Watch Joey Gallo rob his first home run from vocal Yankee fan

The Rangers’ Joey Gallo has already hit a ton of them in his young career, but until Sunday afternoon at Yankee Stadium, he had never robbed another player from hitting one.

Gallo snared a fly ball off the bat of the Yankees’ Austin Romine atop the wall in left field to steal away a sure home run in the eighth inning of Texas’ 7-2 loss.

The vocal Yankees fans behind Gallo in the stands complimented him on the catch. But until that moment, Gallo says, there had a been a colorful back and forth throughout the game.

“Were they saying something? When were they not saying something?” Gallo said when asked if fans were talking to him. “They were pretty nice to me. I didn’t say anything bad, I don’t think.”

After making the catch, Gallo told them thanks before heading back to the dugout.

“Late in the game, the ball started dying a little bit. So when he hit it, I started running back, looked at the wall and looked at the ball and was like, ‘I might as well go up, why not’ and it happened to land in my glove,” he said. “It was the first one I’ve ever robbed, so I was pretty excited.”

Gallo said after watching the replay that he definitely can jump higher.

Was he jumping as high as he could?

“I wasn’t in any position to jump as high as I could. I was just trying to time the ball,” he said. “It really wasn’t a trying to show off my athleticism kind of thing, I was just trying to jump where the ball was.”

Gallo was 2 for 3 with a double and has multiple hits in three of his past five games.

This story was originally published August 12, 2018 at 4:18 PM.