Bonds’ Record Home Run Is Story of the Possessed

We have seen this week the kind of lunacy a couple of dollars inspires in some baseball fans. At Dodger Stadium, they are thinking of renaming the promotion, “Fans Gone Batty Night.”

But a little debris, human and otherwise, scattered across the Dodger Stadium outfield is nothing compared to the madness that gripped a couple of baseball fans when the prospect of a couple of million dollars was waved before their twitching scent-of-money noses.

A new documentary called “Up For Grabs” takes a hard look at the national pastime, greed, which unlike baseball has never faded in profile or popularity. It harks back to a simpler time, to 2001-2002, when the only controversy surrounding a Barry Bonds home run was the legal ownership of the baseball that sailed over the fence.

The baseball in question was the one Bonds struck for home run No. 73 during his record-breaking 2001 season. Two fans positioned in the right field bleachers that day in San Francisco, Patrick Hayashi and Alex Popov, both claimed possession of the ball, which at the time seemed to be a winning lottery ticket wrapped in horsehide.

Three years earlier, Mark McGwire’s 70th home-run ball was sold for $2.7 million. How much more would Bonds’ 73rd fetch in these memorabilia-crazed times? The potential boggled the mind. Or at least those of Hayashi and Popov, who wound up taking the case to court for a ludicrous trial that succeeded mainly in humiliating both parties.

By simply following the story with a straightforward journalistic approach -- interviews, courtroom footage and one crucial piece of videotape -- “Up For Grabs” plays like a Christopher Guest mockumentary, except no performances by Eugene Levy or Harry Shearer were required in the making. Too many real-life characters were too willing to play the fools, none more eagerly than Popov, who apparently was born with no genetic capacity for shame or self-restraint.

Popov doggedly drives the story and the controversy after claiming he caught the ball despite Hayashi being captured by a Bay Area news cameraman sheepishly brandishing the prize following a full-contact bleacher scrum. Hayashi has the ball, but Popov insisted he caught it before being tackled and having the ball pried from his glove while buried beneath a frenzied dog pile.

The news cameraman, Josh Keppel of NBC 11 in San Francisco, also captured Popov’s initial play for the ball -- his leaping grab, the white of the ball peeking out from behind the glove’s upper webbing -- before the deluge. The footage becomes the catalyst for Popov’s case, and is replayed several times in the film, in slow-motion, causing Keppel to jokingly compare his snippet of videotape to the Zapruder film.

That footage also became the catalyst for the documentary. Keppel is listed as a co-producer of the film, which was written and directed by Mike Wranovics, a Giant fan living in San Francisco during the 2001 season.

In publicity material for the film, Wranovics said he was attracted to the story because of its ironic historical context.

“It had been less than a month since Sept. 11,” Wranovics writes. “Our society had supposedly become less self-centered and more unified, less concerned about material things.

“Here, however, two grown men were in a dispute over a baseball. Me-me-me thinking was back with a vengeance.”

Wranovics also saw the controversy as a metaphor for the crash of the Dot-Com Boom, coming at a time when so many other get-rich-quick schemes were falling on their faces.

Additionally, “Up For Grabs” serves as a sort of comparative study of what exactly constitutes “the good old days.”

For Bonds, now besieged with BALCO headlines and knee surgeries, the good old days were four years ago, 73 in 2001, when home runs by Bonds were toasted, not tainted. The film opens with a winking reference to recent events, noting that, “There have been questions about [Bonds’] record and other recent athletic achievements. But those questions can be saved for another movie. THIS film is about the ball.”

For McGwire, who lost his record in 2001 and his saintly reputation in 2005, the good old days were 1998, when his pursuit of Roger Maris’ single-season home run record supposedly saved a sport, when the pursuit of his 70th home-run ball was a cut-and-dried multimillion-dollar transaction.

For baseball, and baseball fans, and common decency and sense among baseball fans, the good old days were 1961, when Sal Durante, the man who caught Maris’ record-breaking baseball, actually tried to give the ball back to Maris without asking for money in return. Maris insisted Durante hold onto the ball and make a little profit from it. Durante took the advice and wound up selling the souvenir for $5,000.

Hayashi and Popov were blinded by much bigger dollar signs. At one point in the film, Popov absurdly argues that his fight for the ball was merely “about history.” Cut immediately to Durante, who had been there himself once upon a time. “I’m sure everybody knows it was about the money,” Durante says with a bemused smile. “That’s the way it is today.”

The dispute becomes such a cautionary tale that even Bonds expresses dismay at the squabble, suggesting at one news conference an all-too-obvious solution -- putting the ball up for auction and having Hayashi and Popov split the proceeds.

“Up For Grabs” opens in New York today and in Los Angeles next Friday. Although the dispute was finally resolved in June 2003, the filmmakers have asked media previewing the film not to reveal that conclusion. If that sounds a bit similar to “The Crying Game,” well, that wouldn’t be a bad working title for this movie, either.