A fan hit by a foul ball stayed through the 9th. Now she’s on a baseball card.

A fan hit by a foul ball stayed through the 9th. Now she’s on a baseball card.

Topps Now trading cards have celebrated some of baseball’s biggest achievements in recent years. One marked Shohei Ohtani cranking his 40th home run last season. Another commemorated Framber Valdez throwing a no-hitter with the fewest pitches in more than two decades. And a third memorialized the Chicago Cubs blasting seven home runs in a single game, the most by a team in nearly a half century.

The newest addition to the Topps Now pantheon: Liz McGuire, a 40-year-old project manager from Toronto. Her achievement: getting drilled with a 110 mph foul ball during Friday night’s Toronto Blue Jays game and, despite a baseball-sized knot on her forehead, staying until the last pitch.

“The Jays were starting a rally,” McGuire said. “That could have been something.”

It fell short. The Blue Jays lost to the Tampa Bay Rays 4-3.

A Blue Jays spokesperson said in a statement that the team has several precautions to protect fans, including netting that wraps around home plate from first to third base. Doctors, nurses and emergency workers staff every game and check on fans immediately when objects fly into the stands, which is what happened with McGuire.

Protective netting at professional ballparks has gotten better in recent years. In 2018, Major League Baseball announced that all 30 ballparks in the league would extend protective netting to at least the ends of both dugouts during the upcoming season. The move came after teams independently began expanding their netting following incidents in which fans were injured by foul balls. In its announcement, the league specifically mentioned one that happened on Sept. 20, 2017, in which Yankees third baseman Todd Frazier launched a foul ball 105 mph into the stands, injuring a young girl who had to be hospitalized.

In 2022, Major League Baseball agreed to require extended protective netting to all minor club teams by the 2025 season.

McGuire said she doesn’t blame the Blue Jays and counts herself as a super fan of the team. A fly fisher, her profile picture on the social media platform X is a trout wearing a Blue Jays hat, and she’s attended about half of the 48 games the team has played this season.

On Friday, she went to the game with three friends, and in the bottom of the seventh inning, they were discussing some of what McGuire considered to be an umpire’s bad calls.

That’s when Blue Jays shortstop Bo Bichette came to the plate with one out and his team down 4-0. During an at-bat that would end with him flying out to center field, Bichette crushed a pitch, ripping the ball foul into the seats along the third base line.

McGuire was looking left toward the outfield, advocating for Major League Baseball to have robot umpires call balls and strikes, when she heard the crack of the bat and a scream, causing her to jerk her head back toward home plate just in time for the ball to slam into the right side of her forehead.

McGuire experienced a split second of blackness but never passed out. Her adrenaline raging, she stood up. One of her buddies told her she had been hit, and when McGuire asked if she was okay, he told her it was bad, she recalled. She felt her forehead swelling and used her phone’s camera to confirm that the goose egg was already “rocking.”

Within minutes, the Blue Jays’ medics reached her, loaded her in a cart, took her to get ice and an over-the-counter pain reliever. While she was being treated, McGuire said, she spotted the woman who ended up with the ball that had hit her and pleaded with her to give up the ball — to no avail. Her friends had already tried near their seats, offering her hundreds of dollars in exchange, she added. The woman refused, even withstanding the crowd’s chants of “Give her the ball!” before leaving the game early, McGuire said.

“I didn’t even get the ball,” she said. “It felt like some social pact had been broken.”

McGuire returned to her seat for the last couple pitches and watched the Rays add a little insult to her injury by beating the Blue Jays 4-3.

After the game, McGuire and her friends walked about 10 minutes to the nearest emergency room where medical staff determined she didn’t have a concussion and used X-rays to confirm that the impact hadn’t broken any bones.

But the next day, McGuire felt nauseated and tired, leading her back to an emergency room. Using a CT scan, doctors ruled out brain bleeds and diagnosed her with a likely concussion.

On Sunday night, she posted on X while watching “How to Train Your Dragon” with her nieces and nephews, tagging the Blue Jays and telling the world “I got my face mashed in by a 110mph foul off Bo Bichette’s bat. I didn’t even get the ball. I even stayed till the end of the game. Any way you can hook a girl up?”

The tweet has since racked up 15 million views.

Topps was watching and within hours had replied with a question: “Topps Now Card?” The series has a reputation for being cheeky, including creating a card for the beekeeper who last month responded to a swarm of bees that delayed a Dodgers-Diamondbacks game in Phoenix. The caption: “Bee afraid, bee very afraid: Bees swarm in Arizona.”

On Monday, the trading card company posted two more tweets asking McGuire to send a direct message to talk about “an idea!”

She did, and later that day, they worked together to design and plan the rollout of her trading card. The card is anchored by the selfie McGuire took minutes after she was hit, a worried look on her face, a Blue Jays cap resting lightly on her head and a goose egg that might be the size of an actual goose egg swelling atop her right eyebrow.

The card’s caption: “Fan wears 110MPH foul ball like a champ.”

Topps did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Washington Post.

The trading card company made 110 cards, a nod to how fast Bichette hit the ball that would nail McGuire moments later. McGuire said she plans to auction off a few, with some of the proceeds going to charity, including the concussion center at Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital just outside of Toronto. She also plans to donate some to the Jays Care Foundation, the Blue Jays’ charitable arm. Others will go to her nieces and nephews, who she said have been traumatized by what happened.

McGuire has already gotten back on the horse. On Tuesday night, she went to a Blue Jays game in which the White Sox crushed the home team 5-0. She said she got scared every time the bat made solid contact with the ball, something she hopes fades with time.

But she planned to attend Wednesday night’s rematch against the White Sox. She said she was excited to get a baseball signed by Bichette. The Blue Jays have also gifted her tickets to a future game and given her access to batting practice.

McGuire said the experience has exposed her to the “ups and downs of humanity.” She was taken aback by the woman who insisted on keeping something that McGuire felt she had a right to. She was also floored when she checked the comments on her X post. Expecting vitriol blaming her for not paying attention, McGuire instead found people being supportive by wishing her well and recommending treatment for her injury.

But a famous trading card company immortalizing her among the best players in the sport was the best part of all.

“Topps is tops,” she said.