When Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani sent a hanging two-strike curveball through the Miami sky on Thursday night, he not only became Major League Baseball’s first 50-50 player.
He also gave fans sitting behind the left field wall the opportunity to leave loanDepot Park with a life-changing souvenir.
The home run to the opposite field hit the facade of a scoreboard in left field and eluded the reach of a fan in a teal tank top. The man leaned over a railing but came within inches of catching the ball out of the air or on first impact.
A chaotic scramble ensued when the ball landed in a field-level lounge area behind the outfield wall. Half a dozen fans rushed to the ground to chase the ball, knocking over a chair and a table in the process, hoping to emerge with a lucrative piece of baseball history.
It’s unclear who took Ohtani’s 50th home run ball or where it is as of early Friday morning. The Japanese slugger told MLB Network after the Dodgers’ 20-4 victory on Thursday that he doesn’t have it. Craig Mish of the Miami Herald tweeted that the fan who retrieved the ball “chose to walk away with it” and that the Dodgers couldn’t work out a deal to get it back.
If you have the courage, you might be able to pay off your mortgage or finance a few years of college tuition.
The 50th home run ball “could fetch over $200,000 at auction,” Brahm Wachter, director of modern collectibles at Sotheby’s, told Yahoo Sports last week. Chris Ivy, director of sports collectibles at Heritage Auctions, wrote that he would conservatively estimate the ball’s value at “a nice round number in excess of $100,000 and expect it to exceed that number many times over.”
Those numbers reflect Ohtani’s popularity and the rarity of his feat. Only five other major league players have ever hit 40 home runs and 40 stolen bases in a single season. Before Ohtani, the closest to the 50-50 milestone was Atlanta’s Ronald Acuña Jr., who hit 41 home runs and stole 73 bases last year.
“It’s never easy to predict the auction price of a piece without considering comparables, but that’s precisely what makes it the ideal auction piece,” Ivy said last week. “If it happens, it will rightly be considered one of the five greatest single-season successes in baseball history.”
Ohtani’s epic performance on Thursday can only add to the ball’s value. He hit three home runs, stole two bases and scored 10 runs, giving Miami 51 home runs and 51 stolen bases this season.
The fact that Ohtani’s 50th home run went to left field certainly surprised the experienced ball-hunters. Most of his 222 career home runs went to center or right field.
Secondary market ticket sales for the Dodgers’ upcoming series against Colorado have skyrocketed over the past week, with Ohtani teetering on the edge of 50-50. The average price of tickets sold in right field was $101, according to StubHub.
History shows how much chaos can break out in the outfield bleachers when ownership of a coveted home run ball is at stake. Two years ago, the battle over Aaron Judge’s 60th home run ball sparked a mob of grown men scrambling to pick it up from the ground. Then there was Barry Bonds’ 73rd home run ball in 2001, which set a single-season record and led to an infamous legal battle between the fan who first caught it and the one who picked it up after the first fan was tackled and dropped it.
A California court eventually ruled that Alex Popov and Patrick Hayashi had a legal claim to the ball and that the best solution would be to split the proceeds equally. The ball, once valued at over a million dollars, was sold in 2003 for a bargain price of $450,000.
In recent years, several fans have decided to return the valuable souvenirs they found. The college student who emerged from the huddle with Judge’s 60th home run ball returned the ball to the Yankees batter in exchange for a meet-and-greet in the locker room and some signed memorabilia. A Tampa Bay Buccaneers fan made a similar decision to return a piece of history in October 2021 after Mike Evans absentmindedly handed over Tom Brady’s 600th career touchdown pass.
As expected, not every fan is so generous. A Dodgers fan refused Albert Pujols’ request to return his 700th home run ball in 2022 and later sold it for $360,000. That same year, a Dallas man who caught Judge’s 62nd home run ball auctioned it off for $1.5 million.
