PHILADELPHIA — Game 3 of the World Series was just the second Phillies game that Ty Kuhner, 10, of Wilmington, Del., has attended this season at Citizens Bank Park.
But he has been a Phillies fan “as long as I’ve been alive,” he said, and the kid came prepared. He had his glove with him as he and his sister, Madison, 13, sat in the first row of the right-field bleachers Tuesday night.
And when Brandon Marsh lofted a deep drive to right field — right at Ty — he knew what to do.
He reached out, and the ball landed right in his mitt. It just didn’t stay there.
For a few moments, there was an expectant and collective holding-of-breath around the park, as everyone in the place wondering whether Kuhner was the 21st century’s answer to Jeffrey Maier, the young Yankees fan who changed the course of the 1996 American League Championship Series by reaching over the right-field wall to grab a Derek Jeter fly ball, turning it into a home run.
Fortunately for Marsh and the Phillies, though, the umpires determined that Marsh’s long drive had been long enough.
The home run, the Phillies’ third of the game, gave them a four-run lead in the bottom of the second inning. It turned Ty into a focus of national attention. And it gave the Kuhner kids, whose parents, Kris and Stef, were sitting a few rows above them, a memory they’ll likely never forget. Better yet, Phillies play-by-play man Tom McCarthy hand-delivered the Kuhners another baseball, one autographed by Jimmy Rollins and Jayson Werth.
And no, Ty Kuhner said, no one booed him when he dropped the ball.
“Just Astros fans,” he said.
