Sawyer Strosnider stepped into the batter’s box for the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers on Wednesday afternoon with his mom, Kandi, in the second row behind home plate, and his dad, Scott, a few hundred feet away in the right-field bleachers.

Kandi was recording Sawyer’s at-bat, as she has done since he was young, but when Sawyer blasted his first professional home run, she was too elated to watch where it landed. When Scott called her to say he had caught it, she couldn’t believe him.

“I’m like, ‘You did not,’” Kandi told The Athletic on Thursday. “I go back to the home video that I’ve just taken, and I look, and sure enough, it’s the man who has the outfit on that my husband has on. I’m like, ‘You did catch that ball!’”

Scott was also filming the at-bat, and as the ball hurtled toward him in right field, the early 90s Morehead State player knew a play had to be made. He dropped his phone as it was recording to make the catch.

His POV video made it onto “SportsCenter” on Thursday night, with the footage showing the phone tumbling to the ground before Scott exclaimed, “That’s my son!”

“We don’t have this conversation if I don’t catch that ball,” he said Thursday. “When I saw it coming, I was like, ‘I’m gonna have to catch this baseball now. I’ll get rid of this phone.’”

Minor leaguer’s first pro HR caught by his dad

Sawyer, a Milwaukee Brewers 2026 second-round pick out of TCU, said he knew the ball found his dad. As the High-A outfielder rounded third for the first time as a professional, he told the third-base coach as much. The bottom-of-the-seventh shot gave the Timber Rattlers a 3-2 lead over the Lake County Captains en route to a 5-3 win.

However serendipitous the moment seemed, it wasn’t fully a coincidence that Scott was there to catch the ball. He felt his son, a left-handed batter, would pull one to right field if he finally saw something straight instead of the off-speed pitches he had been facing.

The father figured it might be his son’s final at-bat of the games his family, from Weatherford, Texas, was in town to see, and Scott wanted a memento.

“I’ve seen him bat 10,000 times,” Scott said. “I was like, ‘He’s due. I think I’m going to go over here and see if we can make a memory.’”

Sawyer added an RBI double in the eighth inning, finishing 2-for-4 with a walk in his seventh career game. He’s 11-for-33 (.333) with four extra-base hits and one home run this season.

If “there” means wandering the stadium, sitting away from his wife behind home plate, that’s how Scott watches his son’s games. Scott said there’s too much to see at any given ballpark to sit still. Too much individual culture to absorb. Too many people to meet and stories to collect.

That included the private-party viewing area he confidently wandered into at Fox Cities Stadium in Grand Chute, Wis., positioning himself where Sawyer’s home run would land.

When reminded, nicely, that he was in said private party, Scott told them, “My son’s getting ready to hit a home run to me, so I’m going to catch this ball real quick, and I’ll get out of your way.”

“He’s a wanderer,” Sawyer said. “He’s always (been that way). He can’t sit still. He likes to go talk to a bunch of different people and see the game from everywhere.”

Even after long days as an equine veterinarian, Scott made a point of attending as many games and family events as possible for Sawyer and his two younger twin brothers, one of whom has Down syndrome.

“My parents, they’re very hard-working,” Sawyer said. “But also family comes first, so they’re always setting aside time, knowing that they had other things to do. My dad was out on a farm all day, but even though he was tired, he was going to make the games.

“It was super important to me, just knowing that they were there to support me.”

Kandi has always made a point of being there for her children. After she worked for 22 years in international finance, the family moved at Scott’s urging from Cincinnati to Texas when Sawyer was 10. Part of the deal in uprooting from her own family was that she would no longer have to work. Kandi poured that time into being there for her kids.

She missed only one of Sawyer’s games at TCU, home or away, during his two seasons with the Horned Frogs. She was there when he was named Big 12 freshman of the year and a second-team All-American by Baseball America in 2025. He finished his college career with a .315 batting average and 24 home runs in 106 games.

Why didn’t she attend them all?

“It was because my boy with Down syndrome didn’t feel great, and I didn’t (want to leave him),” she said. “He loves the games. We actually got to watch it on ESPN Plus.”

Both of Sawyer’s brothers would also have been in attendance Wednesday had they not been starting their junior year of high school back in Texas.

The family’s attendance streak will become harder to sustain. With Sawyer farther away and playing more often, his parents plan to make the trip monthly.

That made Wednesday’s moment feel even more fleeting. After the game, the family reconvened on the field for pictures, laughing over the strange coincidence, or not, of it all.

Kandi was still stunned that the man who caught her son’s first home run, the man captured in her video, was her husband.

“We walked over (after the game), and she was like, ‘You really caught the ball?’” Scott said.

“Yeah, I caught the ball.”