On Wednesday night, before he swatted his first home run in two weeks and cracked his first double in a month, Tommy Joseph put a Phillies jersey on a 12-year-old cancer patient from Boyertown. The boy followed Joseph into the dugout and onto the field for a pregame stretch. They played catch in right field. They jogged together. They fist-bumped Joseph’s teammates.
The boy, last month, caught one of Joseph’s homers to deep left field. Caught it on the fly. “It was sweet,” Joseph said. “He put his hands up and everything.” The first baseman heard about the boy’s interview later that day on the team’s broadcast — how he loved baseball and how he was undergoing treatment for leukemia.