"The Ball" begins innocently enough in a Costa Rican factory as a Rawlings baseball, like thousands of others each year, is wound and sewn for use in the major leagues. The story ends months later at auction, when that very ball is sold for more than $3 million. Between those two events, Cardinal slugger Mark McGwire has hit it--and, up in the stands, a young research scientist named Phil Ozersky has retrieved what turned out to be a shot for history, the Mighty Mac's 70th home run of the season. Now, a hunk of horsehide is suddenly baseball's ultimate object of desire, an instrument of potential wealth and thus ineffable greed.
The story of this ball and its movements--and what it tells us about who we are as a society--makes for an odd and riveting cautionary tale, almost totemic in quality. McGwire made it clear during his hunt for Roger Maris's legendary record of 61 home runs in a season that he'd never pay for any of the record-breaking homers he hit and that their rightful place was on display in Cooperstown. Still, the smart money knows that everything today has a price, and someone is always willing to pay it. "We live in a time," Paisner reminds us, "when dollar bills change hands as carelessly as if they'd been printed by Milton Bradley ... when money burns the kinds of holes in our deep pockets that can't keep us from our impulses." On cue, Ozersky sleeps with the ball the first night and then puts it in his girlfriend's parents' safe the next day before securing it in a safe deposit box the day after. Then the marketers, agents, and auctioneers take center stage. Interestingly, the only person who exits the tale with hands completely clean is the star himself, Mark McGwire, happy to do his part and leave it at that. --Jeff Silverman
From Publishers Weekly
Paisner (The Imperfect Mirror, etc.) believes that Mark McGwire's 70th home run ball just might hold part of the secret to what it means to be American today. From the moment it was stitched in a Rawlings plant in Costa Rica to the moment it sold for just over $3 million to comic book publisher Tod McFarlane, this one particular baseball provides a kind of cultural looking glass. (The idea that a home run ball could carry America's cultural DNA will be familiar to readers of Don DeLillo's Underworld, the prologue to which follows the trajectory of Bobby Thomson's 1951 pennant-winning blast). The ball, as Paisner traces it, infects its possessor and those who wish to possess it with a particularly American kind of greed. Everybody, of course, wants it, but Paisner sees America as having passed a new threshhold in the transmutation of emotional value into market value. McGwire's home run ball is a good example of the phenomenon, but it's an awfully small object to carry all the implications of the cultural criticism with which Paisner tries to stamp it. Paisner is most interesting when he digs behind the scenes with his reporter's pad in clear viewAfor example, when he talks to regular people who thought they hated baseball but were nonetheless swept up by the 1998 season, or to Major League Baseball officials who were in charge of organizing security details for McGwire and Sammy Sosa. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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