Record-setting sales for baseballs have dominated 2024, notably Shohei Ohtani’s 50th home run ball, and the upcoming sale of Freddie Freeman’s walk-off grand slam from Game 1 of the World Series.
But a less celebratory memento was auctioned off Thursday night: Aaron Judge’s dropped fly ball from Game 5 of the 2024 World Series sold for $43,510 at MLB Auctions.
During the top of the fifth inning, Judge dropped a routine fly ball in center field off the bat of the Dodgers' Tommy Edman. What followed was one of the worst collapses in the history of the Fall Classic, with the Yankees surrendering a 5-0 lead in a single inning, going on to lose the game 7-6 and eventually the series in five games.
"I think falling short in the World Series will stick with me until I die,” Judge said. “I think just like every other loss, those things don‘t go away. They‘re battle scars along the way, and hopefully when my career is over we’ve got a lot of battle scars but also a lot of victories along the way, too.”
Impressively, Judge did not have a single error the entire season, nor one in the postseason until that critical play.
In 2012, the ball that infamously rolled through Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner’s legs in the 1986 World Series sold for nearly $420,000 to New York Mets owner Steve Cohen.
Will Stern is a reporter and editor for cllct.