Yankee Stadium Laws
After Sunday night’s Yankee Stadium finale, ownership of the final home run ball ever hit in the park has come into question. When the ball fell into the net covering the area in left-center field, a fan grabbed a hold of the ball through the net. After being instructed by security to let it go, it fell into the hands of another fan in the area. Security retrieved the ball and returned it to the first fan, as in accordance with the rules of Yankee Stadium. The second fan is pursuing his legal avenues, which have been an issue with other big time baseballs:
Legal experts have studied this kind of thing. Paul Finkelman, a professor at Albany Law School, was quoted in a Cardozo Law Review article titled “Fugitive Baseballs and Abandoned Property: Who Owns the Home Run Ball?” The article described a symposium that touched on Barry Bonds’s 500th career homer.
As for the Molina homer, Professor Finkelman said, “it appears to me that when it went into the net, it went into the legal possession of the New York Yankees, and if stadium officials retrieve the ball and say ‘We’ll give it to you’ — whoever they’re pointing to — they have the right to do that.”
The Yankees organization is investigating the incident to see who indeed the ball belongs to. Auctioneers believe the ball could retrieve anywhere from $25-50,000 so there is obviously a lot at stake. It appears though, that by the rules and laws of Yankee Stadium, the ball is in the hands of it’s rightful owner.
Yankee Stadium had a long-established procedure for when a ball is caught in a net and a fan reaches into the net to grab it, according to Howard J. Rubenstein, a spokesman for the Yankees.
He said that the guards were instructed to tell a fan to let go of the ball, and once it was free of the net, a guard would return it.
The fan “doesn’t give up his ownership, he only gives up custody,” Mr. Rubenstein said.
