Historic HR debate: Give baseball back or cash in on history?
Yankees fans cheer Aaron Judge as he stands in the outfield during a game against the Pirates at Yankee Stadium on Tuesday. Credit: Newsday/J. Conrad Williams Jr.
It was closing in on 11 p.m. Tuesday night when a straightforward question was posed to Michael Kessler while he stood in the bowels of Yankee Stadium:
Had the 20-year-old considered what he could get for Aaron Judge’s 60th home run?
“No,” Kessler said in a video posted by ESPN baseball reporter Marly Rivera on Twitter.
Whereas Kessler was unequivocal, many fans have debated whether they would give the balls back to the slugger — if and when Judge hits his 61st and 62nd home runs — or if they would cash in on history.
It’s a hypothetical question only an exclusive few have actually had the opportunity to answer, and the responses have been varied.
And in some cases, the choice was made by the record-breaker. Take, for instance, Sal Durante, who caught Roger Maris’ 61st home run.
In a 2016 interview with The Seattle Times, Durante said he told Yankee Stadium employees he wanted to return the ball to the rightfielder. Except Maris, whose home run was the only run in the Yankees’ 1-0 over the Red Sox on Oct. 1, 1961, had a different idea.
“Keep it, kid,” Durante recalled Maris saying. “Put it up for auction. Somebody will pay you a lot of money for the ball. He’ll keep it for a couple days and then give it to me.”
Maris was prescient.
A California restaurant owner named Sam Gordon paid Durante $5,000 for the ball, which he gave to Maris shortly thereafter.
Maris’ 61st broke Babe Ruth’s then-major league record for home runs in a season, and the tale about the possessors of Ruth’s 60th is an ode to American capitalism.
According to a story on the Baseball Hall of Fame website, a 40-year old named Joe Forner grabbed the then-record breaking home run and had Ruth autograph the ball only to subsequently sell it for $100 to Truly Warner, who used artist renderings of the ball in newspaper advertisements for his store. Sixteen years after Warner’s death in 1948, his son Douglas offered the ball to the Hall, where it resides today.
The money Ruth and Maris’ balls went for is quaint when considering the explosion of revenue in the sport in the modern era. Take, for instance, Derek Jeter’s 3,000th hit, which had been projected to be worth as much as $250,000 even before he homered off Tampa Bay’s David Price in what would be a 5-4 win on July 9, 2011.
The fan who caught the ball, Christian Lopez, returned it to Jeter.
“I did the right thing,” Lopez told reporters at the time. “It never crossed my mind not to give it back.”
The Yankees repaid Lopez’s generosity with four luxury box seats for the remainder of the 2011 regular season and playoffs.
Then there is Zack Hample, who caught Alex Rodriguez’s 3,000th hit, a home run off Justin Verlander. The notorious ball collector engaged the Yankees in public negotiations for two weeks before agreeing to give Rodriguez the ball in exchange for the team donating $150,000 to a charity Hample supported, and an autographed bat and jersey.
