Eyewitness: "Bonds' Homer Landed Right in Front of Me"

Scene: Bottom of the fifth, full count against Barry Bonds, one out, history hanging in the balance. Jaime Ramirez, Section 144, Row 13, in right field, holds up his digital camera, sets it to video mode, and hits record.

Washington Nationals pitcher Mike Bacsik winds up and delivers as the stadium erupts with camera flashes. It’s an off-speed pitch--under 60 mph when it arrives at the plate, high and outside. Bonds crushes it, launching career home run No. 756, the all-time record. The jubilation begins while the ball is still in the air, and Ramirez has an odd moment of realization: “I can see the ball coming right at the camera.”

Even in the foggy resolution, Ramirez's video catches sight of the ball just as it plummets into the stands about four rows in front of him, and then pandemonium ensues. His 10-year-old son, Christian, dives for the ball.

His next thought: “Wow, my son’s somewhere in the middle of that. I gotta go pull him out.”

Christian emerged unscathed, having briefly gotten a few fingers on the ball. When they got home, Jaime uploaded the video to YouTube.

As we wrote about yesterday on USNews.com, the increasing ease of recording amateur video on cellphones and digital cameras and then uploading them to YouTube is giving viewers around the world their choice of hundreds of perspectives on a major news event. This morning, there were already dozens of citizen videos taken at the stadium uploaded to the site, from all parts of the park. Cellular companies are starting to encourage that process by providing high-end phones pre-installed with a client that can post directly to the Internet, cutting out the PC as the middleman and making the process, known as “moblogging,” available to those who wouldn’t otherwise take the time to figure out how to do it themselves.

Ramirez, who owns a technical project management company, says his eyewitness account of the moment, along with several other videos he took at the game, were his first contributions to the video site and he was impressed by how easy it was.

“It took me about 10 seconds to figure out what to do,” he says, adding that a news agency has already contacted him about purchasing the video.

--Chris Wilson