Unable to untangle all of the strings attached to Barry Bonds' 756th home run ball, the Baseball Hall of Fame was prepared to cut bait.
It announced yesterday that it had backed away from obtaining the iconic artifact of the steroid era because what had been announced as a donation had been recharacterized as a loan.
If this was a bluff, it was brilliant.
Within hours of the news release, the ball fashion designer Marc Ecko bought at auction last fall for $752,467 was delivered to Cooperstown without conditions. As promised, an asterisk had been cut out of the leather to denote the dubious legitimacy of Bonds' home run record.
Amazing the power of adverse publicity.
Soon after Hall of Fame spokesman Brad Horn said Ecko's offer had been changed from a gift to a loan, and was therefore unacceptable to the museum, Ecko responded with a statement expressing his surprise and claiming the only unresolved issue related to the Hall's “discomfort in displaying it and addressing the controversy surrounding the record.”
If one of these statements severely tortured the truth, the net effect of the exchange was to force action after eight months of foot-dragging. The ball reached Cooperstown at approximately 7:45 (Eastern) last night in a black Chevy Suburban, where Horn took possession on behalf of the baseball museum.
Once the documentation process is complete – probably a matter of weeks – the ball is expected to be placed on exhibit.
And therein lies a whole new set of problems.
Bonds has vowed to boycott the Hall of Fame – including his own induction ceremonies, if applicable – should the museum display the No. 756 ball with an asterisk.
“I don't think you can put an asterisk in the game of baseball, and I don't think that the Hall of Fame can accept an asterisk,” Bonds told MSNBC in November. “You cannot give people the freedom, the right, to alter history. You can't do it. There's no such thing as an asterisk in baseball.”
Not until now.
When Roger Maris surpassed Babe Ruth's single-season home run standard in 1961, his mark was initially listed separately in baseball's record books. Commissioner Ford Frick, who had once been Ruth's ghostwriter, decided to draw a distinction between Maris' 162-game season and Ruth's 154-game season.
There was never an asterisk as such, though the myth of one persisted. Ten years after a later commissioner, Fay Vincent, clarified the question with his 1991 “single record thesis,” Billy Crystal made a film depicting the Maris/Mickey Mantle home run race and titled it: “61*.”
Maris went to his grave scarred by the perception that he had been “doing something wrong, poisoning the record books or something.” Barry Bonds, ever defiant, acts as if all of the issues are immaterial, as if the steroid allegations that have led to his indictment are irrelevant to the record numbers he produced.
The Hall of Fame, in turn, has been caught in a rundown between posterity and politics. To display Bonds' 756th home run ball with an asterisk cut into the cowhide can only exacerbate baseball's embarrassment about the steroids era. To conceal it would amount to historical deception.
To some extent, the happiest solution from baseball's standpoint might have been for Ecko to keep the ball for his private collection.
But that option was no longer viable once Ecko elected to turn his purchase into a publicity stunt. He staged an online vote to determine the disposition of the ball and milked his moment in the spotlight for a live shot Sept. 26 on the “Today” show. Ecko announced that morning that 47 percent of more than 10 million respondents wanted the ball to be permanently branded with an asterisk before being sent to Cooperstown.
Eight months later, the Hall of Fame was still waiting on delivery.
“The owner's previous commitment to unconditionally donate the baseball has changed to a loan,” the museum announced yesterday morning. “As a result, the Hall of Fame will not be able to accept the baseball.”
Horn said the Hall's position was not a response to Bonds' threatened boycott, but a stance consistent with previous practice. The museum accepted the loan of Willie Mays' glove from the 1954 World Series, he explained, because of a lack of alternative artifacts from that event.
Yet while the museum owns other artifacts associated with No. 756, including Bonds' batting helmet, home plate from AT&T Park, lineup cards and the ball-strike indicator of plate umpire John Hirschbeck, the ball is the first thing you would grab if the exhibit caught on fire.
Museums much prefer a bequest to a borrowing. Getting a gift outright relieves the recipient of responsibility in the event of theft or damage and helps to ensure the authenticity of the item. Jason Aikens, collections curator for the Pro Football Hall of Fame, says some items are loaned to museums mainly as a means of increasing their value.
Similarly, National Basketball Hall of Fame historian Matt Zeysing prefers donations unless “it's something amazing,” like the basketball signed by the game's inventor, James Naismith.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, befitting its freewheeling roots, is more flexible.
“We own the majority of our collection,” said curatorial director Howard Kramer, “but the majority of the most valuable pieces are on loan.”
That list would include a Porsche that once belonged to Janis Joplin and the yellow jacket John Lennon wore for the album cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Kramer asked what price Ecko had paid for the Bonds ball and declared that the Lennon jacket “would dwarf it.”
“The bidding,” he said, “would open at that.”
Tim Sullivan: (619) 293-1033; tim.sullivan@uniontrib.com
