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.”
Seated at an Italian restaurant in mid-January, nobody seems to recognize Capobianco. Dressed in a blue Moncler crew neck and a black beanie, rather than the all-black flat brim Yankees hat and oversized gray jersey he’ll forever be associated with, he’s just another guy out for dinner in the Westchester County suburbs.
On Oct. 29th of last year, he was also just another guy in the crowd, until he made a series of decisions that will likely follow him for a long time.
Capobianco arrived at the stadium for Game 4 with his younger brother Darren, best friend John Hansen and another friend. They found their four seats in section 109, up against the wall in the right field corner — a ticket package Capobianco’s older brother has had the rights to for a little more than a decade.
Almost right away, a dark cloud seemed to hang over the Bronx. In the first inning, Yankees starting pitcher Luis Gil gave up a one-out double to Betts and then a home run to Freddie Freeman, who had sunk the Yankees with a 10th-inning walk-off blast in Game 1 and also homered in games 2 and 3. It felt like the embarrassment of a sweep happening on the Yankees’ own turf may be inevitable.
Reeling and furious, they decided to regroup. They shuffled their seats, hoping it would bring “good juju,” Capobianco said. He slid from his customary spot on the far right of the foursome and into the seat second from the left.
“I’ve never sat in that seat … in my life,” he said.
Then, in the Yankees’ first at-bat of the game, Gleyber Torres made contact with a high and inside fastball. It screamed toward Capobianco and his crew at 91.1 mph.
First the ball got past both of Hansen’s outstretched hands. Then it landed in the glove of Betts, whose left wrist was between Capobianco’s hands, which were forming a cup but didn’t appear to pass the wall and enter the field of play.
What happened next was something nobody had ever seen before.
Capobianco grabbed Betts’ glove with both hands, gritted his teeth and pulled it open just enough to fit his hand inside and knock the ball loose. As Betts tussled with Capobianco, Hansen gripped Betts’ right wrist.
After the ball fell to the field, umpires ruled fan interference and called Torres out. Betts and the group briefly exchanged words.
“Mookie was swearing at us,” Darren Capobianco said at the time. “Not good.”
Austin Capobianco knew he was going to be ejected.
“I didn’t know how bad it was,” he said, “but I knew it was bad.”
Within a minute, Yankee Stadium security guards whisked away Capobianco and Hansen and told them they would be ejected from the game. At the time, Capobianco said, stadium security told them they would be allowed back for Game 5. The next afternoon, MLB announced that they would, in fact, be barred from the game, and the Yankees donated their tickets to a family whose child had cancer.
Capobianco and Hansen watched the rest of Game 4 and all of Game 5 from Billy’s Bar across the street from the stadium.
“A million people wanted to take pictures,” he said.
Capobianco now says he has never watched clips of his interference with Betts and he never will. When it shows on TV, he changes the channel.
“I want nothing to do with that memory,” he said recently.
But in the hours after the game, Capobianco seemed to embrace the notoriety. He did an interview with a reporter for ESPN. The next day, he appeared on a Barstool Sports podcast.
“We always joke about the ball in our area,” Capobianco said at the time, according to ESPN. “We’re not going to go out of our way to attack. If it’s in our area, we’re going to ‘D’ up. … Someone defends, someone knocks the ball. We talk about it. We’re willing to do this.”
But speaking to The Athletic, Capobianco and Hansen each said they had never planned to touch a player. They said the plan was to just knock down the ball to make sure it doesn’t become an out for the Yankees — and only if the ball was heading toward their seats and not the field of play.
Hansen said that he was wrong for gripping Betts’ wrist and that he wasn’t trying to hurt him. He added that when he saw Betts making a move toward Capobianco, he just reacted, not realizing that Capobianco had control of his glove.
“I was just trying to prevent something from escalating in literally half a second,” Hansen, who lives in Nashville, said.
The following day, many were surprised when Capobianco had a famous supporter: Gronk.
Capobianco attended the University of Arizona where he became friends with a freshman tight end named Rob Gronkowski. Gronkowski called Capobianco a “fun dude,” though he added that what he did was “truly unacceptable.”
“Him doing that represents him very well,” Gronkowski said on “Up & Adams” on Fanduel TV. “He is all in for his teams, he is all in for the Yankees. I remember him talking about the Yankees all the time, how he loves them so much. That describes him perfectly, doing whatever it takes to help his team out. He is a beauty.”
Soon after the incident, Capobianco’s cellphone was blowing up, most of the calls either showing “No ID” or Southern California area codes.
Many of the voicemails, which Capobianco shared with The Athletic, were vicious.
“Have fun watching Game 5 from home, ass hat.”
“F— you, you piece of s—. You’ve got karma coming to you. Watch your back, b—-.”
“You’re a f—— idiot and a joke, fatass.”
Now, all Capobianco can do is wait.
MLB’s letter last month noted that his “conduct posed a serious risk to the health and safety of (Betts) and went far over the line of acceptable fan behavior,” something that Capobianco says he understands.
He badly hopes to be allowed back to Yankee Stadium in the near future, though he understands it might take a while. He grew up in Connecticut loving the Yankees and attending games at the old stadium with his dad.
Capobianco said he tries to avoid his phone and doesn’t like social media. He spends most of his days working. He loves to travel. He’s thankful that what they did hasn’t hurt the Capobianco family business.
“I’m a good dude who did a dumb thing on camera,” he said.
Capobianco said he hopes at some point this year to reach out to MLB to ask what he could do to expedite the process of lifting his ban. He said the person who owns their season ticket package may be willing to donate tickets to some games to charity, like he said they have done at various times throughout the years. He added that he would be happy to do some sort of community service, too.
However, the fans who ran onto the outfield and hugged Atlanta Braves outfielder Ronald Acuńa Jr. at Coors Field in August 2023 are still serving indefinite bans handed down by MLB. An MLB spokesman added that a fan seated near Capobianco and his group during Game 4 reported to the league “negative feedback regarding their conduct” before the Betts incident happened.
While Betts’ initial public reaction to the incident at the time was subdued and he hasn’t publicly commented on the indefinite ban since it was leveled, he did let loose on Peacock’s “Back That Year Up 2024.”
“I would really say ‘F— you guys,’” Betts said in late December. “I get them trying to get the ball. Cool. But you tried to grab my s—. I was in the moment. So I thought about throwing a ball at them. And then I realized, ‘Mook, you ain’t gonna do s—. Go back to right field.”
Under the terms of the ban, Capobianco and Hansen aren’t allowed at any MLB stadium, and they can’t attend MLB-sponsored events. They’re allowed to attend minor-league games, unless the stadium is owned by a major-league team.
More than anything, Capobianco hopes to simply fade from public consciousness.
No more assumptions that this was premeditated. No more harassing calls or nasty voicemails. No more mysterious packages.
“I’m a hero in Yankees land. I’m a villain in America,” he said. “I don’t really care. I just want to be forgotten about. That’s it. I want people to forget about me.”
(Top photo of Capobianco and Hansen at Game 4: Al Bello / Getty Images)
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