Is Barry Bonds' 756 home run ball worth $500,000?

No

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by Richard A. Hall

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$500,000 for a baseball? Let's get real, people.

There's a few reasons why my immediate and strong reaction to the question above was a disgusted negative. I'll start with what's really a side-issue: Barry Bonds himself.

I don't know the guy. He may be as sweet as candy. He seems to me like an egotist whose team contribution is secondary to his own pursuit of glory, and so a pretty lousy icon for sport enthusiasts in general and baseball fans in particular, but that's my opinion - and we all know what opinions are like. What I do know is that Bonds has surpassed Hank Aaron's home run record - itself, incidentally, considered in some quarters a lesser feat than the Babe's because of the number of games Hank neeeded to achieve it - and that he has done so with the assistance of performance-enhancin g drugs (I know, I know: he never tested positive. But do any of us really doubt it?).

Now, I'll put my cards on the table here and say that I don't really see that drugs in sport is such a terrible thing. In the Olympics a few years back (I think it was Sydney) there was a guy who made headlines called Eric Moussambani, known affectionately as Eric the Eel, who hailed from Equatorial Guinea and competed in the 100m freestyle swimming event. He made headlines because he was barely able to swim, perhaps not surprisingly given the total lack of adequate training facilities, coaching support and so on available in his home country (he hadn't even seen a 50m pool before making his competitive debut). I don't recall anybody decrying the Aussies their state-of-the-art facilities, high-priced coaches and physiologists and expensive training programs. Yet, if Eric had relied on any chemical enhancement to assist his own ill-starred attempt to match them, he would have been pilloried. Fair's fair, it seems to me, and if we don't penalize an athlete for training better or just being more physically able, and we don't penalize him for following a carefully-planned diet and exercise regime to achieve peak performance, why should we get our panties in a bunch when he takes on anabolic steroids? Sure, we can say there's a risk to the athlete. There's a risk to smoking, or to consuming alcohol. We don't stop people doing those. The risks of all three pale in comparison to the risk of driving your kids to school every day, yet we allow that to go on without restraint. So the whole drugs-in-sport thing seems a little bit sanctimonious to me.

Nevertheless: the rules are clear. Whatever we might think of the rules, we can't ignore them and we can't condone the ignoring of them. I'm among those who think the seatbelt laws are a little bit of nanny-stateism, but I still click it so I don't get a ticket when I drive. By the same token, whether Barry felt he would get away with it, or he ought to be allowed to do it, or the rules just didn't apply to all round superstars like himself, when Bonds took steroids he broke the rules. It's no different from him artificially bringing the edges of the field a hundred yards closer when he bats, and it means comparing his achievement with anybody else's who didn't avail himself of cheating is not only an exercise in wilful ignorance but also an insult to those genuinely deserving sportsman who not only win ball games but do so within the letter and spirit of the rules. On that basis, Bonds' 756th home run is not something to be prized, and any accoutrements thereto aren't worth, to borrow a pithy idiom from a sister sport, "a pitcher of warm spit".

However, that's not the only problem I have with this scenario. *Even if* Bonds' record tally weren't tainted, as it irrevocably is, I'd still have serious problems with anybody slapping a half mill price tag on the ball he struck. Of course, it will be argued that in a free market goods find their own value, so anything for sale is worth whatever any buyer is prepared to pay; and as a laissez-faire libertarian, I can't argue very much with that statement. That being said, an observed result like Say's Law isn't thereby necessarily a desirable one, and it's worth looking in this particular case at the basis for this remarkable evaluation.

The ball itself hasn't done anything very distinguished - just been thwacked out of the park by a man who's done so countless times, 756 of them in major league baseball games. It might even be argued that the home run was facilitated by some inadequacy in the aerodynamics of the ball, so that viewed simply as a baseball in comparison to its fellows it's actually worth less by virtue of the quality of its workmanship. That's a bit of a strawman, but it illustrates that wherever the $500,000 figure comes from, it has really nothing to do with the ball, but with the man who struck it.

I suggested earlier that Bonds was an opportunist, a glory-seeker. He might take less offence at that characterization if I go on to suggest that there's something of that in all of us. We all particularly like the idea of getting big rewards for little work - and there are two examples of this thinking that apply here.

Firstly, we like the idea of taking credit for work we didn't do ourselves in the first place. There's often a risk attached to doing this, the risk of discovery, that prohibits it: even so, we can probably all think of an occasion where we've done it. Attempting to profit from catching a historic home-run ball fits this bill, to my mind. Bonds is very handsomely paid to hit balls out of the park; but that at least is a skilled pursuit, unlike the unseemly melee in the stands that granted Matt Murphy his Warholian fifteen minutes. The media were complicit on this one, making Murphy a part of the story (as it must be conceded he was) and thereby putting him in the popular mind on the same level as the record-breaking batter Bonds. This reflected glory is an illusion, an artificial inflation of value.

Secondly, we like the idea of taking credit for things that happen entirely outside of our control - some people would put belief in the power of prayer in that category, but I'm leaving that can of worms firmly closed for now. In this instance, it was almost entirely pure dumb luck that led to Matt Murphy's receipt of Bonds' bounty on a one-day trip to San Francisco - he even described it himself as a 'lottery' at the time. Given that Bonds has hit more MLB home runs than anybody else, it was inevitable that *somebody* would end up with the ball, so to attach value to it on that basis seems absurd.

In general, there is a grotesque inflation of value across the board if you look back over the last fifty years. Without getting too arid, I'll say at this juncture that Gresham recognized long ago the consequences of replacing good money with bad, and in an economy dependent on unfulfilled promissory notes this sort of thing tends to follow: but it is neither necessary nor praiseworthy, and the ludicrous spectacle of a baseball being hawked for the price of an antebellum plantation house recalls the Tulipmania of seventeenth century Holland, another case of hysterical demand leaving all considerations of the commodity as a commodity in itself behind. Barry Bonds makes as much in a year as a thousand doctors, even in this inflationary age. Can we really argue that his contribution to society is equivalent? We probably could, but that's yet another grim topic: the way media and celebrity are more important and real to us than the communities in which we live. Another side-effect of the replacement of good currencies with floating value-markers.

What it comes down to is our desire to possess what isn't ours. We envy Bonds, not only his ability and the luxury of making a living out of playing a game, but also his wildly disproportionate financial rewards - this envy is compounded by the perceived unfairness of his achieving these worldly successes by cheating, and by the ungracious air with which he accepts them. This envy, this desire to take some part of Bonds' success and make it our own, is what inflates the value of a mass-produced sphere of cork and rubber in a leather skin. That Bonds is seen as an enviable soul in the first place is a grave social ill; that our blase attitude to rampant commercialism enables that envy to produce such ridiculous distortions of value in a world where so many people struggle just to survive is odious in the extreme.

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