THE SCRAMBLE

On Oct. 7, 2001, when Mike Lee, a Giants season ticket holder, watched the scramble for Bonds’ record home run at home on television, never did he imagine he would get involved in the incident that happened in the stands.

"My first reaction to this dispute was ‘Now we’ve got a baseball case?’" Lee says. "People are suing over a baseball? I was thinking, ‘Oh, come on.’"

The prestige and potential value of the ball, however, was all too clear to the two fans fighting over it. Hank Aaron’s 755th career home run ball sold for $800,000 in the same New York auction in which Mark McGwire’s 70th sold for over $3 million. Eddie Murray’s 500th career home run sold in 1999 for $280,000. The fan who ended up with Bonds’ 600th career home run ball last summer had bloodied his face in the scuffle for it, prompting another fan who had backed off to say afterward, "It wasn’t worth my life."

Lee, a slender man in his 50s, admits he had little idea of what he was getting himself into with Popov v. Hayashi.

Lee viewed and reviewed the videotape of the scramble in the stands shot by local KNTV cameraman Josh Keppel, showing Alex Popov grasping the ball in the webbing of his glove for 0.6 second before falling into a mass of pushing fans and out of view. The camera later revealed Hayashi holding the ball before being led away by security.

After losing the ball on the ground, fan Alex Popov came up with another ball that he had felt underneath him while lying on the ground. The ball, according to several witnesses, turned out to be a phony baseball inscribed with the word "sucker" in black ink. In his deposition, Popov said other fans all around him scratched, clawed, kicked, and pummeled him. Popov believed the genuine home run ball was taken from his glove.