Home run balls are all the rage again, what with St. Louis’ Albert Pujols hitting his 700th home run and Aaron Judge crossing the 60-homer mark with the Yankees.
This of course also resurfaces the age-old debate over what someone should do with such a memorable home run ball should they catch it. In most cases, fans hold out for at least some autographed memorabilia from the team and/or player who hit the milestone homer. In Judge’s case, the fan got some signed baseballs and an autographed bat in exchange for the ball. The person who caught Pujols’ ball left the stadium with it and, by all accounts, intends to keep it – at least for now.
Which brings us to a memorable case of a fan being caught up in the frenzy of a historic home run. In 1998, Phil Ozersky caught Mark McGwire’s 70th home run ball, which at the time, was akin to holding the Holy Grail itself in one’s hands. Ozersky was a 26-year-old genetic researcher making $30,000, and asked to meet McGwire in addition to gettinng the signed bat, ball, and jersey that the Cardinals were offering.
McGwire declined to meet with Ozersky, so he kept the ball and, just three months later, would sell it for just over $3 million. Which is exactly what you should do in that situation. Ozersky didn’t even want to keep the ball initially, but when McGwire declined to meet with him, he did the right thing by cashing in. In the most recent case of Pujols’ home run, the Cardinals great and future Hall of Famer didn’t mind at all that the fan kept the ball:
“Souvenirs are for the fans. I don’t have any problem if they want to keep it,” Pujols said postgame, per Bill Plunkett of the Orange County Register. “If they want to give it back, that’s great. But at the end of the day, I don’t focus on material stuff.”
(Source: Sports Illustrated)
Ozersky did plenty of cool things with the money, including donating a sizable portion of it: $70,000 to the Leukemia Society, $70,000 to Cardinals Care, and $70,000 to the American Cancer Society. He also bought a vacation home in Florida, took his dad and brother to the 1999 Super Bowl to see the Rams play the Titans, and purchased an engagement ring for his fiancée.
Perhaps what is most cool about Ozersky, though, is what he was up to before he ever came into all that money. I mentioned he was a genetic researcher, but his entire focus apparently was on worms, so much so that he continued his work on a research project called Wormbase, which is a database of genetic information gathered from worms.
And by all accounts, Ozersky still looks to be deep in the worm world to this day.
