PHOENIX, AZ — It was almost as if Alex Robertson’s father delivered the game-winning home run ball into his hands at Tuesday’s Diamondbacks game as a special 21st birthday present from beyond. Robertson has been struggling since his dad died last month, and he went to the game to celebrate his birthday and to honor his dad, too.
Baseball was his dad’s favorite sport, Robertson wrote on Twitter. “This one’s for you, pops,” he wrote of catching the game-winning home run in the bottom of the ninth inning. The home run gave the Diamondbacks a 5-4 win over the Texas Rangers.
If not for a ticketing snafu at Chase Field in downtown Phoenix, Robertson would never have snatched the ball.
He and his brother had good seats and were “super hyped” about the game, Robertson told news station KNXV. But when they arrived, someone was already in the seats.
“I looked at my brother and said, ‘Should we go get the bouncer?’ and my brother said, ‘No, it’s fine, let’s just find new seats that are open,’ ” Robertson told the news outlet. “Those new seats that we found were where we caught the ball.”
Pinch-hitter Jarrod Dyson was at bat. The Diamondbacks were down, 4-3. The ball “kind of looked short,” Robertson said. It ricocheted a few times before it landed in the hands of Robertson, who said he has been having a hard time coping with the death of his dad.
“We became best friends when my mom and him got divorced,” he told KNXV. “We would watch the Diamondbacks and the Cardinals together all the time.”
He tweeted a photo of himself holding the game-winning ball.
“I almost started crying because it was such an emotional thing for me,” Robertson told the news outlet. “One guy tweeted me, ‘Dyson doesn’t have a lot of power so I was wondering how he hit that ball out, after reading your tweet, now I know,’ I wanted to cry then, too.”
Dyson, who has never hit a walk-off home run in his career, will sign the ball for Robertson, who plans to get a Dyson jersey and frame both.
“I know my dad is up there smiling for sure,” Robertson told KNXV.
And perhaps “Field of Dreams” — the 1989 movie in which an Iowa farmer plows up his fields and builds a baseball diamond that attracts ghosts of great players who emerge from the corn — isn’t just fantasy.
Among countless condolences Robertson received on Twitter was one from Brenda Anshanslin, who thinks the Chicago Cubs won the 2016 World Series because her dad, who died in December 2015, “called in a favor for me.”
“I spread some of his ashes at the Harry Carey statute,” Anshanslin wrote in her condolence tweet. “Baseball is a powerful sport.”
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