I bet if you caught a homerun ball in a baseball game, you wouldn't give it to the kid next to you because "I don't owe the kid anything".
You have evidence of this? Because it would be my first guess that the parent coerces their child to sell the ball.
However, my home team is the Dodgers, so the experience is probably different in other markets where the local team sucks and nobody cares about the players (like the Anaheim Angels, where fans are more likely to throw the ball back onto the field than keep them).