A brush with greatness

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Baseball touches everyone’s life a little differently. I didn’t come to the game until I was well into adulthood, but for others, like my friend Zack Quaintance, baseball permeated his childhood. Quaintance grew up in a baseball family in a baseball town (Chicago). He has childhood photos of his grandfather, who actually played for the Chicago White Sox farm system before the war, teaching him how to hold a bat.  

But more to our interests, one summer day at Wrigley Stadium, Quaintance had a brush - or a near-collision - with greatness when he was almost beaned by a foul ball off Barry Bonds’ bat during a Cubs v. Pirates game at Wrigley Field. Quaintance was only five or six at the time, and he was attending the game with his parents and two brothers. They were seated right behind home plate when Bonds hit a ball straight up into the air, and it lifted back towards tiny little unsuspecting Quaintance.

“I was sitting in the middle, and I have two younger brothers, and they’re on either side of me. My parents each grabbed one to sort of shield them from the ball, and I was just staring at it. It could have come down and clocked me right on top of the head. I probably wouldn’t be here right now.”

Luckily for Quaintance, he did not get clocked by the rapidly descending ball. “It bounced right in front of me and rattled under my chair up and down. I just reached and picked it up. My lasting memory from that was all these adults grabbing at my arm as I grab the ball, and then immediately letting go when they realized it was a small child.”

Once the ball was properly secured, Quaintance’s dad told him to hold it up in the air. “You’re gonna be on TV!”

After the game, the ball was placed in a safe spot in the Quaintance’s laundry room high above the reach of the Quaintance children, who would want to play with it. However, if you’ve spent any time with children, you will know that no spot is really safe from the hands of a determined child, and the Quaintance sons were able to acquire the ball and kicked it about the house until it eventually disappeared. “It just kind of got lost, as things in a house with three small boys tend to do.”

Decades (and a bunch of baseball games) later, Barry Bonds’ foul ball is still the most exciting thing that has happened to Zack Quaintance at a baseball game (including when the White Sox clinched a playoff spot one year), which is perhaps a statement for bringing your kids to baseball games (and also keeping an eye out for stray foul balls). Not only was the experience special, it also changed how Quaintance felt about Bonds throughout the rest of his childhood, “I did feel a weird connection to Barry Bonds for a long time after that.”