ARLINGTON, Texas — Josh Hamilton doesn’t make a habit of tossing baseballs to fans, so when he fielded a foul ball early in Thursday night’s game against the Oakland Athletics, he did what he usually does: he turned it over to the ball girl along the left-field line at Rangers Ballpark.

As he did, he heard a shout from behind the left-field fence. There stood a father and son in the first row of an elevated bank of seats. “Hey, Hamilton, how about the next one?” the father asked.

“I just gave him a nod,” Hamilton, the Rangers’ All-Star outfielder said. And when he chased down another foul ball in the second inning, Hamilton sought the pair out and tossed the ball at the father.

It was a touch short, so Shannon Stone, a firefighter from Brownwood, Texas, leaned in front of his 6-year-old son, Cooper, to grab the ball. In an instant, Stone flipped over the railing and fell 20 feet to the concrete pavement below.

Paramedics scrambled to treat him, but Stone, 39, died of his injuries in the ambulance. His son was in the front seat.

“It’s like it happened in slow motion,” Hamilton, his eyes moist, said as he met reporters before Friday night’s game. “Here was a little boy, screaming for his daddy after he had fallen.”

Of Stone, Hamilton said: “I saw him just tip over the edge there. It was disbelief.” Hamilton said it was all the harder to absorb after he returned home after the game to his own children.

“I can’t imagine what they’re going through right now,” Hamilton said of the Stone family. “All I can think about is just praying for them and that God has a plan and we don’t always understand what that plan is, but these things happen.”

Such things, it turns out, have happened before at the Texas ballpark.

On April 11, 1994, Hollye Minter was at the inaugural game at the ballpark, outside Fort Worth. While posing for a picture in a section of seats known as Home Run Porch, she toppled over the railing. She fell 35 feet, fracturing several vertebrae, ribs and teeth. The Rangers organization promptly raised the height of the railings in that section of the upper deck.

But in 2010, another fan fell over the railing in another part of the park while reaching for a foul pop, suffering similar injuries.

Mourning fan’s death

As Stone was mourned at his fire department in Brownwood, the Rangers announced that the team would wear black armbands during the game in honor of Stone, that the flags at the ballpark would fly at half-staff and that a moment of silence would be observed before Friday night’s game. Grief counselors were made available to players on both the Rangers and the A’s. Nolan Ryan, the president of the Rangers, spoke with Stone’s widow.

But Ryan said there was no immediate plan to raise the height of the railings throughout the stadium and no instant ban on players tossing baseballs into the stands. Ryan said the railings had been inspected last year — and again Friday morning — and were determined to meet local safety codes. But he left open the possibility that the issue could be revisited.

“I think what baseball has done is they want to try to make the experience at the ballpark as memorable as possible for our fans and for them to connect as much as they can with our players,” Ryan said. “I’m no different than our fan base. When I was younger and went to the ballpark, my hope was to get a foul ball.”

Ryan added: “We’re about making memories, about family entertainment and last night we had a father and a son at the game and had a very tragic incident. It just drives to the core of what we’re about, and the memories we try to make in this game for our fans.”

Stone’s family issued a statement saying it was devastated and concerned for the welfare of Cooper. Ryan, at the family’s request, asked news organizations to refrain from replaying the video of the accident.

Stone had served as a firefighter since 1993, said Del Albright, the fire chief in Brownwood. He had risen to the rank of lieutenant, and in 2008 had received a distinguished service medal for rescuing an elderly woman from a house fire.

Policies reviewed

Major League Baseball issued a statement Friday in which it pledged to review the accident, but issued no new formal policies for its teams and the practice of tossing balls to the fans as souvenirs.

Hamilton said he would continue to do it occasionally.

“Of course, that’s what game’s all about,” he said. “Fans come, they pay to see you play, they want to have a good experience at the ballpark, and player interaction is part of that good experience.

“It’ll be something that you’ll look carefully at — at the situations, where the fans are, how high they are up, what’s the railing’s like. All these things will come into play now.”