By: Connor Green
For many baseball fans, the prospect of catching a home run is the pinnacle of fandom. Fans of all ages show up to the ballpark with their gloves in hopes of their moment of fame. Catching a home run or a foul ball can be an incredible experience, but sometimes, when there is a price tag attached to the ball, all hell can break loose.
On September 19, Shohei Ohtani, a superstar baseball player for the Los Angeles Dodgers, hit his 50th home run of the season. This home run cemented Ohtani as the first baseball player in history to hit fifty home runs and steal fifty bases in a single season. As such, the baseball is a historic piece of MLB history and the fan who caught the ball could sell it at auction for a hefty price. Just two years ago, the Yankees’ Aaron Judge, broke the record for the most home runs hit in a season by an American League player. The lucky fan who caught the ball later sold it at auction for 1.5 million dollars.
Unlike other major professional sports league’s, MLB policy is that a team abandons a baseball when a player hits it into the stands. This means that when a fan achieves possession of the baseball, it becomes their property. So, when a player hits a historic baseball into the stands, fans scramble for possession.
In 2002, Barry Bonds broke the all-time home run record in a season with his 73rd home run. When the ball traveled into the stands, there was a scrum followed by a lawsuit over who owned the baseball. In Popov v. Hayashi the court established that if a person completes significant steps to obtain possession of an object but are thwarted by an unlawful act of another from obtaining possession, that person is entitled to a pre-possessory interest in the object. One of the issues in the Popov case was that because it happened in 2002 there were limited camera angles of the scrum. The lack of knowledge as to what happened was a huge factor in the ruling that both Popov and Hayashi had entitlement to the historic home run ball.
Over 20 years later, Ohtani’s home run ball has brought a near identical situation to the courts. When Shohei Ohtani’s home run ball landed in the stands, three fans, Chris Belanski, Max Matus, and Joseph Davidov, made significant efforts to obtain possession of it. It was Chris Belanski, however, that left the stadium in possession of the home run ball. Max Matus and Joseph Davidov, not wanting to go down without a fight, filed separate lawsuits against Chris Belanski attempting to prevent Belanski’s auction of the ball. The main difference in these new cases is that cellphone technology has introduced a new element to the court. With video cameras in every fan’s hand, there are countless angles that the court can look to in determining possession.
As the court in Popov laid out, possession of a baseball can be tricky, especially when there is a scrum. Both Matus’s and Davidov’s lawsuits against Chris Belanski claim that Belanski thwarted Matus and Davidov from obtaining possession by an unlawful act. Whether or not the court determines that Belanski unlawfully possessed the home run ball is a matter of the court’s judgement, but these kinds of lawsuits will become more commonplace in the future. Every fight in the stands over a baseball will have multiple videos attached to it and many of them will involve some kind of unlawful act. In the past, fans have been reluctant to bring lawsuits over baseballs because of the lack of evidence. Today, with a good lawyer, there could be a possession case on every home run ball.
How do the courts manage the Shohei case without opening the door to thousands of future baseball possession cases? The simplest approach would be to force the MLB to change their abandonment rules. It may be beneficial to make baseball like every other sport, the league would require fans to return the baseballs that players hit into the stands.
The problem is that the MLB is a private organization, and the courts do not have the authority to change the MLB policies. Another possibility is that if someone attempts to retrieve a home run ball, the rule is that they are opening themselves up to violence that the court would otherwise consider to be illegal activity. Unfortunately, this could create even more chaos in the stands and lead to fan injuries. The current rule set out in Popov v. Hayashi still stands as the most straight forward metric for possession cases involving home run balls. Nonetheless social media and cellphone cameras are going to lead to a drastic uptick in legal action over priceless sports memorabilia.
Student Bio: Connor Green is a third-year evening student at Suffolk University Law School. He is a staff member for the Journal of High Technology Law, and the President of the Sports & Entertainment Law Association. Connor received his Bachelor of the Arts degree in Government from Franklin & Marshall College in 2019.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are the views of the author alone and do not represent the views of JHTL or Suffolk University Law School.
