When Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani sent a hanging two-strike curveball hurtling through the Miami sky on Thursday evening, he didn’t just become Major League Baseball’s first 50-50 player.
He also gave fans seated beyond the left-field wall the chance to leave loanDepot Park with a life-altering souvenir.
The opposite-field home run struck the facade of a left-field scoreboard and eluded the reach of a fan clad in a teal tank top. The man leaned over a railing but came inches shy of snagging the ball out of the air or on its first bounce.
A chaotic free-for-all ensued thereafter as the ball landed in a field-level lounge area behind the outfield wall. A half dozen fans dove on the ground after the ball, upturning a chair and table in their bid to emerge with a lucrative piece of baseball history.
It’s unclear who came away with Ohtani’s 50th home run ball or where it is as of early Friday morning. The Japanese slugger told MLB Network after Thursday’s 20-4 Dodgers victory that he doesn’t have it. Craig Mish of the Miami Herald tweeted that the fan who retrieved the ball “opted to walk away with it” and that the Dodgers were unable to strike a deal to get it back.
Whoever has the ball might be able to use it to help pay off their mortgage or to cover a few years of college tuition.
The 50th home run ball “could fetch upwards of $200,000” at auction, Brahm Wachter, head of modern collectables at Sotheby’s, told Yahoo Sports last week. Chris Ivy, director of sports collectibles at Heritage Auctions, wrote that he’d conservatively estimate the ball’s value “at a nice round number like $100,000+ and expect it to storm past that figure, likely by multiples.”
Those numbers reflect the popularity of Ohtani and the rarity of his achievement. Only five other major leaguers have ever amassed 40 home runs and 40 stolen bases in a single season. Before Ohtani, the closest anyone had come to the 50-50 milestone was Atlanta’s Ronald Acuña Jr., who last year slugged 41 home runs and swiped 73 bases.
“It’s never easy to predict the price at auction of a piece without any comps to consider, but that’s also what makes it the ideal auction piece,” Ivy said last week. “If it happens, it will be fair to consider it among the top five greatest single-season achievements in baseball history.”
It can only boost the value of the ball that Ohtani delivered such an epic performance Thursday. He homered three times, stole two bases and drove in 10 runs to leave Miami with 51 home runs and 51 stolen bases this season.
That Ohtani’s 50th home run went to left field surely caught savvy ballhawks by surprise. Most of his 222 career home runs have gone to center field or right field.
Secondary market ticket sales for the Dodgers’ upcoming series against Colorado spiked over the course of the past week with Ohtani on the precipice of 50-50. According to StubHub, the average price of tickets sold in right field was $101.
History underscores the potential for chaos in the outfield bleachers whenever ownership of a coveted home run ball is at stake. Two years ago, the battle for Aaron Judge’s 60th home run ball sparked a dogpile of grown men scrambling to scoop it off the ground. Then there was Barry Bonds’ single-season-record 73rd home run ball in 2001, the one that infamously resulted in a lawsuit between the fan who initially caught it and the one who picked it up after the first fan was tackled and dropped it.
A California court ultimately ruled that Alex Popov and Patrick Hayashi had a legal right to the ball and that the best solution was for them to split the proceeds evenly. The ball, once estimated to be worth more than $1 million, sold for a bargain $450,000 in 2003.
In recent years, several fans have chosen to relinquish the prized souvenirs they’ve recovered. The college student who emerged from the scrum with Judge’s 60th home run ball gave the ball back to the Yankees slugger in return for a clubhouse meet-and-greet 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.
Predictably, not every fan is so generous. A Dodgers fan declined Albert Pujols’ request to give back his 700th home run ball in 2022 and later sold it at auction for $360,000. That same year, a Dallas man who caught Judge’s 62nd home run ball auctioned it off for $1.5 million.
