A QUESTION ABOUT A FATHER AND A SON: WHY WASN’T PHILLIES KAREN ARRESTED?
The female fan wanted a baseball so desperately that she grabbed Drew Feltwell on the shoulder — with force — and makes me wonder why she wasn’t arrested by Miami police in a case of stadium violence
Drew Feltwell is a man. His right arm was grabbed forcibly by a woman who proceeded to scream in his face at a game because, in what was more obvious than her gray hair, his son cradled a baseball she craved. Such a horror has happened to me — in a parking matter that should have bothered a cop, but did not. And isn’t it friggin’ peculiar when the woman can break a law when a man always is hauled straight to jail?
That is my takeaway from the story of Feltwell and his son, Lincoln, who was holding a home-run ball until Phillies Karen intercepted their night and dominated social media. Why is it Karen, per se? Why not a name such as Melena, also a bloody and dark stool? Stadium violence should not be a one-sided crime, particularly if a woman is nuts and capable of anything. Yet she was not arrested in Miami after confronting them in the stands and forcing Feltwell to give her the ball.
He was rational. She should spend a week in solitary confinement while his son wipes her spit off his face. If Feltwell didn’t give her the ball, would she have thrown fists at them? It’s not as if the Marlins draw too many fans — 13,290 a game, the worst number in MLB beyond teams playing in West Sacramento and in Tampa’s minor leagues — and certainly had assembled enough police inside loanDepot Park. We still don’t know Karen’s real name, though she has been identified wrongly as Leslie-Ann Kravitz, Karen Cairny and Cheryl Richardson-Wagner.
But what we know of Feltwell is that he might be the Dad of the Year. Most people would be livid when pulled into a viral scene by a person in Philadelphia jersey. All he wanted was Harrison Bader’s home-run ball on his son’s 10th birthday. Instead, they became symbols of ludicrous fan behavior. Each day, we hear of another soul swallowed by sports, such as a female Houston Texans rooter bloodied at SoFi Stadium. In Miami, the public reacted because a man and his son were ripped off by a woman. That happens in everyday life.
To his credit, Feltwell doesn’t want Phillies Karen to face public punishment beyond what she has dealt with. If she shows up again, especially at Citizens Bank Park, who knows if she lasts past the first inning? Don’t clash, he says.
“Please don’t do anything to that lady,’’ Feltwell said. “Leave it alone. If somebody knows her and can talk to her, that’s different. But God, I don’t want people breaking in their house and stuff like that. The internet already messed her up pretty good. I could say something like she got what she deserved, but I don’t know if she deserved that much.”
In his mind, in a split moment, he was smart enough to think beyond a ballpark. “Be Dad and show him how to de-escalate the situation,” Feltwell said of his son. “We were there to get a home-run ball. So I thought I had accomplished this great thing. And putting it in his glove meant a lot. She was just so adamant and loud and yelling and persistent, and I just didn’t want to deal with it anymore. There were hundreds of people just staring. And she was very, very, very close, so I didn’t want to do something I’d regret. And that was the choice I made, just hand the ball back and tell her go away.”
His son was impressed. “Um, I wasn’t very happy that we had to give it to her, but we can’t win,” Lincoln told a TV station. “She was gonna get it anyways.”
As his father pointed out, Phillies Karen wasn’t positioned to nab the ball. He arrived first, which is the ongoing ground rule in stadiums. “I guess she just thought that that was her ball, because it was in front of her,” Feltwell said. “That’s fine, but she was too slow.” She had no right to do anything but sit down. At least the Marlins greeted Lincoln with a goody bag and arranged a post-game meeting with Bader, who provided a signed bat in a real Phillies uniform.
“See, this is good stuff. Good things happen to good people,” Marlins broadcaster Kyle Sielaff said. “Dad was doing a real good job holding it in, because he was not happy with that woman — and neither was I.”
Who is? If Phillies Karen needs $5,000, Blowout Cars will provide the money if she writes, “I’m sorry,” and gives the ball to Lincoln. Don’t be shocked if she’s a gold digger. If the ball returns, Feltwell has an idea.
“I would love to have that particular ball to put on the wall next to his bat, and I got about 500 promises that they’re going to get the ball,” he said. “I just hope nobody does anything stupid to get it.”
Oh, they might.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.