feltwell said.
“I don’t know if she was standing up. Maybe? But I was watching the ball from almost the bat to where it went into that seat and kind of jumbled around and I was already going in and coincidentally, as soon as I was going in, it stopped in one spot and I just picked it up.”
“I didn’t even see her walk up and as she reached for my arm, she just yelled in my ear, ‘That’s my ball!’ like super loud,” Feltwell continued.
“I jumped out of my skin and I was like, you know, like ‘Why are you here?’ you know, ‘Go away.’ And she’s like, ‘That’s my ball! You stole out of – those are from our seats.’ And I said, ‘There was nobody in that seat,’ you know. She said, ‘That’s from where we were sitting,’ and she just went on and on.”
Feltwell made his young hand over the ball in a bid to de-escalate the situation.
“I don’t even remember what she said, it was, you know, a lot of eyes on us by that time and the ball was already in his glove and she just wouldn’t stop and I mean, I’m literally leaning back as she’s in my face yelling and yelling and I pretty much just wanted her to go away because I had a fork in the road: either do something I was probably going to regret or be dad and show him how to deescalate the situation so that’s where I went,” he said.
“We were there to get a home run ball. I thought I had accomplished this great thing and putting [it] in his glove meant a lot and she was just so adamant and loud and yelling and persistent and I just didn’t want to deal with it anymore.”
Fans quickly booed the woman as she furiously headed back to her seat clutching the ball — even flipping the bird to the crowd.
In the wake of the furor, Lincoln ended up receiving a bunch of baseball goodies from the Marlins and met with Bader, who gifted the boy a signed baseball bat, after the game.
Meanwhile, the female fan — who still hasn’t been identified publicly — has been roasted online over her antics.