The grand-slam ball that immortalized Freddie Freeman as a World Collection hero netted a equally grand payout.
An undisclosed bidder paid $1.56 million for the baseball that Freeman struck for a walk-off grand slam within the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Sport 1 win over the Yankees on Oct. 25, SCP Auctions introduced Sunday.
The historic baseball acquired 22 bids over the course of the public sale, which ran from Dec. 4 till Saturday night time.
Freeman’s two-out blast off of Nestor Cortes turned a one-run Dodgers deficit right into a 6-3 win, placing Los Angeles up 1-0 of their eventual five-game sequence victory.
The 413-foot homer into Dodger Stadium’s proper area stands hit off of 1 fan’s palms, permitting 10-year-old Zachary Ruderman to dive on the bottom and faucet it to his father, Nico Ruderman.
Zachary’s mother and father had advised him he was leaving college early that day for an orthodontist appointment, solely to shock the fifth-grader with tickets to the sport.
“Our family hopes that whoever buys the ball agrees to display it in Dodger Stadium so that all fans get a chance to see one of the most famous baseballs in history,” Nico Ruderman mentioned in a press release.
Freeman, 35, received World Collection MVP after hitting .300 with 4 dwelling runs and 12 RBI, regardless of taking part in by way of an ankle damage.
This month’s public sale made Freeman’s grand-slam ball the third-most costly game-used baseball ever bought.
It trails solely the ball that teammate Shohei Ohtani struck in September to clinch the primary 50/50 season in MLB historical past, which bought for $4.392 million; and the ball Mark McGwire hit for his then-record seventieth dwelling run of the 1998 season, which bought for about $3 million.
The ball that Yankees star Aaron Choose hit for his 62nd dwelling run of the 2022 season, which set an American League single-season file, bought for $1.5 million. The baseball that Choose dropped within the fifth inning of Sport 5 of the World Collection, in the meantime, bought final week for $43,510 in an MLB-hosted public sale.
