When a drone suddenly appeared near the left-field wall at Sutter Health Park’s home opener on Monday night, veteran Athletics bat boy Stewart Thalblum decided to help thwart it.
The drone tried to lift him off the grass but Thalblum used a bat and brought it down, careful not to cut himself with the spinning blades, while park security offered up a helping hand and a towel just in case.
Once the device had been corralled, Thalblum handed it off to a security guard.
The drone appeared with Seth Brown batting for the Athletics in the seventh inning of the Chicago Cubs’ 18-3 rout and it delayed the game for a few minutes.
“I think for me I didn’t want to cut my fingers off. I always see that on the news, people hurt themselves when it’s hovering or whatever and their hand gets caught in it,” said the 22-year-old Thalblum, a sixth-year bat boy. “I tried to catch it by the bottom and it was there for me so I just grabbed it and then I just started whacking the wings of it basically with the bat just to snap them off so it wouldn’t fly away from me because I was going to take it behind the wall. We couldn’t figure out what to do with it and it was trying to fly away from me.”
Thalblum is the son of longtime A’s visiting clubhouse manager Mikey Thalblum.
Cubs manager Craig Counsell was impressed. When the drone was spotted by some Chicago players, Counsell alerted plate umpire Adrian Johnson, who hadn’t seen it.
“I guess that’s the world we’re in right now,” Counsell said. “But it was funny because it looked like the drone was trying to fly away, it was trying to fly Mikey’s son away, too. It’s life in 2025.”
Stewart Thalblum had noticed the drone the previous at-bat, a first for him, and then saw Johnson stop play — so he went to work.
“Everybody was just looking at it for a little while and I’ve never had something like that happen,” Thalblum said. “I was asking around, everybody’s looking and nobody from security or anything had gone out there so I was like, I don’t know whose responsibility it is, so I was like, OK, maybe it’s mine.”
Dad was plenty proud of his son — again.
“I’m proud of him for a lot of other reasons more so than getting a drone, just for being a good kid,” the father said, chuckling and not surprised at the fast thinking. “He’s a good clubbie.”
Reporting by The Associated Press.
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