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The Phillies Hate Little Girls?

By: mbohn

This story is a little bit disappointing. Check that, it is extremely disappointing. Big thanks to Gordon Edes of Yahoo! Sports for bringing it to our attention.

Apparently Jennifer Valdivia, a 12 year old girl, caught Ryan Howard’s 200th home run ball in Miami earlier this season. She was escorted by security to the Phillies’ clubhouse where an equipment manager convinced her to give the ball to the team in exchange for a meet and greet with Howard and a signed ball. Problem is, Jennifer thought she was getting her ball back, not some random ball. Another problem was that Howard was a no-show to the meet and greet, and some random “club official” delivered the new ball to 12 year old Valdivia.
So the Valdivias hired a lawyer after speaking with a Miami TV consumers affairs squad and tried to get her ball back. Here is where it gets even shadier. Valdivia’s lawyer got a letter from the Phillies’ team lawyer, William Webb, in which he said the team would return the ball to Valdivia but they would not authenticate it and little Jennifer would have to sign a confidentiality agreement.
Sounds to me like the Phillies were going to send her another random ball, and claim it was Howard’s 200th home run ball. They had already given the ball to Howard and planned on letting him keep the ball. Why else would they say that they could not authenticate the ball? Yet when Valdivia’s lawyer rejected the offer from the Phillies and filed a suit, the real ball showed up the same day. This ball was authenticated by the Phillies. See why it sounds like they were trying to screw this little girl out of the real “200th” ball? This is a record setting ball, for the fastest player to ever get to 200 home runs, by the way.
This ball could be worth a lot of money (seriously, 500K would be on the low side of what it could bring at auction if Howard goes on to a Hall of Fame finish) and the Phillies came up really, really small here. Oh, they did offer her free tickets to a September visit to Miami by the Phillies, which the Valdivias declined to accept, so they have that going for them. The Phillies front office should be ashamed of itself for their actions back in July, and even more so for their actions after that.
You will notice I am not killing Ryan Howard for any of this. I have a feeling that he was not aware of what was going on, and would have been pretty ticked off if he had. Howard, by all indications, is as outstanding of a person as he is a one bagger and slugger. I just can not see Howard agreeing to the actions of the front office here, and it is my guess that he never knew about the missed meet and greet.

Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 2:15 AM
Categories: MLB, MLB Rumors

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