ARLINGTON, Texas - Go to the ballpark and catch a foul ball: It's what every fan wants to do.

And so it was for 6-year-old Cooper Stone.

He and his dad even stopped to buy a new glove on the way to the Texas Rangers game Thursday night. Even better, their seats were in the left field stands, shouting distance from Cooper's favorite player, reigning AL MVP Josh Hamilton.

Maybe, just maybe, he would throw one their way. In the second inning, he did.

Hamilton grabbed a foul ball that ricocheted into left field, and tossed it into the stands. The boy's father, 6-foot-3 Shannon Stone, caught it, tumbled over a 33-inch-tall railing and plunged 20 feet onto concrete below, right in front of his son.

The 39-year-old firefighter died a short time later at a hospital.

"That's what they were there for, was to catch a ball," Shannon Stone's mother, Suzann, said. "Cooper loves baseball and he's a big Josh Hamilton fan. Had his jersey."

On Friday at Rangers Ballpark, flags flew at half-staff and a black tarpaulin covered the gap where Stone fell.

A moment of silence was observed before the Rangers and Oakland Athletics played the second game of their four-game series.

Hamilton, still grappling with the aftermath of the wrenching night, said Friday he could hear the boy screaming for his dad after Stone fell. The player said he remembers the fall "like it happened in slow motion."

Jenny Stone, the victim's 36-year-old widow, worried how her only son would recover from the horror of not just watching his father fall but riding in the front of the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

At the request of the Stone family, MLB.com has not posted video of the accident.

Replays showed the boy watching as his father stretched and reached out to grab the ball and then fell through a gap of several feet between the left-field seats and the 14-foot-high outfield wall that has a video scoreboard on it.

Shannon Stone's mother told The Associated Press that her son and grandson were "almost attached at the hip" and went to Rangers games often, including one of the team's World Series games last season.

She was watching Thursday night and hoping she would catch a glimpse of them.

"Cooper told me where they were sitting so I could look for him on television," she said, adding that she was out of the room when her son fell. "I missed it. I didn't see it."

Her youngest son, Chad, called afterward and broke the news to his parents.