By Ron Kantowski

Published Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2009 | 2:55 p.m.

Updated Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2009 | 3 p.m.

NOW

Did you see the highlight of the father catching a foul ball by leaning over the railing of the upper deck at a Phillies' game, handing it to his daughter, and than watching in (mock) horror as the little girl hurled the souvenir baseball back into the stands below?

Absolutely precious.

I remember my dad getting a foul ball at a White Sox game once. Jim Fregosi of the Angles belted a prodigious drive into the upper deck at old Comiskey Park that twisted foul at the last moment. My dad ran up the stairs in the manner of Bullet Bob Hayes and outwrestled this other guy in the manner of Dick the Bruiser for the ball.

Had he handed it to me and had I thrown it back onto the field below, I am fairly certain that would have been the end of my allowance until football season.

THEN

“The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.”

-- John Cheever