Red Sox deserve ball, scholars say

By wire services
Published January 23, 2005

BOSTON - First baseman Doug Mientkiewicz is storing the ball that clinched Boston's first World Series title since 1918 in a safe-deposit box. The Red Sox want it back, and legal scholars say the team has a good case.

"What appears to be emerging as a legal consensus is that the person with the least rights to it is Mientkiewicz himself," said Yale Law School Dean Harold Hongju Koh, who ranked the claims as "the Cardinals, the Red Sox, Major League Baseball and then the guy who happened to hold it at the end of the game."

The ball for the final out is usually tossed to a fan. No one has spent much time discussing who actually owns the ball because, until now, it hasn't really mattered.

As the rise of the memorabilia market, though, baseball is being forced to confront the issue of who owns the otherwise interchangeable pieces - bases, balls, uniforms - that make the game go.

Mientkiewicz initially called the ball his "retirement fund," though he later backed off those comments and said he wants it for sentimental value. The problem is, so does the team.

"It's not Doug's ball. It belongs to all of us," said Roger Abrams, a Northeastern law professor who has written several baseball books. "He is the trustee of the ball. But it is owned by all of the Red Sox Nation, and it should find a place of special importance, either at Fenway or Cooperstown."

Paul Finkelman, a law professor at Tulsa who was an expert witness in the court fight over Barry Bonds' 73rd home run ball, said the fact Mientkiewicz was a midseason addition and a late-inning replacement makes his claim tenuous. If he had made a leaping catch, been a major contributor during the regular season or even weathered the franchise's lean years, fans and courts might be more sympathetic.

"The notion that Mientkiewicz did anything is absurd. He didn't do anything," Finkelman said. "He caught an underhanded toss from a pitcher. This is what he's paid to do. He didn't win the World Series. It's simply coincidence that it ended at first base."

Of course, there was this little incident during the 1986 World Series.

"I understand that there's some irony in that," Finkelman said when reminded of the grounder that went through Bill Buckner's legs and led to Boston's loss to the Mets, "because not every first baseman in Boston does his job."

[Last modified January 23, 2005, 00:15:19]