For the baseball that Barry Bonds broke the home run record with:
The baseball from Barry Bonds’s much-debated 756th home run will soon land in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. When it gets there, it will be branded with an asterisk. Marc Ecko, the fashion designer who bought the ball for $752,467, asked the fans to decide how he should treat the memento.
After more than 10 million online votes, 47 percent of voters wanted the ball to be adorned with an asterisk, 34 percent said it should not be changed and 19 percent wanted it to be shot into space. The first two options included the addendum that the ball would be donated to the Hall of Fame.
While representatives of the Hall were thrilled to get the ball from the most hallowed record in sports, they said their acceptance of the asterisk-laden piece of history did not mean that they supported the inference that Bonds used performance-enhancing substances to achieve his home run total.
“As far as we’re concerned, the asterisk represents the voices of the fans for this one moment in time,” said Jeff Idelson, the Hall’s vice president for communications and education. “For this one week, in September of 2007, this is what the fans wanted. We felt it was worth it to take it.”
By accepting Ecko’s soon-to-be branded donation, the Hall, which operates independent of Major League Baseball, has put itself in the unusual position of taking, and then displaying, a ball that has been defaced. Idelson said the Hall “does not support the defacing of artifacts,” but that this ball was too monumental to ignore.
“You might say it’s defacing,” Ecko said. “Others might say that it’s validating the way most people feel about the ball.”
And defining for generations of fans to come just how Barry Bonds will be remembered.
