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Two home run balls slipped through this fan's fingers

If you barely missed catching a home run at a baseball game, you’d think about it for awhile, right? How the ball was just inches from your fingers, and if you’d been positioned to the right or the left just a little bit, you would have caught it. Now imagine how long you’d think about it if that happened to you twice in the same game. One fan doesn’t have to imagine, because it happened to him on Thursday, during the game between the Baltimore Orioles and the Seattle Mariners.

The first home run came his way in the bottom of the fifth inning. Mariners left fielder Seth Smith absolutely crushed a pitch from Chris Tillman, and the ball landed about 10 rows deep in the right field seats. Our fan of destiny, clad in a white shirt and khaki shorts, was positioned perfectly to catch it. He saw the ball coming, set his feet, reached out to his left, and… the baseball went through his fingers. He actually touched it, but he couldn’t hold on.

A fan at the Orioles-Mariners game on June 30 misses catching the first of two home runs.
A fan at the Orioles-Mariners game on June 30 misses catching the first of two home runs.

The ball bounced away from him, and a fan across the aisle and a few rows down got to take it home.

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His second chance to snag a homer came just two innings later. Baltimore’s left fielder Hyun Soo Kim launched a seventh inning homer off Taijuan Walker, a line drive laser to — where else? — the right field seats. This time, the fan barely had to move. The ball came down at him, and instead of slipping through his fingers, it clanked off his thumb and bounced onto the ground.

A fan at the Orioles-Mariners game on June 30 misses catching the second of two home runs.
A fan at the Orioles-Mariners game on June 30 misses catching the second of two home runs.

I feel too bad for this guy to call him “butterfingers.” When you get a second chance to catch a home run ball at a baseball game, I’m guessing the only thing going through your head is “Oh it’s coming this way, I have to catch it, I need to catch it, please hands don’t let me down, must catch ball, must catch ball!” That second baseball was so close to landing in the palm of his hand! He was maybe an inch away from redeeming himself.

Even if he never gets another chance to catch a home run, he got a lot closer than most fans get. And now he has a great story to tell people for years to come, even though he’d probably rather have the baseballs.

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Liz Roscher is a writer for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email her at lizroscher@yahoo.com or follow her on twitter! Follow @lizroscher