“He is a unicorn to the sport.”
— Mark DeRosa, Team USA manager
“There’s no such thing as joint possessory interest.”
— Paul Finkelman, law professor
Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers may be far more than just a generational talent. He might be a once-in-a-century talent. In the past three seasons, he’s been the league MVP twice and finished second in the MVP voting in the other year. He is the favorite to win the award in the National League this year. He can hit for average and power, and he has great baserunning speed. Two years ago, when fully healthy, he finished second in the American League Cy Young Award voting for the best pitcher in the league when playing for the Angels.
And this year he did something that no player has ever done before, when he amassed 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in the same season. Considering that only a handful of players had ever reached 40-40, that feat is truly unparalleled.
Toward the end of the regular season, baseball fans around the world were watching to see if Ohtani would make it to 50 home runs. He eventually finished with 54, but you can imagine that when number 50 left LoanDepot Park in Miami on Sept. 19, there was a mad scramble among fans to get their hands on the ball. Not only would it be an incredible piece of baseball memorabilia, but fans knew that it would be worth a pretty penny to wealthy collectors.
Indeed, there was a heck of a scrum in the bleachers when the ball (one of three home runs Ohtani hit that night in Miami) landed in a table and bench seating area. The entire thing – a bonus for future litigation – was filmed by several nearby fans. Immediately after, a memorabilia agency retweeted the video with the caption, “What do you think it’s worth?”
The fan who came out of the scrum with the ball, Chris Belanski, thought it was worth enough that he turned down an offer from the Dodgers to buy the ball from him for $300,000. He then immediately signed a deal with the Goldin auction house to action the ball off with a starting bid of $500,000 and a “buy it now” price of $4.5 million. The auction is set to end on Oct. 16, with a provision that if the bidding hits $3 million before Oct. 9, the “buy it now” option goes away. As of the writing of this column on Oct. 8, the high bid is currently $1.5 million.
Things are rarely simple when that much money is involved, though. And shortly before the auction was to start, another fan, Max Matus, filed a lawsuit in Dade County claiming that he was the first fan to get to the ball but that Belanski placed, “arm in between his legs and wrangled the 50/50 Ball out of Max’s left hand.” In essence, the claim is that Matus, who was at the ballpark celebrating his 18th birthday (a convenient fact, since he’s now able to sue on behalf of himself), had obtained possession of the ball and that it was therefore “stolen” from him. Or, as the lawsuit puts it, that the ball was “forcefully taken away from him.”
And this is where a baseball is different than a deer, and different than a blue whale. That may seem like an obvious statement, but it’s also a legally true one. That’s because possession rules often come down to what the custom is in a particular area.
If you shoot a deer, it’s yours, unless you can’t find it. Then it might be the property of the person who finds it. If you spear a whale first, then you get that whale, even if someone else finishes it off. And in baseball, the fans have sort of created a set of rules over time. If you fail to catch a ball, then you have no claim on it. If you catch it and give it away to an adorable kid near you, then it’s his. But if you firmly catch and possess a foul ball or a home run, then that ball is yours.
There is actually now legal precedent for this. It came from a California case involving a historic home run hit by Barry Bonds. In that case, the court essentially adopted the unwritten rule that if someone catches a ball, it’s theirs. And if no one catches the ball, then it belongs to the first person to possess it. That may be great news for Mr. Matus – assuming that the videos are clear or that he has good witnesses to make his case that he firmly possessed the ball first. It may also be the case that the proceeds of the sale get split between the two claimants because no one can make a clear case as to who had the ball first.
After the auction began, the news broke that the auction house had reached a deal with the two fans in which they agreed to allow the auction house to sell the ball clear of any claims, and then to let the legal process determine who gets the proceeds of the sale. In the meantime, if you have a few million extra dollars lying around, you can go online and put in a bid on the historic Rawlings baseball.
David Hejmanowski is judge of the Probate/Juvenile Division of the Delaware County Court of Common Pleas, where he has served as magistrate, court administrator, and now judge, since 2003. He has written a weekly column on law and history for The Gazette since 2005.
