Phillies

Let Us Analyze this Video of Zack Hample Possibly Bumping into a Kid

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: May 19th, 2023 · 1:38 PM EDT

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Zack Hample caught a Cedric Mullins home run ball off Shohei Ohtani in Baltimore:

ZACK HAMPLE CAN’T BE STOPPED 🤣 pic.twitter.com/fMwBydAyNf

— Joe Pompliano (@JoePompliano) May 18, 2023

He’s getting ripped because there’s a little kid on the fence, standing next to his dad, presumably.

Here’s what I see:

1. kid starts to duck/shrink a bit
2. Hample goes up
3. dad throws an arm in the air, not an amazing effort to catch the ball, but his arm is up
4. Hample pulls some kind of Air Jordan contortion move and is pretty close to landing on the kid
5. it’s hard to see, but around the 15-second mark the kid turns around and starts clapping

It’s hard to tell if Hample knocked into the kid or not. In the broadcast replay, they’re kind of buried in the crowd, so you can’t see any better than the video we have above.

Honestly, if Hample did touch the kid, there doesn’t seem to be that much contact. He’s getting killed on Twitter for “jumping” on the kid and “pushing him against the fence,” but I think that’s slightly overblown here. He did make an effort to avoid clattering into him, and there wasn’t any kind of obvious reaction from the dad.

That being said, Zack Hample remains a humongous dork.