When Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani sent two footballs dangling into the Miami sky on Thursday evening, he wasn’t the first 50-50 hitter in Major League Baseball.
He also gave fans sitting beyond the left field wall a chance to leave Depot Park with a life-changing souvenir.
The opposite fielder hit the front of the scoreboard in left and eluded the view of a fan wearing a teal tank top. The man leaned on the rail but was too shy to punch the ball in the air or when it bounced for the first time.
A free-for-all ensued as the ball landed in the living room area behind the outfield wall. A half-dozen fans swarm the ground behind the ball, raising a chair and a table in their attempt to appear on the best part of baseball history.
It’s unclear who left with Ohtani’s 50th ball or where it is as of Friday morning. The Japanese slugger told MLB Network after Thursday’s 20-4 win over the Dodgers that he doesn’t have one. Craig Mish of the Miami Herald tweeted that the fan who retrieved the ball “chose to walk away with it” and that the Dodgers could not make a deal to return it.
Anyone with a ball can use it to help pay off their mortgage or pay for a few years of college education.
A 50th home run ball “could fetch upwards of $200,000” at auction, Brahm Wachter, head of contemporary collections at Sotheby’s, told Yahoo Sports last week. Chris Ivy, director of sports collections at Heritage Auctions, wrote that he would estimate the ball’s value “at a good figure of $100,000+ and expect it to exceed that figure, possibly many times over.”
Those numbers reflect Ohtani’s popularity and rarity. Only five other major leaguers have ever accumulated 40 runs and 40 steals in a single season. Before Ohtani, anyone who came close to going 50-50 was Ronald Acuña Jr. of Atlanta, who last year drove in 41 home runs and drove in 73 hits.
“It’s never easy to predict the price at auction of a piece without computers to think about, but that’s what makes it such a good auction piece,” Ivy said last week. If it happens, it would be fair to consider it one of the top five single-season hits in baseball history.”
It could increase the quality of the ball that Ohtani delivered on Thursday. He hit three home runs, stole two bases and drove in 10 runs to lead Miami to 51 home runs and 51 stolen bases this season.
Ohtani’s 50th home run to left field caught the savvy ballhawks by surprise. Most of his 222 home runs have come in center or right field.
Secondary market ticket prices for the Dodgers’ upcoming series against Colorado rose last week with Ohtani in the 50-50 spot. According to StubHub, the average price of tickets sold in right field was $101.
History underscores the potential for unrest for foreign attackers whenever ownership of the coveted home ball is at stake. Two years ago, the battle for Aaron Judge’s 60th home run resulted in a crowd of grown men trying to pull it off the ground. Then there was Barry Bonds’ 73rd single-season home run in 2001, which led to a lawsuit between the fan who caught it first and the one who hit it first. take after the first fan is solved and discard it.
In the end, a California court decided that Alex Popov and Patrick Hayashi owned the copyright to the ball and that the best solution was for them to split the income equally. The ball, once estimated to be worth more than $1 million, sold for $450,000 in 2003.
In recent years, several fans have chosen to let go of the precious memories they have received. A college student who came out of a scrum with his 60th Judge ball returned the ball to the Yankees slugger in return for a clubhouse meet and greet and signed memorabilia. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers fan made a similar decision to bring back a piece of history in October 2021, after Mike Evans absently delivered Tom Brady’s 600th letter.
Predictably, not every fan is so generous. A Dodger fan turned down Albert Pujols’ bid to get his 700th home run back in 2022 and later sold it at auction for $360,000. That same year, a Dallas man who caught Judge’s 62nd ball auctioned it off for $1.5 million.
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