By Tom

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I’m 31 years old and know a lot of things, whether they’re important or not is up for debate. Most of the knowledge I’ve acquired through the years pertains to US history, Major League Baseball, and communism. I’ve been in hundreds of conversation circles and nobody wants to talk about the anarchist-uprising in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War–ladies–but people on occasion like to talk about baseball!

My family passed down a bunch of old Cardinals media guides and Post-Dispatch newspapers from the 1990s. I have the sports section from when McGwire hit his 70th and media guides as far back as 1977–the Vern Rapp years! As a young kid growing up with no home internet in rural Southeast Missouri, these books were all I had to satiate my love for the game aside from watching it myself. 

All that said, I’m rather new to baseball kultur as it is today. I check out Jomboy and subscribed to Foolish Baseball’s YouTube channel; I follow and check in with some of the larger baseball twitter accounts on there and on occasion pop into a twitter thread to be obnoxious. I really liked the little haven I created for myself, but then you all went and ruined that.

I didn’t know who Zack Hample was, and was perfectly content with never knowing who he was. My life was 0.05% better not knowing his name and what he’s about. But thanks to you all I now have to see his fucking face and know his fucking name.

Zack Hample is so unbearable to baseball fans he even has a Wikipedia page, which puts his crimes against the sport on par with Himmler and the flogging he’s been getting in the press and on Twitter the Nuremberg Trials. Hample has collected over 11,000 baseballs beginning in 1990 when he collected his first at Shea Stadium–oh God, is he a Mets fan?

Hample has a ball addiction, it’s possibly concerning how he describes it:

“When I watched baseball on TV as a very little kid and I saw baseballs fly into the crowd and the TV cameras would zoom in on the fan who got them, celebrating like crazy and I just basically wanted to experience that someday so that’s when the passion began… and then years later when I got my first ball, it’s like it multiplied from there. I wanted it so bad, not just one, I wanted another, and another and another.”

Hample’s obsession for collecting baseballs would be an instance of harmless fandom if it weren’t for the well-documented ways he has gone about to get 11,000 baseballs. There’s also the lack of self-awareness for someone obsessed with snagging these many balls in every stadium possible. Tens of thousands of people attend baseball games–unless you’re A’s fans–and getting a baseball is a miracle of probability, something so intimate it literally connects fans with the game. What does all that mean exactly to Zack Hample? Is the 11,001th ball he gets more special than the 5,000th? And what about that compares to the first ball another fan receives?

shout out to the Rockies ushers for putting this man child in his place. Zack Hample remains the biggest dork on the planet. pic.twitter.com/f1rQgFXosB

— Absolutely Hammered (@ah_pod) August 26, 2022