Austin Capobianco has grown accustomed to the blowback. It’s been more than three months since the 38-year-old Connecticut man grabbed and pried open the glove of Los Angeles Dodgers right fielder Mookie Betts in Game 4 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium. He’s received hundreds of texts and voicemails from strangers telling him to go to hell or worse.
He’s been excoriated on social media — just one penance for a sin witnessed live on television by 16 million people and replayed countlessly online since.
But this winter, not long before Capobianco would receive a letter from Major League Baseball indefinitely banning him from all MLB stadiums, the arrival of a different sort of delivery left him stunned.
He answered a phone call from his brother, who told him that a box had arrived at the doorstep of their parents’ house in a sleepy suburb on the shoreline of Connecticut.
There was no name on it. It had some weight.
Wary to open it, a Google search of the return address led them to a company that specializes in sending anonymous packages filled with a particular substance.
“It was poop,” Capobianco said.
Someone had paid a company to anonymously send feces to Capobianco. But since his name was still connected with his parents’ address online, it wound up there instead of at his apartment.
Other anonymous packages were also sent to his office, where he and his four siblings work for their family’s food service supply and commercial kitchen design business. They went unopened.
“All the stuff my family has had to deal with because of me,” Capobianco said. “The nonstop phone calls. The people sending me pictures of their ugly looking penises. The packages.”
Capobianco says he regrets interfering with Betts and that he wishes the whole thing “never happened.”
He’s disappointed that he’s been banned, but says that he understands the penalty. The diehard Yankees fan hopes he can get back in MLB’s good graces sooner than later so that he can return to Yankee Stadium.
But he also wants to give his version of what happened that night. And he hopes that the constant stream of mostly anonymous vitriol will finally end.
“Guys, you won the World Series,” he said. “Leave me alone.”
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