Mets fan catches a foul ball and a falling window washer
Section 112, row 4, seat 9. A 61-year-old retired mail carrier made the catch of the season twice in 40 seconds and then asked whether he could keep the ball.
Frank Delgado has been going to Mets games for 48 years and had never caught a foul ball. On Saturday night he caught one in the bottom of the sixth, held it up for the crowd, and then, roughly 40 seconds later, caught a window washer.
The window washer, 29-year-old Tomasz Wrona, had been cleaning the glass on the luxury suites above Section 112 when a strand of what Citi Field's operations staff later described as "a sticky, non-standard material" caught his safety line. The line held. The platform did not. Wrona slid off, swung once, and dropped about 12 feet into Delgado's arms.
"I still had the ball in my left hand," Delgado said. "I wasn't putting it down."
What the stadium saw
Video from the stadium's own cameras, reviewed by the Bugle, shows a figure moving across the suite-level glass about 15 seconds before Wrona fell. The figure is wearing red and blue. The Mets declined to say what the figure was doing there and whether it had a ticket.
“I still had the ball in my left hand. I wasn't putting it down.”
Frank Delgado, Section 112
Wrona was checked by stadium medics and released. He said he had been "more surprised than hurt" and that Delgado "has very strong arms for a mailman." Delgado pointed out that he had carried mail in Jackson Heights for 34 years and that "every building has stairs."
The ball
Delgado asked an usher whether he would be allowed to keep the ball, given the circumstances. The usher told him that he had caught it fair and square and that the window washer did not change that. The Mets later sent a second ball to his seat, signed by the pitcher, along with a hat for Wrona.
The Mets lost, 5-2. Delgado said it did not matter. Wrona said he would be back at work on Monday, "on a different building, preferably one with fewer people on the glass."
The usual question
Citi Field said the suite-level glass would be inspected on Sunday and that the sticky material would be removed "by the appropriate contractor." Asked whether the stadium would seek to recover the cost, a spokesperson said: "From whom?" The Bugle has some ideas.