Dodgers Fan Makes Big Money Selling Albert Pujols’s 700th Home Run Baseball

Back in September, there was some minor hubbub when the fan who caught Albert Pujols’ 700th homer at Dodger Stadium wasn’t interested in giving it back to the future Hall of Famer. This caused much hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth among a certain subset of baseball fans and media who have an overly romanticized view of what sports fandom should be. (And no, that isn’t intended to be a subtweet of my pal Clint, whose article is linked above in which he said it wasn’t right for the fan to keep the ball. Clint and I definitely have different opinions on this, though.)

Pujols, for his part, was much more diplomatic in his reaction to the news that the fan wouldn’t be giving the ball back.

"Souvenirs are for the fans. I don’t have any problem if they want to keep it. If they want to give it back, that’s great. But at the end of the day, I don’t focus on material stuff."

-Albert Pujols on his 700th HR ball pic.twitter.com/0F1OViv1y0

— B/R Walk-Off (@BRWalkoff) September 24, 2022

Of course, the fan didn’t want to keep the ball. What he wanted was the big payday that comes along with catching a historic ball like that. And as we found out over the weekend, that payday came for the fan, named Marlowe Leal.

Final sale price for the Albert Pujols 700th Home Run Baseball: $360,000 ? pic.twitter.com/DPiLirhVMf

— Goldin (@GoldinCo) November 6, 2022

The bidding in the auction started at $25,000 and stalled out at $160,000 for several days, but on the final day of the auction, ten more bids came in, quickly pushing the final sale price to $360,000. We don’t currently know the identity of the auction winner, and presumably it would be up to him or her whether they wanted to be known publicly. The point of owning something like this is to show it off, though, so it seems likely we’ll eventually find out who the new owner is.

Congratulations to Leal, who said he plans to give some of the money back to youth baseball programs. He also refers to the money as “life-changing,” though, so it sounds like most of it is going into his bank account.

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