I am usually very quick to respond to the negative things in the world, but very slow to commend the good things. Well, today I’m going to commend something good: Christian Lopez giving Derek Jeter’s 3,000th hit home run ball back to the man who hit it.
This was an incredibly selfless act on Lopez’s part. He is a stand up guy and should be commended. However, I do want to disagree with something that I’ve heard him say, and that I’ve heard a lot of the sport’s commentators say in the wake of all of this: that the ball rightfully belonged to Jeter. (See the last sentence of the article in the link)
I’ve been to quite a few baseball games in my day, but I’m usually in the cheap seats, so I don’t get many chances to snag a foul ball or a home run. But if I did, I wouldn’t go to the guy who hit the ball and ask whether he wanted it back. It would belong to me. One of the perks of going to a baseball game is the possibility of snagging a souvenir for no extra money. Once you grab it, it’s yours. Sometimes even a bat will fly into the seats, and that just means that a fan got an even better piece of memorabilia to brag about.
Any home run ball belongs to the fan who catches it. It’s a big deal to that fan. To everyone else, though, even to the player who hit the ball, it usually means nothing more than the stats that it produces. The ball Christian Lopez caught was rightfully his. But it wasn’t just “any home run ball.” This was Derek Jeter’s 3,000th hit. This was history. This was valuable, to Jeter and to everyone else.
Lopez didn’t give to Jeter what was rightfully his. He gave Jeter a gift.
And that is why Lopez is so commendable. He made a sacrifice. And that doesn’t mean that he gave up getting what would have been an ill-gotten gain. Selling the ball would have been perfectly legitimate. It was his property the second he laid his hands on it. But instead of getting something from it, he decided to give it to the man it meant the most to, the man who hit it.
Christian Lopez can go around saying that he was giving back to Jeter what was rightfully his. That’s what good people do; they don’t congratulate themselves on their good deeds. But let’s not fall into the trap of thinking the same thing. That doesn’t give Lopez enough credit.